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St Boniface, Apostle of Germany
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 August 2024
Extract
The Church of God, quickened by the Spirit given at Pentecost, is alive even in her past. Her saints do not depend upon any human memorial to keep their name living, for they rejoice already in an undying communion with all the faithful in whom God's grace is operative and, like a cloud of compassionate witnesses, they support by their prayers those who still struggle to live as they lived and die as they died. It is, then, to rescue ourselves from our forgetfulness that it is good to recall a great English missionary who, on 5th June, 754, twelve centuries ago this summer, was killed by a band of the people he had already given his life to convert.
Wynfrith—it was only later that he took the Latin name, Boniface—was born in the West-Saxon country beyond Selwood a little before 675.
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- Copyright © 1954 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 The materials for the life of St Boniface are quite exceptionally ample and reliable. The following brief study is based mainly on the letters and the contemporary life by the monk Willibald. A text of these will be found in Migne, P. L. LXXXIX, but better editions are, for the letters, that of Ernst Dummlet in the Monumenta Germcmiae Historica, Epistolae Merowingici et Karolini Aevi, I (Berlin, 1892), and for the early lives, W. Levison, Vitae Sancti Bonifatii Archiepiscopi Mogimtini, Scriptores rerum Germaiiicarum, (Hanover Leipsig, 1905). A readily accessible book for the general background of the period is the excellent Pelican, The Beginnings of English Society by Dorothy Whitelock. Its bibliography will be a guide to anyone who wishes to go further. In the present article the quotations from the letters are given in the translation of Edward Kylic, The English Correspondence of St Boniface (London, 1911).