Magistra et Mater

There was a mention of Jews on the radio a day or two ago, so L asked me who they were. Fortunately, we’ve now discussed basic ideas of different religions several times, so I had a reasonably slick answer to hand. The Jews are the followers of a religion, they believe in God and in the stories in the Old Testament, but they don’t believe that Jesus was the Son of God. She then asked why the Jews didn’t believe that Jesus was the Son of God, but handily answered herself by saying that they probably thought he was the son of Joseph. (If necessary, I would have told her that people don’t all believe the same things). Her final question was what the difference was between Jews and Muslims. I said that Muslims thought that God had spoken to a man called Muhammed, who had written down what he was told in a book called the Qur’an.

I’ve had variants on this discussion several times in the last year or so, as L starts to get to grips with religious pluralism. She’s doing that at a far earlier age than I did, which comes from being in a very ethnically and religiously diverse school. She’s already had a class visit to a mosque, as well as visits from Christian clergy and a Sikh story-teller, and celebrations of Eid and Diwali and Chinese New Year, alongside Harvest, Easter, Christmas and Red Nose Day. I don’t know how much they’ve done on Judaism or Buddhism yet, but otherwise she’s getting a broad spread of religious culture.

All this means that I need to come up with a coherent but not too controversial account of the world’s religions suitable for an inquiring but somewhat unformed mind. I want to try and be informative and factually accurate, because I don’t want L to feel I’m not taking her questions seriously or can’t be relied on to answer them truthfully. On the other hand, I need to keep things simple and I also don’t want to start conflicts at her school, so I’m careful not to denigrate other religions. I’m conscious that anything that I say may get repeated in a somewhat garbled form, and if a six year old’s version of Christianity meets a six year old’s version of Islam or Sikhism the result may be unexpected. So what I’m trying to do is focus on belief in God (or gods), belief in Jesus and the books taken as scriptures. I’m conscious of some large gaps in my knowledge trying to do this (I know very little Sikh theology) and I’m not sure that Buddhism can easily be fitted into this framework (I’m really hoping that L doesn’t start asking about Buddhism till she’s a few years older). But as a basic framework, I hope my explanations at least aren’t actively confuse ng.

I am also consciously making all my comments as statements of belief: we (Christians) believe that, Muslims believe that etc. And although L hasn’t asked this yet, I will tell her if/when she asks, that different people believe different things, just as different people like different things to do or different TV programmes. In other words, I’m not trying to make an explicit claim about Christianity as a true religion as opposed to other religions. I am treating religion as being a matter of opinion, not a matter of fact, at this stage. In contrast, when L last academic year got into an argument with her friends because she said the earth went round the sun and they said it didn’t, I was happy to tell her that she was right and they were wrong.

Treating my Christian religion as my opinion doesn’t mean I am ashamed of my faith, and when L is older, I’m happy to explain why I believe what I believe and think it’s intellectually justified. But as well as not wanting to stir up things with her friends, I’m also conscious of a longer-term issue. Though L is being raised as a Christian, when she is older she may leave the faith, or choose another one (At the least, she will need to find her own independent relationship to Christianity). If my relationship with her is tightly bound up with my factual claim that Christianity is true, then if she rejects that claim, it is difficult for her to do so without rejecting me as well. Bringing her up to respect other people’s religious beliefs, even if she does not share them, is in that way also a hope for the future in having my own views respected, and a message about how people with different religious beliefs (or none) can nevertheless remain friends.

I feel I should warn any readers who come along to this site that there are not going to be many updates in the next few months. This is because I am trying to finish the manuscript of a book and my available intellectual energy needs to be directed towards this currently, rather than to getting irritated with Hilary Mantel's view of historians. My (possibly unrealistic) aim is to finish the book by early 2010, at which point normal blogging can be resumed...

Meanwhile, I will try and do some posting of links to other sites of interest. My first is to the IHR's Making History site, which along with some useful statistics and biographies, includes interviews with a number of prominent British historians. These include audio as well as transcripts, so anyone who has not heard what Susan Reynolds, Eric Hobsbawm etc sounds like can now discover. I have not yet read/listened to all the interviews myself, so if anyone does discover "any obscene or libellous material that these interviews may contain" (which the IHR firmly states it is not responsible for), I would be interested to know.

Mayke de Jong’s The Penitential State: Authority and Atonement in the Age of Louis the Pious, 814-840, which I am gradually working my way through, is Mayke’s sustained discussion of theories about Louis’ reign, theology and political discourse which she says she’s been developing for over 20 years. But chapter 1 also provides a useful summary of the events of Louis the Pious’ reign, which brings out the soap opera aspects of his ongoing struggles with his sons from 829 onwards.

After a century or more in which Louis the Pious has been seen as an archetypal ‘weak king’, in the last decades there has been a lot of debate over him (in which Mayke has played a determined role). One of the key arguments for those attempting to refute the idea of weakness is pointing out how frequently rulers struggled with rebellious adult sons. On this view, a ruler with three adult sons (as Louis had in the 830s) was bound to have trouble. But as I looked at the events again, I found myself wondering if the real crunch point didn’t come much earlier, and Louis’ problems in the 830s weren’t just the same pattern repeating itself.

I think there is a decent case for seeing Louis’ real problems as starting in 817/818. The Ordinatio imperii of 817 has traditionally been seen as problematic because it produced a succession plan for the empire at such an early stage of Louis the Pious’ reign (before one of his four sons had been born). But more significant, I would argue, is that it made no mention of Bernard of Italy (Louis’s nephew), instead leaving Italy to Louis’ eldest son Lothar I. As a result, Bernard, fearing his sons would be disinherited, revolted.

The recurrent theme of Louis’ later years was that planned divisions of the empire he made led to revolts by those of his sons he had disappointed. This, I would argue, is behaviour that could be expected. It is unrealistic for a parent to deprive a son of part of an inheritance in favour of another and not expect a bad reaction. In the same way, excluding Bernard was asking for trouble.

The subsequent events are also revealing. Louis the Pious put down the revolt and captured Bernard. He then blinded him, a mutilation from which Bernard died. It is clear that Louis over-reacted here. Five years later, at Attigny in 822 he did public penance for the death of Bernard. However much Mayke sees Louis as in control of his own penance and the situation, he had put himself firmly in the wrong. The bishops who judged him in 833 raised Bernard’s death as one of the many offences that made him unfit to rule.

But the reason why Bernard’s punishment had such long-term repercussions is best seen in a comparison with the one family revolt that his father Charlemagne experienced. In 792, Charlemagne’s eldest son Pippin (aka Pippin the Hunchback) revolted. Jinty Nelson has argued that this was because Pippin was being edged out of a future division of the kingdom by his stepmother Fastrada. The parallels seem plain here, but the consequences weren’t. Pippin was not killed, but tonsured and put in a monastery: he died there nearly twenty years later.

Charlemagne had form for this kind of behaviour: he’d similarly put his cousin Tassilo permanently into a monastery in 788, when taking over Bavaria. I don’t think it’s coincidence that none of Charlemagne’s other sons revolted after Pippin. They had too much to lose by doing so. In contrast, I would argue that Louis was unable to deal effectively with his sons after their revolts because of Bernard. Having over-reacted once, he could not again be seen as too harsh. Instead, he combined a determination to divide and re-divide the kingdom, which led to revolt, with recurrent forgiveness for his rebellious sons, thus providing no incentive for loyalty.

In terms of Carolingian standards of parenting, Charlemagne looks in control: stern action which carefully avoided the appearance of brutality to contemporaries. Louis, in contrast, seems all over the place, unable to deal effectively with the predictable consequences of his behaviour. Louis cannot simply be seen as too merciful (as in the traditional narrative), but it would not surprise any modern parenting guru that his uneasy moves between harshness and leniency were unsuccessful in producing family harmony.

Historians once largely believed what Gregory of Tours wrote in his ‘Ten Books of History’ (which is how the History of the Franks is now more accurately referred to). Gregory might be naive (all that reporting of miracles), but his artlessly gory portrayals of Merovingian life told us all we needed to know about the horrors of Merovingian society.

A more recent view of Gregory, along with many other medieval historians, is that his history reflects his own prejudices or that he is writing propaganda. Nevertheless, even though his text is not transparent, we can read through it to get useful material. We can see the outlines of particular actions by his enemies through his distorted stories about them. Alternatively, for social/cultural historians, even if his stories are not true at all, but purely propaganda, they reflect what a king or a queen or a bishop could feasibly do. Propaganda, after all, needs to be plausible.

I would have adhered to such views once, but recent events have made me less certain. If you look at many of the claims circulating in the US about Barack Obama, (such as the claim that he is not a citizen) they’re not remotely plausible, and yet they’re widely accepted. One answer is that this is simply because such stories have been pushed so hard by particular powerful interest groups. But there are implausible stories which have achieved wide circulation and belief without such long term propaganda efforts: Slacktivist has an interesting example of one.

And some claims go beyond the merely deeply implausible to a different level. Take the claim that Obama’s plan for health care involves ‘death panels’, for example. You could see this as an extreme distortion of some possible plans for living wills or not paying for heroic treatment of the terminally ill, but it’s probably better to see these statements as symbolic. Obama is an evil ruler and therefore of course he is planning death panels, because that’s what evil rulers do. And, in glorious circularity, he is planning death panels and so that is ‘proof’ that he must be an evil ruler.

I’ve just been reading Martin Heinzelmann,Gregory of Tours: History and Society in the Sixth Century (CUP, 2001) who argues convincingly and in great detail that Gregory is using symbolic figures in the Ten Books of History: the Good King, the Bad King, the Good Bishop etc. What he doesn’t really get into is looking at how that might affect historians who actually want to know something about the sixth century (as opposed to those wanting to understand how Gregory’s mind works). If Gregory’s stories are largely symbolic, can we take anything factual from them beyond a few names and events? Or are we faced not just with a distorted mirror on the Merovingian past, but a fantasy view of it?

What if we can’t trust Gregory? What does it mean for Merovingian history? He provides a very detailed narrative for the second half of the sixth century, but I suspect it’s possible to reconstruct a skeleton political history for the period from other sources. The biggest problem may be for social history, and especially women’s history. Most studies of Merovingian women rely crucially on Gregory for the social details of laywomen’s lives. Hagiography and letters just don’t give us that texture. But what if his stories of good and evil queens aren’t just distorted and sometimes misogynistic reactions to real women? What if they are just symbolic stories of eternal good and evil women, loosed from any anchoring in Merovingian reality? If you can’t hope to reconstruct a historical Obama from his opponents’ fantasies, will you be able to learn anything true about Hillary Clinton?

I came across the research of Kim LoPrete in the spring, when she spoke at the Pauline Stafford conference, and she also subsequently sent me some of her articles. She works on aristocratic laywomen in eleventh to thirteenth century France and their political role. In particular a number of her recent articles are arguing for the existence of ‘lordly women’ (her translation of the term dominae) in France in the high Middle Ages.

By lordly women what Kim means is aristocratic but non-royal women who are carrying out a variety of activities traditionally seen as lordly: alienating land, adjudicating disputes, collecting dues, ordering knights to fight, swearing oaths to keep the peace, granting privileges, acting as advocates, etc. They are carrying out these actions with authority equivalent to the counts and lords who are their male counterparts.

In the articles I’ve read, Kim is looking at two main questions. Firstly, how do these activities (and women carrying them out) relate to historians’ ideas about the ‘public’? (She argues that such activities are just as ‘public’ as when male lords do them, so you can’t sensibly contrast male public power and female private power). Secondly, how are such women seen by their contemporaries in gendered terms? (The evidence suggests that they’re not seen as honorary men or unnatural, but are still regarded as women).

I want to add a third question to Kim’s, looking from a research background 300 years earlier. Are such lordly women a new phenomenon? Apart from alienating land, I can’t think of any Carolingian examples (750-900) of non-royal laywoman carrying out any of the other activities I’ve listed above. And the linguistic evidence also supports this: domna/domina (except for royal women and abbesses) is not a common Carolingian term as far as I know, and comitissa only starts appearing at the end of the ninth century (the earliest known example is the widow of Raymond I of Toulouse in 865).

The problem, of course, is proving such a negative and deciding whether there’s a difference in behaviour or just in the quantity of sources. (It’d also be useful to know what the evidence for lordly women is in C11-C13 Germany, as a contrast – paging Theo!). For a lot of the kind of activities mentioned, the sources are pretty scanty for the Carolingian period. The one that isn’t, however, is dispute settlement: we do have a decent number of placita. There are a few with royal women involved in making decisions (I think there are some Italian ones involving the empress Engelberga, and Jinty Nelson’s argued for Fastrada deciding one case), but I’m not aware of any with non-royal women prominently involved in judging. Kim is arguing that for 1050-1250 you’re probably looking at around 10-20% of ‘lords’ being women, so you’d expect a few to show up in the Carolingian sources if there’s a similar percentage.

The other negative evidence is Dhuoda, who as a magnate’s wife ought to be a lordly woman if anyone is. But I don’t get any sense that Dhuoda has ever acted as a judge from what she writes, whereas her discussion of the royal court is marked by a personal sense of what it is to be a courtier. Dhuoda does talk (LM 10-4) about the ‘servitium’ she’s giving Bernard in the Marches and many other places, which has led her into debt, but it seems equally possible that it’s household management that’s involved – after all, much of the lordly activities mentioned is revenue-gaining.

If the lordly woman is a post-Carolingian phenomenon, why is that? At least at the level of countess, I think that Carolingian ideology wouldn’t have allowed such female activity: it would rip the mask off countship as an appointed office if a woman was exercising its functions. In contrast, lordship by Kim’s time was seen as exercised by the grace of God, so if the Almighty had ordained that a woman inherited the title, who had the right to complain that it was unsuitable for her to exercise the authority?

About Carolingian lordship below the level of count, I’m less sure. If that kind of lordship was innate, familial, and exercised in a domestic setting (as Kim argues C11-C13 lordship was), then presumably there was no particular ideological reason why women shouldn’t have exercised it. But I think the honest answer is we don’t really know enough about Carolingian lordship to know exactly what was going on. I do think that there’s just enough Carolingian evidence to suggest that overall something did change in non-royal noblewomen’s activities, but as usual, I’m open to countervailing arguments.