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  • Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World
  • David Ganz
Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World. By Valerie L. Garver. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. xx + 310 pp., ill. Hb $49.95.

This well-produced volume offers a fine general account of the activities of Carolingian aristocratic women, with an excellent final chapter on the role of women in the production of Carolingian textiles and other activities relating to household management. Valerie Garver seeks to discuss ‘all female members of the Carolingian elite’ (p. 5) in terms of their beauty, family, prudence, and wealth, the four reasons, according to Jonas of Orléans, why men desire women. The text promises an examination of nascent forms of courtesy in Carolingian sources (p. 17), but this discussion is never explicit. The chapter on beauty spends too long on debates about icons, but it does attempt to explore the ‘Carolingian gaze’. The chapter on the family is chiefly about memory and female entry into religious life. Garver is ambitious — ‘Our understanding of early medieval social relations should better account for women’s roles’ (p. 16) — but too often accumulated detail makes it difficult to discover a structured argument in her chapters. Nor is it clear how the sources on which she draws were identified. Surely Saint Opportuna (Bibliotheca hagiographica latina, 6339–40) and the translation and miracles of Saint Regina deserved a place, and is not Altmann of Hautvilliers’s life of Saint Helena relevant to the culture of Carolingian aristocratic women? The Translation of Saint Bertha (BHL, 1267) and that of Pusinna to Herford (BHL, 6995) show a Carolingian response to female relics that is worth a mention. Garver has looked at cemetery remains, but not at the tomb inscriptions for high-status women included in Cécile Treffort’s Mémoires carolingiennes: l’épitaphe entre genre littéraire, célébration mémorielle et manifeste politique (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2007). Norbert Fickermann’s edition of a marriage poem for Odo of Paris and his queen Theotrada (Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur, 83 (1962), 36–62 (pp. 49–62)), and the epitaphs of Countess Adda of Poitiers and of Louis the German’s daughters (Monumenta Germaniae historica, Poetae, iv, 217–18) would have added to the dossier assembled here. Bertha, the wife of count Girard of Vienne, embroidered an altar cloth (MGH, Poetae, iv, 335 – 36). She was the dedicatee of the Translation of the relics of Saints Eusebius and Pontianus in 863 and received an epitaph, but she is absent. Regino of Prüm’s De ecclesiasticis disciplinis ii.CLXXI discusses women who, though they have taken the veil, live in luxury curiose et verbose, and women who enter nunneries not out of religion or chastity but for the liberty and power to live lasciviously. These are presumably the sorts of aristocratic women whom Garver is studying. Regino ii.CLXXIV is a condemnation of women who attend placita and public meetings and do more to confuse than to resolve the affairs of the kingdom and the interests of the state. According to Regino even barbarian peoples disapprove of women discussing men’s business, and here they are usurping senatorial authority. Neither passage is cited: they provide a general Carolingian context for the wealth of examples Garver has assembled.

David Ganz
University of Notre Dame
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