The programme is now available for the project’s conference, which will be held at the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, University of Cambridge, on 1-2 December 2017. Further information about speakers and bookings may be found here:
https://www.asnc.cam.ac.uk/news/2017/07/07/2140/
Paul Russell, Fiona Edmonds and Caroline Brett devoted a session to the project at this year’s Leeds International Medieval Congress. The session was chaired by Professor Julia Smith and attracted a full house. The papers were as follows: Caroline Brett ‘The Life of St Malo: Covering All the Bases’; Fiona Edmonds ‘Brittany and the Insular World: Contacts and Confrontations During the Viking Age’; Paul Russell: ‘Rustica Imbecillitas: The Rhetoric of the Otherness of Breton Personal Names in Charters’.
On 27-29 April 2017, Caroline Brett presented a paper at a conference on ‘Familles, pouvoirs et foi n Bretagne et dans l’Europe de l’Ouest, Ve-XIIIe siècle’ (Family, Power and Faith in Brittany and Western Europe, 5th to 13th centuries), held at the Université Bretagne Sud, Lorient and at Landévennec Abbey.
Judicaël, King and Saint: The Growth of his Family and Cult
Judicaël, ‘king of the Bretons’ according to two contemporary seventh-century Frankish historical sources, is not only one of the best-attested rulers of early medieval Brittany but also one whose reputation continued to evolve from the ninth century to the later Middle Ages. Within Brittany, he was claimed as an ancestor by a family of the Saint-Malo region in 869, and was depicted as an ideal king in the Life of St Malo by Bili (ca 865 x 872), a portrayal which may have been intended as a criticism of Salomon, the unrelated ruler who then held power in Brittany. In England and Cornwall, Judicaël was named in litanies and lists of saints from the early tenth century onwards. In northern France, he was presented as the brother of two émigré Breton saints, St Judoc and St Winnoc: these traditions suggest a real and continued Breton role in the seventh-century expansion of monasticism in the region. The eleventh-century Lives of these two saints included a genealogy which gathered together rulers’ names from a wide range of north Breton hagiography, and, for the first time, claimed a definite date and political leadership for the ‘coming of the Britons’ to Brittany. I suggest that the compilation of this genealogy was undertaken in the interests of the ducal dynasty of Rennes, whose first notable member, Judicael Berenger (fl. ca 940-50), took the saint’s name, and which subsequently re-founded and patronised his cult centre at Saint-Méen. The composition of a biography of Judicaël by a monk of Saint-Méen may have followed in the early eleventh century, although the transmission of this work makes its authenticity very difficult to determine. The ‘Viking Age’ seems to have been the moment for the Bretons to shake off their earlier reputation as ‘barbarians’ and ‘heretics’ and for their secular ‘heroic’ traditions to receive a degree of acceptance among their neighbours. The figure of Judicaël, a saintly king who formed a dynastic fixed point between the first arrival of the Bretons and their revived tenth-century rulership, was pivotal in this process.