The Divorce of Lothar II: Christian Marriage and Political Power in the Carolingian World (review)

Christian marriage is now considered monogamous and indissoluble, but it was not always so. In this book Karl Heidecker argues convincingly that it was only with the highly publicized divorce of King Lothar II (855–69) that a clear standard for Christian marriage became established in the West. Heidecker is certainly not the first to see this divorce case as a turning point; both medieval and modern writers on the development of marriage have always referred to it, and the outpouring of letters, conciliar rulings, annals, and legal briefs at the time was large enough to fill an entire volume of the modern Monumenta Germaniae Historica. But Heidecker is the first to look at the case in all its complexity, as involving not just church law—which everyone at the time heatedly invoked, even though the existing law was often vague and inconsistent—but also secular law, the dicey question of who could pass judgment in cases like this, and especially political maneuvering, with all sides loudly adhering to and often indeed creating divergent principles to support their own positions.

Lothar II, great-grandson of Charlemagne, was king of the Middle Kingdom between France and Germany, later named Lotharingia in his memory. His problems began in 857 when he decided to divorce his wife, Theutberga, to marry Waldrada, his former mistress. Both the pope and Hincmar, the powerful archbishop of Reims, ruled such a divorce impossible. Immediately Theutberga found herself accused of incest with her brother, and incest in an unnatural position at that, meaning Lothar had to divorce her. She managed briefly to return to her position as queen by proving her innocence by an ordeal, conveniently undertaken by a substitute, but the reconciliation was short-lived. Soon she appeared at a council confessing all, a confession many considered coerced and that she later repudiated. But Lothar's bishops accepted Waldrada as queen, with the new stipulation that Lothar had been betrothed to her before his marriage to Theutberga. The pope and Lothar's royal uncles briefly forced Lothar to take Theutberga back still once again. The furious charges and countercharges continued until Lothar's death in 869.

This book began as Heidecker's doctoral dissertation and was originally published in Dutch in 1997; he has revised and expanded it for the English edition. It is a delight to read, clearly argued and gracefully translated, and fully cognizant that we cannot create tidy categories of law and proper behavior and try to apply them to the people of the past. The bibliography includes the most recent relevant works of English- and German-language scholarship. As well as addressing the development of an ideal of marriage, Heidecker makes a number of thoughtful points about noble family structure and the role of both bishops and secular magnates in Carolingian governance.

A map, family trees, and lists of Carolingian kings make it easy to keep track of the large number of players. The word player here is deliberate, for Heidecker has constructed the story of the divorce as a drama in six acts—part tragedy and part farce. In doing so, he underscores how much everyone involved was performing a role as much as arguing a case; after all, how an argument was received depended on more than the words themselves. The drama metaphor also allows him to break the events down into units, where he summarizes and then analyzes what happened and who accused whom of what, thus making sense of what might otherwise appear a maddeningly tangled series of events. This book is a highpoint in the recent scholarly attention to the Carolingian era.