Lindsay Rudge PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

You are loved, I know, by Christ, your husband and the heavens’ glory,
for to Him alone you have dedicated your body. 5
The appearance of a dedicated religious woman at court may seem incongruous, but the
king’s sister was no ordinary religious woman. Her position was ambiguous: on the one
hand, courtiers such as Angilbert and Theodulf (see below, 220 ff.) underlined her
separate status, reiterating the sense of interior cloister she was expected to retain even
while away from Chelles. On the other, Charlemagne’s sister was a central figure at court
and possessed lands and wealth, giving lands to St Denis in 799 for the souls of their
parents, confirmed by Charlemagne and witnessed by his sons Charles, Pippin and
Louis. 6 As will be discussed at greater length below, the uniqueness of Gisela’s position
may well make her a difficult subject for a case study for female religious life in the
Carolingian period. She stands, however, at the centre of a number of intersecting areas
for discussion, and provides a counterpoint to the main discussion of Charlemagne’s
legislation on religious women, both in the main body of his reign and in the councils of
813.
Recent work on Charlemagne’s legislation has focused on governing through
assemblies held at court, and on their output in the form of capitularies. 7 From the
beginning of his reign, these formal documents demonstrate Charlemagne’s attempts to
re-shape a Christian society. In 769, a confirmation of Pippin’s Aquitanian capitulary saw
Charlemagne and his brother Carloman focus on the rights and duties of men with regard
to the law. The three canons dealing with the clergy emphasise their duty of care towards
ecclesiastical property, and underline that ‘bishops, abbots and abbesses are to live under
a holy rule’. 8 The point is here being made that the monastic rule equates to monastic
5
MGH Poetae I, 360-3. Ed. and tr. P. Godman, in Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance (London:
Duckworth, 1985) at 115.
6
MGH Diplomata I, nos. 190 and 319.
7
On Charlemagne, see now the articles in J. Story (ed.) Charlemagne: a New History (Manchester, 2005).
On the mechanisms of government, see in particular S. Airlie, ‘The palace of memory: the Carolingian
court as political centre’, in S. Rees Jones et al. eds, Courts and Regions in Medieval Europe (York, 2000),
pp. 1-20, at 18-20; T. Reuter, ‘Assembly politics in western Europe from the eight century to the twelfth’ in
P. Linehan and J.L. Nelson (eds.) The Medieval World (London, 2001), pp. 432-450; M. Innes,
‘Charlemagne’s government’, in Story, Charlemagne: a New History, 71-89.
8
MGH Capit. I, 42, can II; trans P.D. King, Charlemagne: Translated Sources (Kendal, 1987), 202.
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