of Septimania to her son, William (ninth century)
Dhuoda of Septimania (d. c. 843/844) penned these solemn words to her absent son, William (d. 849/850), as her world was collapsing all around her. The year was 842 or 843, the most violent apogee of an era of anarchy and civil war that Dhuoda’s contemporaries would come to call their tempus perturbationum—their “time of troubles.” Dhuoda’s husband, once a powerful lord and trusted advisor to the emperor, now lived in exile. He had been forced to surrender William, a boy in his mid-teens, to live as a hostage ward in an enemy court. In his flight, furthermore, he had taken with him his only remaining heir, a baby born to Dhuoda no more than a year or two of age. Thus, Dhuoda wrote her words alone and bereft, left behind, sick in body and roiled in spirit, seeking what comfort she could in a final act of motherly love and protection. Her solace was the hope that her son might one day receive her little book of advice, learn from its wisdom, and live to become a vir perfectus—a “perfect man.”
What it meant to be such a man within the aristocratic culture of Carolingian Europe during the late eighth, ninth, and early tenth centuries CE—the history of its definitions, its symbolic valuations, and its metaphoric associations—is the subject of this book. The typical life of an aristocratic Carolingian male such as William would have involved an array of behaviors and duties associated with his gender and rank: an education in arms and letters; training in horsemanship, soldiery, and hunting; betrothal and marriage; the virile production of heirs; the masterful command of a prominent household.1 Dhuoda’s advice to her young son, however, contains almost no mention of these common badges of Carolingian manhood. Perfection in Dhuoda’s world meant more than the sum of such parts—not to be without flaw so much as to be fully grown or mature—“thoroughly made,” as the word etymologically suggests. To be perfect, in other words, meant to be complete in body and mind. It meant living up to the full potential envisioned by a deity who had shaped humanity in his own image, a deity whose essence was pure wisdom and whose highest command was infinite love. Only a man who was completely made, Dhuoda believed, could survive the troubling times in which her son now lived. Only a “made man” could be strong enough to help end the destructive violence, heal the broken community, and restore the world to prosperity. This sort of man, taught Dhuoda, lived unblemished by fault. He strove for justice. He spoke the truth. He did no harm to those around him, nor did he dissemble in his promises. He used his wealth to build, never seeking to acquire more. He spoke no ill of others. He took no bribes at the expense of the innocent. He endured those who wronged him with patience and not revenge. His conscience was clear. His heart was pure. His passions did not rule him. He knew the extent of his power, yet each day he chose to wield it for the benefit of the common good, helping any and all in need through assiduous compassion and largesse.2 Skill in the arts of war, bounties of wealth and children, heroic and prestigious service to kin and to king—these were the rewards of a man’s perfection, its manifestations, not its causes. The perfect man was a spiritual being. His capacity to love marked his manly vigor. His care for others, not his sword-arm, was the truest testament to his mettle, for it proved that his power was righteous, that his authority came from God himself, and that he deserved in no uncertain terms to rule the world.
As the book will show, the Carolingians constructed their conceptions of manly perfection not upon a revered collection of traits and behaviors but rather upon a profound cultural valuation of love, emotional sensitivity, and care for others. The discussion and representation of this love, sensitivity, and care, I will argue, functioned within their world as a gendered discourse of power, which Carolingian writers actively mobilized to link specific types of men with specific types of moral and political authority. In so doing, these writers made claims, both explicit and implicit, about the hierarchies of power that they believed ought to exist within their world.
Their discourse revolved around a central Latin term, caritas. The word meant “love” in its simplest denotation. As a discursive construct, however, it always referred connotatively to far more. Carolingian writers employed a rich vocabulary of affective language to describe the array of feelings and conduct that they associated with caritas: amor, affectus, benevolentia, benignitas, clementia, compassio, dilectio, misericordia, patientia, pietas. They drew from a vast body of inherited philosophical tradition, both Judeo-Christian and pagan, to contemplate the significance of caritas and the values that its enactment could represent. Alcuin of York (d. 804), arguably the most prominent scholar of the early Carolingian era and the most trusted advisor of the Carolingians’ eponymous emperor, Charlemagne (d. 814), defined caritas as a complete and all-inclusive love, flowing from the whole heart, mind, and soul, as the New Testament Gospels dictated. It entailed not only the unquestioning observation of God’s commandments but also a parallel duty of affective care for one’s fellow human being.3 Alcuin’s equation of caritas with the twofold “love of God and neighbor” was not at all his invention—it was, rather, a common shorthand, used generally and imprecisely throughout the entirety of the Middle Ages to refer to volumes of patristic debate about the affective relationships that were thought to exist between the divine and the human and among humans themselves. The nature of these relationships was often hotly contested within the learned circles of the late antique era and the Early Middle Ages, but the term caritas and the phrase “love of God and neighbor” allowed writers to refer generally to the ideal of other-oriented emotion that it entailed while masking the complex theological and social discourses that produced it. It was its imprecision as a term, not its precision, that gave caritas the power to be invoked in the service of numerous and diverse ends.
The ends that interest me most are Carolingian arguments about aristocratic male identity and authority. Carolingian culture used caritas discourse to place enormous pressure on its aristocratic men to perform their manliness in the service of their society. When problems arose during the period under investigation in this book—and arise they did—the Carolingians looked for solutions by trying to ensure that specific groups of aristocratic males were acting correctly as men. This is by no means to say that Carolingian culture placed less pressure on women to perform certain embodiments of womanliness, only that it was the perfection of the male body, far more than the female, that was seen to hold the most significant link to social well-being.4 This is very different from the European cultures that came after the Carolingian moment, in which the female body increasingly held as much or even more of this connection to social harmony than the male.5
The Carolingians also invoked caritas as a means of defining and delineating the ideal forms that aristocratic masculinity could appropriately take—forms that have proven notoriously difficult for us to comprehend, especially in comparison to the later Middle Ages. We know that Carolingian aristocratic men self-identified under a range of labels and social roles—monk, priest, bishop, abbot, count, king, warrior, and so on—but also, and in combination, under more global designations such as “Frank” and “Christian.” Historians have worked diligently to parse these identities by mapping the ideal traits that defined them, the methods and media through which these ideal traits were taught, and the contexts within which they were reinforced or undermined. The most recent studies have focused on the lay side. Thomas F. X. Noble, for example, has argued that Frankish aristocratic lay identity revolved around a common ideal of “secular sanctity.” Elite laymen performed their station and their service to God by adhering to “a code of values and conduct” that they guarded closely for themselves: a Carolingian aristocrat’s “sword, wife, and extended family were the chief badges of his rank.”6 Rachel Stone, expounding further upon the nature of this code, has claimed that Carolingian lay masculinity involved a complex array of prescriptive practical ethical traits in the realms of warfare, power, and sexual conduct.7 Other scholars of the Carolingian world have identified additional core traits—equity, honor, loyalty—as crucial elements of the ideal aristocratic male.8
Describing masculine identity in terms of traits such as these has provided invaluable insight with regard to the historical continuities between Carolingian aristocratic masculinity and the masculine identities of both Late Antiquity and the
