UNCORRECTED PROOF
Early Medieval Europe () – © Blackwell Publishing Ltd ,
Garsington Road, Oxford OX DQ, UK and Main Street, Malden, MA , USA
EMED_128 Pages: 29 Li ai jiao
Power over past and future:
Abbess Emma and the nunnery of
Sant Joan de les Abadesses
J J
Abbess Emma of Sant Joan de les Abadesses, post-Visigothic Catalonia’s first
known nunnery, left a sufficient documentary record to permit in-depth
study of her method of rule, which included taking her comital brothers
to court for her rights. Closer study of these acts suggests that her rule was
part of a family strategy, whose change by a younger generation was to
undo many of her efforts to secure Sant Joan’s independence. Her rule
included not only aggressive territorial aggrandizement but the reshaping
of the locality’s history in a way which has endured until this day.
Historical and historiography
The charter as narrative
Catalonia is an area of medieval Europe that lacks narrative source
material before about the twelfth century. Before then the outline of its
history must be gleaned from references to the area from the Frankish
or Umayyad courts (in the latter case at considerable removes)
1
and
by painstaking research through the area’s thousands of surviving
1
The Frankish source material is comprised of the Annales Regni Francorum (Annales regni
Francorum inde ab a. 741 usque ad a. 829, qui dicuntur Annales Laurissenses maiores et Einhardi,
MGH SRG VI, ed. F. Kurze (Hannover, 1895; 1950), trans. B. Scholz and B. Rogers in
Carolingian Chronicles: Royal Frankish Annals and Nithard’s Histories (Michigan, 1972)),
pp. 35–125, with commentary pp. 2–21, hereafter ARF, and the Annales Bertiniani (Annales
de Saint-Bertin, ed. L. Levillain, F. Grat, J. Vieillard and S. Clemencet, Société de l’Histoire
de France 470 (Paris, 1964), trans. J.L. Nelson as The Annals of St-Bertin (Manchester, 1991) ),
hereafter AB, but the area also occasionally occurs later in Richer’s History of France (Richer
von Saint-Remi: Historiae, MGH Scriptores XXXVIII, ed. H. Hoffmann (Hannover, 2000) ). For
the various Arabic references, see J. Millas Vallicrosa, ‘Els Textos d’Historiadors Musulmans
Referents a la Catalunya Carolíngia’, Quaderns d’Estudi del Consell de Pedagogiá de la Man-
comunitat de Barcelona 14 (Barcelona, 1922), pp. 125–61.
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