Biography
Angadrisma
About Angadrisma
Angadrisma, also called Angadrême, is remembered as an abbess near Beauvais. The life of Ansbert says that she received the veil from Ouen at Rouen and later governed the community called the Oratory. Later Catholic accounts place her death around 695.
The same life tells how her family arranged an engagement to Ansbert while both wished to preserve their chastity. Angadrisma prayed for a change in her appearance, developed a disfiguring illness and was released from the engagement. It says that she recovered after receiving the veil. This is a hagiographic healing story, not an independently established medical history.
The written tradition survives in later copies. The IRHT manuscript catalogue records a separate life of Angadrisma in an eleventh-century manuscript now at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. That dates the surviving witness listed in the catalogue; it does not establish when every detail of the story first arose.
Her remembrance became part of Beauvais’s civic and religious life. A regional heritage inventory describes a limestone statue in the cathedral treasury, probably from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. It represents her as an abbess looking toward a small prayer book. This later devotional image is a record of her cult, rather than a contemporary likeness.
The diocesan calendar observes her on 27 June, as a memorial across the diocese and a solemnity at Beauvais. Nominis also lists 14 October. Devotion continued into the 2025 cathedral anniversary, when the diocese announced an exhibition devoted to her and extended it until 12 November.
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