Chapter 4 turns to a pair of cultural crises that then shook the foundations of Carolingian aristocratic identity in the wake of Louis the Pious’s passing. In the context of the first crisis, a bloody civil war between Louis the Pious’s heirs, I present new readings of a well-known series of coeval texts: Dhuoda’s handbook of prose and acrostic verse for William; two lamentation poems that reflect upon the war itself, one by Florus of Lyon (d. c. 860) and another from a man calling himself Angelbert (d. unknown); and finally, the most comprehensive narration of the war that we have, the four-part contemporary account composed by an illegitimate grandson of Charlemagne, Nithard of Saint-Riquier (d. c. 844). Each in its own way, these works of literary art collectively demonstrate the extent to which the discourse of caritas and authority permeated mid-ninth-century aristocratic self-conception. The core assumptions of this self-conception suffered serious challenge, I then show, during a second cultural crisis, a far-reaching theological controversy sparked by the predestinarian rebel monk, Gottschalk of Orbais (d. c. 867). Like Paulinus and Alcuin before him, Gottschalk also invoked caritas to preach the equality of all men; only all men were equal, for Gottschalk, in their utter powerlessness to control their collective fate. For Gottschalk, caritas derived solely from God’s grace, not human deeds. Gottschalk was imprisoned, his preaching was condemned as heresy, yet his arguments for the primacy of grace and the inefficacy of deeds in the economy of salvation would weaken the ideological links between lay power, caritas, and divine authority forever.
Chapter 5 explores the weakening of these links further through examination of the rhetorical tactics employed by the Monk of St. Gall (d. 912, presumed to be Notker Balbulus) and Odo of Cluny (d. 942). Both monastics but each of a very different stripe, these writers invoked caritas to articulate ideologies of masculine authority that would presage the male gender hierarchies of the High Middle Ages and beyond. After a brief exploration of how an early Carolingian monastic, Ardo Smaragdus (d. 843), described a range of ascetic observances that were available to the laymen of his world, the chapter shows how the Monk of St. Gall and Odo redrew stark boundaries between lay and nonlay identities. Caritas and ascetic authority remained intimately connected for these writers, but they exploited that connection to diminish rather than to augment the capacity of the laity to attach themselves directly to the divine. In promoting the principles of bodily renunciation and monastic moral authority that Odo and the Monk of St. Gall themselves held most dear, their pens wielded caritas to subordinate and to segregate laymen from the ranks of elite discipleship and the highest echelons of Christian authority.
Finally, a conclusion draws together the long arc of the book’s historical narrative, its interventions, and its contributions. I offer thoughts about how my Carolingian case study can inform us more generally concerning the cultural contingency of gender’s construction. I also suggest some of the modes by which the deep cultural structures that influenced Carolingian thought about caritas may continue to shape our own discourses of fellow-feeling, masculinity, and social responsibility today.
The lives of the book’s protagonists overlapped only slightly. Paulinus of Aquileia and Alcuin of York are the sole members of the group who knew one another well. It is unlikely that Gottschalk of Orbais would have been much aware of Dhuoda of Septimania, his contemporary. We know that Dhuoda read Alcuin, but we can only guess whether she ever came across the work of Paulinus. The Monk of St. Gall and Odo of Cluny probably never concerned themselves much at all with the works of these earlier writers. Together, however, they comprise an interrelated family of main characters for the simple reason that each worked to construct and to manipulate ideologies of masculinity through discourses of emotional fellow-feeling. My intention is not to argue that these figures definitively and widely influenced and transformed Carolingian thinking, although some may indeed have. Nor is it to argue that these figures were representative, necessarily, of the aristocratic groups with which they associated themselves, although some may indeed have been. Instead, I seek to hear and to clarify how each voice spoke individually, not necessarily for or even to the collective but rather about the collective. To study their different discursive strategies in this manner is to paint not a still-life image of what all Carolingian aristocrats believed but instead a more dynamic landscape of what they could believe—a vivid and diverse illustration of Carolingian thought possibility, cast in the unique tonal hues of their world.
Three final comments about the parameters of my study may be helpful. The first involves my unabashed focus on “discourse,” which can still be something of a dirty word in early medieval historical scholarship, thought to lead us away from rather than toward the historian’s holy grail of the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen,” to quote Ranke’s famous maxim.19 This book is most certainly about the actual world of the men and women who lived on the European continent more than 1,200 years ago. Where it can, it traces their active and heartfelt expression of their most pressing concerns. Yet it will be important for my reader to recognize that this book is perhaps less about the specific experiences of historical actors than it is, once again, about elucidating the thought-worlds that those actors inhabited and the guiding narratives by which they sought both to explain and to shape the world around them.20 It is a book about writers and writing, in other words, just as much as it is about gender and emotion. Of primary interest is the vast array of imaginative ways in which Carolingian writers used conceptions and representations of fellow-feeling to argue that certain types of authority and power should be the domain of certain types of men. Studying cultural discourse in this way allows us to analyze the agency that men and women have over the ideologies within which they are inextricably bound and thus still very much to tell the stories of the men and women themselves.
Second, I encourage my readers to consider my discussion of Carolingian caritas in dialogue with Karl Morrison’s insightful historical studies of medieval empathy.21 Indeed, I sometimes use the term “empathy” to describe the ideal of emotional interconnection to which Carolingian caritas discourse often gestured. In so doing, I agree wholeheartedly with Morrison’s recent assertion that although “empathy” is a neologism, coined from Greek linguistic roots at the end of the nineteenth century, there was indeed consciousness of what we label empathetic fellow-feeling in the premodern past that we can legitimately identify and study.22 Which is to say, my book proceeds, following Morrison, from the premise that we can and should attempt to study empathetic thought and behavior “before the word,” so to speak.23 At the same time, however, I am fully cognizant of what Michel Foucault famously theorized—namely, that language always does more than simply describe phenomena. It also creates them.24 The discourse through which we describe fellow-feeling today reflects that discourse’s roots in the discussions and debates of nineteenth- and twentieth-century aesthetic theory, psychology, and sociology. Discourses of fellow-feeling in other cultures must of necessity reflect different concerns. Such discursive dissonances are in fact my quarry, for they provide us with a means for studying cultural variance and contingency across time.
Finally, in my thinking about a discourse of emotion within a community of the distant past, I have found Barbara Rosenwein’s path-breaking work on the history of early medieval emotions, particularly her concept of “emotional community,” to be helpful.25 Without a doubt, the men and women of the Carolingian aristocracy were such a community. They shared a common emotional language through which they described and explained their experiences of particular behaviors, feelings, and ideals. While I absolutely see this book as a contribution to the history of early medieval emotion, I branch away from Rosenwein in that my purpose is not to identify the boundaries of the emotional communities and subcommunities that existed within Carolingian society. Nor do I attempt to count word frequency or to survey ranges of semantic inflection in search of specific lexical meanings. Rather than trying to pin down caritas within the Carolingian world by charting and assigning taxonomies to the usage of certain terms or phrases throughout the Carolingian literary corpus, I seek instead to show the multifaceted ways in which the Carolingians invoked caritas as an unfixed notion, the product of nebulous and sometimes even contradictory discourse. Its lack of fixity rather than its