Via A Corner of Tenth Century Europe I see that Nat Taylor (who I do not otherwise know) has been asking whether historians should be more willing to pass moral judgements. My short answer (as, among other things, a historian of morality) is ‘No’.

My longer answer starts from the assumption that we’re talking here about the times we’re writing/analysis/teaching history and not writing/analysis/teaching morality. I discuss or write about moral issues a certain amount, including on this blog, and I’m quite happy using historical examples. As well as making the subject more vivid, such examples are particularly useful for reminding people that moral views aren’t unchangeable: that, for instance, it was not self-evident for several millennia that all men are created equal, and that the Catholic church has not always held to the same line on contraception.

If you’re writing or teaching history, however, giving your moral opinions on a historical event is only occasionally justified. More often than not it’s either irritating or positively harmful to your analysis. I think giving your moral views on a particular historical topic is justified only when either there is considerable moral controversy among historians about a subject (so I think it would make sense if you were talking about the Allied bombing of Dresden or Charlemagne’s first Saxon capitulary), so people know where you stand, or where you feel the need to challenge a previous moral consensus on a topic (as feminist historians have done about misogynistic sources that scholars had previously simply accepted).

However, all too often, moral comments by historians can turn into grandstanding. It is rarely necessary to point out that slavery and genocide are bad and that tolerance and peaceful protest are good. It’s like medieval writers going on about how they are in favour of justice and against oppressing the poor or earnest Victorian historians pointing out that Charlemagne having concubines was immoral. It tells you nothing useful, only that the historian wants to show that they are virtuous, and such moralising is tedious and irritating to read.

There is also a potential danger to your historical analysis if you spend too much time thinking about the moral aspects of particular acts/policies. It may lead you into the fallacy that acts/policies succeeded because they were moral or failed because they were immoral (or if you are a certain kind of historian, succeeded because they were immoral or failed because they were moral). The morality of an act or policy and its success are independent of each other. Sometimes the wicked flourish like a green bay tree, sometimes they don’t. And equally, a focus on morality can get in your way when you’re considering motivation. It’s all too easy to start thinking that because an act/policy was bad therefore those who devised/carried it out were bad, and to imagine that you’re carrying out historical analysis when you’re merely going round in circles. Historical study even of such an event as the Holocaust needs to go beyond saying ‘this was immoral’ or even ‘this was immoral because’ to say ‘why did this happen?’ Otherwise we risk ending up being nothing more than givers of secular sermons and lose the real point of what history has to offer.

For some reason, I’ve only just come across Jon Jarrett’s post on ‘Sex and medievalists’, although it’s nearly a year old. In this, amid a multitude of examples of medieval texts on sex (and an unfortunate gender reassignment of Constant Mews), he worries that medievalists can’t discuss, let alone teach this kind of stuff without seeming ‘unsound’. As this is pretty much what I do (and I’m currently translating all sorts of dubious sexual matters), it looks like my academic career is pretty much kiboshed before it’s started (though as I’m a gender historian I might get away with being merely marginal). What Jon wants, specifically, is to be able to ask a question like ‘How bawdy was Charlemagne’s court?’ without being regarded as a pervert.

One point to make is that there are some people who have asked this question and got away with it, and not just Jinty Nelson. I once heard a paper by Mayke de Jong, for example, entitled: ‘Sacrum palatium...but what about the concubines?’ In fact, it’s quite tricky to discuss most Carolingian kings without getting into sex scandals at some point (except possibly Louis the German. And of course with Charles the Fat it’s lack-of-sex scandals). But I think that Jon is right that there are particular problems with historians studying sex and I want to explore why that is.

As long as you stick to the evidence in the texts themselves you are fine (which is why Carl Phelpstead can discuss Icelandic penis size with impunity, because the sagas refer to that. But if you’re a medievalist (particularly an early medievalist) writing on any topic, at some point (often fairly early on) the evidence will run out and you’ve got to try and join the dots on your picture. At that point, you a) bring in evidence from some vaguely ‘similar’ society, b) appeal to universal norms of human nature or c) use the assumptions about what you think the world was like then. Every historian has a set of basic assumptions about ‘what the world was like then’ and ‘what people are like’, and if you read enough of their work or listen to them for a while it’s normally fairly clear what they are. (For example, I only listened to David Starkey lecturing on Tudor history a few times before I learned that he considered tax avoidance to be normal, and that immediately tells you a lot about him and his political views).

The problem of course is, if you talk or write about religion, you’re going to give away your religious views, about economics, your economic views: and if you talk about sex you’re going to give away your sexual views. So while it’s OK to ask the question about Charlemagne’s court, if you trying answering it, given the shortage of evidence, you’re likely to have to fall back on your assumptions about human nature. There’s a particular problem because of the nature of our knowledge of sexual behaviour: if you start quoting modern studies of sexuality you’re all too likely to come across as perverted anyhow, given the dubious reputation it’s got after Alfred Kinsey (and ditto with Margaret Mead and sexual anthropology). And inevitably, most of our ideas about sexuality come from our own experience and perhaps a few close friends.

Therefore, unless you can somehow put a firewall between your academic views, your personal views and your own personal life, people are going to suspect once they know your views, they know your sexual practices as well, and that can often be off-putting. The most embarrassing talk on medieval sex I’ve ever heard (and I’ve organised a session that included Carl Phelpstead talking on penises) was one at the IMC when someone gave a talk about fisting as a metaphor for...Well actually I can’t remember what he thought fisting was a metaphor was for, because I was distracted by imagining far more about the speaker’s sex life than I wanted to, which is rather my point.

One solution, as I’ve suggested, is somehow producing a mental firewall in the audience between you and the topics of conversation. I suspect it’s probably easier for middle-aged women (like myself) to do that, because we can easily be assumed to be having either no sex life or a completely uninteresting one. So if we talk about prostitution or sodomy (even heterosexual sodomy) it obviously has nothing to do with us personally. On the other hand, if a male academic suggests a love poem could be given a gay reading, then he’s implicitly assuming that it is ‘normal’ for a man to feel sexual desire for another man, and some people would immediately make assumptions about his orientation.

I think, therefore, that it is possible to write about sex and still succeed in the academy (though that doesn’t necessarily imply I’m going to succeed). In order to do so, however, you will probably need a) to write about other things at times as well as sex (so you don’t come across as obsessed), b) to give the air of having an extremely uninteresting sex life yourself, c) to stick closely to what medieval evidence we have (and as authors like Ruth Mazo Karras have pointed out, we have actually got quite a lot for the Middle Ages as a whole) and d) be really careful with footnotes (because once again the assumption arises: if you’re playing fast and loose with academic rigor, what other standards are you prepared to lower?) With that warning, let’s all get out there and find some more stories about dodgy nuns.

Since I had a lecture on gender and the Carolingian Renaissance to give today I had to explain to L why I was off early and my husband was taking her to school. She can cope both with the idea that I’m a lecturer (=teacher) and that I’m teaching history (=what happened a long time ago). What she hasn’t quite got yet is what I teach about when I’m teaching history. So she asked today whether I was teaching about dinosaurs or Bible stories, which is fair enough, because she knows both happened a long time ago. But how do you explain the concept of the eighth century or 1000 years ago to someone for whom a year represents 20% of their life-span? However, after further reflection, I think I am actually getting quite close towards a suitable form of historical periodisation for five-year olds (or at least my five-year old).

L so far knows about 4 main historical events/figures (in the loosest sense of the world). These are, in order:

1) Dinosaurs
2) Bible stories
3) Bonnie Prince Charlie (owing to numerous renditions and explanations of ‘Over the sea to Skye)
4) Her great-granny (aged 102 and the oldest person she knows)

That still leaves a gap of around 1700 years, which is pushing it a little. What I need is one key medieval date/event. One obvious possibility is 1066, if for no other reason that the Bayeux Tapestry just needs a few English (rather than Latin) captions to be a children’s picture book. Once you have ‘the Norman conquest’ established as a historical event then you have your periodisation set up:

a) Prehistory is after the dinosaurs but before the Bible
b) Ancient history is the time of the Bible
c) Early medieval history (=what Mummy teaches) is after the Bible but before the Norman Conquest

d) The next bit is a little trickier, because you have to stick everything from 1066 to 1745 together. However there is actually a vaguely plausible argument that this is all just the ‘ancien regime’/noble domination, so I think I can have medieval/early modern as after the Norman Conquest but before Bonnie Prince Charlie

e) Modern history is after Bonnie Prince Charlie

f) Recent history (1905 onwards) is in Great-Granny’s lifetime.

For the West at least, that doesn’t seem too bad an outline framework, at least until L needs to learn the difference between the Tudors and the Stuarts. Now all I have to do is work out what medieval history (if any) can be taught to a sensitive child. (I have already nearly got stumped by the question ‘Why did knights build castles?’, because I could not translate my instinctive thought: ‘in order to be able to dominate and oppress the peasants’, into anything more child-friendly).

The question in the title, in some ways, ought to be an unnecessary one. Even in 1981, when Suzanne Wemple was claiming they didn’t, it needed a very narrow definition of the movement to exclude them. If the hagiographer Hugeburc gets excluded because her education was Anglo-Saxon and she didn’t write in the ninth century, then you’re also left with a Carolingian renaissance sans Alcuin. And to imply that Dhuoda doesn’t count because she’s a laywomen is ridiculous. Ever since the evidence has been pointed out for women’s involvement in the movement. Rosamond McKitterick’s written on female readers and scribes, Jinty Nelson on female historians, Steven Stofferahn on nuns and learning and many others.

The more interesting question, perhaps, is what kind of Carolingian renaissance did women have? Here, I want to focus more on the intellectual than the moralistic side of the ‘renaissance’ and compare it with two other periods: late antiquity and the twelfth century renaissance. One interesting way in is to start with the question of what women are reading in the period and what are they writing?

As far as the reading goes, it looks like pretty much everything that men were reading. History, hagiography, poetry (Dhuoda knows some Ovid), theology, medical books and even law texts (one of Eberhard of Friuli’s daughters gets a copy of the Lombard laws). There’s also at least one mention of a text in German. The writing is harder to be certain of, but presuming that the Earlier Metz Annals were written at Gisela’s command (which seems plausible), we have history, hagiography, moral/political tracts (Dhuoda), poetry (Dhuoda again, and nuns’ songs) and letters. (In fact, the Carolingian world may possibly be the first time in Europe/Mediterranean that women are ‘writing’ history at all (though if somebody knows better, then let me know), whereas there’s earlier hagiography, poetry and letters by women).

What we don’t have, as far as I know, is women writing academic theology, philosophy/‘science’ or law and what is interesting is that those three categories look fairly constant over most of antiquity and the Middle Ages as well. Of the three categories, two seem rather obvious exclusions. Women were largely excluded from the law courts, so were unlikely to be able to discuss the topic. And I imagine that academic theology/biblical exegesis, even before it got confined to the universities, would have been seen as too much like ‘women teaching’, and fallen foul of St Paul’s views. (Mystical theology by women, in contrast, seems to have been regarded as OK). As for why no philosophy or ‘science’, that’s slightly trickier, but I suspect that’s to do with how it was taught. More than theology (which you could do off on your own with a collection of the key texts), philosophy tended to be taught personally in a master-disciple relationship, up till the late Middle Ages, at least. Women could only really gain access to this process via close family connections (to avoid scandal): most of the ancient Greek female philosophers seem to have been daughters of male ones. Once ‘philosophers’ could have neither wives nor daughters, that way in was largely blocked. In addition, philosophy and other sciences relied more than other subjects on getting hold of ‘new’ texts: the study of both logic and grammar in the Carolingian renaissance were crucially influenced by texts that Alcuin brought to the Continent. Women’s access to new texts (in terms of material resources in nunnery libraries, and the opportunities to seek out new manuscripts) were always going to be a disadvantage for them in such spheres. It’s also possible that that’s why the greatest early medieval religious women writer, Hrotsvita, wrote in the tenth rather than the ninth century; because it took longer for nunneries than monasteries to benefit from the boost to learning that the Carolingian renaissance gave. (Rosamond McKitterick has pointed to patterns suggesting female scriptoria being built up, with nunneries which have books copied elsewhere in the ninth century, then copying their own in the tenth century).

What all this suggests is that women had about as much of a Carolingian renaissance as it was realistically possible for them to do at the time. It’s hard to see many institutional changes that allowed Ottonian nuns to write and prevented Carolingian ones from doing so. Strict claustration and nunneries not being allowed to educate boys, which Wemple focuses on, wouldn’t, to my mind, be likely to make a major difference. And as Katrien Heene has pointed out, there’s not much sign of Carolingian men thinking intellectual activities are unsuitable for women. Religious women didn’t achieve/benefit as much as religious men in the renaissance largely because they were starting from a lower educational and material basis. Meanwhile, laywomen seem to have shared as fully in the renaissance as laymen. In particularly, it’s not just the existence of Dhuoda, that suggests this, but that we don’t know her family background. Unlike Heloise, unlike Radegund and Christine de Pizan, she didn’t (as far as we know) receive an unusual education from an intellectual family (and I bet she didn’t get it from Bernard of Septimania). Compared to the twelfth century and its institutional and linguistic barriers to female learning (the university and Latin) and to late antiquity and its traditions of public schools, the Carolingian period appears to have been relatively more favourable for women’s intellectual activity. The fact that still meant that they couldn’t participate equally in the renaissance shows how deep the structures ran that limited female opportunities.

Is there a good feminist argument for voting for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries (if unlike me, you are eligible to do so)? I ask, because what I seem to be coming across more often at the moment is poor quality feminist arguments for her. See for example, this article by Robin Morgan.

What it doesn’t do is present any good policy reasons why Hillary Clinton would make a more effective feminist president than Barack Obama would. In fact, she admits that their views on policy are similar (though some might say that Obama is more progressive on, for example, transgender issues). When I asked one pro-Clinton feminist about this on Obsidian Wings, all she could bring up was that although Clinton hadn’t campaigned on issues such as work-family balance and the problems of female carers, she had written about them in the past. (This doesn’t mean that there may not be feminist issues on which Clinton is better - I just haven’t heard what they are). And it’s noticeable that while Morgan complains about Obama being all talk and no action, rather than focus on any actions that Clinton has taken, she starts quoting from her speeches.

Instead, the main focus of the article is on the sexism that Clinton has faced, which has indeed been nasty. But that doesn’t answer the question: why should someone vote for her? The presidency isn’t a consolation prize, to go to the person most badly treated (and if it were, isn’t the ex-POW in line for that)? And it is simply naive to believe or claim that a female president would mean an end to sexist comments in the media: it certainly didn’t in the UK. There’s also a nasty taste in the mouth left by the claim that women are more oppressed than African Americans: it’s very hard to argue that is true in the US. Morgan’s complaint about black women for Clinton being called race traitors would be more potent if she wasn’t implicitly calling women who vote for Obama traitors to their sex. (And note how she complains about age discrimination towards Clinton while pointing out that Ted Kennedy is 76).

Morgan’s article also tries to fudge the two big feminist problems with Hillary’s campaign. One is her voting for the Iraq war and her inability to apologise for this (unlike John Edwards). Now technically, you can say this is not necessarily a feminist issue, although a lot of women anti-war protestors would say that their feminism deeply informs their concerns. However, in Clinton’s case, it seems that her determination to stand by a serious error of political and moral judgement is intended to show her militaristic ‘toughness’. (So contrary to Gloria Steinem’s view, she probably does feel the need to prove her ‘masculinity’ more than some other candidates). In other words, Clinton’s record suggests that as president it will be business as usual; she will not be a woman who will ‘govern differently’, as Morgan claims.

The other feminist problem that Morgan skirts round is the dynastic issue. Would Hillary Rodman Smith be a serious candidate for US president? The answer, surely, is no: she would almost certainly not have the political skills to become one. That is not to compare her with George W. Clinton is an intelligent and politically well-informed woman and would be a competent president, but it is difficult to argue that she has personally the specific skills (coalition building, deal-making, oratory) either to get this far electorally or to achieve significant political results once in office. (If someone wants to dispute this, then I would again be happy to hear more about her political successes, bills passed etc).

Morgan is reduced to saying that dynastic politics can be a way of getting women into high positions, (while ignoring the many women leaders such as Thatcher and Merkel who don’t fit this), just as Steinam mentions powerful fathers, but not powerful husbands. On that argument, maybe the US should bring back hereditary monarchy. In fact, Clinton’s campaign is arguably more dynastically dependent than many of the examples Morgan quotes. Most of the female politicians she mentions achieved their success after the deaths of their fathers/husbands (one exception being Cristina Kirchner of Argentina). They may have inherited a political legacy and a political leg-up, but it was up to them to exploit it on their own. On the other hand, it’s clear that at least some of Hillary’s supporters are really hoping for the third term in office of ‘Billary’. The reliance of Hillary on her husband’s popularity and advice now seems to be a failing tactic, but it is hardly appealing to feminists. How does it benefit women’s political advance if a woman can seemingly only succeed when boosted by a more successful male politician? I think it feels particularly disappointing to me because I can remember back when Bill Clinton was campaigning. Then Hillary’s suggestion that you could get a 2-for-1 did seem a positive way of getting feminism more of a foothold in politics. But I think the Clintons’ subsequent career hasn’t suggested any serious commitment to changing the gender status quo.

Morgan’s article, then, doesn’t seem to me to make a good feminist case for Hillary Clinton, but it's not just that that is the problem for me with the article. There’s also the whole tone, which to a non-baby- boomer likes me smacks a bit too much of the put-down of an unappreciative younger generation. What would the boomers of 30 or 40 years ago have said to being told by their mothers and grandmothers: ‘we know best, do as we say?’ They rightly rejected that. Feminism today doesn’t have the same contours that feminism had in the 1960s and 1970s, but to imply that it is therefore inferior, or that young women who vote for Obama are trying to please their boyfriends is just patronising. If there is a positive feminist case for Clinton, it needs to be made without running down Obama and to have more substance than older women complaining ‘it’s not fair’. And if someone is making this case, I’d be interested to read it.