The Nuns of Saint-Pierre De Lyon and Their Creative History Workshop

In 1251 in the imperial city of Lyon, a dispute erupted between the noble nuns of Saint-Pierre and the bourgeois parishioners and clergy of Saint-Nizier over the burial site of a venerable Merovingian bishop of the city, St. Aunemund. The discord comes as a surprise to us, just as it probably did to the nuns of Saint-Pierre, because as best we can tell, interpreting as we do from textual witness, everyone had always agreed that St. Aunemund lay in the chapel of Saint-Pierre. Around the year 910 Archbishop Austerius of Lyon wrote in a letter that on St. Aunemund's feast he had visited the saint's relics at Saint-Pierre and had given to the community in the saint's honor "as great a gift as possible" (Severt 150). Around the turn of the eleventh century, Archbishop Burchard pronounced against any who would interfere with the administration of the nuns' property a sentence of excommunication in which he invoked both Aunemund and Aunemund's brother, thereby demonstrating their particular connection to the monastery of Saint-Pierre (Guigue I: 8, 14). No such evidence exists today (nor apparently did any exist in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) of any similar relationship between St. Aunemund and Saint-Nizier. So, why in the middle of the thirteenth century did the lay and clerical leadership of Saint-Nizier come to believe otherwise? The modern editors and translators of St. Aunemund's vita, the Acta Aunemundi, have suggested, reasonably enough, that confusion over Aunemund's name may have caused confusion over his burial site. An Anglo-Saxon tradition, found both in the Vita Wilifridi and the martyrology of Bede, holds that Aunemund's name was "Dalphinus," not "Aunemund." The nuns claimed that "Dalphinus" was Aunemund's brother's name. The Acta Aunemundi makes it clear that Aunemund's brother was buried in the Basilica of the Apostles and Forty-Eight Martyrs (SaintNizier). If the Nicetians had a tradition that a certain Dalphinus was buried in their church and then later learned that Bede, among others, identified Dalphinus with Aunemund, they could have then made a connection between the two: we know that Dalphinus is buried in SaintNizier, now we know that Dalphinus is Aunemund, so Aunemund must be buried in Saint-Nizier (Fouracre and Gerberding 174). While this explanation is possible, it is worth noting that the Nicetians never pushed this particular argument very far. They contented themselves with noting in their copies of the Acta Aunemundi that Aunemund was also known as Dalphinus. Additionally, our only evidence that Aunemund's brother's name was Dalphinus comes to us from a document the nuns very obviously forged during their legal travails with the Nicetians. When the clergy and parishioners of Saint-Nizier staged a great ritual invention of St. Aunemund's tomb in 1308, they discovered a tomb whose lettering was mostly illegible but that did bear the letters "annem," which they took to mean "Annemundus." They make no mention of the alternative name (Archives Departementales du Rhone 15 G 109). (1) Jean-Miguel Garrigues and Jean Legrez, on the other hand, have suggested that the confusion over Aunemund's burial place could have stemmed from a situation in the seventh century when the nuns might have been informally attached to the Basilica of the Apostles (Saint-Nizier) and did not yet possess a separate basilica or chapel of their own. According to this theory, Aunemund and his family would have assumed patronage of the women's community and founded a house for them. Because the nuns originally had been attached to the Basilica of the Apostles, when they subsequently built a chapel, they dedicated it to St. Peter, the Prince of Apostles. They eventually forgot their origins and came to believe that their patron, Aunemund, was buried in their chapel (Garrigues and Legrez 193-94). One problem with this theory is that all the non-forged, pre-twelfth-century material, meager though it is, places Aunemund at the monastery of Saint-Pierre and not in the Basilica of the Apostles. …