Roberta Cimino:

The language of women’s powers in Carolingian diplomas

My research focuses on the language of royal charters which describes royal women’s authority in Carolingian and late Carolingian Europe (c. 774 – 1000). This project aims at assessing what the linguistic choices in the creation of Carolingian diplomas can tell us about women’s role in royal politics. Charters are a valuable resource of information for the study of early medieval politics, but their significance for the study of elite women has been underestimated. This project analyses titles and expressions which define queens and empresses and, more broadly, royal women (royal daughters, sisters and mothers). The research aims at show that linguistic choices in the compilation of royal charters can shed light on the political status of women. Moreover, it argues that expressions and titles used to define women offer a crucial insight into the way in which rulers represented themselves, and on the kind of political messages that they wanted to deliver.