Lindsay Rudge PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

and bear in mind the joys fitting for the eternal husband. 25
This passage strongly evokes the strictures of earlier writers on virginity from Jerome
onwards; clearly, although Gisela may not have been confined to Chelles, her mental
cloister was expected to remain unbroken. However, Theodulf’s depiction of the court
suggests that Charlemagne himself ought to have a hand in his sister’s spiritual life:
Should she request that the ways of Scripture be revealed to her,
may the king, himself taught by God, teach her. 26
Although intended more as a laudatory reflection on Charlemagne than a comment on the
education of nuns, the inclusion of this statement suggests that the presence of religious
women at court and even their spiritual formation beyond the walls of the monastery
were not abominations in the eyes of Theodulf’s audience.
Yet even at Chelles, Gisela was not isolated from political and intellectual
currents. In her discussion of the probable composition of the Annales Mettenses priores
at Chelles under the auspices of Gisela, Janet Nelson has underlined the role of the
monastery as a satellite court. A letter of Alcuin reveals that he and Angilbert, both royal
missi, met there; the Annales record the visit of Charlemagne to Chelles in 804 ad
colloquium germanae suae Gislae. 27 As she summarises, ‘[t]hus it was at Chelles... that
political contacts met, that information could be gathered from all over the realm’.
Charlemagne’s capitularies could not and were not intended to legislate for subtle
networks of influence and patronage which were centred on female monasteries. Gisela’s
links with her brother’s court were not solely maintained by her presence there; on
occasion the court came to her. Gisela’s case is of such a network of influence writ large;
her connections are royal, and subsequently imperial. The lack of any surviving evidence
25
Quod si forte soror fuerit sanctissima regis,/ Oscula det fratri dulcia, frater ei./ Talia sic placido
moderetur gaudia vultu,/ Ut sponsi aeterni gaudia mente gerat. MGH Poetae I, 483-9, at 486. Ed. and tr. P.
Godman, in Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance (London, 1985) at 155-7.
26
Et bene scripturae pandi sibi compita poscat,/ Rex illam doceat, quem deus ipse docet. MGH Poetae I,
483-9, at 486.
27
Alcuin, ep. 214; Annales Mettenses priores, s.a. 804, at 92. J.L. Nelson, ‘Gender and genre in women
historians’, in eadem, The Frankish World (Hambledon: London, 1996), 183-197, at 191-2; see now her
‘Gender and Courts in the Early Medieval West’, in L. Brubaker and J.M.H. Smith (eds.) Gender in the
Early Medieval World: East and West, 300-900 (Cambridge, 2004) 185-197, for a more extended
consideration of monasteries functioning as courts.
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