Reginald of Canterbury
Encyclopedia
Reginald of Canterbury was a medieval French writer and Benedictine
Benedictine
Benedictine refers to the spirituality and consecrated life in accordance with the Rule of St Benedict, written by Benedict of Nursia in the sixth century for the cenobitic communities he founded in central Italy. The most notable of these is Monte Cassino, the first monastery founded by Benedict...

 monk who lived and wrote in England in the very early part of the 12th century. He was the author of a number of Latin
Medieval Latin
Medieval Latin was the form of Latin used in the Middle Ages, primarily as a medium of scholarly exchange and as the liturgical language of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, but also as a language of science, literature, law, and administration. Despite the clerical origin of many of its authors,...

 poems, including an epic entitled Malchus.

Reginald, a native of France, was born roughly about 1050 in a place usually called Fagia, which may be the modern Faye-la-Vineuse
Faye-la-Vineuse
Faye-la-Vineuse is a commune in the Indre-et-Loire department in central France.-See also:*Communes of the Indre-et-Loire department...

 in Poitou
Poitou
Poitou was a province of west-central France whose capital city was Poitiers.The region of Poitou was called Thifalia in the sixth century....

. The local lord for Fagia was named Aimericus, and it is possible that this lord served as an early patron for Reginald. At some point he formed some sort of connection with Noyers Abbey, near Tours
Tours
Tours is a city in central France, the capital of the Indre-et-Loire department.It is located on the lower reaches of the river Loire, between Orléans and the Atlantic coast. Touraine, the region around Tours, is known for its wines, the alleged perfection of its local spoken French, and for the...

, but its nature is unclear. By 1100, he was a monk at St Augustine's Abbey
St Augustine's Abbey
St Augustine's Abbey was a Benedictine abbey in Canterbury, Kent, England.-Early history:In 597 Saint Augustine arrived in England, having been sent by Pope Gregory I, on what might nowadays be called a revival mission. The King of Kent at this time was Æthelberht, who happened to be married to a...

 in Canterbury
Canterbury
Canterbury is a historic English cathedral city, which lies at the heart of the City of Canterbury, a district of Kent in South East England. It lies on the River Stour....

, England, and may have been there for quite a number of years before 1100. It is unclear why he traveled to England, although most of his poetical works were composed in England while he was at St Augustine's.

Reginald's major work was an epic poem in six books on the life of Malchus, a late antique Syrian
Syria
Syria , officially the Syrian Arab Republic , is a country in Western Asia, bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the West, Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south, and Israel to the southwest....

 saint whose first biographer was Jerome
Jerome
Saint Jerome was a Roman Christian priest, confessor, theologian and historian, and who became a Doctor of the Church. He was the son of Eusebius, of the city of Stridon, which was on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia...

. Reginald's work, entitled Malchus, or Vita Sancti Malchi, exists in two versions, the first of which consists of 1706 lines and survives at Oxford University as Merton College manuscript (MS) 241. The second is expanded from the first and three times its length.

Reginald's other works included a poem about his native town, a group of poems extolling Canterbury and its saints, and one or two on Anselm of St Saba
Anselm of St Saba
Anselm was a medieval Bishop of London elect as well as Abbot of Bury St. Edmunds.-Life:Anselm was a nephew of Anselm of Canterbury and a monk of Chiusi. He was also abbot of Saint Saba monastery in Rome and a papal legate to England from 1115 to 1119. In 1121 he was elected Abbot of Bury St....

. The largest surviving version of his poems is in Bodleian Library
Bodleian Library
The Bodleian Library , the main research library of the University of Oxford, is one of the oldest libraries in Europe, and in Britain is second in size only to the British Library...

 manuscript Laud misc 40, which was probably a presentation copy to one of Reginald's correspondents, Baldwin, a monk of the cathedral chapter
Cathedral chapter
In accordance with canon law, a cathedral chapter is a college of clerics formed to advise a bishop and, in the case of a vacancy of the episcopal see in some countries, to govern the diocese in his stead. These councils are made up of canons and dignitaries; in the Roman Catholic church their...

 of Rochester Cathedral
Rochester Cathedral
Rochester Cathedral, or the Cathedral Church of Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary, is a Norman church in Rochester, Kent. The bishopric is second oldest in England after Canterbury...

. In his prose works, Reginald experimented with poetic metres, employing hexameters, pentameters and sapphics, but his main poems were in hexameters. These works were edited and published by two different editors. Five poems were edited by Thomas Wright in 1872 in the Anglo-Latin Satirical Poets published in the Rolls Series
Rolls Series
The Rolls Series, official title The Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages, is a major collection of British and Irish historical materials and primary sources, published in the second half of the 19th century. Some 255 volumes, representing 99 separate...

 as volume 59. The other 31 surviving poems were edited by Felix Liebermann
Felix Liebermann
Felix Liebermann was a Jewish German historian, who is celebrated for his scholarly contributions to the study of medieval English history, particularly that of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman law. Born in 1851, Berlin, he came from a Jewish-German family and was the younger brother of the painter...

 in an 1888 article in Liebermann's journal Neues Archiv. Reginald's work was part of the flowering of hagiography
Hagiography
Hagiography is the study of saints.From the Greek and , it refers literally to writings on the subject of such holy people, and specifically to the biographies of saints and ecclesiastical leaders. The term hagiology, the study of hagiography, is also current in English, though less common...

 after the Norman Conquest
Norman conquest of England
The Norman conquest of England began on 28 September 1066 with the invasion of England by William, Duke of Normandy. William became known as William the Conqueror after his victory at the Battle of Hastings on 14 October 1066, defeating King Harold II of England...

 that included works by Goscelin
Goscelin
Goscelin of Saint-Bertin was a Benedictine hagiographical writer, born between 1020–1035 and who died shortly after 1107...

, Eadmer
Eadmer
Eadmer, or Edmer , was an English historian, theologian, and ecclesiastic. He is known for being a contemporary biographer of his contemporary archbishop and companion, Saint Anselm, in his Vita Anselmi, and for his Historia novorum in Anglia, which presents the public face of Anselm...

, and Osbern of Canterbury. He may also have been the author of a Versarium de libris ethnicorum that was recorded as being in the library at Rievaulx Abbey
Rievaulx Abbey
Rievaulx Abbey is a former Cistercian abbey headed by the Abbot of Rievaulx. It is located in Rievaulx , near Helmsley in North Yorkshire, England.It was one of the wealthiest abbeys in England and was dissolved by Henry VIII of England in 1538...

 around 1200, but as the work does not survive it is not clear if Reginald was the author or not.

Reginald was still alive in 1109, when he was the recipient of a poem from Thomas
Thomas II of York
Thomas was a medieval archbishop of York. To distinguish him from his uncle, also a Thomas who was archbishop of York, Thomas is usually known as Thomas II or Thomas the Younger.-Life:...

 the Archbishop of York
Archbishop of York
The Archbishop of York is a high-ranking cleric in the Church of England, second only to the Archbishop of Canterbury. He is the diocesan bishop of the Diocese of York and metropolitan of the Province of York, which covers the northern portion of England as well as the Isle of Man...

, who was elevated to York in 1109. This poem of Thomas' was in thanks for a copy of the Vita that Thomas had received, and the thanks-poem has a notation that it was from Thomas as archbishop.

Further reading

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