Abstract
In the epilogue, Jestice pulls together the book’s argument that the women of the Ottonian dynasty were consciously endowed with the means to be effective sharers in the work of rule. Their prestige—both in terms of material wealth and symbolic authority—made them valuable tools of government under ordinary circumstances and preservers of Ottonian rule when the throne crisis of 984 forced them to take center stage.
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Notes
- 1.
Annales Altahenses maiores, ed. W. Giesebrecht and E. Oefele, MGH SS rer. Germ. in us. schol. 4 (1891), a. 992, p. 15.
- 2.
Hermannus Augiensis, Chronicon, MGH SS 5, a. 991, p. 117.
- 3.
Annales Quedlinburgenses, 68.
- 4.
Thietmar, (IV.15) 150.
- 5.
Gunther Wolf, “Theophanu und Adelheid,” in Kaiserin Theophanu, ed. Wolf (Cologne: Böhlau, 1991), 92.
- 6.
Thietmar, IV.15.
- 7.
Thilo Offergeld, Reges pueri. Das Königtum Minderjähriger im frühen Mittelalter (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2001), 722–23.
- 8.
DOIII 146 (July 6, 994); see Gerd Althoff, Otto III, trans. Phyllis G. Jestice (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 52.
- 9.
Gerbert of Aurillac, Die Briefsammlung Gerberts von Reims, ed. Fritz Weigle, MGH Briefe der deutschen Kaiserzeit 2 (1966), Letter 208, pp. 249–50. This letter was probably written in summer or fall of 995, about the time Adelheid’s regency ended.
- 10.
As argued by Laura Wangerin in “Empress Theophanu, Sanctity, and Memory in Early Medieval Saxony,” Central European History 47 (2014): 716–36, esp. 733.
- 11.
For a now-classic formulation of what changed with the twelfth-century renaissance, see Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).
- 12.
Wangerin argues that three chief factors kept Theophanu from sainthood: that she was too widely recognized as an inferior dynastic bride, western distrust of Greeks, and her competing political ambitions with Adelheid. See Wangerin, “Empress Theophanu,” 718.
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Jestice, P.G. (2018). Epilogue: The Power of Royal Women?. In: Imperial Ladies of the Ottonian Dynasty. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77306-3_11
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