Anchoress and Abbess in Ninth-Century Saxony

Although most of the main Carolingian narrative sources have benefited from English translations over the last 20 years, hagiography has been less well served. Frederick S. Paxton is therefore to be thanked for making these two difficult texts (three, in fact, since Hathumoda's Life is accompanied by a long poetic Dialogue on her death) accessible to a wider readership in plain and readable English. The Lives can both be dated fairly closely to the middle years of the 870s, and both were written soon after the deaths of their subjects by people who knew them personally. This personal knowledge may have contributed to the idiosyncratic nature of each biography, as did the difficulties faced by hagiographers struggling to mould appropriate models for female sanctity from a Late Antique literature that ascribed saintliness primarily to bishops, warriors and other high-status men. This interplay between the problems of genre and the authors’ knowledge of the individuals they wrote about produced distinctive results—Walter Berschin even considered the Life of Hathumoda to represent ‘a new page in the history of biography’. The book's title refers to the roles of the respective protagonists: Liutbirga lived as an anchoress for three decades, while Hathumoda is presented as an idealised abbess for the canonesses of the newly-founded community of Gandersheim. Both were troubled by diabolical attacks, troubling visions and the gift of prophecy. Yet, beyond their depictions of forms of religious dedication and saintly endurance, the texts are interesting for the light they cast on broader aspects of contemporary society and politics. Much of the Hathumoda material is taken up with her long illness, and gives telling insights into beliefs and practices surrounding death and mourning in the Carolingian period (the subject of an earlier book by Paxton). Liutbirga's career was tied up with two generations of a prominent Saxon noble family who feature prominently in her biography, and careful reading reveals snippets of information on aspects of aristocratic culture such as land stewardship, patronage and the education of women. Gandersheim became a key political centre in the tenth century (as, to a lesser degree, did Wendhausen), and the Life of Hathumoda's focus on its founding family gives us access to the nursery of the Ottonian royal dynasty at the court of King Louis the Younger: Louis was Hathumoda's brother-in-law, and Henry I was her nephew. Not all of this will be self-evident to students in particular, and read in isolation such material can be baffling, but the book's 79-page introduction does an excellent job of introducing and contextualising the texts, and points the reader in the direction of related work by scholars such as Julia Smith, Valerie Garver, Sean Gilsdorf and Paxton himself. But it should also be acknowledged that the detailed textual commentaries provided in similar volumes can make distinctive scholarly contributions, and the audience for this book should not be restricted to students and teachers. By providing an expert and thoroughly contextualised entrée into a world often shrouded in the arcana of Germanophone historiography, Paxton extends our understanding of Carolingian Saxony even as he introduces it

Ancient history · Antique · Art · Audience measurement · Biography · Bishops · Literature · Narrative · Ninth · Poetry · Political science · Sociology · Vision · Anthropology · Classics · Historical and Archaeological Studies · Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History