Future Perfect: Reading Temporalities at the Royal Women’s Monastery at Chelles, ca. 660–1050

At the turn of the ninth century, the future must have held tremendous promise for the women at the royal monastic community at Chelles, an ancient Merovingian foundation near Paris. With Charlemagne’s sister Gisla at the helm, anything must have seemed possible. After all, Gisla maintained a close relationship with her brother, frequenting court, maintaining correspondence and political as well as familial relations, and even accompanying him to Rome to witness his coronation.¹ She also displayed her own royal persona during her visits to court (more than some may have thought proper, given her monastic affiliations and obligations) and other public appearances. She aggressively collected an extraordinary collection of relics, erected at least one church, and donated a large sum to the royal basilica of St. Denis as “Ghysile, Nobilissima filia Pippini regis.”² Alcuin’s correspondence with Gisla and her niece Rodtrud suggests a high level of learning and literacy at the monastery and reveals a range of library holdings.³ Alcuin dedicated his treatise on the Gospel of John to Gisla and Rodtruda, and we know from Alcuin’s letters that works of Bede as well as Augustine passed through and were copied by the community, that they owned and grappled with Augustine’s lengthy treatise on the Gospel of John, that they had the Lives of the Fathers as well as a range of hagiographical texts in their collection, and that they owned at least one copy of the letters of Jerome, from which Gisla and Rodtrud quote in their letter to Alcuin.⁴

The women of the community were producers as well as consumers. Sometime in the eighth century, the monastery became known for its scriptorium, which produced high-quality manuscripts. Bernhard Bischoff has identified a core group of texts produced at Chelles, including Augustine’s commentary on the Psalms copied for Archbishop Hildebald of Cologne and the letters of Jerome, as well as sacramentaries and other liturgical books.⁵ Rosamond McKitterick has proposed that Chelles was part of a constellation of nunneries in the Seine River Basin that produced liturgical books for regional churches and may even have produced the Frankish Psalterium duplum and the Missale francorum, both of which she says were associated with the liturgical reforms promoted by Pippin III and his wife Bertrada.⁶ Donald Bullough argues that the gifts for which Alcuin thanks Gisla in a letter dating to around 796 refer to a psalter and sacramentary rather than intercessory prayers and masses (which, he points out, would be impossible).⁷ Authorship of texts, too, has been ascribed to the community at Chelles: the early and later Lives of Balthild, its founder, and the translation of her relics, as well as the Life of Bertilla, its first abbess, and the set of Frankish annals known as the Annales Mettenses Priores.⁸ Already by the late seventh and early eighth centuries, the reputation of the abbey was such that noble and royal women from abroad came to study there. Bede reports that English women were being sent to Frankish monasteries, foremost among them Chelles, Faremoutiers, and Les Andelys.⁹ He also recounts that the young Anglo-Saxon Hild of Whitby was on her way to join her sister Hereswith at Chelles when Bishop Aidan called on her to found a monastic community at home instead.¹⁰ The monastery shared its wealth and expressed its power through donations of relics and properties to other monastic centers, such as Corbie and St. Denis.¹¹

Though records for the monastery are sparse due to the devastations caused by Viking incursions in the ninth century and a fire in the thirteenth, there is evidence for sustained royal interest and support as well as the community’s continuing role as a monastic palace—that is, a site of political as well as sacral importance. As Janet Nelson has remarked, “It was at Chelles, as at tenth-century Gandersheim, that political contacts met, that information could be gathered from all over the realm. And Chelles, like Gandersheim, was a centre of monarchic cult.…The memoria...