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  • Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World
  • Constance B. Bouchard
Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World. By Valerie L. Garver. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2009. Pp. xxi, 310. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-801-44771-6.)

Carolingian elite women have received much scholarly attention in the last generation, ever since the publication of Suzanne Fonay Wemple’s Women in Frankish Society (Philadelphia, 1981). Here Valerie L. Garver expands and builds on earlier work, with the purpose of demonstrating that aristocratic women in the eighth and ninth centuries, far from being relegated merely to the domestic sphere (although they certainly played a key role there), helped shape and disseminate much of Carolingian culture.

Garver begins by quoting Jonas of Orléans, who said that men desire women for their “family, prudence, wealth, and beauty” (p. 1). These four female characteristics, derived from Isidore of Seville and ultimately from Roman ideals of womanhood, become the outline of the present book, as the first four chapters address each in turn. A fifth chapter addresses textile work, which, although not directly referenced by Jonas or Isidore, was still taken for granted as appropriate for women and, Garver argues, brings together the four aspects of women’s supposed characteristics.

This book, far more sophisticated (unsurprisingly) than Wemple’s early path-breaking study, takes much of its strength from a wide-ranging selection of sources, including poetry, hagiography, and visual images as well as the more commonly used law codes, capitularies, charters, and chronicles. Throughout, Garver seeks to combine an analysis of how clerical intellectuals thought women ought ideally to behave, as seen in “mirrors” for laypeople and prescriptive ordinances, with a discussion of what aristocratic women’s lives might actually have been like.

Thirty years ago it could have been assumed from the scholarship that medieval women barely existed. More recent scholars routinely characterized these women as marginalized, subservient, and unlearned, forced into convents by a misogynistic church and given little role to play even in their own families. In the last decade, however, scholars have recognized that elite women, far from being invisible, were often well educated and exercised power and authority. Garver’s book should settle the question definitively for Carolingian-era women, as it was settled for twelfth-century women in Aristocratic Women in Medieval France, ed. Theodore Evergates (Philadelphia, 1999).

Some of the material covered here is already well known. Dhuoda comes in for much attention for her “Handbook for William,” as she has for many previous scholars. But overall, Garver manages to provide new insights into a period about which, it was once thought, we already knew everything important. For example, her discussion of female beauty in chapter 1 includes an analysis of Carolingian aesthetics and brings in the iconoclast controversy. [End Page 348] Here she notes that religiosity need not preclude physical beauty; virtuous women were said to have their virtue reflected in their appearance. Although memorial books have long been used as a source for the ways in which families remembered their kin, Garver is the first to analyze the implications of nunneries as the place where a third of the surviving Carolingian-era memorial books were composed.

The chapter on textiles is the most original. Elite women did more than spin and weave cloth for daily use, although they certainly supervised such production; they also created opulent fabrics, both for high secular and liturgical occasions. Elaborate embroidered cloth, some of which still survives, indicates the great technical skill of the women who made it.

In all, this is a fine, clearly written book. The only major quibble is that the change in women’s perceived status from the eighth century to the ninth, evoked at the beginning (p. 9), never really is conveyed.

Constance B. Bouchard
University of Akron
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