What We Might Learn From Women's Correspondence

Abstract

irst, let me say how happy I am to participate in this session. I feel honored that Joan has claimed me as a teacher though she was already a recognized scholar when she took the NEH seminar, and I have, over the years, learned a great deal from her and her work. It is tempting to try to survey all the various things that medieval women’s correspondence reveals they were thinking about: medical issues, family problems, legal and financial claims, [fighting] divorce, political negotiations, the conflicting claims of world and cloister, the need for moral support in a difficult job, pride in their heritage or in the accomplishments of other women, rebellion against religious authority, and these are all interesting, but there is not enough time for them. I will focus mainly on religious issues, but I would like to remind you first of the influence women patrons had on the writing of secular texts, particularly histories. Women were guardians of history, sometimes in the works they commissioned, sometimes in their persons, often bringing the prestige of an older family to give legitimacy to their more parvenu husbands. It was to their advantage to press the claims of their families, but the same claims were pressed by women religious. In some cases, the interest seems to be mainly in preserving and asserting the prestige of the family, and presumably their own. Gerberga commissioned Hrotsvit’s two epics; one the life of her uncle, Otto I, the Gesta Ottonis; the other, the history of the founding of their monastery by the women in the family, the Primordia Coenobii Gandeshemensis. Matilda, abbess of Essen, the last survivor of the line of Liudolf, Duke of Swabia and son of Otto I, and his first wife, the English princess Edith, grand daughter of Alfred, asked her English cousin AEthelward for a history of her English ancestors [Chronicon AEthelwardi]. Sometimes the histories