Ota, una badessa di stirpe regia

Three documents, concentrated within just three months, testify to the activity of Ota, abbess of the Monastery of St. Salvatore in Brescia in the mid-10th century. In these documents, Ota claims to be of royal lineage, though few scholars have believed this to be true. This essay aims to restore an identity to this forgotten abbess by combining the study of these documents with an analysis of the traces she left in the monastery’s Memorial Codex and by attempting to reconstruct the specific historical and political context in which she lived and worked.