_De caritate tua diligenter confidens_: The Correspondence between Boniface and Eadburg

This essay focuses on the exchanges between Wynfrith / Boniface and Eadburg, a consecrated woman who eventually rose to the rank of abbess. As the essay shows, the exchanges between the two are not only amongst the most revealing of the personal bonds, spiritual concerns, and cultural penchants within the Bonifatian circle, but also of the key intellectual and spiritual as well as logistic contribution of women to what may be defined as the pioneering phase of the Anglo-Saxon Church and society at large. In such a founding phase, an otherwise fundamentally hierarchical and androcentric institution like the Church proved more inclusive and egalitarian, and women could carve out for themselves roles that would otherwise have been the reserve of men, developing an agency for themselves both in the spiritual community and in the scholarly one.