Orchestrating Harmony: Litanies, Queens, and Discord in the Carolingian and Ottonian Empires

Abstract

This chapter explores the role of Carolingian and Ottonian royal women in the royal liturgy, and particularly in the litanies and laudes regiae present in extant sacramentaries, graduals, tropers, and other liturgical manuscripts surviving from the late eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries. It describes a central tension between the manuscript evidence and the historical narratives, between the hope for a cosmic harmony and the reality of discord, disease, and war. As the Carolingian Queen Fastrada organized litanies within Saxony to ensure the success of Charlemagne’s campaign against the Avars, Ottonian queens and empresses also utilized this liturgical form to avert disaster in troublesome times. Liturgy structured the world as harmony; yet the performance of liturgical rites could be triggered by discord. The chapter examines the tension through queens and empresses who appear inconsistently in the liturgical manuscripts, but who consistently work within the wider political community at specific historical moments to oversee the important liturgical rites.