Download PDF | Suzanne Fonay Wemple - Women in Frankish Society_ Marriage and the Cloister 500 to 900-University of Pennsylvania Press (1981).
376 Pages
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
One of the pleasures in publishing a book is acknowledging publicly the institutional and personal support one received while writing it.
First, I would like to express my gratitude to three of my colleagues in the Barnard History Department. Professor Annette K. Baxter, Professor Chilton Williamson, and Professor Emeritus Basil Rauch had sufficient confidence in my judgment that sources for the history of women in the Middle Ages existed, even though they have not been systematically explored, to encourage me to teach and write on the subject. Collaboration with Professor JoAnn McNamara, of Hunter College, on three articles proved to be most fruitful. Through long discussions we managed to formulate a conceptual framework for the history of women in the early Middle Ages.
A grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for 1974-1975 made research in France possible. In Paris I had the gracious help of Professor Pierre Riché and the cooperation of the staff of the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes. Invitations to lecture at the Medieval Club of New York, Haverford College, the Graduate Center of CUNY, the Women’s Center at Barnard, and the Columbia Seminar on Legal History enabled me to test and refine my ideas.
My greatest intellectual debt is to Dr. Mary Martin McLaughlin. She called my attention to new publications, listened with sympathy to my problems, and gave me the inspiration to investigate women’s contributions to the development of new forms of spirituality. From Professor John Mundy, Professor John Contreni, and Denise Kaiser I received constructive criticism. I also wish to thank Ann Fagan for her suggestions on organization and style, Catherine McGee for helping with the tabulation of the data from the Lorsch cartulary, and Mary Jane Chase, Denise Kaiser, and Wendy Wemple for typing parts of the manuscript.
The editors of this book, Gail Levin, Jane Barry, Lee Ann Draud, and Susan Oleksiw, saved me the embarrassment of inconsistency in the anglicizing of well-known Frankish names. They also encouraged me to include genealogical tables and maps. I had Jane Bishop’s help in drawing these. None has independent value; each is merely intended to serve as a guide to complex family relationships or political subdivisions of the Regnum Francorum.
Most importantly I should like to acknowledge a special debt to my husband, George B. Wemple. He not only read the manuscript and helped me to improve it but also took charge of our children and household while I was away doing research and busy writing the book.
Barnard College October 1980
INTRODUCTION
The legacy of women in the Middle Ages 1s riddled with contradictions. Women in Latin Christendom were far more visible than in pagan societies: throughout the Middle Ages women exercised power and applied their talents outside the domestic sphere, whereas women in antiquity seldom transcended sex roles and became visible only through scandalous behavior. But by no means did women reach legal and social equality with men during the thousand years known as the Middle Ages. In fact, in the later Middle Ages their rights in some areas were more circumscribed than in the early Middle Ages.
In trying to understand the forces at work in expanding and limiting women’s sphere of activity and scope of influence, I focused initially on the legal and economic position of women in the Carolingian Empire. Medieval attitudes concerning the place and role of women in the social and economic structure were already discernible in ninth-century Carolingian Frankland, but to explain the ambiguities underlying these attitudes I had to reach farther back to the foundation of the Frankish Kingdom.
From the late fifth century, when Clovis carved out a kingdom in the disintegrating Western Roman Empire, until the late ninth century, when the semblance of unity of Charlemagne’s empire gave way to feudal decentralization, the Franks were catalysts of Western culture. In the territories under their control, new beliefs, attitudes, and institutions, reflecting three distinct cultural influences, German, Roman, and Christian, came into being. The study of women in the Frankish Kingdom yields not only an insight into the nature of these three legacies but also a comprehension of the new forces at work.
Clovis and his successors, called the Merovingians after their legendary ancestor Merovech, did not impose a uniform system of law upon the areas they occupied. Instead of territoriality of law, they followed the principle of personality of law, which meant that each individual had to live under the law of his or her father, or, in the case of a married woman, under the law of her husband.! In areas south of the Loire, where there was a population of Gallo-Roman descent, Roman law continued to be observed in a simplified form; elsewhere Germanic customs prevailed. As people intermarried and moved from their places of birth, the intermingling of customs gradually brought about new assumptions in matrimonial arrangements and property claims. Incorporated later into feudal customs, these assumptions defined the rights of women as daughters, wives, and widows for centuries to come.
In family law, Christianity began to exercise an influence only in the mid-eighth century, after Pepin had dethroned the last Merovingian king in 751. To legitimize his own rule, Pepin presented himself as a minister of God responsible for restructuring society according to Christian ideals. Foremost in his program was translating Christian teachings on marriage into secular legislation. The work begun by Pepin was completed by Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, who endeavored to devise an imperial system that would give an earthly expression to Augustine’s City of God. The new laws, after meeting a dramatic test under Louis the Pious’ sons and grandsons, were upheld by late ninthcentury popes and a series of local synods, the last of which met at Tribur in 895.
The transformation of Frankish society under the Merovingians from a relatively primitive tribal structure to a more complex hierarchical organization, along with the shift under the Carolingians from the extended family to the conjugal unit as the reproductive and economic center of society, provides a sufficient variety of situations to test the validity of two important hypotheses formulated by today’s feminist historians about forces determining the position of women in past societies. It is possible to examine whether or not the development of an administrative structure and social stratification within the framework of Merovingian society adversely affected women and intensified inequalities along sex lines. Another key issue is whether the emergence of the nuclear family and the enforcement of monogamy in Carolingian times enhanced or eroded the power and influence of women.
The history of the period raises other questions, which, although more specialized in nature, hold equal significance for scholars committed to exploring the experiences of women in past societies. Clovis built his kingdom on three pillars: the Catholic hierarchy, a Gallo-Roman administration, and a Frankish military retinue. Women had no place in these institutions and groups. But as wives and mothers they did contribute to the amalgamation of the Gallo-Roman senatorial aristocracy with the leading Frankish families.
It remains to be seen how women used their key position as a bridge between two influential kin groups. Were they mere passive instruments in the hands of their male relatives, or did they play an active part in promoting the social and political advancement of members of their natal family? It is also important to investigate the extent to which women were able to use circumstances to improve their own status and to contribute to vertical mobility in society.
Another important subject is the position and influence of women in the Frankish church. Like women in the early centuries of Christianity, women in Merovingian Gaul were the staunchest supporters of the new religion, converting their husbands, baptizing their children, building churches, and nourishing the faith with monastic foundations. Their role in the Frankish church, however, was not extensive; indeed, it became progressively more limited. Does this constitute the same pattern that historians have observed in other revolutionary movements, which welcomed women for their dedication but, at the moment of victory, forced them to return to traditional domestic activities?
The life of ordinary women must be studied as well. Was there any discrimination against women in the dependent classes, or were men and women equally subject to a lord, at least economically if not personally? Closely related to this inquiry is the nature of the work Merovingian and Carolingian women performed. Did they share with men the cultivation of the land, and, if so, were they recognized as equals of men of their own class?
In recent years American scholars have pioneered in using the records of early medieval manors to study various aspects of peasant family life: marriage patterns, infanticide, and household composition. This book will not attempt to pursue this quantitative inquiry; rather, it will touch upon peasant women only within the context of the two main areas of investigation: the status and activities of women in the family and in the church. Because of the dearth of evidence on the life of lower class women in sources other than manorial records, the emphasis will be on upper class women in both sections.
Records for the history of women in secular and religious life are more limited for the Merovingian than for the Carolingian period, when writing came into more general use. For the earlier centuries, I have relied extensively on legal sources, both secular and ecclesiastical. To judge the extent to which the laws were obeyed, I have supplemented an analysis of the laws with information derived from records of property transfers, collections of formulae, narrative sources, letters, and poems.
The more numerous legal sources for the Carolingian period cover a broader range: royal capitularies and court cases as well as conciliar legislation and formulae. Similarly, the Carolingian period offers a richer variety of literary sources, including treatises on the virtues and vices of different classes of people. In addition, some mon- astic and ecclesiastical cartularies contain a sufficient number of documents from the eighth and ninth centuries to permit at least a rudimentary form of statistical approach.
The institution of marriage and women’s property rights have been extensively studied by historians of private law, a field that is indebted to nineteenth-century German scholarship. Apart from the surveys of Germanic law, beginning with the pioneering study of Jacob Grimm and continuing down to the fourth edition of Karl von Amira’s work, revised by Karl August Eckhardt,? more specialized subjects have been treated in detailed studies, including R. Schréder’s work on Germanic marriage settlements, Julius Ficker’s volume on German inheritance rights, and Heinrich Brunner’s essays on Germanic family and property laws.3 These older works are still useful because of their careful scholarship. Histories of Germanic law written under the National Socialist regime must be used with caution, for they tend to glorify the position of Germanic women.4
Among French legal scholars, Brissaud and Chénon have dealt briefly with the position of women in Frankish society, and Lemaire and Cornuey have studied dowry settlements in the Merovingian and Carolingian periods.® More recently, the Belgian historian Francois Ganshof has provided a comprehensive analysis of the status of women living under Germanic law. For the position of Merovingian women living under Roman law, Conrat’s survey of Roman law in the Frankish Kingdom, published in 1903 and reprinted in 1963, remains an essential source.® ‘These works have been supplemented by studies on various aspects of matrimony in early medieval society presented at the Settimana di Studio in 1976.’
In contrast to the extensive work being done on early medieval family and private law, the history of women in the early medieval church 1s a neglected field. Lina Eckenstein’s monograph, published in 1896, was based on narrative sources.’ Although more scholarly in its approach, K. H. Schafer’s history of canonesses, published in 1907, is marred by the author’s insistence that institutes of canonesses were among the earliest monastic foundations.? More recently, the learned Benedictine Dom Philibert Schmitz studied nunneries in the seventh volume of his history of the order. To Carolingian developments, however, he gave only a summary treatment, possibly because he had analyzed these in the context of male communities in his first volume. !° The latest study by Friedrich Prinz has brought the history of Frankish monasticism to the end of the eighth century, but it does not pay particular attention to nunneries.!!
Information on early medieval nunneries is also provided by histo- ries of double monasteries. The most dispassionate account of the early development of double monasteries, published by Mary Bateson in 1899, needs revision in the light of modern scholarship.!? Ferdinand Hilpisch’s work, although it contains reliable data, suffers from the author’s belief that nuns tended to live as parasites upon monks.!3 More helpful are the investigations of the history of specific institutions, such as Hlawitschka’s work on Remiremont and Hoebanx’s on Nivelles.'4 Finally, Bernhard Bischoff’s research on early medieval manuscripts provides information on the activities of early medieval nuns and canonesses as scribes and book collectors.15
Roger Gryson’s recent monographs give a thorough survey of the policies affecting priests’ wives and deaconesses in the Eastern and Western churches, but do not go beyond an institutional analysis.!® There is a growing body of literature on these issues,!? including Haye van der Meer’s important theological-historical investigation of the church’s opposition to the ordination of women and Martin Boelens’s study of clerical marriage.
Women occupy a more prominent place in modern social histories than in ecclesiastical histories. Pierre Riché, in his study of Carolingian life, paid careful attention to the experiences of women in that society. The two articles he wrote for the Histoire mondiale de la femme give an excellent summary of women’s activities in the early Middle Ages.!9 Genealogical research on the early medieval aristocracy, stimulated and encouraged by Gerd Tellenbach and currently pursued by such leading scholars as Eduard Hlawitschka, Karl Schmid, and Karl Ferdinand Werner, has contributed a great deal to our understanding of the role of women in the upper echelons of Merovingian and Carolingian society.2°
Eugen Ewig’s study of Merovingian royalty—the age at marriage of princes and princesses, the social origin of royal consorts, and the fate of repudiated or widowed queens—provides a systematic analysis of the experiences of women in the highest echelon of early Frankish society.?} Following the same line of inquiry but focusing on two queens, Brunhild and Balthild, Janet Nelson has examined the opportunities for Merovingian queens to play political roles, as well as the limitations of their power.??
Among American scholars, David Herlihy has applied demographic data to the history of early medieval women, and Emily Coleman has followed in this area with research on the Carolingian peasantry.?3 Archibald Lewis has provided many examples of the economic power of women in southern France from the late ninth century.?4 Diana Owen Hughes has studied the substitution of dowry for brideprice in Mediterranean Europe.?°
Early medieval attitudes toward women have also been studied.Marie-Louise Portmann has analyzed these attitudes in the chronicles, and Maria Stoeckle has investigated the ideal of womanhood in Saxon hagiography.?6 Patristic views of women have been synthesized in two recent publications: Mary Daly’s The Church and the Second Sex offers a scathing criticism, while George Tavard’s Woman in Christian Tradition tries to give a less partisan presentation of the contradictions inherent in Christian doctrine and practice. The articles on which I have collaborated with JoAnn McNamara sketch the Christian ideals and secular laws governing women’s lives in the early Middle Ages.?7
The purpose of this book 1s to explain the gap between the ideals and laws on the one hand and the social reality on the other. It will attempt to settle the question of the meaning of Friedelehe. Was this an ancient form of Germanic marriage, or a form of concubinage? Recent discussion has centered on the economic power of women. Historians have observed that women controlled more land in areas where Roman law prevailed. Does this mean that in these areas women were more independent and self-assertive than in areas where Germanic law prevailed?
Of greater interest outside scholarly circles is the debate concerning women’s position in the early church. Are there any historical precedents for the role of spiritual and pastoral leadership that contemporary women are claiming in the Catholic church and have recently gained in other Christian churches? In searching for answers to these and other questions in primary sources, I have sought not merely to settle controversies but also to gain an understanding of the relationship between men and women and to provide insights into women’s experiences in this formative period of European history.
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