Lindsay Rudge PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

more fully. In particular, the contexts for the production and circulation of the ‘booklet’
of Caesarian texts will be identified.
The second objective of this chapter is to discuss the attempts at reform, largely
centred on legislation, of Boniface and Chrodegang of Metz, bolstered by Carloman and
Pippin. Availability of evidence can suggest that the religious landscape of the eighth
century was dominated by one reformer after another, and, indeed, the wealth of material
attached to Boniface’s mission to Francia will serve as a case study illuminating both
Anglo-Saxon and Frankish nuns’ lives. However, this chapter will also demonstrate the
limitations of such reforming initiatives and draw on alternative evidence to discuss
dedicated life for women as a whole.
Dedicated women in eighth-century Gaul
As Schulenburg has described, far fewer foundations for women are recorded as
being made in the eighth century than in the previous century. The political situation in
eighth-century Francia undoubtedly played its part: aside from encouraging specific
missionary endeavours which were themselves part of a wider strategy of gaining control
of more remote territories, Charles Martel (d. 741), father of Carloman and Pippin III,
was more occupied with uniting the Frankish kingdoms that with making new
foundations. 6 From her examination of new foundations in northern Gaul, Michèle
Gaillard has noticed that while, in the seventh century, most new houses were created by
the women who would subsequently go on to reside in them, new foundations from the
eighth century onwards tended to be the work of either bishops or of royal and
aristocratic men and women who had no intention of retiring into the houses they
founded. 7 Gaillard suggests that the decreasing numbers of aristocratic women whose
piety led them to create a monastic establishment for themselves may have stemmed from
6 M. Gaillard ‘Les fondations d’abbayes féminins dans le nord et l’est de la Gaule, de la fin du Vie siècle à
la fin du Xe siècle’, RHEF 76 (1990) 5-20, at 6. For the Church in Francia under Charles Martel, see J.M.
Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church (Oxford, 1983), 132-42.
7 Gaillard, ‘Les fondations d’abbayes féminins dans le nord’, 7-9.
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