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God and Man in Dhuoda’s Liber manualis*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

M. A. Claussen
M. A. Claussen*
Affiliation:
Hollins College, Roanoke, Virginia
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Extract

‘It is one thing for the mother of a family to teach the household by I word and example, but quite another for her, teaching certain useless things, to interfere with bishops or anyone in ecclesiastical orders, or even in a public synod.’ Thus the Libri Carolini, in the 790s, in its continuing attack on the Byzantine empress Irene, defined the proper role for the Frankish woman in doctrinal and educational matters. Dhuoda, wife of Bernard of Septimania, is by this definition an exemplar of Carolingian thought. She explicitly states that she wrote the Liber manualis, addressed to her son William, a hostage at the court of Charles the Bald, because she was unable to educate him in the godly life by her words and deeds. For his sake, then, she committed to writing, in the early 840s, what she would have taught him in person.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 27: Women in the Church , 1990 , pp. 43 - 52
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1990

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank J. Michael Burger, Robin Fleming, Andrea Hodgson, and Thomas F. X. Noble for their help on this paper.

References

1 Libri Carolini, ed. H. Bastgen, MGH. Cone, 2, supplement, III.13, p. 129.

2 Dhuoda, Manuel pour mon fils [Liber manualis, hereafter LM], ed. P. Riché, SC, 225 (Paris, 1975).

3 LM, epigramme, p. 72.

4 Unusual for most medieval authors, Dhuoda gives us the specific dates of the book’s composition. She began, she says, on 30 November 841, and finished on 2 February 843, (LM, xi, 2, p. 368).

5 Wemple, S.F., Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister, 500 to 900 (Philadelphia, 1985)Google Scholar, passim.

6 But now see Rosamond McKicterick’s lucid and convincing argument in The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 7–22.

7 Wilhelm Meyer claimed that ‘Dhuoda zu lesen, ist freilich unerfruelich’: [Gesammelte Abh. zur mittelalteinischen Rythmik, HI (Berlin, 1936), p. 72], but more recently Peter Dronke has written that ‘her Latin is indeed unorthodox and at times incorrect… it is also intrinsically difficult, because of Dhuoda’s complex and subde awareness. The modes of expression, when they are ungainly, uncertain, or unclear, are so chiefly because she was urgently striving to say something in her own way, something that was truly hers. And she does so successfully … despite—and even because of—the limitations of her Latin’: P. Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: a Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua (†203) to Marguerite Porete (†310) (Cambridge, 1984), p. 36.

8 She proclaims that she is ‘indigna, fragilis, et exul, limo revoluta, trahens ad Imma’ in her first epigrammatic poem, and this is a theme that runs throughout the work: LM, epigramme, lines 28-9, p. 74.

9 LM, i, 1, p. 96.

10 ‘… omnia et per omnia et in omnibus ad salutem animae et corporis tui cuncta tibi scriptitata cognosce’: LM, incipit, p. 68. See also LM, x, 1, p. 340.

11 Discussing one of her excursus on her numerology in his introduction, Riche pp. 31-2, notes that ‘pour Dhuoda, il n’y avait pas de frontières’ between intellectual culture and spirituality.

12 Wallace-Hadrill, J. M., The Frankish Church (Oxford, 1983), p. 286 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 J. Thess. 5. 17; Lam. 2. 18.

14 LM, viii, i, p. 306.

15 Luke 10. 38-42.

16 LM. vii, 1, p. 298.

17 LM, vii, 4, p. 302.

18 LM, vii, 6, p. 304.

19 See LM, iv, 8, p.254.

20 LM, viii, 13, p. 314, ‘Forsitan miseratur Pius facturae suae in iudicio …’.

21 See Alcuin, De virtulibus el vitiis, 18, PL 101. col. 626.

22 LM, iv, 6, p. 228.

23 Ibid., ‘… corpus servaveris ruam, mundus eris ab huius peccati originem …’.

24 Ibid.

25 See J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Long-Haired Kings and Other Studies in Frankish History (New York, 1962), p. 11; and J. Wollasch, ‘Eine adlige Familie des frühen Mittelalters: Ihr Selbsrverstandnis una ihre Wirklichkeir”, AKuG, 39 (1959), pp. 150-88, which remains the best single work on Dhuoda.

26 For instance, Riché in his introduction, pp. 26-7.

27 See, for example, LM, iii, 1-3, pp. 134-48.

28 See J. H. Lynch, Godparents and Kinship in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton, 1986).

29 LM, viii, 15, pp. 320-2.

30 LM, iv, 9, pp. 256-8.

31 LM, iii, 10, pp. 178-80.

32 Ibid., p. 180.

33 LM, iii, 3, pp. 142-8.

34 LM, iii, 4, p. 150.

35 For example, in the near-contemporary Vita Leobae, cap. 20 (MGH. SS. XV, 1, p. 130), written by a monk for monastic audiences, Leoba is called to court by the Queen, and although she does visit it, ‘she was not at all pleased, and only agreed to go for the sake of her long-standing relationship’ with the Queen. See also, Jaeger, C. S., The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals, 930-1210 (Philadelphia, 1985), pp. 54’66 Google Scholar.

36 LM, iii, 4, p. 148.

37 LM, iii, 9, pp. 170–2.

38 LM, iii, 10, pp. 172-4.

39 LM, iii, 8, pp. 168-70.

40 LM, x, 3, p. 348.

41 LM, vii, 3, pp. 300-2.

42 LM. iii, 8, p. 170.

43 LM, iv, 4, p. 212. Moreover, she says that he will be a child, a liber, with the other children of God.

44 G. Duby, ‘Une enquête à poursuivre: la noblesse dans la France médiévale’, RH, 226 (1061), pp. 1-22.

45 LM, iii, 10, p. 172.

46 LM, iii, 8, p. 168; LM, iii, 10, p. 172.

47 LM, iii, 10, p. 172.

48 LM, iii, 10, p. 172: ‘Ipse est, ut ait Propheta, minimus in mille et parvulus in gemem fortissimam…’.

49 LM, iv, 3, p. 210.