‘Against the Custom’: Hagiographical Rewriting and Female Abbatial Leadership at Mid-Eleventh-Century Remiremont

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of a recently identified campaign of hagiographic writing from the mid-eleventh-century monastery of Remiremont to reconstruct how this female convent positioned itself at a time when clerical resistance to the lifestyle and autonomy of non-Benedictine communities was gaining momentum. In a first stage it looks at the three hagiographies from this campaign and how they reveal a cohesive strategy to drastically review the abbey’s narrative of origins. In a second it reconstructs how their argument fits into Abbess Oda’s (before 1045-1065/70) governance strategy and how that strategy was influenced by historical leadership choices at the nearby male houses of Luxeuil and Lure. And in a final one it considers memories of abbatial agency and discourses of communal identity at ninth- and tenth-century Remiremont, and how these influenced the abbess and her associates. In doing all these things, this study reveals that the abbey’s leadership deployed a multi-faceted strategy to secure Remiremont’s independence, taking ownership of its identity narrative at a critical juncture in its existence.