Edmund of Abingdon’s Dream Job

It was the early 1200s, and a younger college lecturer had fallen asleep after a tough day’s educating. As he slept the younger man, whose identify was Edmund, had a dream by which his late mom appeared earlier than him. She scrutinised the notes and drawings he had been engaged on and requested him: ‘Son, what are these shapes you’re finding out so earnestly?’ Edmund – in all probability greater than a bit startled – defined that he was planning a lecture for his college students, and these had been diagrams he was utilizing for example geometric figures. His mom was not impressed. Seizing his hand, she traced her personal diagram on his palm: three circles, inside which she wrote the phrases ‘Father, Son, Holy Spirit’. ‘These are the figures you have to be finding out!’, she stated, and vanished.

The younger man understood this motherly recommendation to imply that it was time to vary his profession path. He was in his late twenties, and for a number of years he had been constructing a promising profession as a lecturer within the liberal arts. He had studied in Paris within the 1190s, earlier than coming to Oxford to show among the many new communities of scholars which had been more and more gathering there. Supposedly the primary particular person to lecture on Aristotle at Oxford, he was a lot in demand as a instructor and lecturer.

Now the dream recommendation of his mom – or was it his personal conscience? – persuaded Edmund that he had spent sufficient time on the liberal arts and he ought to progress to the upper research of theology. Maybe not many teachers would be glad about such blunt parental suggestions on their analysis plans, however Edmund’s mom Mabel had at all times been intently concerned in her son’s schooling. The household got here from a reasonably humble mercantile background in Abingdon, close to Oxford, and Mabel, a religious and decided widow, appears to have felt schooling was the best way for her kids to get on on the planet. She supported her teenage sons once they had been despatched to review in Paris. Whereas they had been away she would ship them parcels of garments, and it was stated that with this care package deal she would come with a hair shirt, a bit nudge in direction of habits of self-discipline.

His mom’s posthumous profession recommendation turned out properly for Edmund. He thrived as a scholar of theology and gained a status as a preacher and instructor exterior the schools. Ultimately he was appointed to a place at Salisbury Cathedral, and in 1233 was chosen as Archbishop of Canterbury. After his dying in November 1240, he instantly started to be talked of as a saint – St Edmund of Abingdon, as he grew to become identified. Letters and testimonials to assist the reason for his canonisation had been gathered from his former college students and buddies, and it’s by these that we all know private particulars of his early profession.

So what did it take for a medieval educational to change into a saint? When describing Edmund’s life as a pupil and instructor these testimonials emphasise his charity, self-denial and humility. It was remembered that as a younger man Edmund would give monetary assist to assist poor students at college, even promoting his personal books to take action. He had so little concern for wealth, one buddy testified, that when he was paid for his educating he would throw the cash on the windowsill and let it’s carried away by anybody who occurred to be passing.

You won’t assume educational life would supply a lot scope for working saintly miracles, however Edmund apparently discovered alternatives. By prayer he healed one in every of his students from a severe sickness, and he wrestled with a satan who attacked him whereas he was making lecture notes for his college students. Maybe most helpful of all, he had the ability to miraculously preserve rainclouds away when he was preaching open air.

Non secular revelations had been essential proof for sanctity too, in fact, together with the imaginative and prescient of his mom, whose affect over his profession Edmund clearly remembered with gratitude. The tales about him recommend a medieval very best of scholarly holiness, not distant from the on a regular basis work of educating and studying in a busy college, however woven into its each element. It won’t be the type of factor that might rating extremely in a contemporary analysis evaluation or tenure assessment; the targets of an instructional profession have modified a bit prior to now 800 years. However it will not be a nasty aspiration for any instructor to want to be remembered by their college students as warmly as St Edmund appears to have been.

Eleanor Parker is Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Brasenose Faculty, Oxford and the writer of Conquered: The Final Youngsters of Anglo-Saxon England (Bloomsbury, 2022).