Dhuoda

Flourished 824-843
Noble Mother

Sources

A Difficult Life. Dhuoda was the wife of a nobleman, Bernard of Septimania, a retainer and godson of Louis I (the Pious), Holy Roman Emperor and King of France. Bernard was close to Louis and had served as tutor to one of Louis’s sons. Bernard’s prominent family is frequently mentioned in medieval records; Dhuoda is known only through the survival of a long letter she sent to one of her sons. In it she recorded that she and Bernard were married at the emperor’s palace in Aachen on 29 June 824 and that she gave birth to a son, William, on 29 November 826, describing him as her “so longed-for firstborn son.” Her marriage was not happy. She suffered from the uprooted-ness of military life, following her husband as he moved around the kingdom. Moreover, in 830 her husband was accused of an adulterous relationship with Louis’s wife, Judith, and became caught up in a civil war that wracked the kingdom in subsequent years. Fifteen years after the birth of William, Dhuoda gave birth to a second son. By then she was probably in her late thirties or early forties. Bernard was absent and, while the baby was still so young that he had not yet been baptized, his father ordered that the child be brought to him, probably to protect him from his father’s enemies.

A Lonely Woman. Dhuoda was left alone, bereft of the company of her newborn child and her fifteen-year-old son. To fill her lonely hours Dhuoda composed a manual for her sons, to guide them as they grew to manhood, without the benefit of their mother’s company and advice. The manual, which she sent to William, was written in Latin and filled with quotations from the Bible and other authorities, indicating that Dhuoda was well educated. Moreover, beyond her conventional advice, citations, and quotations, Dhuoda conveyed her heartfelt maternal affection. She wrote that among her many concerns, “seeing you again one day with my own eyes is the greatest.” She warned William to watch over his little brother as they made their way in the world: “When your little brother, whose name I still do not know, has been baptized in Christ, do not fail to instruct him, to educate him, to love him.” Expressing her longing for her children, she lamented, “Most women have the joy of living in this world with their child, and I, Dhuoda, oh my son William, am separated and far from you.” Dhuoda’s book allows modern readers a rare glimpse of the affection that bound parents and children during the violent upheavals of ninth-century Europe. Nothing is known of Dhuoda’s life after 843. Her husband was captured and beheaded by Louis’s son Charles the Bald in 844; William died in battle in 850. The fate of her second son, whose father named him Bernard, is uncertain.

Sources

Dhuoda, Handbook for her Warrior Son, Liber Manualis, edited and translated by Marcelle Thiebaux (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Dhuoda, Handbook for William: A Carolingian Woman’s Counsel for Her Son, translated by Carol Neel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).

James Marchand, “The Frankish Mother: Dhuoda,” in Medieval Women Writers, edited by Katharina M. Wilson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), pp. 1-29.