Overshadowed by St. Patrick

          On March 17 most of the world, especially the United States, celebrates the Feast of St. Patrick. But there is another saint whose feast day is March 17. I found this representation of that saint on the Episcopal Memes Facebook page. The representation is from an original work by Carolee Clark, King of Mice Studios.

         Gertrude of Nivelles (c625-659)  lived in the 7^th century in Belgium and was a younger daughter of Saint Pepin of Landen and Saint Ida of Nivelles; sister of Saint Begga of Ardenne. It seemed to be a saintly family. They lived in the pre-Charlemagne era (the Merovingian era) when the Western Roman Empire was in tatters and there were many local kings and small local states. Very little is known of Gertrude’s early life.

        The chief source of Gerttude’s life is the Vita Sanctae Geretrudis and the Additamentum Nivialense de Fuilano probably written before 670 and after 663 (very soon after Gertrude’s death). The Vita indicates that when Gertrude was ten years old, she rejected a royal suitor and declared vehemently that she would take neither him or any other earthly spouse but only Christ the Lord.

           

          Her parents seem to have honored her wishes. It was only after her father died in 639 that her mother shaved Gertrude’s head, leaving only a crowned shape tonsure in order to repel any other suitors who might wish to marry her daughter for wealth and power. Ida then built a Benedictine double monastery at Nivelles where she retired with her daughter. When Ida died, Gertrude at the age of twenty became abbess of the monastery.

          Gertrude was known for her hospitality and the aid given to Irish missionary monks . St. Patrick had lived almost 200 year previous and Ireland was then in need of more evangelization. She also was helpful to St. Follian by giving him land on which to build his monastery at Fosses, Belgium.

          In 656 she resigned as abbess in favor of her niece St. Wilfretrudis and devoted the rest of her life to studying Scripture. She had the gift of visions and was known as an ascetic visionary. She fasted so rigorously and slept so little that her health became precarious. She died at the age of 33 in 659. It was said that St. Patrick watched over her deathbed.

          Gertrude was not formally canonized but in 1677 Pope Clement declared her universal feast day to be March 17.

          Gertrude’s iconography is flexible and evolving. Originally she was considered the patron of travelers because of her hospitality and then patron of gardeners and the mentally ill. As time went by, she became the patron of rats or mice because she was known to pray for souls in purgatory, and medieval artists frequently portrayed those souls as mice. Many drawings and statues of Gertrude showed her with a crozier symbolizing her position as abbess and mice or rats at her feet or running up her robes or the crozier. Since mice or rats have never had a good reputation, she later became the saint who would intercede when there was infestation of mice or rats.

           Recently people have associated the saint who warded off mice or rats as a patron of cats  We have no story that Gertrude even owned a cat but cats were useful in medieval times to keep the rats and mice away from food supplies and even out of houses whose floors were “rushes”( mats made of straw or any dried pieces of greenery) that caught and held food droppings and were only changed every season. Many authors point to the 1981 Metropolitan Museum of Art's catalog, Metropolitan Cats, as the beginning of her status as  patron of cats.

          Gertrude of Nivelles is not to be confused with another Benedictine saint and mystic, Gertrude the Great, who lived from 1256 to 1302 at Helfta in Germany. Perhaps I’ll do a future post on her.

                                         Sr. Deborah Harmeling, OSB