HIDDEN
WOMEN

Charlemagne’s Celtic
Domain

Recent finds shine a new light on Charlemagne. The head of the Holy Roman Empire was not holy, never Roman and no emperor. Instead, he, his mother and his sister all founded secular abbeys - in the days before abbeys excluded women, of course.While that might be nice to know, it’s also crucial to confront what really happened in Europe’s past in order to deal with the world now. The measure is: How did they treat their women? How females fare shows who is working toward what end. Although little physical evidence survives from that era, these few remaining vestiges speak volumes. The advances made in Iron Age archaeology open new views of a beautiful medieval world long dismissed as barbaric. A buried cosmopolitan past is coming to life in all its flourish, bustle and elegance.