Saint Margaret of Scotland: Her Byzantine, Bulgarian, English, German, Hungarian, Polish and Russian Ancestors (?)

The aim of this lecture in the OTKA Saints Colloquia Series is to show how medieval texts dealing with the ancestors of a holy queen and the recent genealogical reconstructions based on them influenced the modern image of a female saint. The life of Saint Margaret of Scotland is not only one of the most debated stories of the eleventh century, but also a unique example of hagiographic interpretations. Her father, Edward the Exile, was the son of Edmund Ironside, who was briefly king of Anglo-Saxon England. King Cnut, the Danish conqueror of England, exiled the infant prince Edward, who lived for a time in Sweden before moving to Kievan Rus and later to Hungary. Edward married a woman named Agatha whose genealogy has been the subject of scholarly debates and speculations for two centuries. They returned to England with their children Margaret, Christina, and Edgar, as Edward was the acknowledged heir to the Anglo-Saxon throne. Within five days of landing in England, Edward the Exile was dead, and Margaret fled to Scotland, where she married King Malcolm III. As queen, she became known for her great personal piety. The sanctity of Margaret is typically assumed to have been the direct result of her pious family and upbringing.

József Laszlovszky, Professor at the Department of Medieval Studies (CEU), is the author of numerous studies and articles in the fields of medieval archaeology, medieval European history, monastic culture, material culture, medieval settlement system, and medieval English-Hungarian contacts. The hagiographic, genealogical and historiographic discussion of the present topic is based on the results of a new, two-volume monograph on the history of medieval English-Hungarian contacts: Attila Bárány–József Laszlovszky–Zsuzsanna Papp: Angol-magyar kapcsolatok a középkorban (English-Hungarian Contacts in the Middle Ages), 2008-2011.