ABSTRACT
The panegyric of Adelaide and Mathilda was written at Quedlinburg, in a nunnery where Mathilda had been abbess and Adelaide had often visited; it may even have been written by a woman. Women, even the powerful women, of the early middle ages were mostly chronicled by men, often by men in all-male monastic communities. This certainly does not produce a uniformly hostile picture–Adelaide herself was the subject of an adulatory life composed by Odilo abbot of Cluny–though it does raise questions of perspective and interpretation. Adelaide had been queen and empress, Mathilda was an abbess. Women are called 'queens' or 'abbesses' throughout certain period, though 'empress' is confined to the period after 800 when a Western empire had been revived. Abbesses were women, and some of their powers had the same gendered origins and were legitimated in the same ways as those of the queen: they ruled households and were referred to as mothers of their communities.
