Few texts assigned to the authorship of women survive from antiquity.By and large, this also holds true for the fifth and sixth centuries CE, which, as a historical period, saw the consolidation of Christianity as the dominant religion in the Mediterranean, the disintegration of the Roman Empire and the emergence of non-Roman successor kingdoms in its Western territories.Still, these two centuries present a unique moment in the history of female writing.Twenty-six letters composed under the name of female members of imperial or royal dynasties remain from that time.Nineteen of these were written in Latin, while seven are preserved in Greek, of which at least three may be translations from an original Latin composition.The letters originate from both the East and the West of the late Roman Empire, as well as from Ostrogothic Italy and from Merovingian Gaul.They can be divided exactly into one half written under the name of late Roman imperial women and one half attributed to royal women of the mentioned kingdoms.All these letters are 'political' in the sense that they either deal with diplomatic negotiations between different political entities or are part of communications between rulers and subjects (for a full list see the Appendix).Very little attention has been paid to the majority of these letters so far. 1 Where they have been studied, the approach has usually been individualising and biographical, with the intention of analysing a single letter's content for evidence of a specific woman's personal opinions, relationship to the recipient, feelings, writing style or political power. 2 Building on a notable exception to this approach -Andrew Gillett's studies of the letters of Brunhild, mother of the Merovingian king Childebert, and of diplomatic embassies in the post-Roman West more generally 3 -this article argues that these twenty-six letters are more productively studied as a corpus.This is despite the difference in language or political contexts from which they originated.What these letters -with one exception -have in common is that they were sent with other letters as part of 'batches', following literary and ceremonial conventions of letter-writing that late Roman and the post-Roman ruling elites shared.4 This common format suggests that the late Roman and post-Roman letters considered here can be studied together, but also that they formed part of larger political strategies that went beyond the relationship between a single letter's sender and recipient.Focusing on such relationships only is therefore deeply problematic.
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