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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
On 29 June 824, a woman named Dhuoda went to Aachen to be married in the imperial palace. She herself tells us about the wedding, yet it is characteristic of the Carolingian age that we know far more of the groom, Bernard of Septimania, than of the bride. His career and connections can be pieced together from a wide range of sources, but she is only known from the manual of moral and spiritual advice which she composed in 841–3 for her absent fifteen-year-old son William. Bernard’s life can be reconstructed as a coherent narrative, but Dhuoda’s only emerges from a few tattered snapshots, without even a family album to contain them. Famous as she is as the only lay woman among the tiny handful of women writers known to us by name from the early Middle Ages, Dhuoda’s isolation must be stressed. Not merely her personal sense of loneliness, powerfully conveyed, nor even the difficulty of placing her within any secure literary context, but also her historiographical isolation mark her out, for we know all too little about the women of the early medieval aristocracy to which Dhuoda belonged. We can neither sketch with any precision the lifestyle of Dhuoda’s peer group, nor assess whether she is typical of it – or exceptional. The married women of the Carolingian aristocracy remain largely occluded from our sight, chronicled only in disjunct fragments of evidence which do not permit of any extended or systematic analysis. When we can find them, aristocratic women more often appear enveloped within the bonds of family and kinship than independent individuals within political contexts. But there remains the unsettling image of the young Dhuoda, briefly translated out of her familial and domestic setting into the shadowy corridors of imperial power: and the scene prompts questions about the place of wives and marriage within the Carolingian polity.
1 Dhuoda, Liber Manualis, praefatio. Pierre Riche, ed., Manuel pour mon fils, SC, 225b (Paris, 1991), p. 84 (also available in English translation by Carol Neel under the title Handbook for William: a Carolingian Noblewoman’s Counsel for her Son [Lincoln, NE, 1991])- In preparing this paper I am very grateful to David Ganz and Mayke de Jong for sage advice, and to Kate Cooper, Ann Matter, Jinty Nelson, and Tom Noble who have all shared unpublished work with me.
2 Heilbrun, Carolyn G., Writing a Woman’s Life (London, 1989).Google Scholar On Bernard, see Joachim Wollasch, ‘Eine adlige Familie des frühen Mittelalters, ihr Selbstverstandnis und ihre Wirklichkeit’, Archivfiir Kulturgeschichte, 39 (19S7), pp. 150–88; Nelson, Janet L., Charles the Bald (London, 1992), pp. 80–1, 88–91, 102–3, 120–1, 139–41.Google Scholar
3 Dronke, Peter, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: a Critical Study of the Texts from Perpetua to Marguerite Porete (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 36–54.Google Scholar
4 Cf. the comments of Dauphin, C., Farge, A., Fraisse, G., et al., ‘Culture et pouvoir des femmes: essai d’historiographie’, Annales, 41 (1986), pp. 271–93 Google Scholar; Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden age to separate spheres? A review of the categories and chronology of English women’s history’, Hist], 36 (1993), pp. 383–414; Pauline Stafford, ‘Women and the Norman Conquest’, TRHS, 6th ser., 4 (1995), pp. 221–50; Hans-Werner Goetz, Frauen im fiühen Mittelalter (Cologne, 1995), pp. 13–30.
5 Of the growing literature on women and gender in the early Middle Ages, the following are fruitful avenues into the more specialist literature: Nancy Partner, Studying Medieval Women: Sex, Gender, Feminism (Cambridge, MA, 1993); Nelson, Janet L., ‘Family, gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages’, in Michael Bentley, ed., Companion to Historiography (London, 1997)1 pp. 153–76 Google Scholar; Affeldt, Werner and Kuhn, Annette, eds, Interdisziplinare Studien zur Geschichte der Frauen im Frùhmittelalter (Dusseldorf, 1986);Google Scholar Werner Affeldt, ed., Frauen in Spâtantike und Frùhmittelalter: Lebensbedingungen – Lebensnormen – Lebensformen (Sigmaringen, 1990).
6 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton, NJ, 1981)Google Scholar; D. H. Coole, Women in Political Theory: From Ancient Misogyny to Contemporary Feminism, 2nd edn (New York, 1993); James M Blythe, ‘Family, government and the medieval Aristotelians’, History of Political Thought, 10 (1989), pp. 1–16.
7 The literature is vast, but is usefully approached via Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge, 1993) and Brown, Peter, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, 1988).Google Scholar
8 Bugge, J., Virginitas: an Essay on the History of a Medieval Ideal (The Hague, 1975);Google Scholar Averil Cameron, ‘Virginity as metaphor, women and the rhetoric of early Christianity’, in Averil Cameron, ed., History as Text: The Writing of Ancient History (London, 1989), pp. 181–205; Kate Cooper, ‘Insinuations of womanly influence: an aspect of the Christianization of the Roman aristocracy’, Journal of Roman Studies, 82 (1992), pp. 150–64.
9 The original phrase is to be found in Isidore, Etymologiae, IX.iii.4, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford, 1911), but soon became a commonplace of early medieval political thought.
10 Libri Historiarum, VIII.20 (MGH SRM, I, pt 1, pp. 386–7). On this passage, see Godefroid Kurth, ‘Le Concile de Macon et l’âme des femmes’, in his Etudes Franaues, 2 vols (Brussels, 1919), 2, pp. 161–7.
11 K. E. Borreson, ‘Imago Dei, privilège masculin? Interprétation augustinienne et pseudo-augustinienne de Gen. 1.27 et I Cor. 11.7’, Augustinianum, 25 (198s), pp. 213–34; H.-W. Goetz, Frauen imfruhcn Mittelalter (Cologne, 1995), pp. 82–90. Cf. Maria L Arduini, ‘Il tema vir e mulier nell’esegesi patristica e medioevale de Eccli. XLII.14. A proposito di und interpretazione di Ruperto di Deutz’, Aevum, 54 (1980), pp. 315–30, 55 (1981), pp. 246–61.
12 And similarly in the preface to his Liber Vitae Patrum (MGH SRM, I, pt 2, p. 662).
13 Jacques Fontaine, ‘Isidore de Seville et la mutation de l’encyclopédisme antique’, Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale, 9 (1966), pp. 519–38; Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Oxford, 1996), pp. 218–19, 221.
14 Elymologiae, IX.ii.17-19, 24.
15 Moore, Henrietta L., ‘Understanding sex and gender’, in Tim Ingold, ed., Companion Encyclopaedia to Anthropology: Humanity, Culture and Social Life (London, 1994), pp. 813-30.Google Scholar
16 Libri Historiarum DC.27 (MGH SRM, I, pt 1, pp. 445–6).
17 Libri Historiarum V.38 (MCH SRM, I, pt 1, p. 244).
18 Isidore, Etymologiae, IX.11.22. For a discussion of the term in hagiographical contexts see Julia M. H. Smith, The problem of female sanctity in Carolingian Europe, c.780-920’, P&P, 146 (Feb. 1995), pp. 1–37 at pp. 18–20. I am aware of one example of a woman whose masculine behaviour earned criticism. When Gerald of Aurillac found a peasant woman ploughing because her husband was too ill, he gave her the money to hire a labourer to do this opus virile. Gerald’s biographer, Odo of Cluny, described the woman’s situation as a calamitas, and explains Gerald’s response on the grounds that a woman doing man’s work was contrary to nature and therefore abominable to God. Odo of Cluny, Vita Geraldi, I.21: PL 133, col. 656. On the gendered distribution of tasks in peasant communities, see further Ludolf Kuchenbuch, ‘Opus feminile. das Geschlechtverhaltnis im Spiegel von Frauenarbeiten im friiheren Mittelalter’, in Hans-Werner Goetz, ed., Weibliche Lebensgestaltung im fruhen Mittelalter (Cologne, 1991), pp. 139–75.
19 See especially the account of the West Saxon victory over Viking marauders in 860 in Assess Life of King Alfred, ed. W. H. Stevenson with introduction by Dorothy Whitelock (Oxford, 1959), ch. 18, pp. 17–18: ‘Osric, Hamtunensium comes, cum suis et Æthelwulf comes, cum Bearrocensibus, viriliter obviaverunt… [pagani] muliebriter fugam arripiunt.’
20 Aimoin of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Translatio Vincentii ch. 8 (PL 126, col. 1018B).
21 Hrabanus Maurus, Ennarationes super Deuteronomium, II.29 (PL 108, cols 922–3), commenting on Deut. 22.5.
22 Haimo of Auxerre, Commentarium in baia, 3.4 (PL 116, col. 737D): ‘Effeminati autem sunt, qui fortitudinem stabilitatemque virilem in femineam mollitiem habcnt redactam. Tales sunt hodie principes Judaeorum, pueriliter videlicet cuneta agentes, nulliusque virtutis existentes.’
23 Alcuin(?), In Apocalypsin, 9.8 (PL ioo, col. 1140).
24 Walahfrid Strabo, In Isaia prophetam, 59.16 (PL 113, col. 1302): ‘“quia not est vir”: mente omnes effeminati sunt’.
25 Hrabanus Maurus, Ennarationes super Deuteronomium, III.7 (PL 108, col. 929C) commenting on Deut. 23.1, here quoting Bede on the same verse.
26 I Cor. 6.9.
27 Carol Clover, ‘Regardless of sex: men, women and power in early northern Europe’, Speculum, 68 (1993), pp. 363–87, quotation from p. 387 (and reprinted in Nancy F. Partner, ed., Studying Medieval Women: Sex, Gender and Feminism [Cambridge, MA, 1993], pp. 61–85).
28 Pseudo-Cyprian, De duodecim abusivis saeculi, ed. Siegmund Hellmann, Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur, ser. 3, 4 (Leipzig, 1910), pp. 51–3 with quotation on p. 53. On the sources and diffusion of this work, Hans Hubert Anton, Tseudo-Cyprian, De duodecim abusivis saeculi und seine Einfluss auf dem Kontinent, inbesondere auf die karolingische Fürstenspiegel’, in Lowe, Heinz, ed., Die hen und Europa im frühen Mittelalter, 2 vols (Stuttgart, 1986), 2, pp. 568–617.Google Scholar
29 De duodecim abusivis saeculi, ed. Hellmann, pp. 40–3.
30 Ibid., quotations from pp. 40–1, 42–3.
31 Airlic, Stuart, ‘The aristocracy’, in Rosamond McKitterick ed., New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 2, c.joo-aoo (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 431–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
32 The two vices singled out by Alcuin, De virtutibus et vitiis, ch. 18 (PL 101, col. 627B).
33 Bullough, D. A., Friends, Neighbours and Fellow-Drinkers: Aspects of Community and Conflict in the Early Medieval West (Cambridge, 1991).Google Scholar
34 See in particular Hincmar of Rheims’ De coercendo et exstirpando raptu viduarum, puellarum ac sanctimonialium (PL 125, cols 1017–32) for a powerful description of some aspects of this and, in general, Devisse, Jean, Hincmar, archevêque de Reims, 845–882, 3 vols (Paris, 1975–6), I, pp. 526–34.Google Scholar
35 On public penance, see Jean Chélini, L’Aube du moyen âge: naissance de la chrétienté occidentale (Paris, 1991), pp. 362–409, and Mayke De Jong, Tower and humility in Carolingian society, the public penance of Louis the Pious’, Early Medieval Europe, 1 (1992), pp. 29–52 (she also deals with harmiscara, the saddle punishment). On penitential pilgrimage, see C. Vogel, “Le Pèlerinage penitentiel’, Revue des sciences religieuses, 38 (1964), pp. u3-53.
36 Lester K. Little, ‘Pride goes before avarice: social change and the vices in Latin Christendom’, AHR, 76 (1971), pp. 16–49, Cf. R. Newhauser, Towards a modus in habendo: transformations in the idea of avarice’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung fir Rechtsgeschichte, kanonistische Abteilung, 106 (1989), pp. 1–22.
37 Pierre Toubert, ‘une potion buvable de l’idéal chrétien et l’idéal militaire’, ‘La Théorie du mariage chez les moralistes carolingiens’, Settimane, 24 (1976), pp. 233–82 at p. 247. On the genre as a whole, see Michel Rouche, ‘Miroirs du prince ou miroirs du clergé?’ Settimane, 39 (1992), pp. 341–64; Thomas F. X. Noble, ‘Secular sanctity: forging an ethos for the Carolingian nobility’ (forthcoming), to which I am greatly indebted.
38 ‘Moral breviaries for lay aristocrats’: the phrase is Toubert’s, Théorie du mariage’, p. 244. For a demonstration of the way that the most widely-read of these treatises drew on the patristic and ascetic tradition, sec Liutpold Wallach, ‘Alcuin on virtues and vices: a manual for a Carolingian soldier’, HThR, 48 (1955), pp. 175–95.
39 ‘Sciens te in multis saecularium rerum cogitationibus occupatum’: Alcuin, De virtutibus et vitiis, prefatory epistle (PL 101, col. 613). For reassurance that laity could enter the kingdom of heaven, see below, n. 46.
40 Paulinus of Aquileia, Liber exhortationis, ch. 20 (PL 99, cols 212–14).
41 Dhuoda, Liber manualis, IV.2, ed. Riché, Manuel pour mon fib, p. 204: Tu, tamen, fili, dum in sacculo militaris inter mundanas actionum turmas.’
42 Most notably the case of Gerald of Aurillac, who remained in the world but did renounce both arms and marriage. Cf. Stuart Airlie, The anxiety of sanctity: St Gerald of Aurillac and his maker’, JEH, 43 (1992), pp. 372–95.
43 On the piety of married late Roman aristocrats who did not undergo a monastic conversion, see Kate Cooper, The “silent majority” in the early medieval period’, in Klingshirn, W. E., ed., The Limits of Ancient Christianity (forthcoming)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
44 Notker the Stammerer, Gesta Karoli magni imperatoris. Ilio, ed. Haefele, Hans F., MGH SRG, ns 12 (Berlin, 1962), p. 66.Google Scholar
45 Gaudemet, Jean, Le Mariage en occident: les moeurs et le droit (Paris, 1987), pp. 91–132 Google Scholar; Suzanne Fonay Wemple, Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister, 100–0.00 (Philadelphia, 1981), pp. 75–123; and, controversially, Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge, 1983).
46 Alcuin, De virtutihus et vitiis, ch. 36 (PL 101, col. 638): ‘igitur sicut omnibus aequaliter regni Dei praedicata est beatitudo, ita omni sexui, aetati et personae aequaliter secundum meritorum dignitatem regni Dei patet introitus. Ubi non est distinctio, quis esset in saeculo laicus vel clericus, dives vel pauper, junior vel senior, servus vel dominus: sed unusquisque secundum meritum boni operis perpetua coronabitur gloria.’
47 Liber exhortationis, ch. 29 (PL 99, cols 225–6).
48 De civitate Dei, xix, 16 (CChr. SL, 48, p. 683). Cf. Roger Bonnaud Delamare, L’Idée de paix à l’époque carolingienne (Paris, 1939).
49 De institutione laicali (PL 106, cols 121–278). On Jonas’ career see the introduction to the new edition of his De institutione regia, ed. A. Dubreucq, Le Métier du roi, SC, 407 (Paris, 1995), pp. 9–42, esp. pp. 28–31. On the two different recensions of De institutione laicali, their date and dissemination, see Isolde Schroder, ‘Zur Uberlieferung von De institutione laicali des Jonas von Orleans’, Deutsches Archiv, 44 (1988), pp. 83–97.
50 De institutione laicali, II.1-16 (PL 106, cols 167–99). It must also be stressed that despite the great similarities of thought between Dhuoda and Jonas, there is no evidence that Dhuoda knew Jonas’ treatise. They had, however, read many of the same works, including Augustine’s Enchiridion and Alcuin’s De virtutibus et vitiis.
51 De institutione laicali, prefatory letter (PL 106, cols 123–4).
52 Ibid, II. 1 (PL 106, col. 167).
53 Ideas about hierarchy and subordination within marriage are discussed briefly by Goetz, Frauen im frühen Mittelalter, pp. 330–1.
54 De Institutione laicali, II.4: ‘Patet nempe quod inter virum et uxorem par pudicitiae forma et conjugalis tori fides sit conservanda’ (PL 106, cols 174–7, esp col. 177).
55 Ibid., II.12, cols 188–91. “Et sicut pudicis et honestis feminis moris est, virorum suorum infirmantium, et longa aegritudine tabescentium lectulis jugiter assidere, eisque famulari, et pro viribus opitulari et in nullo a conjugali thori fide deficere’ (col. 191).
56 Ibid., II. 14, col. 192.
57 De institutione laicali, II. 16, cols 197–9, quotations from col. 197.
58 Schmitz, ‘Schuld und Strafe. Eine unbekannte Stellungnahme des Rathramnus von Corbie zur Kindestötung’, Deutsches Archiv, 38 (1982), pp. 363–87 discusses the relevant legislation. I am only aware of a single instance of what happened in practice: see letter of Stephen V to Lambert, Bishop of Le Mans, Epistolae Stephanae papae V, no. 24: PL 129, col. 807, where it is misattributed to Stephen IV.
59 Vita Desidera Cadurcae urbis episcopi, 9–11 (MGH SRM, IV, pp. 569–70).
60 Annales Mettenses priores, aa. 678, 693, ed. Simson, B. de, MGH SRG (Hanover, 1905), pp. 3, 16 Google Scholar. Cf. Janet L. Nelson, ‘Gender and genre in women historians of the early Middle Ages’, in eadem, The Frankish World, 750–900 (London, 1996), pp. 183–97, at p. 193.
61 Dhuoda, Liber Manualis, praef. and X.4, ed. Riche, pp. 84–6, 350–2.
62 Ibid., prologus, p. 80.
63 M. A. Claussen, ‘Fathers of power and mothers of authority: Dhuoda and the Liber Manualis’, French Historical Studies, 19 (1996), pp. 785–809, with full discussion of the quotations from the Bible and the Rule of St Benedict which Dhuoda uses. I am grateful to Janice Farnham for drawing my attention to this article.
64 Toubert, Théorie du mariage’, pp. 259–60.
65 Council of Meaux/Paris, d. 77 (MGH Cone., Ill, p. 124). Cf. Nelson, Janet L., ‘Women and the word in the earlier Middle Ages’, SCH, 27 (1990), pp. 53–78.Google Scholar
66 Contrast the lack of differentiation between the roles of mother and father in earlier legislation, MCH Cap., I, no. 121, p. 240.
67 Hucbald of Saint-Amand, Vita Rictrudis, chs 5, 15, 17 (PL 132, cols 833–4, 841–3, 844-5). For Hucbald’s use of Jonas’ De institutione laicali in describing Rictrude’s marriage, see Julia M. R Smith, ‘A hagiographer at work: Hucbald and the library of Saint-Amand’, Revue Bénédictine, 106 (1996), pp. 151–71 at p. 156. For further hagiographical examples, see Toubert, Théorie du mariage’, p. 259 n. 69. On motherhood as nurturing, see the introduction to John Carmi Parsons and Bonnie Wheeler, eds, Medieval Mothering (New York, 1996), pp. ix-xvii.
68 Patrick Corbet, Les Saints ottoniens: sainteté dynastique, sainteté royale et sainteté féminine autour de l’an Mil, Beihefte der Francia, 15 (Sigmaringen, 1986), pp. 204–6.
69 Haimo of Auxerre, In epistolam I ad Timotheum, 2.15 (PL 117, col. 791). This passage may be a rethinking of Jerome, Adv. Jovinianum, I.27 (PL 23, col. 249).
70 De institutione regia, III.57-109, ed. Dubreucq, Le Métier du roi, pp. 188–92, quoting the ninth abuse verbatim.
71 Carefully analysed by Elizabeth Ward, ‘Caesar’s wife: the career of the Empress Judith, 819–29’, in Godman, Peter and Collins, , eds, Charlemagne’s Heir: New Perspectives on the Reign of Louis the Pious (Oxford, 1990), pp. 205–27 Google Scholar; and eadem, ‘Agobard of Lyons and Paschasius Radbertus as critics of the Empress Judith’, SCH, 27 (1990), pp. 15–25.
72 829 Council of Paris, cl. 69 (MGH Com., II, pt 2, at pp. 670–1).
73 Details in Geneviève Bührer-Thierry, Xa Reine adultère’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, 35 (1992), pp. 299–312.
74 The strategies and rhetoric of this bitter dispute have been recently analysed by Stuart Airlie, The virgin secrets of girls and women: private bodies and the body politic in the Carolingian age’ in a paper delivered to the Anglo-American Conference, July 1996.
75 De rectoribus christianis, ed. Siegmund Hellmann, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur lateinischen Philologie des Mittelalters, 1 (Munich, 1906), pp. 19–91. There is no agreement whether Sedulius wrote this work between 855 and 859 for Lothar II (as argued by Hans Hubert Anton, Fiirstenspiegel und Herrscherethos in der Karolingerzeit, Bonner Historische Forschung, 32 [Bonn, 1968], pp. 261–3) or f°r Charles the Bald in perhaps 869 (as claimed by Staubach, Nikolaus, Rex Christianus. Hojkultur und Herrschaftspropaganda im Reich Karl da Kahlen [Cologne, 1993], pp. 109–12, 168–97).Google Scholar
76 Sedulii Scotti Collectaneum miscellaneum, XIII.19-20, ed. Simpson, Dean, CChr. CM, 67 (Turnhout, 1988), pp. 68–9 Google Scholar. On Sedulius’ indebtedness to Pseudo-Cyprian and other insular texts in his ideas on kings, see Anton, Fiirstenspiegel, pp. 263–81.
77 Sedulius Scottus, De rectoribus christianis, ch. 5, ed. Hellmann, p. 35, translated by Edward Gerard Doyle, Sedulius Scottus: On Christian Rulers and the Poems, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 17 (Binghampton, NY, 1983), pp. 59–60. For a possible West Saxon reflection of Sedulius’ ideas on good and bad queens, see Anton Scharer, The writing of history at King Alfred’s court’, Early Medieval Europe, 5 (1996), pp. 177–206, at p. 206.
78 Sedulius Scottus, De rectoribus christianis, ch. 5, cd. Hellmann, p. 35.
79 Ibid., p. 35: ‘Is ergo perspicaciter procuret ut non solum nobilem pulchram ac divitem, sed et castam, prudentem atque in Sanctis virtutibus morigeram habeat coniugem.’ Cf Jonas, De institutione laicali, II.5 (PL 106, col. 179): ‘Pcrpendant itaque conjugati, quod … exterior pulchritudo, et carnalis uxorum delectatio, carum interiori casto amore nullatcnus sit praeferenda. Non sunt igitur in uxoribus divitiae tantum et pulchritudo, sed potius pudicitia et morum probitas quaerenda.’
80 Rather of Verona, Praeloquia I.i, ed. Reid, P. L. D., CChr. CM, 46A (Turnhout, 1984), p. 5.Google Scholar
81 Rather of Verona, Praeloquta H.ii-12, pp. 54–6, including quotation from Ps. Cyprian’s fifth abuse.
82 Ibid., II.3, p. 47.
83 Ibid, II.4-10, pp. 47–54.
84 Ibid., II.2, pp. 46–7.
85 Bührer-Thierry, “Reine adultère’.
86 Brown, Body and Society, p. 153; Nelson, ‘Women and the word’, p. 58.
87 For further general discussion of some of the issues raised in this paper, see Heene, Katrien, The Legacy of Paradise: Marriage, Motherhood, and Woman in CaroUngian Edifying Literature (Frankfurt, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which appeared too late to be incorporated into the present text.
