NOTES

 

 

SPECULUM MATRIS : DUODA'S MANUAL 

 

 

 

* Cet article a été initialement publié dans la revue Florilegium n° 10 (1988-1991), p. 49-64.

 

I wish to thank St Olaf College for a grant which enabled me to complete the research for this essay and Carol Holly, James May, and Ulrike Wiethaus for their helpful comments.

 

(1) The full title of the work is Liber manualis Dhuodane quem ad filium suum transmisit Wilhelmum. All references to this text are cited from the edition of Pierre Riché, Dhuoda : Manuel pour mon Fils, Paris, 1975. This edition includes an introduction, critical text, notes, and a complete facing-page translation into French by Bernard de Vregille et Claude Mondésert, S.J. I have consulted the earlier edition of Edouard Bondurand, L’Éducation Carolingienne : Le Manuel de Dhuoda, Paris,1887, which also gives a French translation and the partial edition of Jacques Mabillon included in P.L. 106, p. 109–118. James Marchand has translated selection of Dhuoda’s manual into English in his essay : "The Frankish Mother : Dhuoda" in Medieval Woman Writers, (dir.) Katharina M. Wilson, Athens, Ga., 1984) p. 1–29, as has Marcelle Thiebaux in her anthology, The Writings of Medieval Women, New York, 1987, p. 65-79. The translations which appear in this article are my own.

 

(2) The battle of Fontenay was fought in 841 between Louis’s warring sons, Charles and Louis against Pippin and Lothar. Charles proved victorious, and Bernard who had sat out the battle refusing to aid him, would try to make amends by sending his first son William as hostage. See Nithard, Historiarum libri quattuor 3.2 in Histoire des Fils de Louis le Pieux, (éd.) Ph. Lauer, Paris, 1926. In 844 Bernard would die at the hands of King Charles. History recounts that Bernard, aiming to increase the Spanish marches, came into direct conflict with the king, who held this land as his own. Captured at Toulouse, Bernard died at a public execution. Legend gives Bernard a more interesting end. Having made peace with Charles, he kneeled to do homage in the monastery of Saint Saturnius near Toulouse. Perhaps doubting his own paternity, Charles offered Bernard his right hand while stabbing him with his left, no doubt remembering the charge of adultery waged against Bernard and his mother Judith in 831. Judith and Bernard had publically defended themselves against this charge of adultery years earlier. According to Nithard’s Historiarum 1.4, Judith declared her innocence to the church and state at a broyal assembly at Aachen on 2 Feruary 831. Bernard came out of hiding in May of that year to challenge his accusers to a trial by combat, but none came forward to accept the challenge. The innocence of both was publically accepted, but as this legend concerning Bernard’s death testifies, privately doubted. In her manual Dhuoda makes no allusions to sexual misconduct on Bernard’s part, but she is acutely aware of the political danger he faces, and she entreats William to pray often for his father’s safety (8.7).

 

(3) William, Dhuoda’s first-born, is named after his famous paternal grandfather, William Count of Toulouse, whom history knows as St William of the Desert.

 

(4) For the charge of adultery and abuse of power waged against Bernard, see Nithard’s Historiarum 1.3 (at n. 2) ; Paschasius Radbertus, De vita Walae 7.2 and 8.4 in P. L.  120, p. 1615–1618 ; and the Annales Bertiniani, "anno 831", (éd.) G. Waitz, MHG Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum, Hanover, 1883.

 

(5) Pierre Riché, Dhuoda : Manuel pour mon Fils, éd. cit., p. 21-23.

 

(6)  Suzanne Wemple, Women ln Frankish Society, Philadelphia,1981, p. 98.

 

(7) One’s dialect can indicate much during this formative time for vernacular languages. Contemporaneous with Dhuoda’s manual are the Oaths of Strasbourg, a treaty sworn to by the sons of Louis the Pious, Louis the German, and Charles the Bald, against their brother, the Emperor Lothar on 14 February 842. Each brother took the oaths in language accessible to the soldiers of the other, with Louis swearing in French and Charles in German. The oaths were recorded by Nithard in his Historiarum 3.5. The German oaths, which were imperfectly understood by the scribe, appear in Rhenish or Middle Franconian dialect ; the French version stands as the earliest document in the Romana lingua, or the French language which has become distinct from Latin. This linguistic evidence indicates that if Dhuoda had chosen to write in her vernacular tongue, we would have a sense of her native dialect and birthplace.

 

(8) I interpret the phrase ob absentiam praesentiae vestrae as referring to William and his brother on the basis of the preceding paragraph, in which Dhuoda discusses the fate of the younger child. For an alternate reading of this passage as referring to Dhuoda’s husband and William, see Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, Cambridge, 1984, p. 48-49. Recent critics have made much of Dhuoda’s "unhappy" marriage. The tone of sympathy is evident in Marcelle Thiebaux’s comment on p. 66-67 of her analysis : "Bernard’s treatment of his wife would certainly have intensified her wish to placate him. Married to Bernard [...] in June 824, Dhuoda was whisked away to the little southern town where she was compelled to live out her days. Bernard visited her infrequently enough to father two sons [...] Bernard took both sons from her - William when he was fourteen, and the infant Bernard before he was baptized. Parted from her children, and an outsider to the events at court, Dhuoda must have sought comfort in writing this treatise [...] On p. 2 of his introduction to Dhuoda’s manual, James Marchand writes even more dramatically : "Just these bare facts already enlist our sympathy for Dhuoda, but when we place them in their historical framework they permit us a glimpse of the tragedy which her life must have been. The story of her marriage and life with Bernhard of Septimania...reads like a dimestore novel." Despite these critics’ sensitive readings of the manual, they voice complaints Dhuoda never makes by reading into the autobiographical details that she reveals. Dhuoda’s letter displays absolute loyalty to her husband. In the manual she refers to Bernard respectfully as "my lord" (senior meus, Praefatio 23). She advises William to follow loyally (3.1, 3.2) and to pray (8.7, 11.1.113-19) for Bernard. At the end of the manual she begs her son, after her death, to pay the debts she has incurred for Bernard (10.4.43-53).

 

(9) In the epigram Dhuoda refers to a consors amica fidaque (Epigrama 30-31), but it is impossible to assign a fixed meaning to the oblique reference.

 

(10) Scholars have criticized Dhuoda’s Latin as barbaric, but in Women Writers (at n. 8, p. 36) Dronke comes to her defense : "Her Latin is indeed unorthodox and at times incorrect, whether by classical norms or by the standards of Charlemagne’s litterati ; it is also intrinsically difficult, because of Dhuoda complex and subtle awareness. Her modes of expression, when they are ungainly, uncertain or unclear, are so chiefly because she was urgently striving to say something in her own way, something that was truly hers. And she does so successfully, I would argue, in that despite - and even because of - the limitations of her Latin, the language she had learnt but never felt fully at ease in, we can still find in her writing a person whom, once we have perceived and understood her, we could never blur with any other, or ever forget." 

 

(11) Ibidem, at n. 8, p. 29-30.

 

(12) For a survey of this genre, see Lester K. Born, "The Specula Principis of the Carolingean Renaissance", Revue Belge de Philologie d’Histoire n°12, (1933), p.  583-612.

 

(13) Enchiridion ad Laurentium de fide, spe, et caritate 1.4, (éd.) E. Evans in Aurelii Augustini opera, CCSL vol. 46, Turnholti, 1981.

 

(14) Dhuoda later ignores the tripartite structure of norma, forma, and manualis she establishes in the Incipit textus.

 

(15)  Herbert Grabes, The mutable Glass : Mirror Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, (trad.) G. Collier, Cambridge, 1982, p. 2-4, 48.

 

(16) For example, Sirach 3:3, 3:6, 3:7, 3:5, and Leviticus 20:9, all of which Dhuoda cites in 3:1.

 

(17) In his Etymologiarum 19.31.18, (éd.) W.M. Lindsa, Oxford, 1911, Isidore of Seville defines a mirror in the following way : Specula sunt in quibus feminae vultus suos intuuntur. Dictum autem speculum vel quod ex splendore reddatur, vel quod ibi feminae intuentes considerent speciem sui vultis et, quidquid ornamenti deesse viderint, adiciant. ["Mirrors are those things in which women gaze at their own faces. About a mirror it is said that it either returns an image brightly or that the women gazing in them study their own reflections, see what ornaments are lacking, and add them."] Although both Isidore and Dhuoda use women in their examples of viewers in the mirror, Dhuoda’s image otherwise bears no likeness to Isidore’s.

 

(18) According to Enid McLeod, The Order of the Rose : the Life and Ideas of Christine de Pizan, Totowa, N.J., 1976, p. 173, Christine probably wrote Les enseignements moraux que je Christine donne à Jean de Castel mon fils in 1377 when her son Jean left home to be trained in the household of the Earl of Salisbury. She probably also composed L’Epı̂tre d’Othéa, dated 1399 or 1400, with Jean in mind.

 

(19) Alcuin’s De virtutibus et vitiis liber, addressed to Count Wido of the Breton March and probably dating from 800 begins with an epistola nuncupatoria immediately followed by twenty-six chapters of lessons (P.L.101, p. 613-638) composed between 812 and 815 for Louis the Pious, adopts a similar structure, with an epistola nuncupatoria followed by thirty-one chapters of lessons (P.L. 102, p. 934-70). Jonas of Orleans’s De institutione regia, dedicated in 834 to King Pippin, reveals a slightly more complex beginning.  It opens with an epistola eiusdem ad Pippinum regem and a poem entitled, versus breviter digesti, which are followed by seventeen chaptersof lessons (P.L. 106, p. 279-306). Sedulius Scottus’s Liber de rectoribus Christianus, a work which postdates Dhuoda’s, has the most complex structure among the Carolingian manuals. Composed between 855 and 859 for Lothar I’s son, King Lothar II, the book begins with a poem, a prayer, and an incipit capitula ; each of the twenty chapters of lesson that follows appears in Boethian prosimetrum form (P.L. 103, p. 291–331). Hincmar of Rheims, who served as archbishop of Rheims 845-882 and as the chief political advisorto Charles the Bald, returned the genre to a simple form. His De regis persona et regio ministerio starts with a praefatio in prose followed by thirty-three chapters of lessons, also in prose (P.L. 125, p. 833–56). None of these works approaches the complex structure of Dhuoda’s manual, with its serial opening, eleven books subdivided into chapters, and serial ending.

 

(20) P. Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, op. cit., (at n. 8) p. 39.

 

(21) See P.L. 120, p. 1261-1262 and 1387-1388.

 

(22) Dhuoda first instructs in verse, Lector qui cupis formulam nosse, / Capita perquire abta versorum. / Exin valebis concito gradu / Sensu cognosci quae sim conscripta ("The reader who desires to know the formula should search the capital letters in order. Therein you will be able to discern by progessive steps what is written",  Epigrama 80-83). She later adds in prose : A littera D. delta incipe legendo, M. moyda hactenus conclusa sunt. Finiunt versi ("Begin by reading from the letter" "D", delta, up to the "M",  moyda, where it ends. The poem is finished", Epigrama 88-89).

 

(23)  Marcelle Thiebaux, The Writings of Medieval Women, op. cit., (at. n. 1) p. 68. 

 

(24) For example, see St Jerome’s letter 107.4, Ad Laetam de institutione filiae in Select Letters of Saint Jerome, (trad.)  F. A. Wright, the Loeb Classical Library, London, and New York, 1933. 

 

(25)  Mary Martin McLaughlin, “Survivors and Surrogates:  Children and Parents from the Ninth to the Thirteenth Centuries” in The History of Childhood, (dir.) Lloyd de Mause, New York, 1974, p. 115.

 

(26) Dhuoda’s sister-in-law, the nun Gerberga, met a particulary violent end at the hands of Louis the Pious’s son, Lothar. Because Bernard supported King Louis against his rebel son, Lothar takes revenge on Bernard’s family. According to Nithard’s Historiarum 1.5 (at n. 2), Lothar has Gerberga executed as a witch by having her thrust in a barrel and drowned in the Saone : Gerbergam more malefecorum in Ararim mergi praecepit.

 

(27) In the Confessionum 5.8.14, (éd.) Lucas Verheijen, O.S.A., CCSL Vols. 13-14, Turnholti, 1981, Augustine recounts leaving Carthage to teach in Rome, presumably to work with less disruptive students, but actually pro salute animae meae. Augustine describes having to lie to and dupe his mother so he could leave. Like Aeneas fleeing Dido, he fled Carthage at night leaving a lamenting woman on shore. Throughout the Confessionum Augustine warmly refers to Monica’s concern for his spiritual welfare (2.3, 3.11, 3.12, 6.1, 6.13), and he writes of her character with extraordinary affection when he reflects on her death (9.8–9.13).

 

(28) According to the entry for the year 850 in the Annales Bertiniani, Dhuoda’s son William was captured and put to death in Barcelona, which he had earlier seized with a force of soldiers ; he was 24 years old at his death. According to the annal for 864 Bernard, Dhuoda’s younger son, was caught attempting the ambush and murder of King Charles the Bald ;  he was put to death at 23 years of age.