Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World - by Valerie Garver (Paperback)

About the Book

Garver offers a fresh appraisal of the cultural and social history of eighth- and ninth-century women, examining changes in women's lives and in the ways others perceived women during the early Middle Ages.

Book Synopsis

Despite the wealth of scholarship in recent decades on medieval women, we still know much less about the experiences of women in the early Middle Ages than we do about those in later centuries. In Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World, Valerie L. Garver offers a fresh appraisal of the cultural and social history of eighth- and ninth-century women. Examining changes in women's lives and in the ways others perceived women during the early Middle Ages, she shows that lay and religious women, despite their legal and social constrictions, played integral roles in Carolingian society.

Garver's innovative book employs an especially wide range of sources, both textual and material, which she uses to construct a more complex and nuanced impression of aristocratic women than we've seen before. She looks at the importance of female beauty and adornment; the family and the construction of identities and collective memory; education and moral exemplarity; wealth, hospitality and domestic management; textile work, and the lifecycle of elite Carolingian women.

Her interdisciplinary approach makes deft use of canons of church councils, chronicles, charters, polyptychs, capitularies, letters, poetry, exegesis, liturgy, inventories, hagiography, memorial books, artworks, archaeological remains, and textiles. Ultimately, Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World underlines the centrality of the Carolingian era to the reshaping of antique ideas and the development of lasting social norms.

Review Quotes

Women and Aristocratic Culture makes a major contribution to our understanding of early medieval and aristocratic experience. Garver is consistently able to take even unsurprising findings and well-known points and parlay them into strong planks of support for her overall thesis.

"Garver provides an excellent synthesis of current scholarship about aristocratic Carolingian women. Although she acknowledges the paucity of sources directly addressing women's rolesshe does a commendable job of examining the existing literature and delineating the place of women in Carolingian society. This creates a useful contribution to both women's history and social history in the Carolingian period." --Margaret J. McCarthy

English-speaking scholars have contributed considerably to research on Carolingian women since Suzanne Fonay Wemple's pioneering Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister 500-900, but they have produced few monographs. Valerie Garver's new book is a welcome exception, aiming to show women as 'active participants in shaping and perpetuating the behaviors, beliefs, and practices' of Carolingian culture.

Garver's mastery of a variety of early medieval sources allows her to draw novel conclusions about the roles of aristocratic women as active participants in and shapers of Carolingian elite culture.... Women and Aristocratic Culture reveals a great deal.

Severe source constraints confront all historians of ninth-century women. The Carolingian world is relatively rich in sources but not in material overtly concerned with women. Yet Garver has read widely. For Garver, the Carolingian reforming revaluation of the aristocratic female household role was a turning point in Western views of women. That is one of many challenges to historians of earlier and later periods left by this brave book, which opens new and interesting perspectives.

About the Author

Valerie L. Garver is Associate Professor of History at Northern Illinois University.