This book makes a stunning intervention into our understanding of communities of canonesses in Ottonian Germany. Through careful examination of contemporary texts related to the foundations and intended purposes of the Gandersheim and Quedlinburg female monastic communities, overlayed with the political milieux that shaped the development of each of these institutions, Sarah Greer challenges much of the received wisdom and assumptions about what we have thought we knew, not only about Gandersheim and Quedlinburg but also about the forces shaping female monasticism in tenth-century Saxony.
Greer's command of her sources is impressive and includes extensive analyses of a wide variety of narrative sources alongside cartulary evidence to establish timelines and political contexts to support her arguments. She persistently presents examples of how the Ottonians have been understood in past scholarship and persuasively demonstrates the problems inherent in those arguments. She is also very clear that, in places where evidence is lacking, what she is proposing are better explanations, possibilities that make more sense than traditional explanations when other contemporary examples and/or historical contexts are taken into account.
The book is clearly organized to emphasize the comparative aspect of Greer's methodology. Consisting of five chapters, with an introduction and conclusion, chapter 1 “Saxon Female Monasticism c. 852-1024” provides an excellent overview of its theme. Then follow four analytical chapters: chapter 2 “The Origins of Gandersheim”; chapter 3 “Rewriting the Origins of Gandersheim”; chapter 4 “The Origins of Quedlinburg”; and chapter 5 “Rewriting the Origins of Quedlinburg.” While these two institutions are the book's main focus, numerous comparisons are drawn to other Saxon monasteries. Greer asserts that Saxon female monasticism must not be viewed as a monolithic institution, nor should the prominence of these two monasteries in particular be taken as a historical given. Instead, she demonstrates how the changing political needs of individual members of the Liudolfing/Ottonian families shaped the degree to which the importance of each monastery was enhanced or reduced at various times in its history, and how the abbesses and canonesses negotiated this changeable landscape by reworking the historical memory of their institutions to reassert their relevance or to appeal to particular patrons. Greer is at pains to emphasize that those patrons were individuals, reminding the reader frequently that they made decisions about these monasteries based on their own situations at particular times. Nothing was inevitable. We are also reminded that the Ottonian dynasty itself was not an inevitability, and that each succession was accompanied by rivals and rebellions from within the family. This approach emphasizes the complexity of the Ottonian world that these institutions and the women in them inhabited, conveying the richness of their social networks, the perils and precariousness of prestige based on Königsnahe, and the power the abbesses often exercised in the service of their families and monasteries.
Chapters 2 and 4 provide refreshing reassessments of the history of each institution. Greer assiduously avoids falling into the trap of seeing the foundation stories of Gandersheim and Quedlinburg as foundation stories for the Liudolfings/Ottonians as well, instead examining the legends and traditions of each monastery's beginnings vis-à-vis the circumstances of the founders and their political world. For example, Greer convincingly argues against seeing Gandersheim's efforts to acquire royal protection merely as evidence of its importance as a memorial institution for the Liudolfings. Instead, she suggests that while this grant was a way for Louis the Younger to reward a loyal Saxon family, the act of seeking royal protection was stimulated by a number of factors that potentially could have threatened the survival of Gandersheim, including a Carolingian succession crisis and competition between larger monasteries over control of the convent. For an example with regard to Quedlinburg, Greer challenges two persistent arguments about its early history: that it either existed for thirty years without an abbess, or that Queen Mathilda fulfilled the role until Otto I's daughter became abbess in 966. Greer persuasively demonstrates that Quedlinburg most likely did have abbesses in that period, and that the queen was not one of them. These are merely two examples; the reader will find many more.
Chapters 3 and 5 draw our attention to the weaponization of memory by Gandersheim and Quedlinburg by abbesses seeking to realign their monasteries with new political realities. Examining Hrotsvitha's Primordia coenobii Gandesheimensis (likely 970s) and the anonymous Quedlinburg Annals (1008–1015, and then from 1020–1030), Greer demonstrates how the choices made by the authors and their abbesses in writing historical memory reflected the changing fortunes that these institutions might face in often rapidly shifting political circumstances. In the wake of rebellions by Abbess Gerberga's brother, Henry the Quarrelsome, Greer argues that the Primordia was pitched to the family and supporters of Duke Otto (the grandson of Otto I, son of Duke Liudolf), due to the very real possibility of losing the court as the monastery's patron and benefactor. The creation of a new history, emphasizing the relationship between the founding Liudolfings and Duke Otto's family, encouraged patronage from a different, yet still powerful, family line. The Quedlinburg Annals, written after the accession of Henry II in 1002, were likewise a manipulation of historical memory at a time of perceived crisis. While the Annals as a whole were intended to persuade Henry II to continue the support Quedlinburg had enjoyed under his predecessors, the deliberate emphasis on Queen Mathilda as the founder and “model royal patron of Quedlinburg,” Greer argues, may have been pitched to Henry's wife, Queen Cunegunde (168).
Sarah Greer's graceful and astute handling of the sources is matched by her clarity. Despite the often dizzying reoccurrence of names among different family lines (multiple Mathildas, Ottos, Liudolfs, etc.), and the complexity of her arguments, the reader will not be lost. Greer's prose is accessible, and her trains of thought are clearly mapped out for the reader. One might find the index unhelpful; as two examples, the wrong page number is given for the dating of the Quedlinburg Annals, and the Primordia does not appear in it at all. But this is a minor complaint. It is worth noting in closing that Commemorating Power in Early Medieval Saxony is itself a rewriting of the past of Gandersheim and Quedlinburg; but it is a rewriting that peels back the layers of past representations of these institutions, representations both created by their medieval contemporaries and postulated by modern historians. While those interested in medieval Saxony and these two institutions in particular will find this volume thought-provoking and provocative, it ultimately has much to offer to a broad array of intellectual interests, including medieval monasticism, hagiography, women's history, textual communities, memory studies, and medieval historiography.
