Gender and Ideology in the Early Middle Ages
Julia M. H. Smith
On 29 June 824, a woman named Dhuoda went to Aachen be married in the imperial palace. She herself tells us about wedding, yet it is characteristic of Carolingian age that we know far more groom, Bernard Septimania, than bride. His career and connections can pieced together from wide range sources, but she only known manual moral spiritual advice which composed 841–3 for her absent fifteen-year-old son William. Bernard’s life reconstructed as coherent narrative, Dhuoda’s emerges few tattered snapshots, without even family album contain them. Famous lay among tiny handful women writers by name early Middle Ages, isolation must stressed. Not merely personal sense loneliness, powerfully conveyed, nor difficulty placing within any secure literary context, also historiographical mark out, all too little medieval aristocracy belonged. We neither sketch with precision lifestyle peer group, assess whether typical – or exceptional. The remain largely occluded our sight, chronicled disjunct fragments evidence do not permit extended systematic analysis. When find them, aristocratic often appear enveloped bonds kinship independent individuals political contexts. But there remains unsettling image young Dhuoda, briefly translated out familial domestic setting into shadowy corridors power: scene prompts questions place wives marriage polity.
Studies in Church History