Storia di un’imperatrice perseguitata. L’epitaffio e altri testi agiografici su Adelaide di Borgogna (930 ca.-999)

This article aims to reconstruct the figure of St. Adelaide of Italy taking into account several biographical texts. The biography of St Adelaide of Burgundy is reconstructed through a consideration of a wide range of textual sources, from her epitaph to Hrotsvit’s poem on Otto I, as well as other texts such as the Chronicle of Novalesa. At the conclusion of the analysis presented here, it would appear that hagiographical truth and historical reality do not necessarily coincide, as is so often the case in accounts of the lives of male and female saints.