Imma, wife of Einhard
Overview
Biography
Imma is known to us as the wife of the writer, Einhard, who spent years as a member of Charlemagne’s court in the 790’s and was private secretary to Louis the Pious after his father’s death in 814. He left the court in 830. Two of Imma’s letters survive, preserved among his, but otherwise all we know of her is the praise of Lupus of Ferrieres in a letter of consolation to Einhard after her death. Lupus praises her “prudentia, gravitas, honestas.” He describes her as one who “had indeed learned many things from her association with you, so that she far surpassed not only those of her own sex but even ordinary men in her remarkable wisdom, sobriety, and uprightness, qualities which contribute great dignity to human life, and although a mere woman in body, she had achieved in spirit the stature of man.”(1) If Einhard himself wrote about her during her life, we do not have it. But after she died, on 13 December 835, he wrote to his friend Lupus that he was reminded of the loss of his “fidissima coniunx” in “every day, in every action, in every undertaking, in all the administration of the house and household, in everything needing to be decided upon and sorted out in my religious and earthly responsibilities.”(2) Smith assumes that when Einhard traveled without her, he left the administration of the church and the property in her hands (p.70).Julia Smith notes that the first mention of Imma is in a diploma by means of which Louis the Pious granted two estates in eastern Francia, Michelstadt and Mulinheim ‘to our faithful man Einhard and his wife Imma’ on 11 January, 815 (p.57). Smith suggests that Imma may have come from a local landowning family in the vicinity of these estates, that she might have been the widow or daughter of Count Drogo, the former holder of Mulinheim and they may have had a son, Vussin (Smith, 57-58). They made a will in 819 transferring the estate at Michelstadt to the royal monastery of Lorsch but reserving the usufruct of it for their lives. Bishop Gozbald of Wurzburg kept notes of the deaths of important people at the royal court and Imma is the only woman mentioned (Smith, 58). Einhard and Imma were buried in the same tomb, close to the remains of the martyrs Marcellinus and Peter to whom they and their church were devoted (70).