Queen Radegundis

Radegundis (also Radegund or Radegonde) was a Thuringian princess of the early sixth century, daughter of King Berthar (Bertachar) of Thuringia. In the aftermath of the Frankish conquest of Thuringia, in which her father was killed, she was taken as a captive of war by the Merovingian kings. Assigned to Chlothar I, she was brought up at his royal villa of Athies in Picardy and given a Christian and literary education unusual for a royal woman of that milieu. Contemporary and near-contemporary writers, notably Venantius Fortunatus and Gregory of Tours, present her as already inclined to piety, fasting, and works of mercy while still at court.

In adulthood she was married to Chlothar I and thus became a Frankish queen, one among the several wives and consorts of that king. As queen she used her position for charity, the foundation of hospices, and the ransoming of captives. The marriage was politically useful to Chlothar but personally unhappy for Radegundis. After Chlothar had her remaining brother put to death, she left the court, sought out Bishop Médard of Noyon, and obtained consecration as a deaconess despite royal opposition. She then withdrew from secular queenship to a religious life.

Settling at Poitiers, she founded the monastery of Sainte-Croix (the Holy Cross), which followed the strict enclosure of the Rule of Caesarius of Arles. Agnes was installed as abbess; Radegundis herself lived as a nun of marked austerity rather than as formal superior. Through correspondence with the Byzantine court of Justin II and Sophia she obtained a relic of the True Cross for the house; Venantius Fortunatus composed hymns, including Vexilla regis prodeunt, for its reception. Fortunatus became her close friend and panegyrist, and Gregory of Tours visited the community and later described her death and burial.

Radegundis died at the monastery in Poitiers on 13 August 587. Because the Caesarian rule forbade the nuns to leave the cloister, she was buried in a funerary church outside the enclosure, the church that later took her name (Sainte-Radegonde). Veneration began at once; Gregory of Tours attended the funeral and recorded miracles at her tomb. Her cult spread in Frankish Gaul and later in England, where a medieval nunnery dedicated to her occupied the site that became Jesus College, Cambridge. She was never the subject of a formal papal canonization of the later medieval type; her status as a saint rests on continuous liturgical cult from the sixth century.