Dhuoda

Carolingian writer

• Born: c. 805
• Birthplace: Unknown
• Died: 843
• Place of death: Uzès (now in France)

Dhuoda’s Liber Manualis is the only work written by a woman that survives from the Carolingian period. It offers vivid insights into ninth century Western European life.

Early Life

Conjecture attends all aspects of the early life of Dhuoda (dew-OH-duh). That she was married in 824 a fact she records in the Liber Manualis (c. 841; Handbook for William, 1991) allows one to posit a birth year of about 805, while the scant evidence bearing on her birthplace and lineage points to an origin in what is now northern Germany (though France cannot be ruled out). She hailed from a distinguished family that doubtless was consanguine to Charlemagne, a heredity confirmed by her marriage to Bernard of Septimania, a close confidant and second cousin of the emperor Louis the Pious, whose own father, Charlemagne, had stood as Bernard’s godfather. Louis himself attended the couple’s wedding, which was held in Aachen, the imperial capital, in the emperor’s own private chapel.

Dhuoda brought much to her marriage and would in time become a shrewd and talented proxy for her husband in southern France. Bernard, in turn, made an early name for himself by defending the Spanish March. Consequently, in 831, he was appointed chamberlain, which wedded his fortunes closer to those of Louis the Pious. Dhuoda gave birth in 826 to a son named William, and at some point later she and William were sent to live in Uzès in southern France.

As chamberlain, Bernard was intimately involved in the struggles of Louis the Pious against his scheming sons, who were constantly at odds with, and eventually waged war on, their father and each other. Even before Louis’s death, in 840, civil war was endemic. Louis had not even been dead a year when one of his sons, Charles the Bald, began fighting in earnest for control of the empire, a mere seventeen-year-old whose youth ensured his endurance but also fueled an arrogant zealousness.

Charles the Bald’s hostility toward Bernard was patent and had already manifested itself toward Bernard’s cloistered sister, Gerberga, who was accused of sorcery, sealed in a wine cask, and thrown into a river to drown. To this was added the widely circulated rumor that Bernard had carried on an affair with Charles’s mother, the empress Judith. In this highly charged setting, Bernard returned to Uzès in 840, reunited with Dhuoda long enough for her to get pregnant a second time, and then traveled north to pay homage to the king. Moreover, as an earnest of his good will toward the mercurial young king, Bernard delivered William to Charles’s safekeeping, in effect making his son a hostage to the king’s caprice. When Dhuoda’s second son was born, in 841, Bernard holed the child up in Aquitaine, at a stronghold surrounded by bishops and nobles loyal to him, presumably as a safeguard to the family’s future fortunes.

Life’s Work

Amid the bereavement of losing her two sons in a matter of months, one of whom was a mere infant, Dhuoda struck on the idea of working through her grief by composing a book in which she would record for William those things she deemed necessary for him to survive. This book, the Handbook for William, belongs generically to a kind of writing known as a princely mirror, which extols the ideals of correct princely living. Dhuoda’s work, however, is more than the usual mirror for a prince, for in standing for comparison with other such compositions, it is clear that Dhuoda has composed a more personal and, therefore, more original work. It is very much a mother’s book.

The power of her unique view is felt at once in the book’s opening lines, in which Dhuoda offers to William in exchange for her presence a book that he must use as if it were actually her, punning on the Latin word for “body” corpus which also means “book.” However, what she hopes to achieve through this exchange is another matter, for, as she goes on to say, she has hidden, obscure things to tell her son.

Many things are patent to many people that are hidden from me, and there are those like me with a hidden sense, lacking intellect, [wherein] if I say less, I am more. . . . Although I have a fragile sense and live unworthily among worthy women, still I am your mother, William, my son, and I am sending you now the discourse of my manual . . . so that . . . you might frequently read this little book directed to you by me . . . just as if you were looking in a mirror or playing a board game.

Dhuoda characterizes her own mental abilities as a species of hiddenness, suggesting a unique maternal (feminine) quality to her knowledge, which includes deeper truths hidden in the mysteries of etymology, wordplay, and numerology. Dhuoda is at her best in this regard.

God [Deus] contains two syllables and four letters . . . and our “D,” with which the name of God begins, among the Greeks is delta; and this is expressed according to their system of counting by the number 4, perfection; D in our Roman numerals, however, is 500, also suggesting a sacred mystery.

The hard work required of knowing, and the hidden bounties that are revealed to those who search for them, are suggested here in layers of meaning patiently set forth and explained and many pages of the Handbook for William fit this mold, setting forth principles of correct living from beneath the veil of Dhuoda’s own, rarified sources of knowing.

Many pages of the Handbook for William are, of course, straightforward charges to William about all manner of life’s activities praying, moral conduct, social awareness, and the like. Always, however, the priority of affect over reason looms large in Dhuoda’s estimations of authentic action. Her treatment of prayer is a case in point, for Dhuoda admits that oratio stresses reason in its derivation from oris ratio, meaning “reason of the mouth.” Yet in composing a prayer for William to recite, Dhuoda produces a specimen that stresses the inability of reason to ascertain the fullness and complexity of divinity claims her own broader notion of knowing has already affirmed.

The contrast of feminine, maternal affect and masculine, hierarchical, reason is used to good effect as Dhuoda more formally considers right behavior, the correction of moral imperfection, and the balancing of human needs with spiritual progress, themes that take up a considerable portion of the Handbook for William. Consistently the world of power and intrigue the masculine world of Bernard and Charles the Bald is held up against the purer, more ephemeral world, to which Dhuoda has better access. When she instructs William in the proper attitudes he must hold toward his peers and lords, for example, Dhuoda avers that such figures and their families are owed respect, because, in the larger social structure in which she and her son exist, it is important to remain “truthful” toward such figures as these.

When Dhuoda goes on to enjoin William to be kind to great and small, however, the vocabulary and imagery of hierarchy, of masculine political power lord to knight, son to father, vassal to lord gives way to a parable based on Psalm 41, which begins with the image of a deer longing for the running waters. The deer points up a useful image in longing for the water, Dhuoda says, for when it needs to ford a river, the herd gather together and form a line in which each deer supports and helps the deer in front and behind. Slowly the lead deer drops back to rest and a new leader takes its place, so that the line remains refreshed and the river is more easily spanned.

This is brotherly love and compassion, Dhuoda says, but it is also an attitude that argues against respecting one’s peers and their families simply in token of their status. Such respect as this, based on rank, power, and hierarchy, is contrasted here to the smooth, well-moving line of deer, who are exemplary precisely because they do not operate hierarchically, because they refuse to step on each other’s backs or to submerge each other’s heads. In this sense, then, Dhuoda affirms her own notion of moral fairness and right action apart from the world of male hierarchy, opting instead for a purer world framed by feeling, compassion, and the words of the psalmist, whose full sentiment, with its emotional productions, is not at a far remove from those lines of her own Handbook for William. In the text, speaking to God, Dhuoda declares, “my soul longs for you God, as the deer longs for the running waters.”

The poetry of the psalms returns in several original poems that mark the end of Dhuoda’s Handbook for William. One such piece highlights the singularity of Dhuoda’s position as a woman and a mother, for she longs now to see how her son has physically matured, remembering how he grew from infancy to boyhood. At the same time, she laments her ill health and bad luck, which leads her to compose her own epitaph, before commending her soul to her readers by repeating those qualities of her own intellect that she holds in best esteem: her maternity and femininity; her access to deeper, rarified truths; and her knowledge of feeling and affect.

Affect looms largest perhaps in the final poem of the Handbook for William, in which Dhuoda speaks of her own discernment as a means to frame her desire to see William in the flesh. The idea of Dhuoda’s special kind of discernment highlights her own commitment to the feelings that bind in an excellent and fair way, that commit humans most pervasively and most completely to each other. Longing never leaves her words. She writes,

You are now 16 years old and you are yourself a lord of sorts; I long to see again how you look . . . but I’m tired, so very tired. . . . I hope you know, William, that you’ll never have anyone like me like me because, though I am unworthy, I am your very mother.

One hopes that these words and others like them helped William in the time leading up to his father’s murder in 844, and his own execution in 847, in that world his mother had warned him against so carefully. Presumably they did, precisely because they are so very much like their author.

Significance

Dhuoda’s Handbook for William is one of a kind, both in its length eleven books of Latin prose and poetry and in its overarching claim that feeling trumps reason in making authentic sense of the world. In terms of generic protocols, too, the Handbook for William strikes in fresh directions, making the princely mirror into a venue for personal expression in both prose and poetry. Dhuoda’s Latin strikes for attention, in its earthy Germanicisms, its simplicity, and the ways it suggests the further development of later into Medieval Latin. Finally, the Handbook for William opens a window onto the social, political, and spiritual habits of the ninth century that otherwise would be permanently closed to view.

Bibliography

Dronke, Peter. Woman Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua (203) to Marguerite Porete (1310). New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. A sensitive and subtle treatment of Dhuoda’s Handbook for William.

Marchand, James. “The Frankish Mother Dhuoda.” In Medieval Women Writers, edited by Katharina M. Wilson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984. A partial translation and concise treatment of the Handbook for William.

Mayeski, Marie Anne. Dhuoda: Ninth Century Mother and Theologian. Scranton, Pa.: University of Scranton Press, 1995. Chapters discuss Dhuoda in historical and theological context, the “moral life of the Christian,” and “biblical wisdom.”

Neel, Carol, ed. Handbook for William: A Carolingian Woman’s Counsel for Her Son. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. A translation of the Liber Manualis that includes an excellent introduction and bibliographical guide.

Thiébaux, Marcelle, trans. Dhuoda: Handbook for Her Warrior Son. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. A translation of the Liber Manualis with useful introduction and bibliography.

Thiébaux, Marcelle, trans. The Writings of Medieval Women. New York: Garland, 1994. A partial translation and discussion.