Strife and the Saintly Body: Frideswide’s Legacy at Christ Church, Oxford

Saint Frideswide, the patron saint of Oxford, has dominated Oxford's sacred spaces since her eighth-century death. Dr. Heckman's talk will trace the long history of the bodies (mostly dead but some living) that were drawn into complex relationships with Frideswide's burial site in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. From the sixteenth-century Protestant woman whose burial at Christ Church generated controversy to the seventeenth-century convict corpses dissected at the college's nearby Anatomy School, Frideswide's remains attracted other bodies, as local residents both inside and outside the college continually refashioned their relationship with this holy space.

Dr. Christina Heckman is Professor of English at Augusta University, where she studies early English literature and culture. Her most recent book, Work and Its Representations in Early Medieval Saints' Lives, considers the role the manual labor played in the early medieval world as an everyday activity as well as a rewarding activity; it was published by Boydell and Brewer in 2025. Today's talk comes out of her current book project, which examples how the presence of early medieval saints' relics contributes to the transformation of those places over time, considering the ways that post-medieval local communities organized themselves around (or against) these holy remains.