Blended and Extended Families in Carolingian Charters
Julie Hofmann (Shenandoah University)
My final paper summary from last week’s visit to the Institute for Historical Research took a closer look at Carolingian family charters to examine the potential gestures of affection among step families. This project began with an invitation for Hofmann to give a paper on stepmothers that ended up being the impetus behind her current research. Despite not finding the expected evidence, it raised many interesting questions, but unfortunately, didn’t result in very many conclusive answers that I will address at the end of my summary.
While there are examples of extended and step families in Merovingian and Carolingian charters, blended families are somewhat rare. This paper attempted to look for connections of kinship, and how family relationships were viewed. Hofmann wanted to find evidence of caring between step families in early medieval charters.
Apparently some of the worst examples of step parenting come from Gregory of Tours, the bishop at the centre of Merovingian politics and culture and author of the famous Historia Francorum. He details the rather unpleasant details of the war waged between Clovis’s son from his first marriage and his second wife, Clothilde’s sons. Hofmann also discussed the actions against Charles Martel by his stepmother, Plectrude. In most of these cases, the victims were men threatened by “wicked” women. These early medieval narratives tended to be composed by clerics, yet we still know relatively little.
Remarriage after widowhood was not as difficult as remarriage after divorce; clerics actively discourage remarriage but received inconsistent support from Carolingian and Merovingian rulers. Carolingians appear to have been more proactive in the discouragement of remarriage. Laws preventing remarriage helped protect the property rights of a child from an earlier marriage but there were clearly tensions between theory and practice.
Monastic charters have long been used to help us understand kinship patterns. A look at some chartersfrom the abbey of Fulda revealed curious findings. In only two cases out of approximately 476 charters are there mentions of a step family in a donation. The specificity of the two documents that mention this are curious, it seems the family might have felt a need to make the relationship clear.
In another charter dating to 775 in a donation by John (Johannes), Hofmann found an interesting snippet that “may have” indicated affection. In another case, in 942, a woman and her daughter sold property to a monastery. The property had been given to her by her step father – was this a sign of affection? It does not necessarily indicate affection, but it shows she was not treated as an outsider. The Otacar, Leidrat and Hrabanus Maurus families were the primary Mainz magnate families. In one donation to Fulda Abbey, Otacar’s step daughter, Landswinda was omitted from later charters, thirty years after the first donation made by her father naming her in it. Her name appears much earlier on her father’s charters than her mother, Hruodswinda, and her two sisters, Elizabeth and Geilrat. It is likely that this is because she was a child from an earlier marriage. Half siblings are not really mentioned in the law codes, leaving the implication that the property was divided equally. Hofmann concluded that the charters show that there is no single way half siblings view their relationships to each other, and that while step familial affection cannot be proven we can infer something about family and kinship structure.
Personally, I really looked forward to this paper but it fell well short of the mark. After rambling through a hodgepodge of poorly tied together examples (while sipping wine!) she couldn’t answer any questions conclusively. I felt the paper was random, scattered and unconvincing. It felt like vague guesses as opposed a concrete attempt to properly address early medieval step families.
~Sandra Alvarez
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