Julia M. H. Smith

Did Women Have a Transformation of the Roman World

Despite intense and interdisciplinary interest in the transition from antiquity to the middle ages, work on women and gender generally remains marginal to the dominant paradigms for understanding political and social change in the period from c. 300 to c. 800 ce. This article critiques these interpretations from a gendered perspective and also reviews recent work on women and gender in late antiquity, Byzantium and the early medieval Europe. By outlining similarities and contrasts between womens lives in early medieval western and Byzantine cultures, it emphasises the diversity of womens experience. Suggestions about how to envisage a fully gendered history of this period conclude with a call for radically new approaches to the study of the transformation of the Roman world.

Gender and Ideology in the Early Middle Ages

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.

EINHARD: THE SINNER AND THE SAINTS

This essay offers a major reassessment of the career of Einhard, biographer of Charlemagne, and an analysis of elite lay piety in the Carolingian era. Einhards life ( c . 770–840) is discussed in terms of childhood, youth, marriage and old age, with emphasis on the significance of his wife, Imma. His personal relationship with the relics which he had translated from Rome to Seligenstadt and his self-description as a ‘sinner’ offer insights into his religiosity. Einhard and Imma are also situated in a broader discussion of the religious activities of other elite married couples of their day. Monastic foundations, relic collecting, Christian household morality and close engagement with the Psalter characterise a distinctive conjugal Christianity in the Carolingian period.

Fines Imperii: the Marches

This chapter offers an inverse picture of the Carolingian polity. The brief survey of all the frontier regions of the Carolingian empire reveals some persistent themes in Carolingian frontier policy which transcend the individuality of each peripheral region. In the first place, negotiation combined with a readiness to use force to prosecute Carolingian interests always characterised Frankish strategy. Secondly, the Carolingians participated in the common early medieval diplomatic practices of receiving, entertaining and dismissing envoys; royal gift-exchange; demanding hostages to keep at court; extracting tribute and oaths of loyalty; welcoming and sheltering political exiles from other kingdoms; and concluding truces and treaties. Thirdly, the Carolingian imperial rhetoric of a Christian, Latin empire broke down at the frontier. The nineteenth-century efforts by the French and the Germans each to appropriate Charlemagne for themselves contributed to their respective efforts to build the historiography of the nation-state.

Christians under Muslim rule

By the year 732 CE, just one hundred years after the death of the prophet Muhammad, Arab military forces, in the name of Islam, consolidated their hegemony over a large stretch of territory outside of Arabia. This expanse of territory, embracing major portions of the Roman and Persian empires of Late Antiquity, included many indigenous Christian communities, in several denominations. They all came under Muslim rule, but demographically they made up the religious majority in many places until well into the eleventh century. There were strong Christian communities in Spain (al-Andalus) and in the territories of the former eastern patriarchates of the Roman Empire, as well as in Persian Mesopotamia. During the first four centuries of the hegira (i.e., the Islamic era) most of these Christian subjects of the Muslim caliph gradually adopted the Arabic language, while retaining to a greater or lesser extent, depending on local circumstances, their traditional, patristic, and liturgical languages for church purposes. Christians in the Qur’ān and in early Islam Arabic-speaking Christians were in the audience to whom the Qur’ān first addressed the word of God, as it claimed, in “a clear Arabic tongue” (Qur’ān 16.103 and 26.105). Indeed the Qur’ān presumes the priority of the Torah and the Gospel in the consciousness of its hearers, and insists that in reference to the earlier divine revelations it is itself “a corroborating scripture in the Arabic language to warn wrong doers and to announce good news to those who do well” (Qur’ān 46.12). In the Qur’ān, God advises the Muslims, “If you are in doubt about what we have sent down to you, ask those who were reading scripture before you” (Qur’ān 10.94).

The ‘archbishopric’ of Dol and the ecclesiastical politics of ninth-century Brittany

In the history of the invasions which marked the end of the Roman empire in the west, the Armorican peninsula of northwestern Gaul holds a distinctive place. It witnessed the only substantial settlements by people whose homeland lay within the Roman empire, and who had been subject to Roman civil government for several centuries. These settlers crossed the English Channel probably between the late fourth and early seventh centuries. Establishing new communities in the sparsely populated areas of western Armorica, they brought with them their own language, social patterns and Christian organisation, and a strong sense of affinity with the Celts of Wales and Cornwall from whom they derived.’ Whilst the Britons were establishing themselves as Bretons, the Franks were asserting their hold over the remainder of northern Gaul. A few of them settled in the eastern approaches to the peninsula, in the Roman civitates of Rennes and Nantes. Culturally and politically, only this part of Armorica was attached to Merovingian Gaul, having as its kings the descendants of Clovis, and as its bishops members of the Gallo-Roman aristocracy.

Latin and Greek Christians

At the end of Late Antiquity, when this chapter begins, the Alps were a Great Divide between Mediterranean cultures and transalpine ones; Rome and Constantinople had more in common with one another than either did with Germanic groups in the north. The emperors in Constantinople still wielded enough authority in Rome to arrest popes who resisted their policies, and the papal apokrisiarios at the imperial court was an important figure in Rome. But by 1100 the popes themselves often came from north of the Alps, few in the West knew Greek, and imperial authority, when acknowledged in Rome, came from Germany. The Latin world, developing with, assimilated to, and combined with the Germanic world of northwestern Europe, had lost sympathy for imperial and Byzantine ways of ruling while developing its own hierarchies. The role and prestige of the popes in the western church was beyond the ken of Byzantines, while the role of the emperor in the eastern church puzzled and appalled Latin Christians. Theological and ritual differences added to a general sense of estrangement, reflected most famously in chronicles of the crusades. To describe relations between Greek and Latin Christians between the seventh century and the eleventh is, then, to write the history of the schism between the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches. Yet overabundant hindsight lurks in such a statement. A narrative which begins at the end – with schism – tends to overemphasize disagreements in earlier eras and to overlook charity and cooperation. It tends to rely on sources that “explain” the origins of the schism and to overlook sources that assume or explicitly say that there was no schism at all.

A Hagiographer at work: Hucbald and the library at Saint-Amand

Two men mark the intellectual achievement of the carolingian monastery of Saint-Amand : Milo (d. 872) and his pupil Hucbald (c. 840-930). Hucbald was famous in his own day for his skill as a composer of hymns, a hagiographer and a teacher. Close attention to Hucbalds work allows us to deepen our knowledge of the scholarly resources of this distinguished library and simultaneously, by exploring Hucbalds own cultural milieu, to gain a deeper understanding of Hucbalds intellectual achievement

Law and its applications

The term “law” has a deceptive consistency. It may be said to result from “a particular political ideology or even cosmology.” Yet even within a given tradition, geographical setting, or institutional context, its applications and meanings are far from consistent. To study law in history is to study change. The subject of this chapter, the law of the early medieval Church, or canon law, turns out to be a disparate and lumpy mix, resistant to categorization in terms of later-medievel legal assumptions and modern ones alike. A canon in Greek is literally a yardstick, hence, a rule. The term stuck, in west as well as East. By 600, the canons issued by the great councils of the fourth and fifth centuries were widely regarded as authoritative. Thereafter, in the various provinces and kingdoms of the early medieval West, no single authority issued or taught or interpreted the rules of canon law. Bishops assembled in councils made law from time to time, legal collections continued to be made and circulated on private and local initiatives, and law was applied by bishops acting as judges. The situation was not so different in the East, and scholars nowadays are alive to the prevalence there, despite the concentration of evidence emanating from Constantinople, of provincial activity and diversity. In both East and West, canon law and secular law were associated in practice, and secular and ecclesiastical concerns overlapped in imperial legislation. For the Church, as for secular rulers in the West, the Theodosian Code (438) remained an occasional reference point for much of the period covered in this chapter, while in the East, the Justinianic Code (534) remained the basis of canon and secular law throughout.

The northern frontier: Christianity face to face with paganism

Christianity, deviance, and paganism Officially the Roman Empire had been Christianized by the end of the fourth century. Although the barbarians who crossed its frontiers in the fourth and fifth centuries were pagan, the majority of them soon accepted Christianity. By the sixth century the religion had even spread beyond the borders of what had been the empire. Christians were to be found in the Celtic west, notably Ireland, and also in the heartlands of Germany in the land of the Thuringians. On the other hand Christianity was by no means a monolithic religion, even in its old heartlands. The leaders of the church might have wanted it to be, but the bishops of Rome, Constantinople, and Alexandria, to name but three, frequently differed in their own definitions of their religion. Moreover different regions and groups adopted different doctrines and different patterns of organization, not least because of preexisting social patterns. This is most obvious in a region as distinctive as Ireland, but every part of Christendom had its own practices: its own liturgy as well as its own attachment to different saints and cults. The depth of Christianization was also a matter of concern. Many pre-Christian practices intended to ensure good harvests or safe childbirth, to predict the weather, or to ward off evil had not been abandoned, and indeed in some cases would not be abandoned until well into the modern period. Leading bishops, whose own religious commitment was radically more impressive than that of the majority of the population, understood their religion, and the demands it made, very differently from most of the laity.