Empresses, Queens, and Letters: Finding a ‘Female Voice’ in Late Antiquity?

Abstract

Few texts assigned to the authorship of women survive from antiquity. By and large, this also holds true for the fifth and sixth centuries AD, 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, as a series of letters, composed under the name of female members of imperial or royal dynasties, remain from that time. 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. Altogether, there are twenty-six letters of this type, nineteen of which were written in Latin, while seven are preserved in Greek, of which 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.