Wife of Edward “the Confessor,” king of England, Queen Edith (d. 1075) was educated at Wilton Abbey and became an astute political actor. She commissioned the Vita Ædwardi regis (Life of King Edward), composed 1065–1067; this anonymous work promotes Edith’s centrality to court culture during the tumultuous years surrounding the Norman Conquest. The Vita Ædwardi’s virtuosic Latin witnesses to Edith’s learning and the education available to high-status women in eleventh-century England.