Alcuin’s Letters Sent from Francia to Anglo-Saxon and Frankish Women Religious

Abstract

In 2003, Barbara Yorke’s Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses offered radically new ways of thinking about religious women in the early medieval world. One was the realization that “kings could claim lordship over nunneries by virtue of their having been founded by members of the royal house.” Another was that nunneries “were not so much passive places ... as playing a proactive role...” A third was that “an abbess had a position which paralleled that of a male equivalent in the church ... Headship of a royal monastery was ... a gendered role. It was one that only royal women could perform from the royal kin-group.”1 Over the past fifteen years, abbesses have been the subject of much new thinking, not least from Barbara herself. In this paper, which I offer in her honour, and mindful of a venerable tradition of women’s sending of munuscula, I begin by taking a comparative approach, juxtaposing some evidence from Continental Europe, especially Francia, to evidence from AngloSaxon England, in quite different genres of the same period. The genres in question are, first, prayer-texts; second, capitularies, that is, administrative regulations and/or admonitory texts issued by early Carolingian rulers; and third, letters. On this basis, I shall investigate the women religious to whom Alcuin wrote.