Monegundis

Saint Monegundis (also Monegund, Mongon or Molmadund) was a Frankish hermit who died around 570. She was a native of Chartres in France and married, "as her parents wished". She had two daughters, who both died in childhood of a fever. Overcome with grief, which no one, neither husband nor friends, could console, as Saint Gregory of Tours puts it, she left her home and lived as a hermit in a small cell, on bread and water. Gregory, who knew her personally, wrote her life in De Vita Patrum, seeing in her the married woman who turned the bitter loss of her children into a source of spiritual nourishment for others.

Her fame grew through the miracles she performed. With her husband's permission she moved to Tours, near the shrine and basilica of Saint Martin, where other women joined her and built a convent, called St. Pierre-⁠le-⁠Puellier. It is said that she gave to the poor the bread she made from barley flour that she prepared herself, and that she slept on a small mat. Her feast is on 2 July, the day on which she is also commemorated in the Orthodox calendar, as a saint of the West before the Great Schism (a saint of the undivided Church), by the New Calendar.