August 13 + Saint Queen Radegund

Radegund was born in 520 AD to King Berthar, one of the three kings of Thuringia (located in present day Germany). Her uncle, Hermanfrid, killed her father in battle, leaving Radegund an orphan.

When she was 12 years old, King Clotaire of Neustria took Radegund captive and six years later, she was forced into marriage becoming one of his six wives.

She devoted herself to the poor, the sick, and captives, founded a leper hospital, and bore Clotaire's cruelties uncomplainingly until he murdered her brother. She then left the court, received the deaconess habit and became a nun at Saix. She built the double monastery of the Holy Cross at Poitiers, to which she retired and which she developed into a great center of learning.

Radegund was active in peacemaking roles and lived in great austerity. The abbey she founded was named for the relic of the True Cross that Radegund obtained from the Byzantine Emperor Justin II. To celebrate the relic and its installation, Venantius Fortunatus composed a series of hymns, including the famous Vexilla Regis, considered to be one of the most significant Christian hymns ever written, which is still sung for services on Good Friday, Palm Sunday, as well as the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.

Radegund became noted for acts of piety and the miracles which she wrought. A sick man was healed by taking a bath and by the saint pouring a sweet smelling oil over his head. She would wash the feet of poor beggars and care for their wounds, not disdaining to touch them, however filthy and loathsome they might be. On one occasion she revived a still-born child brought to her by its father, by wrapping it in the horse skin rug on which she knelt at her devotions. Her acceptability to Heaven was shown by a special manifestation of the Virgin and Child Jesus to her one day as she was praying. Clotaire at one time thought of taking her back to him by force, but she wrote to Saint Germain of Paris, who went to the king and dissuaded him.

Radegund lived the last years of her life in seclusion and died at the monastery on August 13, 587.