Search under the floors and on all the walls

Statues, busts, markers and gilded portraits adorn the streets and halls of Oxford. They pay tribute to political and literary luminaries, saints, clerics and heretics. The lives they remember are truly remarkable, and they are nearly all male lives. Perhaps that once seemed normal but not now. It seems as if some of the human race, especially those women who lived equally well or stood courageously are missing from the story that is being told. I am on a sabbatical pilgrimage preparing for a class in Women in Christianity, and I am on the look out! 

On my first night eating dinner in the Hall at Christ Church, I was enthralled by being served at long tables knowing that Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll (author of Alice in Wonderland), William Penn (founder of Pennsylvania), John Locke (influential educational theorist), and beloved John Wesley (a founder of Methodism), all sat at these long tables underneath the soaring vaulted ceiling. Their pictures all hang on the walls. Perhaps they, too, heard the three loud raps by the gavel declaring: Dinner is Served!

Once a chair is found at the long table a grace in Latin in offered:  Translated: In the neediness of our human condition, which invites your compassion, almighty God and heavenly Father, we give you reverent thanks for the food which, in your kindness, you have lavished on us for the sustenance of our bodies; and we also beg that we may use it without greed or excess and with enjoyment. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

As the first course was served, I asked our tutor: “Are there women's portraits in The Hall?” She pointed to the front. Next to a portrait of Henry the VIII—king when Christ Church was founded in 1525-- was his daughter Elizabeth I with her curly red hair.

By the time our dessert had come around, talk had turned to Frideswide, the patron saint of Oxford. Before the founding of the Oxford colleges, Henry the VIII’s first queen, Catherine of Aragon (recall Henry VIII declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England when the pope would not agree to annul their marriage), had come on pilgrimage to the very site where, Christ Church would be built. The queen stopped to visit the shrine of Saint Frideswide asking that the saint bless her pregnancy and grant her a male heir. Her prayers were not answered.

A couple of days later, I went to morning prayer in the Lady Chapel. Afterwards I asked a canon of the cathedral who had presided to show me the location of the wall of Frideswides' double monastery. I had read that part of the old abbey wall was incorporated into the cathedral. He pointed below my feet. Frideswide’s bones  and the original wall lay somewhere beneath where I was standing. He pointed to a rectangular structure in the north corner and said, “That is Frideswide’s shrine.”

        

Frideswide was the daughter of a local ruler named Didan and his wife Safrida, whose land bordered the River Thames. One version of her story (there are several) is she was born around the year 650 and died either in 727 or 735. Desiring to devote her life to prayer Frideswide took a vow of celibacy. This greatly disturbed another local ruler, Algar, who wanted to marry her. When Frideswide refused, he tried to kidnap her, and she fled to Binsey, a town up river. Algar pursued her and tried to lay his hands on her. Frideswide prayed and a clap of thunder and a lightening strike stopped Algar and blinded him. Frideswide was instructed in prayer to tap the ground with her staff and water appeared. Algar’s eyes were washed, his sight returned, and humbled he went on his way never to bother Frideswide again! The place where water flowed, is marked by an ancient holy well in the parish church yard in Binsey. (On a later day I found the well, more about that in another blog.) The dramatic miracle and Frideswide’s consistency in her vow of prayer and celibacy, convinced her father to support her founding a priory with twelve other women devoted to prayer.

The nunnery was destroyed by Vikings in 1002. In 1122 a chartered Augustinian monastery claimed the same spot which was a well-visited pilgrimage site until 1525 when the Bishop Wolsey began planning for what would become Christ Church, a college that was to be an educational testament to the glory of God and the mind. During the Reformation, a rather zealous canon mixed the bones of Frideswide with those of a former nun, Catherine Dammartin,who had married the Zwinglian Regius Professor of Divinity, Canon Peter Martyr Vermigli. In later centuries the women's remains were sorted and today Christ Church, Cathedral of the Church of England in Oxfordshire, keeps the shrine open as place of prayer.

Around the corner from Tom Quad and the Cathedral is Christ Church’s picture gallery. It has wonderful Tuscan-school depictions of the holy family and a couple of large renderings of the five Sibyls—the ancient Greek female oracles who prophesied at holy sites. The small museum didn’t take long to view, and as I turned a corner into a hallway, I came face-to-face with a newly completed portrait of a woman who looked like she walked out of the classroom. To see a modern woman’s face among the Madonnas and Greek ideals of womanhood stopped me in my tracks. Who was she? Why was her portrait here among the greats of the art world? 

A photo from  the Christ Church website
of the unveiling of the portrait. 

Judith Pallot, Emeritus Professor of the Human Geography of Russian, became the first woman lecturer at Christ Church in 1979. Women were admitted as students in 1980. Her portrait shows a warm smile and a Russian tea cup and a well-disguised tablet computer on her desk. The descriptive marker beside the portrait says in the coming months, this portrait will be moved to the Great Hall. I asked one of the Canons where the portrait will be placed. He didn’t know but said, “One of our old deans will come down. Several hundred years is enough of a tribute for him.” At last, the Hall will have a modern woman on its walls and a holy saint in its foundations. 

My first few days in Oxford retaught me what I know but easily forget. Look for the the contribution of women in the history of every place and time. Dig a little. Ask questions. She is always there.