Women and Documents in Early Medieval Legal Formularies

Evidence that women in early medieval Europe participated in the documentary culture around them has until recently seemed sparse, particularly for those who were not members of royal families or the highest aristocracy. What evidence there was came almost exclusively from ecclesiastical or monastic archives. It primarily showed women making pious gifts of property to churches or monasteries (usually but not exclusively together with their husbands) or serving as actors or beneficiaries in inheritance arrangements that involved churches or monasteries. Women rarely appeared taking part in other sorts of situations that required documents or directly producing or commissioning documents for their own purposes.

In the last few years, however, more evidence has surfaced that early medieval women both used and kept documents. It has appeared in the context of work on the use of documents by laypeople, in a world where documentary culture was long thought to have been dominated by the clergy. Much of this evidence appears in legal formularies from the eighth and ninth centuries. The formularies comprise collections of model documents that served as sources of language for documents and as resources for teaching. They reveal that women took an active part in a lively documentary culture that embraced both clergy and laity. They participated in transactions or conflicts that were recorded in documents, that did not necessarily concern churches or monasteries, and that dealt with other matters besides giving and receiving property. In the course of many of these transactions or conflicts they received documents that they likely kept for future reference. They sometimes generated, or at least commissioned, documents on their own initiative and for their own purposes. Perhaps most important, among the female participants in documentary culture were women of low and even unfree status, as well as members of the landed aristocracy.