Gender and Ideology in the Early Middle Ages

Abstract

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.

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