Virgin Walburga

Saint Walburga (also Walpurga, Walpurgis, or Wealdburg) was an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon nun, abbess, and missionary, honoured as a virgin saint. She was born in the kingdom of Wessex in southern England, according to later tradition near the beginning of the eighth century. Her father Richard, a West Saxon noble later venerated as Saint Richard the Pilgrim, set out for Rome with his sons Willibald and Winnebald and died at Lucca in 722. Walburga was placed in the double monastery of Wimborne in Dorset, a leading centre of female monastic life and learning under Abbess Tetta. There she received a Latin education and was professed as a Benedictine nun, remaining in the community for some two and a half decades. Medieval writers present her family as related to Saint Boniface (Wynfrith), the West Saxon missionary who organized the church in the German lands, though contemporary evidence does not define the exact relationship.

In the middle of the eighth century Boniface and his circle appealed to English monasteries for nuns who could teach and form women’s communities on the Continent. Walburga was among those who answered the call. She is linked with the monastery of Tauberbischofsheim, governed by Saint Leoba, another Wimborne nun and a close collaborator of Boniface, before she joined her brother Winnebald. About 752 Winnebald founded a double monastery at Heidenheim, in the region of the Sualafeld within the diocese later centred on Eichstätt. When Winnebald died in 761, Walburga assumed the government of both the monks and the nuns. Such an arrangement, though unusual in later Benedictine practice, was familiar from Anglo-Saxon double houses. She is remembered as a capable and devout superior. Hagiographical accounts ascribe to her miracles of healing and of calming storms already during her lifetime.

Walburga died at Heidenheim on 25 February 779, though some earlier authorities give the year 777. She was buried in the monastery church. Her surviving brother Willibald, bishop of Eichstätt from 741 until his death in 787, remained a support to the house. In the later ninth century Bishop Otgar of Eichstätt had her relics brought to Eichstätt. A further solemn elevation in 893, under Bishop Erchanbald, is associated with the report that her bones were found incorrupt and that a fragrant oil began to flow from them. That oil, collected at the Abbey of Saint Walburg in Eichstätt, has been distributed for centuries as a sacramental and is still obtained from the shrine. Her cult spread through Bavaria, Franconia, Alemannia, and the Low Countries.

The Roman Martyrology and the calendars of many dioceses keep her feast on 25 February. A second commemoration on 1 May, marking the translation of her relics, became widely popular in German-speaking regions and gave its name to Walpurgis Night, a vigil around which much later popular folklore, only loosely connected with the historical abbess, eventually clustered. She is invoked against storms, rabies, coughs and whooping cough, plague, and famine, and is regarded as a patron of sailors, of the harvest, and of farmers. Among the places that honour her as patron are Eichstätt, Antwerp, Oudenaarde, Weilburg, Zutphen, and Groningen. She was never canonized by a formal papal process of the kind that developed in the later Middle Ages; her sanctity was recognized by local episcopal authority and by the continuous liturgical cult that was already well established in the ninth century.