Egburg (also Egburga, Ecburg) was a 9th-century

abbess An abbess (Latin: ''abbatissa''), also known as a mother superior, is the female superior of a community of Catholic nuns in an abbey. Description In the Catholic Church (both the Latin Church and Eastern Catholic), Eastern Orthodox, Coptic ...

about whom little is known. A letter by her remains in the Boniface correspondence, in which she writes to

Saint Boniface Boniface, OSB ( la, Bonifatius; 675 – 5 June 754) was an English Benedictines, Benedictine monk and leading figure in the Anglo-Saxon mission to the Germanic parts of the Frankish Empire during the eighth century. He organised significant ...

of her grief. The letter evidences that she was highly learned—according to Eleanor Duckett, "Her letter is short, and her misery is very great; she manages, however, to bring in four reminiscences of Vergil's ''Aeneid'', two of various writings of Aldhelm of Malmesbury ..., two of a letter written by Jerome to the monk Rufinus, together with at least half a dozen quotations from the Bible".

Lina Eckenstein Lina Dorina Johanna Eckenstein (23 September 1857 – 4 May 1931) was a British polymath and historian who was acknowledged as a philosopher and scholar in the women's movement. Life Eckenstein's father was a Jewish socialist from Bonn who had ...

proposes she might have been a daughter of Ealdwulf, king of East Anglia, and the abbess of

Repton Repton is a village and civil parish in the South Derbyshire district of Derbyshire, England, located on the edge of the River Trent floodplain, about north of Swadlincote. The population taken at the 2001 Census was 2,707, increasing to 2,8 ...

References

External links

Egburg's letter to Boniface, 716-720
9th-century English people 9th-century English women Anglo-Saxon abbesses Roman Catholic abbesses 9th-century Christian nuns {{Christianity-bio-stub