Feast Day
3 saints in our library are celebrated on November 16.
c. 1140 AD — November 16, 1200 AD
A Burgundian Carthusian monk who became Bishop of Lincoln — England's largest diocese — Hugh shielded Jews from mob violence under Richard I, excommunicated royal foresters on his first days in office, refused military levies even at financial penalty, and rebuilt Lincoln Cathedral in Gothic stone after earthquake damage. He was the first Carthusian ever canonized.
c. 1174 AD — November 16, 1240 AD
Born in Abingdon to a merchant family, Edmund Rich became one of Oxford's first master lecturers before being appointed Archbishop of Canterbury — a position he initially refused. He championed the Magna Carta and ecclesiastical independence, clashed with King Henry III and papal legates alike, and died in France in 1240 after falling ill near Pontigny, where the monks he loved buried him.
January 6, 1256 AD — c. 1302 AD
Gertrude the Great entered the Benedictine Monastery of Helfta at age five and never left — yet from that cloister she produced some of the most theologically precise mystical writing of medieval Germany. At twenty-five, a vision of Christ shattered her pride in learning and turned her entirely toward the Sacred Heart, making her its first great systematic theologian and the only woman saint to bear the title 'the Great.'