#though it's equally true that she was less affluent than Angelberga and once her son had died was also less important

[wonder-worker]

"The remarkable thing about [Gerberga of Saxony's] widowhood is that she seems to have carried on exercising her queenly status without open challenge more or less until her death in 969, and without an obvious break when her son reached majority. As well as making regular appearances as petitioner in royal charters, she is also referred to consistently and unproblematically by Flodoard as ‘queen’. In this respect, she was arguably the most politically active royal widow since the late ninth-century Italian empress Engelberga. The fact that Gerberga retained such a high profile should not be taken for granted. The participation of royal widows in the public life of the kingdom was extremely vulnerable to criticism because (unlike kings, who remained kings until death regardless of how many wives predeceased them) they were not automatically categorized as political actors—their roles usually had to be justified and rationalized. Because of the peculiar role of queens in articulating the shape of royal dynasties, widowhood was conceptualized as a specific state onto which various ideologies could be projected. The Ottonians are thought to have developed a distinctive approach to this problem by turning royal widows who played crucial political roles into saints.

[The charter Gerberga issued in 959 for the monastery of Homblière exemplifies her prominent role]. The ‘gratia Dei (by the grace of God)’ clause is particularly striking, implying that her status derived not from a husband or son but, like a king’s, directly from God. In fact, there are very few surviving charters of any kind issued by queens before the twelfth century, a pattern that cannot be dismissed as an accident of survival. Those we have were mostly composed for queens who were, like Gerberga, widows. But in contrast to Gerberga’s case, the status of these queens was carefully framed in reference to the authority of their late husbands, often using the past tense. Thus two charters recording gifts made to the monastery of Gorze in 910 by Richildis, widow of Charles the Bald (840–77), refer to her as ‘former queen’ (‘quondam regina’). Similarly, the testament of Ageltrude, widow of one dead Italian king and mother of another (respectively Guy, 889–94, and Lambert, 894–8), describes her as ‘former empress’ (‘olim imperatrix augusta’) and invokes the authority of both men in claiming her right to dispose of her property. Even the Empress Engelberga, one of the most powerful queens of the ninth century and someone who was able to exercise independent power in Italy after the death of her husband Louis II in 875, shrouded her public persona in this kind of rhetoric. Her testament, which dates from 877, is an impressive statement of her power and connections, but opens by establishing that she was, above all, ‘former wife and august empress of the most pious emperor Louis of blessed memory’, and goes on to emphasize that she was even now acting on his authority. Compare Gerberga’s charter of 959, in which her late husband Louis IV is conspicuous by his absence and it is the queen herself who is rhetorically inserted into the role of ruler.”

— Simon MacLean, Ottonian Queenship