Saint Walpurga

Saint Walpurga, also known as Walburga, Walpurgis, or Wealdburg, was an Anglo-Saxon Benedictine nun, abbess, and missionary to the German territories of the Frankish Empire in the eighth century. Traditional accounts, followed by standard reference works, place her birth about the year 710 in Devonshire, within the kingdom of Wessex. She is presented in medieval hagiography as the daughter of Saint Richard the Pilgrim, described as an underking of the West Saxons, and of his wife Wuna or Winna, whom later tradition sometimes makes a sister of Saint Boniface. Two brothers, Willibald and Winibald (Wynnebald), likewise became missionaries and saints: Willibald was consecrated first bishop of Eichstätt, and Winibald founded the monastery of Heidenheim. Although some elements of this family story, including Richard’s royal title and the precise kinship with Boniface, rest on later legend rather than strictly contemporary evidence, the siblings’ English origin and their participation in the Boniface mission are not in serious doubt.

Walpurga was placed as a child at the double monastery of Wimborne in Dorset, a distinguished house of learning under Abbess Tetta, and there she was educated and professed as a Benedictine nun. When her father and brothers set out on pilgrimage to Rome, probably in the early 720s, she remained in England. In the middle of the eighth century Saint Boniface, organizing the church east of the Rhine, asked for English nuns to help establish religious life and the education of girls among the newly converted. Around 748 Walpurga crossed to the continent, in the company of other Wimborne nuns such as Saint Leoba. After a period at missionary centers in the Frankish lands, she settled at Heidenheim am Hahnenkamm, in the Sualafeld region of what is now Bavaria, where her brother Winibald had founded a double monastery in the diocese of Eichstätt.

When Winibald died in 761, Walpurga became abbess of Heidenheim. In the Anglo-Saxon manner she governed a community of both nuns and monks, and the house served as a center of prayer, literacy, and pastoral work on a still-missionary frontier. Later writers credited her with healing gifts and even with medical skill, and a medieval tradition of doubtful accuracy attributed to her a life of Winibald and a narrative of Willibald’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land; modern scholarship assigns those Latin texts to Hugeburc, a nun of Heidenheim. Walpurga died at her monastery on 25 February, in 779 according to the date most widely received in the liturgical tradition, though some authorities give 777. She was buried at Heidenheim.

Her veneration spread quickly. In 870 Bishop Otgar of Eichstätt translated her relics from Heidenheim to Eichstätt; this solemn translation, connected with Pope Adrian II, is commonly treated as her canonization. From the rock of her tomb there has long issued a fluid known as Walburgis oil, collected to the present day at the Abbey of Saint Walburg in Eichstätt and regarded as miraculous. Her chief feast is 25 February. The May translation gave its name to Walpurgis Night, the eve of 1 May, which in German-speaking Europe became fused with older spring observances and, in later folklore, with tales of witches on the Brocken. She is patron of Eichstätt and of several towns in the Low Countries and Germany, including Antwerp, Oudenaarde, Weilburg, and Zutphen, and is invoked against rabies, coughs, plague, storms, and famine, as well as by sailors and those who work the harvest.