Maternity and Spiritual Progression in Dhuoda’s Liber Manualis (840s CE)

Abstract

Maternity and Spiritual Progression in Dhuoda’s Liber Manualis (840s CE) Dana M. Polanichka In November 841 CE, as civil war raged across the Carolingian world, a noblewoman in Uzès, twenty-five miles west of Avignon, faced her own battle: Dhuoda wrestled with the absence of her sons, William (fourteen years old) and Bernard (a mere eight months), as well as her husband, Bernard of Septimania. She chose to mitigate the distance and make herself present to her sons by composing, what she describes in her incipit as, “liber . . . Manualis [a handbook].”1 She directed her Liber manualis to her older son, asking that he eventually share it with his brother.2 In the incipit, she presents her book as a substitute for her presence: “Quod si absens sum corpore, iste praesens libellus tibi ad mentem reducat quid erga me, cum legeris, debeas agere [But though I am absent in body, this little book, when you read it, will remind you of what you should do for me].” She also writes, “et si defuerim deficiens, quod futurum est, habes hic memoriale libellum moralis [and in the future, should I fail you by my absence, you have this little moral book as a reminder]” (1.7).3 Near the end, she assures William that as his “ordinatrix tibi in cunctis assisto [instructor, I stand beside you in all things]” (11.1). Dhuoda is not unusual in her use of writing to connect distant individuals and bridge geographical divides in the Carolingian world; her contemporaries also proclaimed their letters, poems, and manuscripts to be substitutes for their physical presence.4 Nor is hers the only Carolingian book for which “materiality matters.”5 Dhuoda, however, employs her unique authorial status as a mother—specifically, mother to her handbook’s recipient—to intensify the physical ways in which a manuscript could connect author and audience. She, more forcefully than other Carolingian authors, elicits her son’s sensory experiences with her book, first by drawing on an established Carolingian hierarchy of the exterior [End Page 7] and interior senses that encouraged Christians to transition from materiality to immateriality in their spiritual journey.6 This mother then maps her son’s progression from his outer to inner senses onto her own maternity so that she might appear in her son’s mind’s eye, his heart’s ear, and his soul’s touch, if not within his actual vision, earshot, or grasp. More than simply highlighting her son’s transition from materiality to immateriality through the embodied act of reading her handbook, Dhuoda also reveals her shift from material to spiritual mother through her own embodied acts of procreation and composition. Through her emphasis on her and her son’s sensory experiences of the materiality of her manuscript, the Liber manualis became an actual surrogate for Dhuoda, transforming into the motherly face her sons could not see, the loving hands that could not touch them, the caring voice that could not speak to them, and the nourishment she could not physically feed them. Dhuoda, Writer and Bibliophile Dhuoda was born into an aristocratic family around 800 CE. In June 824, at the Aachen court, she married Bernard of Septimania. Her husband, chamberlain for Emperor Louis the Pious (r. 814–840), came into notoriety in 830 as the alleged lover of Louis’s second wife, Judith. One decade later, Bernard betrayed his new lord, Charles the Bald (823–877), and was compelled to offer his son William (b. 826) as a political hostage to the young king.7 When a second son was born to Bernard and Dhuoda in 841, Bernard had the infant brought to him in Aquitaine. Dhuoda was left alone at the family estate in Uzès, struggling to manage both the family finances and her maternal longing.8 To ease her suffering, she composed, from November 841 to February 843, the Liber manualis for William, which modern editors have divided into eleven books.9 Only three extant manuscripts contain her text in whole or part. The earliest dates from the ninth to eleventh centuries and includes nine noncontiguous fragments.10 The fourteenth-century copy, compiled with other pedagogical texts, was produced in...