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Biography

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Adela of Pfalzel, also known as Adela of Trier, Adula, or Adolana, was a Frankish noblewoman and abbess of the later Merovingian period, active in Austrasia in the country around Trier. She is remembered principally as the foundress and first abbess of the monastery of Palatiolum, later called Pfalzel, which stood on the Moselle a short distance from the city of Trier. No contemporary text records the date or place of her birth, and any attempt to assign a birth year would be conjectural. A strand of later medieval tradition identified her as a daughter of the Merovingian king Dagobert II. That royal genealogy is not accepted by modern historical scholarship and appears to belong to the legendary elaboration of saintly origins. More careful study of the Austrasian aristocracy has placed her, with considerable probability, in the family of Hugobert and Irmina of Oeren. Hugobert served as seneschal and count palatine in the late seventh century; Irmina founded the monastery of Oeren, also called Horreum, in Trier and was herself venerated as a saint. In this reconstruction Adela would have been a sister of Plectrude, who married Pepin of Herstal, mayor of the palace of Austrasia, and who after Pepin's death played a prominent and contested role in the politics of the Frankish kingdoms.

The pattern of Adela's life resembles that of other high-born Frankish women of the seventh and eighth centuries who, after marriage and widowhood, used family wealth to found and rule monastic houses. Tradition states that she was married and that she had a son named Alberic. The identity of her husband is not established by any source of unimpeachable authority, and later genealogists have proposed names that cannot be verified. After her husband's death she embraced the monastic life. Early in the eighth century she established a community of women at Palatiolum, a place whose Latin name points to a former palatine or royal association. She governed the foundation as abbess and is understood to have endowed it with estates drawn from her kin. The house became a significant religious centre in the Moselle country. A rare contemporary glimpse of her standing survives in the correspondence of Saint Boniface, the Anglo-Saxon missionary and papal legate. In a letter written in the 730s Boniface asked Abbess Adela to receive with hospitality a young kinsman of his who was travelling to Rome, which suggests that Pfalzel was regarded as a reliable and respectable station on a major route and that Adela's authority was known beyond her immediate neighbourhood.

Adela is traditionally reported to have died at her monastery on 24 December, in or about the year 735. She was buried at Pfalzel and was honoured as a saint in the diocese of Trier. Her feast day is 24 December. The cult remained essentially local; she was not the object of a widely diffused medieval pilgrimage, and no extensive contemporary vita from her own century survives. In the later Middle Ages the women's community at Pfalzel was transformed. The original nunnery did not persist in its first form, and the site eventually became a collegiate foundation served by canons. Relics and liturgical commemoration nevertheless kept her name in the local calendar.

Because the written evidence is thin, consisting largely of later hagiography, necrological notices, and the reconstruction of aristocratic genealogies, a number of details that appear in popular accounts cannot be confirmed. It is not possible to verify a precise birth year, a birthplace, or the name of her husband from sources that meet a strict historical standard. The royal descent from Dagobert II should be treated as legend. What remains reasonably secure is that Adela was a noble widow of the Austrasian elite, that she founded and ruled the monastery of Pfalzel in the early eighth century, that she belonged to the same social world as Irmina of Oeren and the family of Pepin of Herstal, that she was known to Boniface, and that she was venerated after her death as a holy abbess in the country around Trier.

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