Lindsay Rudge PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

victory at the battle of Tertry in 687. However, the process of aligning these lands with
those of the existing kingdoms of Gaul continued well into the eighth century, and the
northern areas were the heartlands of the court even before the change of ruler to an
Austrasian dynasty, the Pippinids or Carolingians, in 751. Royal interest in the northern
lands meant that much of Gaul – Aquitaine, Provence and Burgundy – was ruled by
effectively independent dynasties of dukes. At a more local level, bishops, based in the
old Roman civitates, wielded a great deal of authority. Accusations of treason against
bishops appear commonplace in the Libri historiarum of Gregory of Tours: their local
power, and the friction this could cause with secular rulers, cannot help but be underlined
by these stories. While much of the present study is deeply informed by the
configurations of both secular and episcopal power, it must at the same time cut across
such structures.
Historiography
There is already a vast literature on early medieval dedicated women, largely the
result of the increasing interest in ‘women’s history’ since the 1960s. It is still true to say,
as did Deborah Thom in 1992, that ‘[t]he history the historian writes is the history of her
own times’. 14 One of the earliest works on the subject, Lina Eckenstein’s Women under
Monasticism, was written by one of the earliest female scholars at Cambridge, and
published in 1896. Eckenstein based her work upon the principle that ‘a clearer insight
into the social standards and habits of life prevalent in past ages will aid us in a better
estimation of the relative importance of those factors of change we find around us to-
day.’ 15 For Eckenstein, one of the most important lessons of the past was that ‘[t]he right
to self-development and social responsibility which the woman of to-day so persistently
asks for, is in many ways analogous to the right which the convent secured for
14 Thom, ‘A lop-sided view’, 28.
15 L. Eckenstein, Woman under Monasticism: chapters on saint-lore and convent life between AD 500 and
AD 1500 (Cambridge, 1896), vii. For more on Eckenstein, and other women medievalists, see now J.
Chance (ed.) Women Medievalists and the Academy (Wisconsin, 2005).
18