Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia

Abstract

This book is a study of the intellectual culture of the women’s monasteries of the Main Valley during the eighth century, with a particular focus on Karlburg and Kitzingen. It is based on an analysis of the manuscripts produced and used by the women religious, beginning in the middle decades of the century, when the arrival of the “Anglo-Saxon missionaries to Germany” (including Boniface of Mainz and his “beloved,” Leoba of Tauberbischofsheim) inaugurated book production in the region. The content of the women’s books was overwhelmingly gender-egalitarian and frequently feminist, that is, resistant to patriarchal ideas. Female intellectuals preferentially selected for reproduction and transmission texts that supported their own aspirations to dignity and authority in the ecclesiastical landscape of the Carolingian realm. Furthermore, the scribe-authors of Karlburg and Kitzingen actively intervened in the texts they transmitted to modify them (when necessary) in a more feminist direction, combined pre-existent texts in innovative ways, and composed a number of entirely new texts in order to produce powerfully feminist visions of Christian history and Christian theology. At Kitzingen, a talented theologian-artist also produced illuminations that enhanced the meaning of the texts, in one case (a crucifixion miniature illustrating the Pauline Epistles) also in a markedly feminist way. Religious Women also provides many glimpses into non-gendered aspects of monastic culture during the eighth century, such as the importance of the practice of devotional penance.

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