ABSTRACT
Venantius Fortunatus downplays her privileged status and her ties to the Merovingian and the Frankish kingdoms that efficient aspect of her royalty that enabled her to bypass Maroveus and refuse to defer to him. Added to Pope Gregory’s and Fortunatus’s reminiscences is the biography by Baudonivia, a nun in Radegund’s convent, who received an assignment from her abbess Dedimia to write the saint’s life some twenty years after her death. Caesarius’s Rule for women contained forty-one articles, a recapitulation in nineteen articles, and a prologue. The women slept in dormitories, although Radegund was privileged to have her own cell. The only permissible needlework was the embroidering of handkerchiefs and towels which the abbess ordered. However, there is evidence that the women did spinning, for Radegund left her spindle behind. The Rule provided for strict enclosure and scholarship, and evidently, Radegund’s women were readers and writers.
