Download PDF | Valerie L. Garver - Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World-Cornell University Press (2009).
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has grown into its present shape because of the generous suggestions, time, and funding of many individuals and institutions. If I forget to mention any one of them, it is not out of a lack of gratitude.
Many individuals have helped me become a Carolingian historian. Lisa Bitel first sparked my interest in early medieval women, and time spent at the University of Groningen convinced me that I wanted to become a historian. I am deeply indebted to Tom Noble and to the late Jim Lang for sharing their enthusiasm for and knowledge of the Carolingian world.
I am grateful to University of Virginia faculty and students, especially Paul Kershaw but also Peter Baker, Greg Hays, Ted Lendon, Erik Midelfort, Duane Osheim, Anne Schutte, Tony Spearing, Augustine Thompson, and Libby Thompson. I particularly want to thank Herwig Wolfram and Walter Pohl, who made it possible for me to spend a year in the rich intellectual atmosphere of the Institut fiir Osterreichische Geschichtsforschung and the Forschungstelle fiir Geschichte des Mittelalters, Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. For help and camaraderie I thank the writing workshop of Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute.
At Northern Illinois University, I have benefited from the support and collegiality of my colleagues in the History Department. I continue to be impressed by their dedication to both research and teaching, and I remain extremely grateful to the senior colleague who took on an overload in order to give me a reduced teaching load for one semester. My fellow medievalists at NIU, particularly Nicole Clifton, Sue Deskis, and Ann van Dijk, provided me with sound advice and friendship.
I am profoundly grateful to Lynda Coon and Sandi Yandle, who read complete drafts of this book, and to the two anonymous readers for Cornell
University Press, who helped me to improve this book in countless ways. At Cornell University Press, I wish to thank my patient editor Peter Potter as well as Rachel Post, Irina Burns, and Susan Specter. Equally I am indebted to the individuals I thank elsewhere, who read complete or partial drafts. Any errors or omissions are of course mine.
Parts of this book appeared in slightly different form in earlier publications. I thank Verlag Walter de Gruyter for permission to reprint short portions of “The Influence of Monastic Ideals upon Carolingian Conceptions of Childhood,” in Childhood in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the History of Mentality, edited by Albrecht Classen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005), 67-85, in chapter 3 and the conclusion; and short portions of “Old Age and Women in the Carolingian World,” in Old Age in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Neglected Topic, edited by Albrecht Classen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), 121-41, in chapters 1 and 4 and the conclusion.
I also thank Dennis M. Kratz for permission to reprint several lines of his translation of the poem Waltharius, in Waltharius and Ruodlieb, edited and translated by Dennis M. Kratz (New York: Garland Publishing, 1984), in chapter 4. Short portions of “Learned Women? Liutberga and the Instruction of Carolingian Women,” in Lay Intellectuals in the Carolingian World, edited by Patrick Wormald and Janet L. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 121-38, appear in chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5.
The intellectual and financial support of many institutions made completion of this book possible. The University of Virginia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Corcoran Department of History as well as the Northern Illinois University Division of Research and Graduate Studies, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and History Department provided funds for research and travel.
I am also indebted to the Fulbright Commission of Austria and the University of Notre Dame Medieval Institute for financial support. I am grateful for the help of staff at Alderman Library, University of Virginia; Founders Library, Northern Illinois University; the Institut fiir Osterreichische Geschichtsforschung; the Forschungsstelle fiir Geschichte des Mittelalters, Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften; the Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek; the Fakultatsbibliothek fiir Katholische Theologie, Universitat Wien; the Biblioteca Queriniana; the Archivio di Stato e Archivio Storico Civico Brescia; the Emeroteca e Basi Dati Brescia; the Musée des Tissus de Lyon, especially Marie-Jo de Chaignon; Hesburgh Library and the Medieval Institute, University of Notre Dame; the Library of Congress; the Vatican Library and Museum, especially Guido Cornini and Claudia Lega; the St. Afra Didzesanmuseum, especially Renate Mader; the Bibliothéque Municipale, Arras; the Bibliothéque Nationale de France; the Koninklijke Bibliotheek van Belgié; the Bibliothéque Municipale de Douai; the Universitats- und Landesbibliothek Diisseldorf; the Centrale Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit Gent; the Koninklijke Bibliotheek Nederland; the Karlsruhe Landesbibliothek; the Bibliothéque de l'Université de MonsHainaut; and the Bibliotheque Municipale de Saint-Omer.
Among others from whom I received generous support, references, or advice were Stuart Airlie, Taylor Atkins, Cordelia Beattie, Scott Bruce, Caroline Walker Bynum, Cristina Cervone, Albrecht Classen, Richard Corradini, Amber Croy, Abe Delnore, Allyson Delnore, Max Diesenberger, Paul Dutton, Peter Erhart, Alberto Ferreiro, Mary Garrison, Pat Geary, Eric Goldberg, Sarah Hamilton, Yitzhak Hen, Marion Hoppe, Matthew Innes, Mayke de Jong, Bob Katz-Riihl, Annette Kern-Stihler, Lezlie Knox, Conrad Leyser, Felice Lifshitz, Amy Livingstone, Leslie Lockett, Jonathan Lyon, Louisa Mattozzi, the late June Mecham, Dimitri van Meenen, Rob Meens, Jinty Nelson, Catherine Nielsen, Helmut Reimitz, Jenny Ruff, Axel Stahler, Roland Steinacher, Rachel Stone, Amy Murrell ‘Taylor, Patricia Werbrouck, Lara Diefenderfer Wulff, and Philip Wynn. I also thank Mildred Budny and Dominic Tweddle for permission to reproduce their photographs of the Maaseik embroideries. Mike Dawson saved me days of work with his expert technical advice. I am particularly thankful for the wonderful teachers at the Child Development Lab at NIU, whose care for my daughter made it possible for me to finish this book.
Words are hardly sufficient to thank my husband, Robert Feldacker, for his unfailing encouragement, support, and love. For the many hours he spent listening to me talk about the Carolingians and, most of all, for our beautiful daughter Rachael Iam endlessly grateful. I am also fortunate to come from an extended family that has always prized learning. I am especially thankful for my grandparents, my brother Lee, and the entire Feldacker family. Finally, my greatest thanks goes to those who have always set an example of what it is to be good scholars, teachers, and people—my parents. It is to them that I dedicate this book.
Introduction
WOMEN AND CAROLINGIAN SOCIETY
“For there are four reasons why men desire women: family, prudence, wealth, and beauty.”! Thus wrote the Carolingian cleric Jonas of Orléans in his De institutione laicali, composed in the 820s to explain to laymen how they could lead a virtuous life. On the surface Jonas’s list seems self-explanatory, a list of attributes that men doubtless have long desired in women. In fact, his choices mirror an earlier list of wifely characteristics in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies (c. 560—-636),” who in turn drew upon ancient prescriptions concerning women’s traditional roles.
Since the early Christian era, prudence in women, for example, referred to domestic virtue. Resting upon old Roman ideals of the matrona, a woman was to bear children, care for her family, remain at home spinning, and maintain the good reputation of her husband and household. Yet it is safe to say that when Jonas wrote these words in the early ninth century he did so with the specific social conditions of his own day in mind. Certain cultural attributes were prized by the Carolingian elite, and each of Jonas’s characteristics—beyond being desirable for centuries—reflect the expectations men had for women during the Carolingian rule.
In this book I argue that women, specifically elite women, were active participants in shaping and perpetuating the behaviors, beliefs, and practices that marked the culture of the Carolingian lands between c. 700 and c. 925. Their contribution to that culture remains very much in the background of texts from that era, but by examining the rhetoric concerning aristocratic women it becomes clear that their actions were recognized and valued. Churchmen expected that elite women would participate in the dissemination of Christian reform, especially because women communicated regularly with those with whom clerics probably had the least contact: other women, children, and social inferiors.
Aristocratic women had ample opportunity to transmit religious ideals and to persuade others to act with Christian virtue. According to her vita, the Saxon recluse Liutberga explained appropriate behavior to other women in her local community. Just as clerical authors of mirrors for laymen taught them how to pray, Liutberga instructed an aristocratic woman Pia to pray.’ In this respect, expectations of women’s participation in the Carolingian renaissance reflected clerical male understanding of women’s positions and actions.
Carolingian women were participants not just in religious matters but also in the wider political, social, and cultural spheres of their day. In this regard women in both the religious and secular worlds had a great deal in common. Rather than separating women into these two categories, as has often been the case in early medieval scholarship, I explore the many similarities that linked elite female experience, regardless of profession, in the Carolingian world. Clerical and lay aristocratic values often intersected with respect to women. Ecclesiastical leaders recognized the need to make some allowances for the lay elite. Religious men tolerated certain potentially sinful behaviors, characteristics, or possessions that marked high status among laywomen so long as those women cultivated a domestic virtue in order to prevent a life of excess (/uxuria). Thus aristocratic women could employ an opulent appearance to demonstrate familial wealth and prestige and to enhance the status of men as members of the elite.
Jonas gives us one way to think about early medieval women; modern scholarship offers a different approach. In the quarter century since the publication of Suzanne Wemple’s groundbreaking Women in Frankish Society, historians have increasingly turned to gender as an analytic tool for examining the ways that women in the early Middle Ages participated in and changed the broader society around them.’* Following the lead of this scholarship, I present a gendered investigation of women’s experiences in Carolingian lands that considers both ideals and social practices. Strictly dividing “ideal” and “reality” is impossible; indeed it is useful to consider the two notions together as they emerge from the sources. Stephanie Hollis, Clare Lees, and Gillian Overing have argued, for example, that clerics in Anglo-Saxon England sometimes obscured contemporary women’s roles in society because they emphasized a view of women based on earlier traditions.’ Nevertheless these scholars argue that it is possible to learn about Anglo-Saxon women by examining those ideals, their variations, and their deviations. Such an approach can be usefully applied to Carolingian sources as well.
Though not all scholars agree on a single definition of gender, most acknowledge that gender relies upon norms and beliefs, not upon objective observations of men and women.’ In this book I use gender to refer to the social and cultural expectations of men and women and the ways in which perceived differences of femininity and masculinity affected social relations. The relative degree to which gender influenced early medieval women has been the subject of some debate, but gender was fundamental in forming female identity in the Carolingian world.’ From the moment a girl was born, her femininity shaped her expectations and her ability to work in her own interests, though naturally status, religious estate, age, and kinship affected her perception of herself as well as others’ assessment of her. Gender also influenced the society around her, especially with respect to how the Carolingian elite often measured the power and success of individual men and women upon their ability to embody idealized masculinity and femininity.*
In some ways this book hearkens back to Eileen Power’s efforts in the 1920s and 1930s to examine seemingly ordinary aspects of women’s lives.? Power demonstrated that the everyday experiences of women provided rich context for the social, economic, political, and religious understanding of the Middle Ages. Few scholars immediately followed up on Power's insights, but a burst of scholarship in the first half of the 1980s initiated the concentrated interest in early medieval women that has persisted in the United States.'? Although this scholarship was critical in laying the basis for the study of early medieval women, one of its fundamental conclusions—that women became increasingly restricted to the household and convent in the Carolingian period—no longer seems so certain. Relying mainly on prescriptive evidence, these historians sometimes overlooked the opportunities that women had to influence those around them." They also tended to see a strict division between lay and religious women. In recent years, scholars of the early Middle Ages have increasingly found innovative ways to tap into the lives of women using a wider range of textual sources.” It is becoming clear in the process that the experiences of elite women, religious and lay, often overlapped. Specifically, I argue that their common efforts to create and perpetuate aristocratic culture linked them.
I realize that to some it may seem that this book is advancing a traditional agenda—making the actions of the female elite visible. However, when studying early medieval women, it is the aristocratic women who are consistently visible in surviving sources.’ Lisa Bitel’s recent survey of early medieval women makes a commendable effort to focus upon “ordinary” as well as powerful women." Yet the extant sources limit the areas of women’s lives one can examine. The most poorly documented women of the early Middle Ages are those numbered neither among the powerful elite nor among the peasants listed in inventories of estates. This lack of evidence pertaining to the countless free women who lived on Carolingian lands makes any discussion of them relatively conjectural.
Hans-Werner Goetz has suggested two avenues by which to approach the study of early medieval women: the ideal way others thought women should conduct their lives and the reality of how they could lead their lives." My study takes both approaches into consideration while arguing that we can learn a great deal about women’s preservation and transmission of elite culture by concentrating on the ways in which clerical discourse and social practice shaped one another. All early medieval people contended with substantial social, economic, and political conventions that affected their ability to act as they might wish.'® Some of these constrictions were gendered. Early medieval aristocratic women certainly had their own Lebensform (way of life) because of their gender and particularly because of their reproductive capacity and the biological differences in life expectancy, aging, and relative maturity between men and women.'’ Nevertheless, elite women created a way of life for themselves through the very constrictions placed upon them.
There is a relatively large corpus of work on royal women in the early Middle Ages, but this book widens the focus to include all female members of the Carolingian elite.'!* Far more direct evidence remains concerning queens or the daughters, sisters, and mothers of kings than other women, but because royal women often came from aristocratic families or married into them, differentiating sharply between royal and aristocratic women would obscure the continuum along which all elite Carolingian women ranged. Religious women have received even greater scholarly attention.'? Distinguishing between lay and religious disguises the fact that status and gender gave women common experiences. When powerful abbesses and queens worked in their own interests, for instance, clerics and other writers often reacted adversely. They believed that such actions were not in keeping with female virtue—early medieval women were rather to work for the benefit of their spiritual and natal families.
The Carolingian era was transformative in European history for both men and women. The map of modern Europe began to take shape during the ninth century, following the 843 Treaty of Verdun by which Charlemagne’s grandsons divided the empire in three. The erudition of Carolingian scholars changed European culture. Their synthesis of Roman, Christian, Germanic, and Hebrew traditions in nearly all aspects of life resulted in the composition of a rich body of texts, construction of beautiful buildings that made statements of power, fabrication of fine artworks ranging from manuscripts to metalworks to ivories, and the development and spread of religious learning throughout western Europe.’? During the late eighth and ninth centuries, clerics under royal patronage wrote various texts and helped to formulate laws at church and secular councils meant to bring about increased consistency in practice and belief.’' Reformers concerned themselves with issues ranging from acceptable rules for the religious life to mandatory recitation of the Creed and Lord’s Prayer by the laity, from prohibitions of work on Sundays and holidays to the regulation of marriage; from chastisements for immoral behavior by priests, abbesses, monks, nuns, and laypeople to attempts to improve clerical education.”” Almost nothing escaped their purview.?? These comprehensive, organized efforts reveal great ambition even if they ultimately never gained full implementation.”* Indeed the fruits of these reforms and the artistic and literary revival that accompanied them merit the title of renaissance.”
The originality of the Carolingian renaissance rested upon an ability to draw from older texts and traditions while applying them to contemporary exigencies. Carolingian rulers, especially Pippin the Short, Charlemagne, and Louis the Pious, worked to implement a degree of religious uniformity in Carolingian-controlled lands, and the sons and grandsons of Louis the Pious carried on smaller-scale programs of reform within their own kingdoms. A Frankish-papal alliance developed in the mid-eighth century between Carolingian rulers, who desired papal legitimacy after their usurpation of kingship from the Merovingian family, and popes, who wanted Frankish protection from the Lombards. Over time, Charlemagne and his heirs gained access to many important manuscripts through their alliance with the papacy. They also engaged the papacy in major theological debates, but popes did not direct Carolingian rulers to make specific reforms, and textual evidence reveals inconsistencies in papal and officially sanctioned Carolingian views on certain Christian practices.” Furthermore, great variety marked ideas of reform: rulers and clerics promoted learning and cultural activity quite broadly—efforts that produced diverse results.”” Some of the changes this Carolingian renaissance brought were quite practical: the propagation of schools and scriptoria, where manuscripts could be copied in a new uniform script, Caroline miniscule; reforms to church liturgy so that ideally one could hear the same mass throughout Carolingian lands; and an effort to build a system of standardized legal and administrative practices in the empire, especially through church councils and the issuing of capitularies, prescriptive lists of acts, edicts, and instructions on nearly every topic imaginable.
Carolingian reformers contended with many cultural, social, religious, legal, political, and economic issues in direct response to the world around them. Reflecting their broad desire that reform respond to perceived needs, ecclesiastical leaders encouraged women to spread good Christian practice and demonstrate virtue to others.”* Of all the Carolingian reforms, the ideas concerning this female role had perhaps the greatest effect upon women’s lives. Women therefore participated in the Carolingian renaissance but not always in the same ways or to the same degree as men. Clerical demands that elite women be moral exemplars found fruition, for example, in the aristocratic laywoman Dhuoda’s composition of a book of advice for her absent son William in the early 840s. Female participation in the vibrant literary production of this era allowed for some of their contributions to the Carolingian renaissance.”’ Religious women produced manuscripts that responded to the wider reforms in script, Latin grammar, and dissemination of texts. Some religious women copied texts, and some may have written original texts themselves. If the Prior Metz Annals were produced at the double monastery of Chelles where Charlemagne’s sister Gisela was abbess, it is possible a woman (or women) wrote them.*” A number of women wrote letters including various Carolingian queens, the abbess Leoba, and Charlemagne’s daughters, who displayed their love of learning by asking the court scholar Alcuin (73 5804) to write a commentary on the Gospel of John for them.*! Nonetheless relatively few have investigated women’s contributions to these changes, particularly the ways in which religious rhetoric touched upon women.
Carolingian clerical views of women were often ambivalent, neither consistently negative nor wholly positive. When Carolingian churchmen advocated marriage as a beneficial institution among the laity, they echoed the works of earlier thinkers, but they recognized the ways wives could act constructively within their families. Compared to many of their late antique and eleventhand twelfth-century counterparts, some Carolingian theorists can come across as less misogynist.*” ‘The Carolingian renaissance and traditional expectations nevertheless limited opportunities for women. Ecclesiastical leaders believed laywomen should focus on the domestic sphere, explaining how they should best be wives, mothers, and heads of households and estates, similarly to the ways they described the duties and actions of abbesses in hagiographical texts. The late ninth-century abbess of Gandersheim Hathumoda, for example, looked after her flock with great care, tended the sick, including her elderly aunt, and ensured the religious instruction of the girls in her charge.
Male lay aristocratic necessities and desires sometimes came to be reconciled with the goals of Carolingian religious reform. In the Liber exhbortationis of c. 795, a book of advice for the layman Eric of Friuli, Paulinus of Aquileia described hell as the elite world turned upside down. Using examples that would make an impression upon a male lay aristocrat, Paulinus writes that hell is a place
where there is not any honor, or recognition of closest kin, but unremitting sorrow and pain; where death is desired and is not given; where there is no esteem of the older man and king, nor is the lord above the servant, nor does the mother love son or daughter, nor does the son honor the father; where all evil, and the anger and stench and acrimony of all abound.
Paulinus emphasized social bonds, underlining their importance in the Carolingian world. A hierarchy of personal relations regulated the well-ordered aristocratic world, and elite men wished to gain offices and recognition that could maintain and promote their power and authority. Men conceived of and wrote about women in ways that reflected their desire that women aid them in these tasks; though highly idealized, the specific female actions and expectations, which Carolingian texts encouraged or took for granted, reflect the activities women either undertook or conceivably could undertake. Notice that Paulinus discusses a mother’s love and a father’s honor; other clerics also assumed the prominence of parent-child relations among lay aristocrats, particularly singling out the mother for her nurturing role. This passage helps to reveal one reason why ecclesiastical leaders emphasized motherhood: the laity prized it. Paulinus equates the repercussions of the rupture of these personal bonds with the torments of hell in order to convey to his aristocratic audience how terrible damnation is. As did Jonas of Orléans in his De institutione Iaicali, Paulinus exhorted the laity to behave in a Christian manner, but molded his ideas to conform to lay life. In great part, these two bishops understood the demands and contingencies of the lay world because they were born into it and because they remained part of the aristocratic milieu beyond consecration.
Examining these predominantly male texts, one can see that the rhetoric concerning elite women and reform changed over the period of Carolingian rule, but by the reign of Louis the Pious (814-840) it had begun to stabilize. The models of the first third of the ninth century remained influential at least into the early tenth century. This development had repercussions for the long-term history of Western women, for it marked a key period in reshaping older perceptions of women in lasting ways. During the rule of Pippin the Short and more notably under his son Charlemagne, men began to write about women in new ways. Although virtuous wives and mothers had long been associated with worthy households, in the early ninth century reformers began to spell out that role more clearly. For example, the bishops at the Council of Meaux-Paris in 845 insisted that noble men and especially noble women look after the morality of their households.** In other words, women had an active role in propagating and maintaining a Christian society. In this regard, the Carolingian renaissance shaped the Western perception of women as exemplary models and informal teachers for children, other women, and individuals of inferior status.
The experiences of Carolingian women can be seen as part of the ongoing project of remaking classical culture north of the Alps. Carolingian rhetoric concerning women drew from the Roman and sometimes (through late antique intermediaries) the Greek past. When Theodulf of Orléans argued in the Opus Caroli (792-93) that women ought not teach publicly, he drew upon not only Paul of Tarsus but also upon the same classical idea of woman as weaker vessel that had influenced Paul.** The holy woman Liutberga studied scripture, hymns, and psalms, becoming so learned that were it not for the “weakness of her sex” she could have taught well.*° She did, however, help other women develop piety and domestic virtue. At the same time Carolingian writers continued to associate ancient gendered practices such as textile work with morality. Penelope wove and unraveled in her husband Odysseus’s absence in order to preserve her virtue. Carolingian nuns engaged in textile work to prevent idle gossip.
Ecclesiastical leaders molded their exhortations to women in ways that reflected contemporary social practice, consciously interpreting ancient models in ways that conformed to the needs of their own time. This delineation of female duties contributed to the transformation of Christian culture under the Carolingians as secular and ecclesiastical leaders worked to bring increased order and harmony to religious practice. Numerous sources offer evidence that women carried out the activities that churchmen advocated. For example, Queen Emma gave a belt to a bishop, a prominent example of fulfilling clerical demands that women provide textiles to churches. Old models helped to shape the ways women could act, offering boundaries that women sometimes transgressed. Dhuoda, for instance, instructed her child in Christian practices such as praying and giving alms just as men had long expected that mothers should, but she asserted her authority to do so in written form, inserting her words and her presence at the royal court, where her son was a hostage. She instructed her son on ostensibly male affairs advising him to exercise caution in dealing with powerful men.
This book reveals that women had agency to affect both their society and their own presentation in contemporary texts. Churchmen wrote all but a handful of these sources to address other topics, providing us with a masculine and elite vision of Carolingian society that reflects the clerical view of monks and priests. Ninth-century advice books for men, for instance, have passages that often touch upon women and their social roles.*” Though I employ texts not typically associated with the history of women and gender, the evidence for both cultural expectations and activities of women displays relative consistency and quantity across many source types. Prescriptive texts offer regulations concerning women; annals and other historical works sometimes comment upon the actions of queens or abbesses; and hagiography and literature present rather idealized pictures of aristocratic women.**®
This evidence poses certain problems. First, only rare Carolingian sources provide a woman’s voice; Dhuoda’s handbook for her son is the best known Employing gendered analysis helps to overcome this difficulty; nevertheless we are primarily left with the male view of women. Furthermore, these sources reflect only the experiences and ideas of the elite. By addressing the subject of aristocratic culture, my hermeneutic position can help to overcome both of these problems for I address a subject of profound concern to the elite, including many male clerical writers. Rather than addressing a topic beyond the scope of these sources, such as female friendship or women’s attitudes to marriage, this study embraces the limitations of the sources, making them the subject of study. So long as I account for its genre, author, audience, models, and purposes, I can often use the asides or incidental details of a text to help to reveal information concerning women. When these elements do not come from an earlier model or advance the purposes of a text, it is frequently possible to assume that they reflect contemporary norms and practices.
I take an interdisciplinary approach, examining a wide range of sources: textiles, exegesis, archaeological remains, poetry, liturgy, letters, inventories, lay mirrors, charters, polyptychs, capitularies, church councils, hagiography, and memorial books. In addition to examining material evidence, I address written mentions of material culture. Cemetery remains, for example, help to support estimates of female longevity based upon written works. Elite women’s control over and organization of goods marked their daily activities and affected their presentation in sources. Lay and religious aristocratic women frequently had responsibility for acquiring, commissioning, and producing textiles. As such, they were both fabricators and patrons of this art form.*”
In order to gain the most evidence, I cast my net widely, examining sources from all areas ruled by the Carolingians from the beginning of the eighth century to the first decades of the tenth century. The phrase “Carolingian women” therefore refers not only to women of the Carolingian ruling family but to all elite women living under their rule. “Membership” in the aristocracy remained fluid throughout premodern Western history, with individuals attaining and losing recognition as members of the elite from generation to generation.” In the Carolingian Empire status as a magnate or aristocrat depended heavily on: access to and display of wealth, especially land; ability to exert power over others; close proximity to the king (Konigsnihe); a respected
family background; close bonds with other members of the elite; appointment to royal offices; and the status of women with whom men associated. Writers either directly identified or implied that numerous women of wealth, good family, and learning were aristocratic.
Noble markers and participation in the activities of the elite constitute what I will term aristocratic culture—the set of knowledge, practices, beliefs, and behaviors that helped individuals identify themselves as members of the elite and aided others in recognizing them as such. ‘To be sure, aristocratic culture refers to a modern understanding of past beliefs and ideas; early medieval people did not write specifically about such a conception. Some historians might question whether an aristocracy existed at all in the eighth and ninth centuries. By aristocracy, I mean an open elite, with a membership defined by certain cultural practices and understandings. Scholars have increasingly sought to determine the markers and self-understanding (Selbstverstindnis) or self-awareness (Se/bstbewufstsein) of an aristocrat. Because men and women shared this elite culture, men also transmitted it to others, and their activities are at the forefront of many sources. Less clear have been the ways women helped to produce and perpetuate aristocratic culture. Their duties concerning the instruction of children and domestic management gave them increased opportunity to convey practices, beliefs, behaviors, and knowledge to others. Because women—aristocratic, free, half-free, or unfree—often transmitted their status to their children, others may have expected women to transmit the culture that defined their rank.*! Association with male aristocrats indicated a woman’s membership in the elite. The daughters, wives, mothers, and sisters of magnates and kings were aristocratic as were those accepted into the circles of the powerful in the Carolingian world, and contemporaries recognized as noble those holding extensive lands, moveable wealth, or high office, such as abbesses. Women identified as aristocratic in this book therefore had one or more of these status markers.
As in much history of the poorly documented past, this study relies on relatively sparse evidence, but its conclusions are grounded in careful readings of the Carolingian texts mentioning women. Employing a disciplined imagination offers one way to deal with the sometimes intractable sources related to Carolingian women. By a disciplined imagination, I mean an approach to texts that takes careful account of the strictures of convention, earlier models, and contemporary circumstances in order to suggest highly probable female actions and behavior. For this reason, this book is to some degree speculative and I cannot claim to offer definitive conclusions concerning female actions much less purport to have reconstructed ninth-century social reality. In order to study some areas, particularly household management, I suggest the activities for which women almost certainly had responsibility based on the existing evidence. For example, according to prescriptive texts, gardening seems a probable activity of religious and lay aristocratic women, and the discovery of a watering can at an excavation of the convent of Herford helps to bolster the veracity of that impression. By employing this methodology, this book explores little studied areas of female life, especially commemorative prayer, beauty, textile work, and domestic management. Rather than ignoring evidence of a problematic nature, I employ difficult sources, sometimes offering speculative readings when no other analysis is possible. It is better to address these subjects in this manner than not to address them at all. In other cases, I have gleaned asides and remarks from many sources by paying rigorous attention to the details of texts. Because I am interested in perceptions and discourse, I consider as evidence letters composed in Anglo-Saxon England that ended up in Carolingian hands and vitae written about Merovingian women in the ninth and tenth centuries. Such prescriptive sources can reveal the responsibilities and actions of women as well as the ideals that others urged upon them. Individual prescriptions did not necessarily demand actions or behaviors that did not already occur; they could be meant to reinforce or shape them. Because the audience for female vitae, mirrors, and letters consisted mainly of women and laymen, it is hardly surprising that they promote domesticity and feminine virtue.”
Many sources, but especially hagiography, provide circumstantial details revealing women’s roles in aristocratic culture. The authors of vitae hoped mainly to demonstrate that an individual was worthy of veneration. In order to accomplish this task, they often borrowed heavily from earlier vitae, making some Carolingian vitae highly formulaic. Furthermore, hagiographic texts frequently employed topoi, sometimes making it difficult to determine whether the events they relate have much bearing upon social practice. When certain information is incidental or does not appear in other vitae, they quite possibly provide circumstantial details about Carolingian life. The Vita Liutbirgae twice mentions that the aristocratic woman Gisla had to travel among her estates.** These passing references corroborate other evidence for female supervision of family lands.
Conscious selection marked each author’s or scribe’s choice of certain words or motifs. One ought not to dismiss tropes, ideals, and repetition of earlier texts as mere copying of earlier models. To reject the content and connotation of topoi and passages of older texts is as much a mistake as taking them literally. Ernst Curtius identified many topoi and formulae but never dismissed their potential resonance for a contemporary audience.** Examining antique and earlier medieval texts circulating in the Carolingian world proves helpful at times to understanding views and social practices of eighth- and ninth-century women. Earlier texts exerted a profound influence on portrayals of early medieval women in historical texts and emphasized virtue in depictions of both lay and religious women.* ‘Topoi also frequently reflected the needs of aristocratic families and society. Poetry employed traditional motifs that reveal male expectations and sometimes provide supporting evidence for behaviors or practices described elsewhere. Royal and aristocratic women in poems are always beautiful in similar ways—richly adorned, white skinned, they display the wealth and power of their families, helping to clarify why Jonas of Orléans mentioned beauty as a desirable characteristic in his lay mirror. One can read topoi in reverse, finding in disapproval of women the ideal characteristics men desired. For example, Regino of Priim wrote that an aristocratic woman, Friderada contributed to the deaths and problems of her successive husbands through lack of virtue.” Her case is similar to the better-known and better-documented queens of the mid-ninth century, such as Judith and Theutberga, who suffered accusations of sexual immorality.
Approaching Carolingian sources broadly reveals the relatively wide scope women had to act in their society despite the legal and social constrictions. Official limitations did not restrict women as closely as once thought; Carolingian women sometimes attained their objectives within those bounds. In fact, the institution of such limits reveals a concern on the part of Carolingian clerics and rulers with the ways women helped to promote the power and prestige of aristocratic families. Had women been strictly confined to their religious houses or to their households, they might not have been able to preserve portions of the family patrimony as easily or promote the careers of their husbands and sons as successfully. The letter Lull, archbishop of Mainz, wrote to Suitha in 754 chastising her and her fellow nuns for ignoring their religious duties and enjoying lay delights reveals that some tried to enforce such legislation. Suitha and her sisters were to go as penitents, consuming only bread and water and abstaining from meat and drinks they enjoyed.*” Though we do not know what became of Suitha and her sisters, this letter suggests that ideas concerning strict claustration represented more than empty rhetoric. In contrast to some earlier scholarship on Carolingian women, I examine the particular ways women acted in their own interests within the contours of their specific bounds rather than try to define precisely where those limits lay. A number of scholars have noted in the last twenty years that such boundaries were in any case permeable and fluid.**
Many women were aware of clerical exhortations that they lead upright lives. Those women who were literate surely read texts concerning virtuous behavior.” Religious women in particular could have attained some knowledge of Latin grammar and writing as some of them produced manuscripts or wrote texts.°° In the religious life female teachers instructed young girls; a letter from one of these pupils to her magistra even survives.*' Extant evidence suggests that the lay elite enjoyed many of the same texts and artworks as did their religious counterparts. For example, the ninth-century magnate Eberhard of Friuli and his wife Gisela owned a rich library, containing theological, historical, and practical books.*? Similarly, some learning allowed laywomen to instruct their young children and to inculcate virtue in their households. Clerics rarely discussed such instruction explicitly, rather mentioning it in asides in texts on other subjects. Rather than preventing women from learning, churchmen encouraged them to attain the knowledge necessary to be a virtuous Christian. Oral transmission of ideas was a prime part of Carolingian women’s lives; that relative informality may help to explain the lack of discussion of female instruction in surviving sources.*? Mothers’ care for children contributed to the dynamics of early medieval aristocratic families.** According to the early tenth-century anonymous Vita Aldegundis, the saint’s mother provided an inverse model: when the young Aldegund ran out of alms to distribute to the poor, she thought that she ought to give away the money that her mother, Bertilla, hid. Naturally, the holy Aldegund resisted this temptation.*’ This saintly act also speaks to female supervision of wealth.
Our understanding of early medieval social relations should better account for women’s roles. Wives contributed more to their marital families than producing and instructing heirs, though broader Carolingian scholarship tends to emphasize these two duties. Although early medieval marriage had legal, social, and economic consequences for both partners, a woman’s efforts in perpetuating aristocratic culture brought some intangible benefits to her marriage. The beauty and social competence that men sought in women contextualizes the more material aspects of elite unions. A wife may have squandered wealth and family connections without an eye for effective display.
Women contributed to the collective memory of the Carolingian aristocracy. Their acts of remembrance connected them to others, especially their spiritual and religious families, and made them cognizant of their membership in the elite. Maurice Halbwachs argued that all memory is reconstructed based on common recollection.** His conception of memory is applicable to consideration of female commemorative acts within a larger social context during the eighth to ninth centuries. A goal of early medieval commemoration was to create bonds among the living and between the living and the dead, but it also served to help individuals recall their noble backgrounds and connections to other members of the elite.*? This conception of these female actions conforms to Rosamond McKitterick’s premise that the memory and commemoration of the past in the written record was a means for Carolingians to develop identities.** Annals, histories, and letters provide information on the gendered nature of medieval memory: both men and women worked to preserve memory in a variety of ways. Elite women helped their families remember and construct identities that made them and others aware of their high status. Their participation in commemoration helped them retain bonds to their kin, to other families, and to institutions such as monasteries and churches.*? When women at the convents of Remiremont and San Salvatore in Brescia kept copies of charters and maintained their memorial books— which contained lists of the living and the dead for whom they were to pray by employing the liturgical texts also recorded in the codices—they participated in developing an “archival” or historical memory, that is the (re)collection of past events.” As Mary Carruthers argued, medieval people did not separate oral and literate forms of memory, often understanding books as devices to help in recalling. Like most individuals prior to the Renaissance, they experienced the written word by listening to a reader.*' Hearing the names listed in these memorial books probably produced visual images in the minds even of women who had no direct contact with those texts. Furthermore, participation in liturgical rites of commemoration helped the women to recall the past and relate it to the present.”
Exploring women’s various economic and social roles clarifies political relations in the Carolingian world, providing a gendered vantage often missing in much early medieval political history. Men and women needed every possible advantage to help them successfully navigate elite society. The landholding and related bonds and alliances that governed that world shifted frequently. Disputes over land were frequent. Early medieval society was highly litigious, though the many remaining eighth- and ninth-century charters reveal only those cases that involved the religious institutions that preserved the documents. Furthermore, the late eighth and ninth centuries witnessed a number of rebellions against the Carolingian ruler; shifts in alliances among aristocratic families were relatively frequent and sometimes resulted in bloodshed. No male aristocrat, including the king, could assume his power would remain secure.“ Succeeding in this arena required political acumen, the ability to negotiate alliances with and among other aristocrats, and awareness of the behaviors, beliefs, and possessions that marked a member of the elite. Women could aid men in these areas of expertise with appropriate conduct, demeanor, and appearance.® Just as scholars have noted incipient aspects of knighthood, nascent forms of courtesy or courtliness appear in Carolingian sources, showing that these later movements had roots in the early Middle Ages and late antiquity.
As the Carolingian Empire gradually fragmented during the ninth century, elite families came increasingly to imitate the royal family, and women had greater opportunity than before to advance their own interests and those of their families. Carolingian texts reflected the need to employ expected behaviors, such as female hospitality, in order to develop those bonds. According to an early ninth-century vita, the abbess of Pfalz Addula provided hospitality to the missionary Boniface and used the opportunity to advance the interests of her grandson, Gregory of Utrecht.* Queens and women at court had access to the goods of the household, giving them opportunities to shape the provision of hospitality. Such female labor involved humble but necessary tasks such as the recycling of wax, which could allow for the provision of light or for lining containers to store or serve food and drink.® Despite many scholarly attributions of responsibility for household management to early medieval aristocratic women, no one has yet systematically explored female supervision of labor.” Bringing such efforts to light places women squarely in the current historical discourse concerning the early medieval economy.
“Family, prudence, wealth, and beauty” in women provided advantages to aristocratic men, both lay and clerical, explaining why Jonas of Orléans emphasized them. I begin my study with the two seemingly most self-explanatory characteristics—beauty and family. These are traits determined greatly by birth, though women found ways to improve upon or surpass what birth had provided them. Some clerics wrote about female beauty as a possible indication of female virtue, but in lay society it could serve to display the status of male kin. Women could alter their appearance using material items to enhance or create a pleasing impression. Men also had their female kin connect them to other families, including the royal family, through marriage and through religious communities making those women members of marital and spiritual families.
Prudence and wealth offered women ample opportunity to act and were therefore less accidents of birth than tools women could employ. Each offers new opportunities to consider how men understood female social practice. Defining precisely what Jonas meant by prudentia is difficult, but it is the only characteristic in his list that alludes to female actions. Carolingian aristocratic women possessed a social competence, that is a knowledge of the actions and behaviors that allowed them to instruct their children, act as moral exemplars to those around them, supervise households and estates, make shrewd decisions concerning the management of resources and the advancement of their kin, and find ways to exert power despite the legal, social, and political constraints that bound them. Heiresses brought wealth and status to their spouses, while women’s management of household and convent helped to preserve the wealth of those institutions. Women, along with men, held and transmitted land, a principal marker of an aristocrat. Their possession and donation of that land helped to preserve the memory of their families and ensure the commemoration of their kin as did female prayer and participation in the liturgy of commemoration. Laywomen almost certainly organized rich, appealing display in household and court. Their supplying of fine textiles to religious houses allowed for rich decoration in those institutions. Extant Carolingian sources reveal that their authors took account of these conventional female roles in aristocratic culture, at the same time shaping and being shaped by them.
‘Textile work unites Jonas’s characteristics. Aesthetic considerations were crucial to fabrication and display of cloth in both liturgical and lay settings: not least clothing could profoundly affect contemporaries’ assessment of a woman’s beauty. Supervision of a household necessitated knowledge of textile work because textiles comprised essential components of the material culture that marked Carolingian aristocrats. Traditional ideas, advanced especially by male clerics, and female work on textiles built upon each other to give cloth and clothing crucial roles in Carolingian aristocratic culture. Through their association with textiles women could advance the interests of their families and convents, demonstrate their virtue, and play a vital economic role. Each of these acts related to textiles required the exercise of women’s prudence.
Female social practices and related rhetoric concerning women were essential to the political, social, economic, and cultural transformations of the Carolingian era, and indeed influence the heirs of the Carolingians in the West to this very day. Men had similar expectations of the behavior and abilities of lay and religious women, who had far more in common with each other than with their male counterparts. Carolingian reforms often reveal that clerics understood the lives of aristocratic women, and they promoted expectations of women that encouraged them to cultivate their virtue and to use their conventional duties for broader purposes. This book argues for the many prominent ways in which women produced, maintained, and shaped elite culture in the Carolingian world. Because of the nature of both the sources and traditional historical approaches, this role has too often been absent in studies of both early medieval women and aristocratic culture. Crisscrossing and comparing disparate sources rarely employed in conjunction with each
other allows exploration of much new territory and re-evaluation of seemingly well-examined subjects. These efforts not only produce a new image of elite women as producers and transmitters of the culture that marked the Carolingian aristocracy but also demand re-evaluation of the male-dominated world in which they lived.
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