Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World (review)

The study of women in the Middle Ages always poses daunting challenges: few texts are identifiably written by women, so certifiably feminine voices are elusive; and although men—mostly clerics—had plenty to say about women, it often devolved into tendentious diatribes on virtue and vice. The agency of women, whatever it may have been beyond individual cases, appears to be buried beneath impenetrable layers of moralizing and male insecurity. Or so it would seem. Valerie Garver is justifiably impatient with this view of the situation. Instead, she has perceptively decided that because nearly all of her sources were authored by the elite, they exhibit assumptions about wealth, status, power, and virtue that were shared by aristocratic men and women alike, whether they were lay folk or the professionally religious. In short, she maintains that the putative limitations of the sources are positive evidence for something. Her willingness to embrace Carolingian assumptions, of course, does not banish all of the methodological problems. Garver confronts these with the standard shucking and sifting of the sources dear to medievalists, and supplements this with a gendered analysis. When these approaches come to dead ends, the author charges ahead with what she terms a “disciplined imagination” (12) to infer what might have been possible or probable. Thus equipped, Garver has produced a densely argued monograph that probes an impressive range of written and material sources to sketch out the roles elite women played in shaping the aristocratic culture of Carolingian Europe between roughly 700 and the early tenth century.

The study is divided into five chapters, on beauty, family, prudence, wealth, and textile work. The investigation of each category requires that Garver struggle with varying degrees of tension between ideals and reality, or more accurately with what we wish to know and what Carolingian writers cared to write about. A case in point is carnal beauty, or in Garver’s parlance, “good looks” (42). The problem is that conceptions of physical attractiveness are nearly impossible to retrieve from Carolingian accounts because beauty, even when a writer might have been referring to its corporeal dimension, was interpreted as a reflection of inner virtue. With adornments and dress, Garver has more textual and material evidence at her disposal; but these, too, were usually explicated as symbols of ethereal goodness. Although she does not pursue the issue, one wonders what a discussion of conceptions of ugliness might have revealed.

At the opposite end of the spectrum of evidence is “prudence,” by which Garver means instruction and moral exemplarity, as well as family relations. For these, Garver can draw upon a deep secondary literature and a diversity of textual witnesses, in particular the memorial books of nunneries, the rich vein of female hagiography connected to Fulda, Carolingian reform legislation, and Dhuoda’s ninth-century manual of advice to her son. These chapters deftly portray the overlapping experiences of lay and monastic women: if lay women contributed property and status to a marriage, they also were responsible for the moral instruction of children; and if nuns, in theory, renounced their families upon entering a monastery, in practice, they reproduced family bonds when they transacted gifts of property with kin, educated the daughters of friends and relatives, and nurtured their natal family’s legacy with prayers.

The chapter “Wealth: Hospitality and Domestic Management,” which is largely composed in the subjunctive mood, is the most speculative part of the study. Garver uses her “disciplined imagination” (173) to imagine women managing estate enterprises, reviewing “records of financial transactions” (187), and supervising production. Her speculations may be right, but the asserted links in the causal chain are not always compelling. She begins substantively with the Capitulare de villis, which ordained that the queen should help in the supervision of estate managers. Since the queen was a model for other aristocratic women, ergo the capitulary must signal aristocratic women in general. Consequently, any estate documents can now be read as evidence for what women...