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St. Liudtrud legend does not concem us here.3 St. Pusinna’s first
resting-place was in the church of Binson, diocese of Chålons-sur-
Mame. The oldest witness to her cult in France is the late eighth-
century psalter of St. Mary’s nunnery in Soissons, where she is
invoked in the litany. However, she has left only a few traces in her
native country after the translation of her relics c. 860 from the church
of Binson to St. Mary’s nunnery at Herford in Westphalia, a
foundation on a par with that of St. Mary’s of Soissons, both closely
connected with the Carolingian rulers and their families.
Her feast, 23 April, is recorded in the famous palimpsest calendar,
MS Ambros. M. 12 sup., written in the course of the 870s, if not in
Herford, at least in a region adjacent to it.4 As patron saint of Herford
she appears in German sources from the late ninth century to the
Reformation.5 A fifteenth-century Herford missal, now in Berlin,
contains her Mass with a sequence, ‘Sponsa Christi o Pusinna/ jugi
laude semper digna’ (AH 9, no. 330). Her cult, apparently, never
spread far from Herford. Among the late-medieval German diocesan
calendars, only those of Paderborn and Minden record her feast, 23
April.6
Herford probably ceded a relic to the nunnery of Wendhausen in
Harz. A document from 999 refers to Pusinna as the patron saint of
Wendhausen. The subjection of Wendhausen to Quedlinburg may
account for the presence of a relic in Quedlinburg before 1200. The
Church of Hildesheim possessed a relic before 1061, St. Peter’s
monastery of Erfurt before 1104, the Church of Osnabriick before
1342.7
Our Icelandic calendars in question are MS AM 249b fol., c. 1200,
3 See H. Beumann, Pusinna, Liudtrud und Mauritius: Veroffentlichungen des Provin-
zialinstituts fur westfalische Landes- und Volkskunde. Reihe I, Heft 15 (Mtinster W.
1970), pp. 17-29; and B. de Gaiffier, Å propos des Vies des Stes Pusinne et Liutrude:
Analecta Bollandiana, 89 (1971), pp. 311-18.
4 Ed. B. Bischoff, Das karolingische Kalendar der Palimpsesthandschrift Ambros.
M. 12 sup.: Colligere Fragmenta. Festschrift Alban Doid. Texte und Arbeiten hg. durch
die Erzabtei Beuron, I, Beiheft 2 (Beuron 1952), pp. 247-60.
5 For the documentation, see de Gaiffier, La plus ancienne vie, op. cit., pp. 190-
96.
6 H. Grotefend, Zeitrechnung des deutschen Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, 2/1
(Hannover 1892), p. 145, and p. 130.
7 See de Gaiffier, La plus ancienne vie, op. cit., pp. 193 sqq.; Beumann, op. cit.,
pp. 17-18.