far richer and more nuanced understanding of the Carolingian aristocracy than we had before. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill’s summation of “cutting throats, but endowing churches” as the quintessence of Frankish aristocratic values no longer conveys the extent of our comprehension.9 Nevertheless, the study of aristocratic masculinity in terms of traits has also revealed just how much Carolingian masculinity stubbornly resists consistently definable patterns beyond only the most general of trends. There seem to be almost as many exceptions, that is, as there are rules.10 Variations abounded. Abbots could be monks, but they could also be nonmonastic laymen. Laymen could be warriors, but professional soldiers could also be called to the pastoral care of souls. Bishops could be powerful landholders and military leaders. Monks could serve at court. Priests could be married. The study of Carolingian masculinity in terms of ideal traits has brought us no closer to solving the perplexing questions of how aristocratic men negotiated these seemingly mixed identities, many of which appear (at least to us) to involve conflicting cultural ideals. In turn, this has forced scholars to label these compound identities as peculiarities or anomalies and with binary language—devotion and apathy, corruption and orthodoxy, rules followed and rules ignored.
Scholars commonly argue, for example, that because the Frankish aristocracy was a warrior culture, Christian ideals of pacific manhood must necessarily have been at odds with secular male values. Because sexuality was crucial for the production of heirs and the promulgation of family lines, the logic goes, there must have been friction with Christian ideals of celibacy and monogamous marriage. Because land and war spoils were chief sources of Carolingian social prestige, Christian warnings against the accumulation of wealth must have been difficult to follow. In related fashion, scholars have commented repeatedly on the “worldly” character of Carolingian-era bishops and priests. Ecclesiastics controlled vast territories of private lands, commanded private armies, hunted and fought with secular weapons, and yet still made successful and regular claims to spiritual authority. It has been common to read these men as somehow compromised, even “corrupt,” because of the “secular” traits that they regularly exhibited as “spiritual” men.11 In the aggregate, scholars have argued, all of these apparent conflicts of interest must have caused attempts to “Christianize” (which is most often the verb used to describe the interplay between these phenomena) the Carolingian aristocracy either to fall upon deaf ears or to reduce themselves to banality and diluted religiosity.12 Wallace-Hadrill’s condescension draws its humor precisely from the fact that the evidence clearly shows Carolingian aristocratic men negotiating all of these apparent contradictions and only very occasionally with consternation or anxiety.13 The regularity with which they did so presents us with a significant puzzle and begs the question of whether our conclusions of banality, dilution, corruption, or ignorance can truly explain what we see.
My book proposes that if we are to understand Carolingian masculinity on its own terms and to find answers for why what appears conflictual and contradictory to us may have been not only acceptable but also even logical to the Carolingians themselves, we need a different theoretical approach.14 Specifically, I propose to study gender not as a collection of ideal traits but as what Gail Bederman has called “a historical, ideological process.”15 To study gender as an ideological process is to recognize that gendering involves more than the association of particular anatomies with particular gender labels (male or female, in the case of the Carolingians) or traits (warfare, wealth, sexual conduct, etc.). Gendering involves instead the normative association of particular anatomies with particular configurations of power and authority—configurations that dictate what individual people can and cannot do, who they can and cannot be, and under which circumstances these allowances and restrictions occur. As with all cultural constructions, such normative associations are never inherently consistent. There is no essential connection between authority and anatomy. It is only gender ideology that makes such connections seem “natural.” And thus we can study not only the ways in which particular individuals become positioned by gender ideologies but also the ways in which individuals actively exploit the constructed nature of ideologies and adapt them to their own purposes.16
Within the Carolingian world, gender ideologies revolved around an axis that extended between poles of male and female. That is to say, Carolingian men imagined themselves to be categorically different from women, and they believed furthermore that social power and authority were “naturally” theirs to hold, to command, and to maintain. Carolingian gender ideologies also revolved, however, around a second axis that stretched between poles of worldliness and nonworldliness—secularity and nonsecularity. As Rachel Stone has demonstrated in convincing and startling fashion, Carolingian sources reveal remarkably little use of feminizing language between male groups.17 Being “less of a man” did not always mean and perhaps did not even usually mean being feminine. As the Carolingians established and reinforced their power through allegiance with Christian authority, the aristocracy increasingly adopted an ideology of Christian masculinity that defined the ascetic male as the paragon of manhood. Lynda Coon has shown, and my book shows further, how deeply and pervasively this Christian gender ideology reached into Carolingian aristocratic culture during the course of the ninth century.18 Distinctions between ascetic masculinity and worldly masculinity became at least as important to male identity as distinctions between male and female. Male and female, nonsecular and secular—all of the hierarchical relationships that the Carolingians presumed to exist between these categories were the completely constructed product of gender ideology. There was no logical connection between the Carolingian male and his claim to power, nor was there a logical connection between the ascetic male and his claim to divine authority. It was only the associative process of gender ideology that framed masculinity, asceticism, and authority as intimately interconnected and interreliant.
Caritas discourse played an integral role within these dynamics of Carolingian gender and power. The same Christian ideologies that made the ascetic male the epitome of manhood also associated the ascetic male with a “natural” capacity for caritas. Thus, the performance of caritas became one of the most important means by which Christian men who lived and worked within secular space—bishops and priests and, for a time during the Carolingian era, laymen—could perform their world denial and gain access to ascetic authority symbolically. Discourses of caritas were not only an instrument for indoctrinating and situating Carolingian men within Christian hierarchies of male authority but also a means by which these men could adapt and manipulate those ideologies for their own use, making claims to divine authority and wielding that authority in the service of their own diverse ends.
My opening chapter sets the stage for these arguments, narrating the long pre-Carolingian history of the ideological associations that gave caritas its discursive force. Its account begins with Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) and his deep preoccupation with early Christian challenges to the fundamental assumptions of Stoic and Manichean moral philosophy. Caritas, for Augustine, encapsulated the essence of these challenges: a degree of emotional interconnection between self and other that extended far beyond anything that the ancient world had conceived as a social ideal. The chapter ends with Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604) and the ideology of Christian male authority that he articulated in his highly influential Book of Pastoral Rule. As Christianity evolved into the majority religion of the European continent, communities began to associate caritas with their moral elite who sought to escape the bounds of common society: the holy hermits and early cenobitics of the late antique world. Gregory’s ideology allowed Christian communal leaders who lived and worked within the secular world—bishops and priests—to perform caritas as a means of linking themselves to the divine authority thought to be held by these ascetic men. Central to this history, I demonstrate, is a series of linguistic associations that emerged during the fifth and sixth centuries between caritas and more ancient moral ideals, specifically pietas, clementia, and misericordia. Chapter 1’s discussion of these terms, their interrelationship, and the new connotations that they acquired informs all subsequent chapters of the book.
Chapter 2 focuses on two early Carolingian writers, Paulinus of Aquileia (d. 802) and Alcuin of York, who
