Geoffrey of Wells

Geoffrey of Wells (Galfridius Fontibus [Another "Galfridus Fontibus" was Geoffrey of Fontaines-les-Blanches: see Giles Constable, "Religious communities, 1024-1215", in David Luscombe (ed.), "The New Cambridge Medieval History" (Cambridge University Press) 2004:364.] ) was a mid-twelfth-century English hagiographer, doubtless formerly a canon of Wells Cathedral, whose "De Infantia Sancti Edmundi" ("The infancy of Saint Edmund"), [Geoffrey of Wells, "Liber de infantia Sancti Eadmundi", R.M. Thomson, editor, "Analecta Bollandiana" 95 (1977:34-42).] part of the burgeoning library of twelfth-century legendaries concerning Saint Edmund [Gábor Klaniczay, (Eva Pálmai, translater), "Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe" (Cambridge University Press) 2002:162; [http://www.stedmundsbury.gov.uk/sebc/visit/stedmund.cfm "The history of the legend of Saint Edmund"] ] accounted the royal saint's childhood to have been full of adventure; [For parallel apocryphal literature, see Infancy gospels.] he dedicated his "largely spurious account" [Hugh M. Thomas, "The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity" (Oxford University Press) 2000:132.] to Ording, eighth abbot of Bury St. Edmunds, [ [http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=37880 Abbots of Bury St. Edmunds] ] and spoke of the encouragement of another well-placed Anglo-Saxon, Prior Sihtric. The manuscript of Geoffrey's pious embroidery was among the manuscripts collected by the early seventeenth-century antiquary Robert Bruce Cotton, now conserved in the British Library. [British Library, Cotton Titus A. viii, part II, BL2393]

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Further reading

* [http://escholarship.bc.edu/dissertations/AAI9610868/ Victoria B Jordan, Boston College, "Monastic hagiography in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman England: The cases of Edward the Confessor and St. Edmund, King and Martyr"] dissertation, 1995.