Inscribing property, rituals, and royal alliances: The ‘Theutberga Gospels’ and the Abbey of Remiremont

This paper examines the ‘Theutberga Gospels’, a ninth-century gospelbook recently sold at auction at Christie’s in London, in light of questions about literate practices, ritual scripting and aristocratic patronage of female religious communities in Lotharingia between the middle decades of the ninth century and the beginning of the eleventh. While an estate list entered into the manuscript c. 1000 likely refers to property management at the abbey of Remiremont, an ordination ritual for abbesses entered roughly a century earlier reveals significant efforts to revise the representation of abbatial office in a transitional phase of that institution’s existence. These observations invite re-interpretation of traditional assumptions about how the manuscript should be located in mid-ninth-century patronage networks. Appended to the article are editions of the estate list and the ordination ritual.