My first post of 2013 has little connection with the topics usually featured here. It’s not about Scotland, nor any other part of the British Isles, even if it does fit with the overall theme of ‘early medieval’. It’s actually about Galicia (in the Iberian Peninsula) from where we have a charter issued by a prosperous woman called Letasia in the year 896. This document gives a fascinating glimpse (through female eyes) of ninth-century attitudes towards immorality among people whose lives were probably not dissimilar to those of their contemporaries in Britain. It comes courtesy of medieval charter expert Jonathan Jarrett in his final blogpost of 2012.
Happy New Year to all.
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Cool. Thanks for the link
Thankyou for the link, Tim, and the praise, much appreciated. I ought to point out before it travels too far that the date in the document is given in the Hispanic Era, which for reasons I can’t remember starts in 38 BC, so the CE date is actually 858, not 896, not that this spoils the story!
Thanks for clarifying the date, Jonathan. Interestingly (from a Scottish viewpoint) it makes Letasia a contemporary of Cináed mac Ailpín, rex Pictorum, who is said to have died in the same year. I suspect she belonged to the generation of his children.
That should have occurred to me; once his regnal dates were graven in my mind… I think, however, that the ease with which Letasia seems to navigate her situation and the lack of spousal recrimination suggests that she was a widow at the time, so I would guess her to be Cináed’s generation myself.
Notwithstanding the self-assuredness implied in the charter, could she have been a young widow of, say, twentysomething?
There’s no way to tell, but if so I’d have expected male relatives to be involved, don’t you think?
Good point. The custom of the time would suggest she was older.