Hercules and the Carolingians: corruption and classicism in the poetry of Theodulf of Orleans

 

A rather naturalistic depiction of Hercules from the Leiden Aratea (c.816 - 840), a Carolingian copy of an astronomical treatise by the Roman general (and father of Caligula) Germanicus Julius Caesar (15 BC - 19 AD), which is basically a Latin translation of the Phaenomena, a poem about the constellations by the 3rd century BC Greek poet Aratus. This manuscript was likely commissioned for and owned by the Emperor Louis the Pious himself. The Aratea is essentially a picture book, with the beautiful images of the constellations  captioned by the relevant verses of the poem written in Rustic Capitals (see the right hand folio in the image), the deluxe handwriting of the ancient Romans which the Carolingians liked to use for Classical texts. For the Bible and religious works they used Carolingian miniscule, which forms the basis of the handwriting we use today.

Hi everyone! Since its world poetry day, lets return to our old friend Theodulf of Orleans. Now, as you may remember from the post I did about him two months ago, as well as being a poet, courtier and bishop extraordinaire, he was a royal missus dominicus? But what the hell is a missus dominicus when it's at home? you might ask. 

The role of the missus dominicus in Carolingian government can be described as something of a hybrid of circuit judge and superintendent. Their job was basically to hear cases that the local courts (placita/ malla publica) were unable to deliver a fair verdict on, ensure that provincial governors (counts, dukes and margraves) and their teams subordinate officials were behaving themselves and generally ensure that everything was running smoothly and that the king's policies were actually being implemented in the localities. Typically, in each provincial circuit, the missi dominci would consist of one cleric (a bishop or an abbot) and a lay nobleman, both of whom would not be landowners/ provincial office holders in their own circuits so as to prevent conflicts of interest. They start appearing as ad hoc commissions under Charlemagne the late 780s, but their work had become more regularised by the end of the eighth century. They thus came to provide an important link between centre and locality - by 800, Charlemagne's Empire stretched from the Elbe to Catalonia and from the North Sea to Tuscany, so there was only so much work a peripatetic imperial court or even Charlemagne's sons being set up as regional sub-kings (Louis in Aquitaine and Pepin in Italy) could do.

A modern artist's impression of a pair Missi Dominici going on tour in the provinces

Theodulf of Orleans was indeed one of these missi dominici and as you might have gathered from the previous post, as a highly learned and energetic individual who commanded a lot of local power and respect (in the Loire valley area) and an enthusiastic supporter of Carolingian reform, he was the perfect fit for the job. Yet as we'll see in the poem, what he experienced in his activities, or at least claimed to have, as a royal missus he found sobering and darkened his outlook on the operation of the law and justice in the provinces and what is work as an agent of Carolingian reform could achieve. But, as we'll also see, there's a lot more to poem that kindles the historian's interest than that.

Theodulf and the antique vase

Too often I see that our judges relinquish the law to those 
Who bribe them with gold, fine food and delicious drink.
Often I am keen to prevent those who wish to accept bribes
But there are many wishing to take, few willing to say no.

Great crowds in gathering after gathering sought us out,
Every age and every sex was represented there:
Small ones, old and young ones, fathers, unmarried women and men,
Elders, youths, old women, husbands, wives, and children.
Why do I hold back? These people immediately offered us gifts,
Thinking that if they gave, they would receive what they wanted in return.
They tried hard to smash our resistance with this assault,
So that our will would collapse before the intense pressure.
One of them promises me gems and a crystal
If I can get for him the lands belonging to another.
Another showed me a huge number of golden coins,
Some of which bore Arabic lettering,
Some, these silver, bearing Latin inscriptions;
All to help him obtain estates, fields, and houses. 
In a hushed voice yet another whispered to my assistant, 
That he should carry the following message to me:
"I possess a vase decorated with ancient figures.
Its metal is pure and it is heavy to hold.
On its sides are engraved the crimes of Cacus:
The skulls of men stuck on stakes and rotting flesh,
His rocks chained down and evidence of rapine and theft,
The fields coloured with the blood of men and cattle. 
There Hercules in fury smashed the bones of Vulcan's son,
Who spits out his father's flame from his beastly jaw,
As Hercules knees him in the stomach and kicks his abdomen,
Shattering with his club the beast's smouldering face and throat.
There you can see the bulls emerging from the cave,
Afraid they might be dragged back again.
On the inner mouth of the vase, on a thin band,
Can be seen a series of small figures:
The Tirinthian infant [Hercules himself] slaying the two snakes,
And his ten labours shown in their proper sequence.
The outer surface of the vase, however, is well-worn from handling,
And a scene that once existed there is rubbed down. 
There Alceus, the river Calydon, and the centaur Nessus,
Fight over the beauty of Deianira.
The poisonous robe laced with the blood of Nessus is depicted,
Along with the frightening fate of the wretched Lichas.
As well Antaeus is seen losing life in the arms of the powerful Hercules,
For he is prevented from touching the ground as he needed to.
This vase I shall bring to you my lord - for he was calling me his lord -
If he heeds my requests.
There are a great many people - mothers, fathers,
Children and youths of both sexes -
Whom my father and mother left behind as free,
And from that fact they remain free.
If I could falsify their records, the lord would own the ancient vase,
I would own those people and you would soon receive gifts."
Another said, "I own a rug dyed in a variety of colours,
Which I believe a wild Arab sent.
On it a young calf can be seen following its mother and a heifer trailing a bull.
The colours of the calf and heifer are alike, while those of the cow and the bull are the same.
You can see the beauty of the piece, and the artistic use of colour.
And how a small circle is artistically joined to larger ones.
I am involved in a dispute with another man over some nice cows,
On behalf of which I am ready to give suitable gifts:
A calf for the calves, a bull for the bulls,
One cow for the cows, and one ox for the oxen.
Another man promises to give me some beautiful cups,
If I grant that he need not hand over what another demands ... 

Oh this foul plague [of bribery] which is found everywhere,
Oh this crime, this madness, this too savage habit.
Which lays claim to and evilly captures the whole world,
There is no one who does not give and no one who does not take bribes.

(Translation sourced from Paul Edward Dutton, Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader, University of Toronto Press, 2009, pp 100 - 102)

This highly intelligently crafted poem, rich and vivid in its imagery and full of emotion deserves much by way of literary analysis, but that is not what is going to be done here - while I very much prefer this kind of stuff to charters, I'm a historian not a literary scholar. 

Theodulf gives us much insight into the kind of corrupt practices that the missi were confronted with in the localities in the time of Charlemagne. The man who tries to bribe Theodulf with the gold and silver coins, and the one mentioned in the previous two lines who tries to bribe him with the precious stones, seem to be trying to obtain a title deed to estates in the rightful possession of others that they have obtained illegally. The man who offers him the beautiful Arab rug depicting the four cows is trying to get Theodulf to give him a favourable judgement in a dispute he has with another free landed proprietor over the ownership of some cattle. And the man who tries to bribe Theodulf with the antique vase is hoping that Theodulf will forge some documents so that the erstwhile unfree men and women his parents manumitted will become slaves again. 

Theodulf himself is completely horrified by these corrupt practices, which are very well attested in other Carolingian sources, and feels deep sympathy for those victimised by them. What Theodulf is describing is fairly quotidian, and are certainly far from being one of the worst examples of corruption encountered by a royal missus. A generation later, Wala (d.836), serving as a missus for Emperor Louis the Pious in Italy in the 820s, encountered an elaborate cover-up of the expropriation and murder of an aristocratic widow in which people at all levels of Italian society were implicated. Its precisely because of stuff like this that historians' assessments of the Carolingian reforms have been so mixed in the last hundred years - see Chris Wickham, "The Inheritance of Rome", pp 390 - 392 for a very even-handed view of the debate. On the one hand, we a high-minded and dynamic royal government that is clearly able to make its presence felt in the localities. On the other hand, we have pervasive corruption at all levels of society that requires the skeletal Carolingian state bureaucracy to bite off more than it can chew. future posts I'll hope to cover more about the Carolingian reforms - the evidence, when looked at as a whole, certainly permits a far more optimistic view of them, which is what historians have increasingly swung towards in the last 30 years, than does Theodulf's poem by itself.

Other significant details include the importance of written documents over memory and orality hinted at by the need to forge documents in order for the litigants to get favourable verdicts. Theodulf was of course a Missus Dominicus in Aquitaine and the Midi, where the Gallo-Roman legacy remained very strong and with it a very strong tradition of written law and archival and notarial culture among the law - written wills never disappeared here like they did in Gaul north of the Loire following the Frankish takeover at the end of the fifth century. Another thing that's interesting is the references to coinage, the gold coins being described as having Arabic lettering and the silver ones bearing Latin inscriptions. The golden coins are clearly gold mancuses imported from nearby Muslim al-Andalus, some of which made their way as far north as the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia (see below).

A Gold dinar with Arabic writing, bearing the name of King Offa of Mercia (757 - 796) 

Meanwhile, the Franks, since the failure of the sub-imperial gold coinage in the late seventh century and the currency reforms of Pepin the Short (r.741 - 768) only minted in silver (see below).

A silver denier of Charlemagne with a cross on the obverse and the Carolingian monogram on the inverse

Gold coinage in eighth and ninth century Trans-Pyrenean Europe was thus a real prestige item that could only be acquired by contacts with the Muslim world, as Carolingian Aquitaine and indeed Anglo-Saxon Mercia both clearly had - there, here's your nice little dose of fashionable global history for you.

What I found most interesting about it, however, were the Classical elements, specifically the antique vase. Traditionally, scholars following the lead of Julius Schlosser in 1892 presumed that Theodulf was providing a straightforward description of an ancient Roman vase which has since been lost. However,  Lawrence Nees in "Theodulf's mythical silver Hercules vase, Poetica Vanitas, and the Augustinian Critique of the Roman Heritage", Dumbarton Oaks Papers Volume 41 (1987), pp 443 - 451 argues against this. He points out that, for starters, Theodulf in the poem isn't actually describing an object that he can see with his own eyes. Rather he is describing an object that the slave master trying to sweet talk Theodulf's servant has described to him, and because Theodulf did not accept the bribe after the servant relayed the information on to him he never saw the object himself. He also demonstrates well that the descriptions of Hercules' encounters with Cacus and Nessus are not drawn from any extant Roman artwork but straight from Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses, and that what Theodulf was doing here fitted squarely into the poetic exercise of ecphrasis - describing an object or place (real or imagined) and extrapolating deeper meaning from it.

While I find Nees' arguments broadly convincing, I do think its overwhelmingly likely that Theodulf did have some interest in ancient Roman material culture. This is especially clear from the highly archaeological manner in which he describes it, such as mentioning how certain of its features are worn and erased by centuries of use, which strongly suggest that Theodulf had seen and handled a good few Roman antiquities in his time. And even if he had no real interest in them except as imaginary poetic devices, we know that other people in the Carolingian era did have an appreciation for them as physical objects which they used in their daily lives. See for example the "Cup of the Ptolemies" (see below), crafted from onyx in Alexandria sometime in the first century AD, which ended up in the possession of Charlemagne and his grandson Charles the Bald.

Concerning the broader meaning of this part of the poem, Nees argues that Theodulf's take on the labours of Hercules is far from celebratory. He points to how for all that the description of Cacus lair matches the one contained in Virgil's Aeneid, while the Roman poet portrays Hercules as a civiliser clearing the site in which the glorious city of Rome will one day flourish of a troublesome monster, Theodulf's Hercules comes across more like a thug driven by rage and a desire for violence. I think Nees goes a bit too far in claiming that Theodulf, like St Augustine before him, tries to cast a sympathetic light on Cacus - its clear from Theodulf's description that he thinks Cacus had been an absolute menace in the countryside of Latium, stealing cattle and terrorising innocent humans. And in describing Deianira, Theodulf emphasises how Hercules fights with Nessus out of lust for her beauty. And after the poisoned robe kills Hercules, there is of course no suggestion of his Apotheosis. Nees thus argues that Theodulf is using Hercules, a heroic figure yet one nonetheless, by his estimation anyway, driven by pride, lust and brutish impulses, as metaphor by which to attack pagan Roman culture as fundamentally inadequate, lacking as it did the higher truths of Christian revelation which would otherwise make people cast aside its flawed notions of heroism and virtue. He argues, fairly convincingly, that Theodulf was following in the tradition of St Augustine, who in his "City of God" (430) his extensive knowledge of pagan Roman literature and histories to turn the pagans own stories and symbols against them, which is what, as Nees sees it, Theodulf is doing with Hercules' exploits as recounted in Virgil and Ovid. 

Here it is interesting to note that Theodulf most likely wrote this poem in 799, in the build-up to Charlemagne's coronation as Roman Emperor in the West on Christmas Day 800. Charlemagne had just rescued Pope Leo III from the Roman mob, and talks must have already begun about him whether or not the pope should repay him by granting him the imperial title - contrary to what Einhard in The Life of Charlemagne claims, the coronation in Old St Peter's Basilica was almost certainly not a surprise to the emperor. Perhaps he might have seen his royal master taking up the mantle of the Caesars as another poisoned cloak, and in writing this poem was trying to weigh in against Charlemagne's other advisors, such as Alcuin, who were more positive about the idea of Roman imperial revival. This is incredibly speculative on my part, but perhaps Theodulf, in placing this in a longer excursus on judicial corruption, was trying to give a warning to Charlemagne. That being that he should not lose sight of the fact that, first and foremost, he is a Christian king with a duty to uphold justice and good morals among his subjects and to eradicate corruption and oppression of the poor by the powerful. Taking up the glamorous yet tainted mantle of Roman Emperor, synonymous with the celebration of power and might (represented in the poem by Hercules), makes him potentially risk losing sight of that, and from there all kinds of trouble begins.

Theodulf may be a figure very mentally remote from us in certain respects. If Lawrence Nees is right to see him as a thinker in the Augustinian tradition, which would later be a huge influence on mainstream Protestant Christianity in both its Lutheran and Calvinist forms, then Theodulf obviously believed that people could not be truly moral without being blessed with the divine revelations of Yahweh (in the Old Testament/ Jesus Christ (in the New Testament). As Martin Luther, probably one the greatest and most famous Augustinians (in both the narrow and the broad sense) who ever lived, and John Calvin would argue 700 years after Theodulf, Socrates and Cicero were not exemplary figures (contra Erasmus) and would be burning for all eternity in the fires of Hell. Why? Because, as Augustine had argued back in the early fifth century, they, unlike Moses or St Paul,  did not have God's revelation and grace and therefore could not be moral or be saved. Theodulf would have probably agreed, and I doubt that he, like Dante Alighieri (1265 - 1321), would have had Virgil guide him through Hell and Purgatory, let alone, like Peter Abelard (1079 - 1142), imagine the pagan poets and philosophers being taken up to Heaven, along with the Old Testament Prophets, by Christ in the Harrowing of Hell. Except among extreme Protestants in places like the US Bible Belt, this way of thinking would come across as profoundly disturbing to most Christians, let alone most people generally, today. It seems self-evident to most of us that people in all times, place and cultures are capable of being good and virtuous, and the idea that people can rightly to be condemned to eternal punishment and alienation from God simply for not knowing about him, indeed not being able to know about him, seems revolting to us. More than a generation after Theodulf, the heretic Gottschalk of Orbais (808 - 867) would anticipate the Protestant theologians of the sixteenth century in taking Augustinianism to its extreme. According to Gottschalk, not only are all non-Christians damned, but so are all but a small chosen group of Christians (God's elect), who have been destined to go to Heaven before they were even born on account of God being all-powerful and all-knowing. A brilliant book on this whole subject area is John Marenbon's "Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz" (2015) in which the author explores how medieval and early modern Christian thinkers grappled with the three thorny questions of whether pagans could provide valuable intellectual and moral wisdom to Christians, whether they could be virtuous and whether they could be saved without conversion, both in relation to Graeco-Roman antiquity and more contemporary encounters with Scandinavians, Mongols, Native Americans and Chinese. The story he tells is an incredibly erudite and complex one, and certainly not one of linear progression from medieval bigotry to early modern open-mindedness.

Yet at the same time, there are many ways in which Theodulf isn't actually that mentally removed from us secular liberal humanists in the twenty-first century at all. This is a man who, as is evident from the poem, believes in the rule of law and an honest and equitable judicial system, and despises official corruption and the oppression of the poor and vulnerable by the rich and powerful. Indeed he points to the invaluable contribution medieval Christianity made to shaping our western liberal values and how, while we like to see them (with some justification) as having their ultimate roots in Classical Greece and Rome, the pagan ancient world perhaps wasn't as amenable to them as we think and its contribution to them has been overstated. This is very much the argument pursued in Larry Siedentop's "Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism" (2016), one of the books I read in the summer before I applied to university, and more recently in Tom Holland's "Dominion" (2019) - Tom Holland is the creme de la creme of popular historians and I'm a huge fan of his "The Rest is History" podcast which he co-hosts with Dominic Sandbrook. See here the debate between Tom Holland and A.C Grayling on the subject of Christianity's contribution to Western values - its great good fun to watch, and in my opinion it was Tom Holland who carried home the day. 

Indeed, late antique and early medieval history whom we expect to be completely removed from us mentally, but we actually find quite a lot of common ground with. John Chrysostom (347 - 407), one of the Church Fathers, denounced wife beaters, corrupt politicians and people who didn't show compassion for the poor. Caesarius of Arles (470 - 542) rejected the double standard, denouncing male promiscuity, drunkenness and loose morals. Jonas of Orleans (760 - 843) and Hincmar of Rheims (806 - 882) are all about denouncing corruption in church and state and aristocrats oppressing their social inferiors. Agobard of Lyons (779 - 840) even went so far as to attack the institution of slavery. This is a huge contrast to a lot of modern Christian moralists, who focus only on attacking women and the poor and neglecting the abuses committed by rich and powerful men, above all, the 45th President of the United States. There's no doubt that any early medieval Christian would have harboured beliefs we'd now consider highly distasteful, though frankly nothing one wouldn't also find in earlier or later periods. But that shouldn't conceal some aspects of their thought that are quite genuinely admirable and arguably formative to the moral universe in which we live in today.

I will return in future posts to the importance of the Carolingian age in shaping our ideas about power, accountability and good government. But as Theodulf is also demonstrative of, is its importance to shaping how we approach the past. For all that Theodulf might have been downbeat about the pagan ancient world, he was deeply fascinated by it and had studied its literature so extensively. And he clearly saw the Greek myths as invaluable cultural artefacts that imparted necessary moral lessons, even if the lessons he extrapolated from them weren't entirely the same as those that the Classical Roman poets and their readers would have done, and as many modern writers are now doing, especially in the recent trend towards feminist retellings of the Greek myths and explorations of their "subversive power." Yet he approached it nonetheless as a culture separated in time and in many other ways removed from his own. As Anthony Kaldellis points out in relation to how Theodulf's contemporaries in the East Roman world approached the same issues in "Byzantium Unbound" (2019) Chapter 3, this sense of critical distance from the classical culture is in fact precisely what is needed for classical studies to emerge. If you treat it as a living culture that you yourself continue to inhabit, its not classical studies, its just literary studies. Theodulf combines fascination with and serious stud of the literature and beliefs of the ancient world with an all too keen awareness that this is not his own culture, but rather one of a bygone age, that needs to be approached with care. Indeed, and here I'm deliberately being provocative and controversial, it might even be fair to say that he was one of the first ever Western European classicists, as opposed to participants in a living classical culture (as Desiderius of Cahors more than a a century and half before arguably still was, being the last participant in a continuous tradition of letter writing as an art going back to Cicero and Seneca). All in all, Theodulf is a reminder that for all that the Carolingians, and early medieval more generally, feel mentally remote from us, they played a critical role in shaping Western Civilisation and the world we live in today.

International women's day special: an early medieval mother's advice to her son (back to solid Carolingian content again)

Happy International Women's Day

After my wild excursion into the history of post-Roman Britain, that ended up becoming a monster post that went into some at once very exciting yet uncomfortably speculative territory, I can now say we're back in more familiar territory for me. It is of course, now, International Women's day. It is thus on this day that I want to celebrate and express my gratitude towards all the amazing women in my life, past and present. 

First and foremost among them, however, would be my mother. Besides providing all the parental love one could possibly desire for the past 22 years, it suffices to say that, without her advice, encouragement and support, I would not be the historian I am now and I wouldn't be on such a successful path as I am currently on. As someone who studied Litterae Humaniores at Oxford (1986 - 1990) and has taught Latin and Greek for over thirty years, I owe to her my love of the ancient world, almost as enduring as my (obviously greater) love of the Middle Ages, and if it weren't for that a lot of my interests would be very different. I probably wouldn't be at all fixated on the Carolingians and classical reception in the Middle Ages if I hadn't been so into ancient Rome as a kid, which was very much thanks to my mother introducing me to classical mythology and history and taking me round so many ancient sites from as early as I can remember. Through all the conversations we have had, mostly on our weekend runs together, she has provided me with immeasurable intellectual stimulation, and lots of constructive criticism of my ideas from her learned and intellectually-engaged outsider's perspective. It is also thanks to her that the very idea of this blog came into being, though it would take another year for me to finally get that one going. And without her providing me with lots of informal teaching, I wouldn't be nearly as confident with my Latin.

She's not the only one who has made me the historian I am now, though. I would love to give a shout out to my Granny (on my mum's side), who studied history at Oxford (1956 - 1959) and is a published historian and translator in her own right, though sadly she was never able to have an academic career for two very specific reasons which I shall not go into. I've had many immensely enjoyable historical discussions with her, and she's been very supportive of me going down the medievalist route, which was what she would have taken herself had she been able to do a PhD, and she provides me with an exemplar of how you can remain committed to historical scholarship even if your academic career never takes off - which is the overall likelihood for me. I would also like to thank one of my closest friends (if you're reading this, you'll know who you are) who works on the period just before mine, late antiquity (though I guess we both share the fifth century AD). She's helped me embrace who I am, including all my nerdy eccentricities that do much to fuel my work, more than most people. And our historical conversations are absolutely legendary, being both stimulating and downright hilarious. The one we had back in July about when did the (Western) Roman Empire really fall, is one I always look back on with a smile and a glow of nostalgia. Her influence has also probably been a contributing factor in me making the jump from late medievalist to early medievalist, especially in embracing the fact that less really is more in terms of sources.

Meeting Dhuoda

 It is in honour of my mother and all the amazing advice she has given me, and continues to do so to this day, that I chose to write about Dhuoda and her Liber Manualis. There are so many colourful, courageous and creative women who made history, albeit in circumstances very much not of their choosing, across the period I loosely specialise in (400 - 1200 AD) which I could have chosen from - from Galla Placidia and Clotilda to Heloise, Hildegard of Bingen and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Yet I chose Dhuoda, a Frankish noblewoman from roughly the very middle of my period. I did so not because she's one of the more famous and consequential figures of this period, but because she's a rare example of an early medieval woman whose own authentic voice survives to us this day, in the form of an advice manual she wrote for her son. Its a very rich and wonderful text, as we'll soon see.

Firstly, a bit about Dhuoda's life. As is very typical with early medieval people generally, even the most well known ones (historians still argue over whether Charlemagne was born in 742 or 748), we do not know when Dhuoda was born. Most historians think she was born c.803, but that's only a rough guess. We don't actually know her family background, though its generally presumed that they were high nobility. What little we can say about childhood and upbringing is also a matter of educated guesswork. Modern scholars can't make their minds up about which part of the Frankish Empire she grew up in, and whether she spoke a Romance language or some Old High German dialect as her mother tongue - there's tentative evidence for both propositions. She definitely received some kind of literate education as a girl, but whether it was in a convent, from a private tutor or indeed from her own mother, we simply do not know. 

We do know, from Dhuoda's own testimony no less, that on 29 June 824, in the imperial palace chapel at Aachen, she married Bernard of Septimania (795 - 844). Bernard was a prominent courtier and the son of the great William of Gellone (755 - 812), duke of Toulouse, who would later be canonised as a saint by Pope Alexander II in 1066 (the year of Hastings) and become the subject of one of the earliest chivalric romances, the chanson de Guillaume (1140). In 826, her husband was appointed Count of Barcelona and military governor of the Spanish March by Emperor Louis the Pious, and Dhuoda accompanied Bernard on his early campaigns against the Muslims on the frontier. On 29 November 826, again according to Dhuoda's own writings, she gave birth to her son William - the recipient of the Liber Manualis. By 829, Bernard was becoming such a rising star on the Spanish March that Emperor Louis decided to make him the royal chamberlain at Aachen. This led to Bernard sending his wife to stay at Uzes, near Nimes, having assigned the administration of his counties of Barcelona, Toulouse and Carcasonne to his brother Guacelm, who became the new military governor of the Spanish March. Why he decided to do this, rather than taking his wife to court with him, we can only speculate about. Some use this to support the theory that Dhuoda was a native Romance speaker from what is now Southern France - it is thought that Bernard did this so that Dhuoda could use her local connections to help consolidate his political influence in Septimania (the region between the river Rhone and the Pyrenees that includes the southern French cities of Nimes and Narbonne). Others suggest something else was Bernard's mind on the basis of what happened next. 

In 830, Bernard of Septimania was accused of adultery with none other than Empress Judith, the second wife of Emperor Louis. We can only guess how Dhuoda herself felt about these rumours, but we know very well how the imperial court reacted. Thegan the Astronomer, who wrote a biography (Gesta) of Emperor Louis, believed these rumours to be malicious lies. Its quite revealing that when Bernard offered to prove his innocence in the eyes of God through trial by combat, none of his accusers came forward. The consequences of this were nonetheless explosive. Bernard of Septimania was forced to leave the imperial court and had his county of Autun, in Burgundy, confiscated. Emperor Louis' three sons (Pepin, Lothar and Louis) from his first marriage, to Ermengarde, who resented the influence of their stepmother at court anyway, were incited to rebel against their father, and the final decade of Louis' reign was filled with on and off civil wars between him and his sons. 

Almost immediately after Emperor Louis died in June 840, Dhuoda was visited again by Bernard in Uzes and become pregnant with his second child. Bernard took part in the fresh bout of civil war that followed, which I've covered in a previous post, in which he sided with Lothar and Pepin II of Aquitaine (Lothar's nephew and son of the previous Pepin), who wanted to keep the Empire united, against Lothar's brother Louis and half-brother Charles (son of Empress Judith), who wanted it to be divided up. Bernard was present at the extremely bloody and traumatic battle of Fontenoy in 841, on the losing side. As a show of good faith to his new royal master, Bernard sent William as a hostage to Charles. Dhuoda was thus caught up in the high political dramas of the ninth century Carolingian realm, It was in this context that, later on in 841, that Dhuoda sat down to write the Liber Manualis.

The Stuttgart Psalter (c.820), Wurttembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart, folio 33v. While this does not depict Dhuoda, Bernard and William, the three figures here from left to right might as well stand in for them, as no contemporary image (or indeed from any subsequent period) of any of them exists. 

The Liber Manualis

Dhuoda begins the preface of the Liber Manualis with an a brief account of her marriage to Bernard of Septimania - this itself is quite remarkable as we otherwise have barely any autobiographical writings by women (however brief) between the late Roman period (Perpetua and Egeria) and the twelfth century (Heloise). She shows a remarkable capacity for remembering precise dates - it is, after all, from her that we know when she married Bernard of Septimania and when William and his unnamed younger brother were born. 

Dhuoda then introduces the purpose of her decision to write the Liber:

But since I have been parted from you for a long time and am living, on the orders of my lord, in this city where I now rejoice in [Bernard's] struggles, I have taken the trouble, because of my love for both of you, to have this little book (its size in keeping with my intelligence) copied and sent to you. Although I am beset with many difficulties, nevertheless let this one thing happen according to the will of God, if he so wishes, that I might look upon your face once. Indeed I would wish for this, if the power [to do so] was given to me by God, but because salvation is far away from me as a sinner, I [can only] wish for it, and in this wishing my determination grows weaker.

I have heard that your father, Bernard, has commended you into the hands of the lord, King Charles [the Bald]. I urge you to do your dignified duty in this business to the best of your will. All the same, as the Scriptures say, "Seek the kingdom of God in all things and other things will then be given" (Matthew 6:33), those things which are necessary for you to enjoy your soul and body.

I don't have access to the whole text, nor can I give you a convenient summary here. Instead I'll take you through some of the highlights. In Book Ten, she provides a poem titled "Concerning your times"

You have finished now four times four years.

If my second child were to reach the same age,

I would copy out another little book for his person.

And if you were to reach the age of 36,

And if I were to see you again,

I would with more words urge upon you even stronger things.

But because the time of my end hastens towards me,

And sickness everywhere wears my body out,

I have rushed to put this book together for the use of you and your brother.

Knowing that I shall not live another twenty years.

I urge you to savour this book as though it were a pleasant drink

And honey-laced food meant for your lips.

For the date when I married your father

And the date you were born occurred on the

[same Kalends] of [different] months, as I told you above.

Know that, from the first verse of this little book,

Until its last syllable,

Everything has been designed for the purpose of your salvation.

That you may more easily follow what is written there,

Read the acrostic verses.

The little verses written above and below, and everything else,

I myself have composed for the benefit of your soul and body,

And I do not cease even now urging you to read them and keep them close to your heart.

A subsequent poem in the Liber, in the original Latin, has the first letters of each of the seventeenth stanzas spell out Versi ad Wilhelmum (verses for William): 

That you might be strong and thrive, O best of sons, 

Do not be reluctant to read the words that I have composed and sent to you and may you effortlessly discover things that please you.

The word of God is alive; look for it diligently and learn its sacred teaching,
For then your mind will be stuffed with
great joy forever.

May the immense and powerful King, be radiant and kind,
Care to cultivate your mind in all things,

Young man, and to guard and defend you
Every minute of every day.

Be humble in mind and chaste in body,
Be ready to give proper service,
Show yourself constantly kind to all people,
Both the great and the not so great.

Above all, fear and love the Lord God,
With your full heart and soul and expend all your strength,

Next fear and love your father in all things.

Do not regret continually serving,
The glorious offspring [Charles the Bald] of [that Carolingian] race,

With its line of ancestors, for he shines,

With the great.

Esteem magnates and respect those of high rank at court;
Be humble with the low;
Associate yourself with the well-intentioned; be sure not to
Submit to the proud and imprudent.

Always honour the true ministers
Of the sacred rites, the worthy bishops,
Always commit yourself simply and with outstretched hands,

To the custodians of the altars.

Frequently give assistance to widows and orphans,
Give food and drink to pilgrims;
Offer hospitality; stretch out your hands
With apparel to the naked.

Be a strong and fair judge in legal disputes;
Never take a bribe
Never oppress anyone, for the great Giver will repay you.

Be generous with gifts, but always vigilant and modest,
Make a sincere effort to get along with everyone,
Rejoice in humble things, for the image of this will
Stay with you.

There is One who weighs up everything,
A bestower who grants to each according to merit,
Assigning for [good] words and works the greatest of gifts:
The constellations of the heavenly stars.

Thus, my noble son, you should take care
And seek constantly to obtain
The great advantages [of heaven], and spurn
The fires of pitch-black wood.

Although, at sixteen, you are in the very flower
Of your youth, your delicate limbs
Age [along with you] step by step
As you proceed through life.

I long to see your face,
But the prospect seems distant to me.
Even if the power should be given to me,

Yet I still do not deserve this.

Would that you might live for Him who shaped you,

May you enter into, with gentle spirit, a fitting association
With his servants; may you with joy rise up again when your
Life is done.

My mind surely turns to thoughts of death,
But still I want you to read carefully the pages of this book,
As I have written them [for you], and keep them constantly
Foremost in your mind.

These verses, with the help of God, are now done

As you finish your sixteen years
At the start of December, on the Feast of Saint Andrew [30 November],
And the Advent of the Word.

Christine de Pizan (1364 - 1431) advises her son, Jean, before he goes to live in the Earl of Salisbury's household. British Library, Harley 4431 folio. 261v. Dhuoda was far from unique among medieval mothers in giving her son wise advice and caring for his well-being even when he was going to be absent from her for an indefinite period of time - some would say that motherly instincts never change.

Later on in the text, Dhuoda returns to talking about herself and her personal anxieties and shortcomings. She laments the frailty of her body, her slothfulness in failing to pray the seven canonical hours every day (this would become a major feature of lay piety in the later middle ages with the popularity of Books of Hours), sinning in thought and speech and taking on too many debts from Christian and Jewish creditors. Above all, she is gravely uncertain over whether she merits salvation.  She requests that William, maintain a spiritual link with her even if they can never have a physical one again:

While you see that I am [still] alive in this world, alertly attempt in your heart to exert yourself so that, not only through vigils and prayers, but also by giving charity to the poor, I might deserve, when finally seized from my body and from the chains of my sinning, to be received kindly in every way by our kind Judge.

At the end of the book, Dhuoda composes her own epitaph, in which she reflects on the transience and insignificance of the physical body, and requests that whoever looks upon her tomb pray for her soul.

Source for the text: Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader, edited and translated by Paul Edward Dutton, Toronto University Press (2009), pp 336 - 343

Thoughts and analysis

The Liber Manualis is a beautiful, intelligently written, moving and deeply humane text, that in itself is a fitting monument to its author and her intellect and personality. A lot of early twentieth scholars, no doubt motivated by sexism to at least some degree, were remarkably rude about it, especially its Latinity. But as Peter Dronke has argued in a highly sympathetic defence of Dhuoda, while her Latin style was orthodox and incorrect, both by Classical or Carolingian standards, and is often difficult to translate, that is because she was trying to express thoughts that were very much her own and which she could only express her own unique way. Unlike a lot of correspondance in this period, there is nothing that could have been ripped straight from, say, Cicero or Ambrose of Milan, and the only literary trope she really uses is that of personal unworthiness, which is to be found in just about every Carolingian writer - Einhard is full of it in his Life of Charlemagne and personal letters. Indeed, like Einhard and a number of other Carolingian authors, Dhuoda really stands out as someone who saw herself as a unique somebody and wanted to express it, which very much goes against what we've been taught to expect of early medieval people, and early medieval women in particular. 

For all that many historians may caution us that we cannot access the real thoughts and feelings of medieval people through literary texts, Dhuoda’s here, which were so complex and authentic she struggled to put them into learned Latin,  feel as real as those in any text of any age - her love and concern for her son, her sadness at being parted from him and the uncertainty of whether she’ll ever see him again and her anxiety for the fate of her soul. 

For all that Dhuoda laments her physical and spiritual weakness, things very much associated with femininity, she does manage exert a distinct kind of authority that the patriarchal society of Carolingian Francia can nonetheless afford to her, that of a mother. As Janet Nelson reminds us, Carolingian patriarchy depended on mothers as much as fathers and they were owed respect and obligations. And this is another respect in which Dhuoda nonetheless manages to stand out as a unique individual - while mothers may have advised their sons all the time in this period, none put it down into writing, nor for that matter did fathers. As Nelson points out, Dhuoda is unique among Carolingian moralists in standing on a parental platform - all the others were either celibate monks and clerics (Alcuin, Jonas of Orleans, Hincmar etc) or lay noblemen who, so far as we can tell, had no biological children of their own (Einhard and Nithard). 

The content of what Dhuoda writes reflects a wealth of not only personal wisdom but also knowledge of ancient and contemporary texts, including the Bible, the late Roman grammarian Donatus, the works of the Church Fathers like Augustine and Gregory the Great, the Rule of St Benedict, Charlemagne's General Admonition of 789 and Rabanus Maurus' treatise on Computation. This is testament to the depth and richness of learning that at least certain lay women were capable of achieving in this period.

Given her familiarity with all these texts, it is not surprising that what Dhuoda writes resonates so much with the aims and rhetoric of the Carolingian reform programme, which tried to create a moral lay elite and which concerned itself as much with inward spiritucal disposition as with outward public display of good morals - very apparent from Dhuoda's work. Indeed, her Liber Manualis is demonstrative that this reform effort didn't fall on deaf ears amongst the Carolingian aristocracy, even if the results across the board were very mixed to put it bluntly. It also shows how women could play a role in reinforcing it and not just in a family context - more than three copies of the Liber survive, more than do for a lot of later medieval moralistic texts like the Livre de Chevalerie of the fourteenth century knight Geoffroi de Charny (one of the texts I read for my undergraduate thesis). In a sense, Dhuoda wrote not just as a mother advising her son but as a public intellectual, and it does seem she had a public impact. Whether or not women in general had a Carolingian Renaissance (an inevitable play on feminist historian Joan Kelly’s famous article “did women have a Renaissance?”), and I think they did, if not quite the same as that of men, Dhuoda truly was a Carolingian Renaissance woman. 

As is clear throughout the text, Dhuoda wrote this when she was suffering from some kind of long term illness. If she lived much longer past 841, and we really don’t know if she did, her life, which had already been filled with much drama and misfortune, wasn’t going to get anymore uplifting for her. In 844, Bernard of Septimania was executed by Charles the Bald for switching sides too many times in the various civil wars and most recently having sided with Pepin II of Aquitaine in revolt against Charles the Bald. In 850, William, who managed to get awarded some of his fathers counties after his death, was judicially murdered by Charles’ partisans as part of the ongoing political turmoil in the South - ninth century Carolingian politics is depressing like that!

Dhuoda’s story is demonstrative of why the Carolingian period is so fascinating relevant to us today. It may not quite deliver what we, living in a post-Game of Thrones world, think we want from medieval history - the Carolingians want to limit violence, sex, and political corruption and scheming in favour of high mindedness  and building a better world, yet fail because various reasons and that hits too close to home and leaves a bitter taste in our mouths. Yet it does show us how intellectuals, male and female,  clerical and lay, reflected on themselves as unique individuals and on the human condition, and sought creative solutions to their own personal challenges and those facing society more generally. They remind us how deeply human and indivisible people in the medieval past really were, something that us moderns have often been minded to forget, and how they struggled and did their best to cope with a chaotic world, which is very much what we are confronted with now.