Women and Charters in the Carolingian East

For the past twenty-five or so years, an increasing number of Anglophone scholars have turned their attentions to the eastern Carolingian kingdoms and to the rich evidentiary corpus of monastic charters and cartularies. With this increase has come a broadening of approaches to charter evidence that goes beyond, and indeed, often questions, traditional diplomatic. The monastery of Fulda's Carolingian charters reveal that women were much more involved in the alienation of property than has been generally reckoned. The appearance of women's names on witness lists, for example, even when there is no apparent connection of the women to the particulars of a transaction, allows us to reevaluate the roles women might have played at a local level. This paper examines charters from other important eastern monasteries, like Lorsch, in order to help establish whether the evidence from Fulda is typical for the period. It also addresses the extent to which these charters and cartularies can be compared, given the many differences in organization, composition, transmission, authorship, etc.