Judith of West Francia, Carolingian Princess and First Countess of Flanders: Biographical Elements and Legacy. Edited by StevenVanderputten. Turnhout: Brepols. 2024. 254 pp. €70. ISBN 978 2 503 60461 9 (hardback); 978 2 503 60462 6 (ebook).

Even by the standards of early medieval royalty, Judith of West Francia, or Flanders, was a figure who packed a lot into a short life. Born around 843, she was the child (probably the eldest) of Charles the Bald and his first wife Ermentrude, and was named after the king’s mother. While still very young she was married in turn to two kings of Wessex: first Æthelwulf in 856 and then, after his death two years later, his son Æthelbald, who likewise only lasted two years. Her father’s plans for her after she returned to Francia in 860 are unclear, but we know he was enraged by her elopement in 862 with a certain Count Baldwin, who would later be remembered – somewhat anachronistically – as a founder of the County of Flanders. After a medium-sized political storm involving the other Carolingian kings, the archbishop of Rheims Hincmar and the pope (Nicholas I), the marriage was recognized and the pair were grudgingly reconciled with Charles. From that point on Judith’s life is unfortunately obscure. Her career did, however, leave some tantalizing traces in the written record, most famously the queenly ordo for her marriage to Æthelwulf and Asser’s enigmatic comments about the status of the king’s wife in Wessex. Unsurprisingly for this period, such material is insufficient for the writing of conventional biography, as acknowledged in this book’s subtitle (‘biographical elements and legacy’) and in its lucid introduction by Steven Vanderputten (‘meta-biography’). The first main chapter, by Charles West, does an excellent job of collecting everything that can be known about Judith and placing her carefully in her contemporary surroundings. The next two, by Brigitte Meijns on the early development of the County of Flanders and Els De Paermentier on its early countesses, are state of the art treatments which situate Judith in those wider contexts. Lisa Demets provides a fascinating survey of Judith’s Nachleben in later medieval Flemish chronicles. The final three chapters turn to the reason for the book’s existence in the first place: the discovery of a group of high-status burials at Saint-Peter’s in Ghent in excavations of 2002–6, and the subsequent identification of one of the bodies – in a grave labelled S127 – as Judith herself. This entered public consciousness via a 2021 television series on the history of Flanders (and, incidentally, brings to mind the media attention in the UK occasioned by the excavation in 2008 of a grave occupied by the English princess turned Ottonian Queen Edith in Magdeburg: H. Meller et al., Königin Editha und ihre Grablegen in Magdeburg (2012)). Georges Declerq offers an exhaustive discussion of the evidence for Saint-Peter’s function as a dynastic mausoleum, concluding that if the body in S127 were indeed Judith, we would have clearer evidence in the written evidence for comital commemoration in the tenth century. The chapter can be read with profit as a case study in how such commemoration took shape in this period, and the nature of the institutional and dynastic logics which shape our evidence. The chapter by Geert Vermeiren and Marie-Ann Bru turns to the actual excavation, and particularly the context of the graves in relation to the Carolingian and Ottonian versions of the church building itself. Finally, we have a multi-authored chapter on the biomolecular and physiological evidence from the human remains. This is fascinating. The analysis of S127 leaves Judith as a possibility, as the dental evidence fits with someone who spent time in both Flanders and England at a young age. Yet, as the authors underline, there are alternative explanations for these patterns: a salutary reminder of the potential and the limitations of this kind of work for answering the questions that interest historians. The value of the book is not, however, tied to the identity of the woman whose remains were found in that grave. There is plenty of food for thought here for anyone interested in early medieval duchies, political commemoration, and the history of royal women more generally.