Saturday after the Sunday after Ascension

Dunstan was born in 909 near Glastonbury into a family connected to the West Saxon royal house. He was educated at Glastonbury Abbey and showed early talent for music, metalwork, and illumination — arts he practiced throughout his life. It is from this work at the forge that the later medieval tradition draws his most famous image: that while making liturgical vessels he was tempted by the devil and seized him by the nose with red-hot tongs. The episode is unknown to his earliest biographer ('B.,' writing in the 990s) and first appears in Osbern of Canterbury more than a century later; it nevertheless became the iconographic signature by which Dunstan was known throughout the English Middle Ages.

His early career was politically turbulent. He was a courtier under King Æthelstan but was expelled from court on accusations of practicing black magic (likely the suspicion of a jealous rival). After a period of uncertainty, King Edmund appointed him Abbot of Glastonbury around 940. Under Dunstan's leadership, Glastonbury became the model for the English Benedictine revival: he enforced strict observance of the Rule, built up the library, promoted the arts, and trained a generation of monks who would become bishops and reformers.

Dunstan served as chief adviser to successive kings — Edmund, Eadred, and Edgar. Under Edgar (959–975), the monastic reform reached its peak. Dunstan, together with his fellow reformers Æthelwold (Bishop of Winchester) and Oswald (Bishop of Worcester, later Archbishop of York), reorganized English monasticism along Continental Benedictine lines. The Regularis Concordia, a unified monastic customary drawn up at the Council of Winchester (c. 970), codified their reforms.

As Archbishop of Canterbury (959–988), Dunstan wielded enormous ecclesiastical and political power. He crowned Edgar in an elaborate ceremony at Bath in 973 — a liturgical event that established the pattern for English coronations thereafter. After Edgar's death, Dunstan navigated the difficult succession between Edward the Martyr and Æthelred the Unready.

Dunstan died on May 19, 988, in his eightieth year. His last recorded public act was preaching three sermons on Ascension Day, during which he is said to have announced his imminent death.

The most famous legend about Dunstan tells that one night, while he was at work in his forge, the devil appeared at the window in human disguise — in some tellings as a beautiful woman — and sought to draw him into temptation. Dunstan, recognizing his adversary, snatched up the red-hot tongs from the fire and seized the devil by the nose, holding him fast as he howled and writhed; the cries (a later English rhyme adds) were heard three miles off before he was at last released. The story connects to Dunstan's known skill as a metalworker and became his defining iconographic attribute. It first appears, however, in Osbern of Canterbury's Vita (c. 1090), over a century after Dunstan's death; it has no early attestation and belongs to the classic devil-encounter hagiography of the post-Conquest period.

The earliest vita ('B.') records that Dunstan experienced visions and that his appointment to Glastonbury was divinely confirmed, but these are relatively restrained compared to the later tradition. 'B.' also records miracles at Dunstan's tomb, following standard convention.

Dunstan's prediction of his own death on Ascension Day is reported by the earliest sources and has the character of a deathbed prophecy topos, though the specific liturgical context (three sermons on the feast) gives it circumstantial weight.