Handbook for William: A Carolingian Woman's Counsel for Her Son, by Dhuoda (review)

Abstract

Reviews 213 Handbookfor William: A Carolingian Woman's Counselfor Her Son, by Dhuoda translated with an introduction by Carol Neel, Washington, Catholic University of America Press, 1999; paper; pp. xxviii, 163; R.R.P. US$14.95. Among the vast body of literature thrown up by the Carolingian Renaissance, few texts have the charm of this book of advice written by a mother to her son in the confused political situation which followed the death of Louis the Pious in 840. Separated from her husband and children, Dhuoda poured a mother's love into her book: 'My son, m yfirstborns o n — you will have other teachers to present you with works of fuller and richer usefulness, but not anyone like me, your mother, whose heart burns on your behalf'. Texts written by w o m e n are u n c o m m o n in this period, as are those by members of the laity; having been written by a laywoman, Dhuoda's Handbook is of outstanding interest in various ways. Among these is the way in which the text lets us see the literary culture which an educated w o m a n of the ninth century had at her disposal. She knew the Bible well, and was also able to draw on patristic and Carolingian material. Dhuoda's intellectual world was more explicitly Christian than that of Einhard, a nearly contemporary member of the laity, but impressive none the less. Her son William inhabited the same world of texts: 'Read the Synonyms', she peremptorily instructs him at one point. W e learn of relationships among the aristocracy. Whereas William is encouraged to show reverence to his father, only loyalty seems to be due to his lord, Charles the Bald, and family connections are overwhelmingly thought of as being with the family of one's father rather than that of one's mother. Like many people of the period w h o wrote about society, Dhuoda seems to have found the values expressed in the Old Testament more relevant than those in the New, and, like many writers of just that time in Francia, she found the figure of Job particularly compelling. Intriguingly, some of her material on him is based on Gregory the Great's Moralia in Job, a work far longer and more complex than the book of the Bible which it sought to elucidate, although oddly enough she suggests that William read that pope's Pastoral Care for information on Job. W e are confronted with a good deal of information on the Carolingian and post-Carolingian aristocracy; it comes as a surprise to leam from the introduction that the founder of the great monastery of Cluny may have been a grandson of Dhuoda. 214 Reviews But for m a n y readers, the book will chiefly be of interest in that i t allows unmediated access to the words of a w o m a n . The voice which emerges is engaging, both modest and confident, and Carol Neel draws special attention to this tension between her self-deprecation and the boldness of her educative purpose. She brings out, without adjudicating between, different approaches to the text opened up by feminist scholarship: for example, can it be taken as the voice of a distinctive female piety, or does it reveal a flattening of gender distinctions? Neel has done a fine job. Her book is a paperback reprint of a work published in hard covers some years ago, with the addition of new material at the end, where an exceptionally helpful Afterword engages with some of the surprisingly large volume of relevant recent work and suggests ways in which it facilitates the reading of the text. Dhuoda's work is rendered into clear English, to which an introduction, pitched roughly at undergraduate level, eases the path. The notes make available much material accumulated by Pierre Riche for his publication of a critical edition, and are generally helpful, although I a m not sure whether to believe the suggestion that the letters in the term 'tD+Mt', which abbreviate the Latin 'dis manibus', stand for 'into the hands of God'; perhaps Dhuoda mistakenly thought...