“Accomplished in the Art of Athena”: Carolingian Queens, Textiles, and the Politics of Clothing in the Ninth Century

In the mid-ninth century, Carolingian queens’ production and control of textiles gave them means to enter the male-dominated political sphere because men valued attire for its political valence, but women produced it. Clothing’s effective nature and feminine associations in the Carolingian Empire have meant that its political role has remained underappreciated. Through examination of texts and extant textiles, this article argues that this traditionally female work afforded queens a political role at court and beyond. The article explains the documented textile labor and direction of four queens. The mid-ninth-century evidence more directly and more abundantly credits three queens with producing textiles than earlier sources that attributed cloth and dress fabrication to Frankish queens. Because this association of queens and textile work was strongest during the time of the Carolingian civil war (840–43) and the ensuing division of the empire, it demonstrates that queens employed material means to help their husbands vie with one another and establish bonds with powerful men and institutions. As the best documented crafter of dress and cloth, Queen Ermintrud (d. 869) provides the strongest case for women’s roles in an elite politics of clothing, but evidence for the textile work of her queenly peers Ermengard (d. 851) and Emma (d. 876) shows that they, too, had a similarly crucial and highly visible role to play in political competition among their husband kings.