In western Europe the formalization of the position of wife of the ruler started taking shape in the Carolingian period. She began to be crowned as empress alongside her husband, and the practice of anointing her as queen was adopted. Simultaneously with the introduction of formal coronations of queens and empresses in the West, rulers’ wives were gradually included into the world of Christian symbolism, and their special position, confirmed by religious rites, required a theological explanation and foundation.

Research on queenship ideology is undoubtedly a vivid and important field of recent medieval studies. Focusing on the religious basis of the ruler's consort position and its biblical models, students of the subject have shown the role of the Queen of Heavens, the Virgin Mary, already for centuries titled regina, as an important point of reference for the terrestrial queen. The confident conviction that the role of the Mother of God in queenship ideology was so crucial from the very beginning can in fact be called into question, but this is not the place to undertake that subject. My goal in this article is much more limited: I would like to show how the assumption of an ideological bond between Mary and the ruler's consort, in some cases perhaps too easily accepted, may have led us to misinterpretations of particular sources. I would like to show that only analyzed in a wider context can they help us to better understand queenship ideology as well as the perception of the Virgin in the early Middle Ages.

As examples, I have taken three iconographical sources, that is, miniatures from three different codices. The first of these images is from the so-called Bible of San Paolo fuori le Mura or the Bible of Charles the Bald (fig. 1.1), produced under the patronage of the ruler between ca. 866 and ca. 875. Another image is the famous dedication page of the Liber Vitae from New Minster, Winchester (fig. 1.2), a confraternity book containing names of monks and benefactors of the abbey, which was produced and began to be filled about 1031. The final example is from the Petershausen Sacramentary (fig. 1.3), the work of Anno, a scribe from the extraordinary centre of Ottonian art that is Reichenau Abbey, made between ca. 970 and ca. 980.