Motherhood, Religion, and Society in Medieval Europe, 400-1400

Essays Presented to Henrietta Leyser

Lesley Smith, Conrad Leyser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409431459
• eBook ISBN: 9781317093961
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Who can concentrate on thoughts of Scripture or philosophy and be able to endure babies crying...? Will he put up with the constant muddle and squalor which small children bring into the home? The wealthy can do so... but philosophers lead a very different life... So, according to Peter Abelard, did his wife Heloise state in characteristically stark terms the antithetical demands of family and scholarship. Heloise was not alone in making this assumption. Sources from Jerome onward never cease to remind us that the life of the mind stands at odds with life in the family. For all that we have moved in the past two generations beyond kings and battles, fiefs and barons, motherhood has remained a blind spot for medieval historians. Whatever the reasons, the result is that the historiography of the medieval period is largely motherless. The aim of this book is to insist that this picture is intolerably one-dimensional, and to begin to change it. The volume is focussed on the paradox of motherhood in the European Middle Ages: to be a mother is at once to hold great power, and by the same token to be acutely vulnerable. The essays look to analyse the powers and the dangers of motherhood within the warp and weft of social history, beginning with the premise that religious discourse or practice served as a medium in which mothers (and others) could assess their situation, defend claims, and make accusations. Within this frame, three main themes emerge: survival, agency, and institutionalization. The volume spans the length and breadth of the Middle Ages, from late Roman North Africa through ninth-century Byzantium to late medieval Somerset, drawing in a range of types of historian, including textual scholars, literary critics, students of religion and economic historians. The unity of the volume arises from the very diversity of approaches within it, all addressed to the central topic.

Chapter 1
Augustine and Monnica

Kate Cooper

The relationship between mothers and children in antiquity is often elusive for modern historians, because it was for the most part not the kind of thing that our ancient predecessors cared to write about. What we know of it has been pieced together as a mosaic from disparate sources: from laws and inscriptions, and from occasional references in poetry and the ancient romances. For one family of the provincial gentry in late Roman North Africa, however, a window has been left open to shed a dazzling light. Monnica, the mother of Augustine, bishop of Hippo, is the subject of an extended memoir that forms part of Augustine’s Confessions, the meditation on human frailty and the love of God that her son wrote upon becoming a bishop.¹

Born in 354, Augustine was the son of Patricius, a clubbable member of the town council of Thagaste, a market town in the fertile valley of the Mejerda river (modern Souk Arras in eastern Algeria). In light of the father’s good relations with one of the more powerful local landowners, the son’s early brilliance meant that through him the family had the chance to raise its status. By the time Augustine’s career was properly launched, it was within reason to aspire to an office that could confer promotion to the senatorial class. Augustine’s education stretched the modest resources of his parents to breaking point, but it was a sound investment. Yet when Augustine reached sixteen the money ran out, and he was forced to suspend his studies, kicking his heels at home, until resources were found to send him back to school and then university.

We know very little about the family standing of Monnica’s people, beyond the fact that they were of citizen status. According to the practice of the time, Patricius would have tried to marry the daughter of a local landowner slightly more powerful than his own father, and there is no reason to believe that he did not succeed. The story Augustine tells of his mother is that of a woman whose vivid imagination and human warmth had allowed her to expand her own horizons from the minor provincial town of Thagaste to the heights of Milan, then the empire’s Western capital. It is possible that she had her own wealth and connections. Augustine’s choice to bring his by then widowed mother with him to Milan when he went to the imperial city to make his career may have been a matter less of charity towards a widowed mother than of a sense – correct, as it turned out – that the social skills and contacts of an experienced provincial matrona could serve him well in establishing his standing at court.

Augustine’s story of Monnica is coloured by his ambivalence about her worldly ambitions, and he tends to downplay her considerable nous. If he writes about her with great fondness, there is also a certain narcissism in his point of view. His memoir shows interest not in the mother’s dreams, but in the son’s conscience with respect to the disappointments he knows himself to have caused. Still, he reports with relief that, in the end, he had somehow managed to reconcile his mother’s contradictory hopes for him.

There were other more painful memories to contend with, however. The Confessions also give us a glimpse of a second mother–son relationship, that of Augustine’s son by the love of his life, the woman with whom he lived and whom he was forced to leave in the brutal game of arranged marriage and social climbing at court. When Augustine wrote the Confessions he had concluded his precipitous climb, retiring from public office, accepting baptism, and allowing himself to be ordained first as a Christian priest and then as a consecrated bishop. While he was unwilling to share with his readers even the name of his lost love, whom he had betrayed for the sake of ambition, he was able to muse freely on his years with Monnica. He was now far older than his mother had been at the time of his own childhood, and looked back at their years together with affection only mildly coloured by regret.

Monnica married at around fourteen, to Patricius, a man substantially older than herself. To a modern sensibility, it is difficult to imagine the challenge faced by the young Monnica when she first went as a bride to her husband’s house. Augustine says that she was brought up ‘in modesty and sobriety’, and that she married early. ‘When she reached marriageable age, she was given to a man and served him as her lord. She tried to win him for you, speaking to him of her virtues through which you made her beautiful, so that her husband loved, respected and admired her’ (Confessions, 9.8.17).² It is somewhat shocking to remember that in Roman law the ‘marriageable age’ to which Augustine refers here was only twelve – although there is some evidence that Roman women normally married slightly later, in their mid-teens, and Monnica may have done so as well.

Augustine remembered his father as hot-tempered, and the marriage was not an easy one. Monnica and Patricius seem to have had three children. The first, probably the older son Navigius, must have been born when Monnica was in her mid teens, and there was also a girl. Augustine was born when his mother was twenty-three, and he may have been the last. Augustine rarely mentions his sister, but there is a hint of sibling rivalry when he writes about Navigius. The older brother appears repeatedly in Augustine’s writings as a foil for the younger brother’s brilliance and sensitivity. Navigius fails to follow his younger brother’s train of thought, or his obtuseness leads him to miss a moment of complicity when Augustine and Monnica understand each other perfectly. The younger son was clearly possessive about his closeness to his mother.

The father, by contrast, does not seem to have been an important rival for her affections. As an older man, Augustine remembered Patricius as having been repeatedly unfaithful to Monnica, and he remembered Monnica as having turned a blind eye. It is possible that she was in fact grateful for his infidelities, since they may have allowed her to escape the cycle of almost continuous pregnancy and childbirth experienced by many other women. However, it is also possible, given the public health conditions of late Roman North Africa, that there were many pregnancies but only three that produced a surviving child.

Augustine offers us a window into the austere upbringing that prepared his mother for the task of holding her own when faced with a difficult older man and an equally difficult mother-in-law. Although she had been brought up by Christian parents, it seems to have been the relationship with the household’s female slaves that left the most lasting impression on the child. Most important of these, in Monnica’s memory, was an old woman who had been with the family since Augustine’s grandfather’s childhood. ‘She used to speak highly not so much of her mother’s diligence in training her as of a decrepit maidservant who had carried her father when he was an infant, in the way that infants are often carried on the back of older girls’ (9.8.17). The old woman was an important figure in the household, both loved and feared.

Because of this long service and for her seniority and high moral standards in a Christian house, she was held in great honour by her masters. So she was entrusted with responsibility for her master’s daughters and discharged it with diligence and, when necessary, was vehement with a holy severity in administering correction. (9.8.17)

At points, her strategies for developing the girls’ sense of self-control seem somewhat alarming. For example, the children were denied drinking water despite the North African heat. ‘Outside those times when were fed a most modest meal at their parents’ table, she allowed them to drink not even water, even if they were burning with thirst, wishing to avert the formation of a bad habit’ (9.8.17). The Spartan training would serve Monnica well in her future life.

Another story, this time told of one of Monnica’s childish companions, a slave-girl with whom she often did errands for her parents, makes vivid the awkward balance of power in the household. In even minor instances, the master’s daughter had to show herself worthy of her privilege, or she would be made to feel it by the other children in the house. When Monnica was asked to fetch wine from the storage cask to fill the jug with which it was served at table, she would sometimes take a sip of the wine she was carrying, and eventually she acquired a taste for it. This left an opening for one of her playmates to wound her pride: ‘The slave-girl who used to accompany her to the cask had a dispute with her young mistress which happened when they were alone together. Bitterly she insulted her by bringing up the accusation that she was a drunkard. The taunt hurt’ (9.8.18). Augustine commends the child’s reaction to the accusation: instead of trying to defend herself, ‘she reflected … and stopped the habit.’

The moral of the story (which Augustine may have heard from his mother) seems to be that the wise child Monnica was humble enough – or self-possessed enough – to find opportunity in even the most humiliating of childhood dramas. Even the malicious attention of other children who envied her virtue – or her position – and wanted to ‘catch her out’ could be taken as a valuable chance for moral betterment. ‘… The maidservant in her anger sought to wound her little mistress, not to cure her. But You, Lord, ruler of heaven and earth, turn to your own purposes the deep torrents. Even from the fury of one soul you brought healing to another’ (9.8.18). This ability of Monnica’s to find valuable correction where others would have seen only pointless humiliation was to be one of her great gifts.

When Monnica married, she was again the target of spiteful tactics from her inferiors, this time from the female slaves of her husband’s household. ‘Monnica’s mother-in-law was at first stirred up to hostility towards her by the whisperings of malicious maidservants’, Augustine tells us. However, she won her husband’s mother over, ‘by her respectful manner, and by persistence in patience and gentleness. The result was that her mother-in-law denounced the interfering tongues of the slave-girls to her son’ (9.9.20). We must imagine here a household in which the mother-in-law is a widow living with her adult son; otherwise it would have been to the father-in-law that disputes among the household’s women were reported.

The power of punishment wielded by the paterfamilias is seen here as an instrument of good order. The mother-in-law applies to her son to cut short a situation that has spun out of control. ‘The domestic harmony between herself and her daughter-in-law was being disturbed, and she asked for them to be punished. He met his mother’s wish by subjecting the girls of whom she complained to a whipping’. We are led to believe that order was thus successfully restored. ‘From then on, no one dared to utter a word, and they lived with a memorably gentle benevolence towards each other’ (9.9.20).

Yet the bishop betrays ambivalence about his father’s power, which was not always applied with justice. As a beloved younger son, Augustine’s natural instinct was to take his mother’s side as he watched her efforts to cope with a difficult husband, and this sympathy colours his account of the relationship between his parents, written long after both of them were dead. He paints his father as warm-hearted if somewhat volatile – ‘He was exceptional both for his kindness and for his quick temper’ (9.9.19) – and as someone who could not be trusted to manage his temper. In this, Patricius was probably not unlike many Roman husbands of his day.

Augustine was grateful for his mother’s pragmatic attitude to her situation. Again, her patient willingness to look for opportunities where others saw only difficulty would stand her in good stead. ‘She knew that an angry husband should not be opposed, not only by anything she did, but even by a word.’ He did not see her as allowing herself to be walked upon, but rather as having the self-control to choose her moment. She could be trusted to make her own case when she was met with unjust criticism, but she was cautious about the timing. ‘Once she saw that he had become calm and quiet, and that the occasion was opportune, she would explain the reason for her action, in case perhaps he had reacted without sufficient consideration’ (9.9.19).

In his desire to celebrate his mother’s adept handling of a potentially threatening imbalance of power, Augustine steers perhaps rather too close to blaming those women who were not so fortunate for the difficulties they experienced with their own husbands. When other women complained about the behaviour of their husbands, Monnica was more practical than sympathetic. ‘Speaking as if in jest but offering serious advice, Monnica used to blame their tongues. she thought that they should remember their condition and not proudly withstand their masters’ (9.9.19).

All concerned seem to have taken it for granted that wives who did not manage their husbands’ tempers successfully could expect physical abuse. When Monnica gave advice to her friends, she was met with admiration. ‘The wives were astounded, knowing what a violent husband she had to put up with. Yet it was unheard of, nor was there ever a mark to show, that Patrick had beaten his wife or that a domestic quarrel had caused dissension between them.’ In any event, Augustine’s impression was that Monnica’s advice was useful to those women who took it to heart. ‘Those who followed her advice found by experience that they were grateful for it, while those who did not were treated as subordinate and mistreated’ (9.9.19).

Years later as a bishop, when he wrote letters of advice to married women, Augustine would suggest a similar tactic of charm and patience for dealing with difficult husbands. He has sometimes been criticized for this: since it was certainly a bishop’s duty to admonish a man who was misbehaving toward his wife, some scholars have thought that it was wrong to encourage the wives to make light of any difficulty with their husbands. However, if Augustine reveals any weakness of judgement in this arena, he came by it honestly. It is characteristic of children who grow up in abusive households to internalize the distress caused by a parent’s outbursts, and to believe, however wrongly, that if only one could find the right formula to soothe the nerves of the abuser, the abusive behaviour would cease. Augustine clearly believed that his mother had somehow found the magic formula, and he wished to dwell on her victory.

One imagines that, as he tells the story, the now-grown son is looking for a way to put an uncomfortable memory to rest. Even if the young Monnica’s attempts to steer her husband away from intimidating behaviour and even violence were largely successful, having to witness them must have been distressing to her children. For the mother, the presence of a sympathetic son must have been a source of strength, especially a son who paid as close attention to her struggles as Augustine’s memoir reveals that he did. One can understand why the boy was the object of such intense affection.

One wonders, too, whether Monnica’s ambition for her son – the ambition that drove him first to Carthage and then to Rome and Milan – was not a way of imagining a different future, not only for him but also for herself. The life he chose in early adulthood, which took him far from Thagaste to the imperial capital at Milan, must have seemed a provocative answer to the years of enduring the temper of a swaggering provincial paterfamilias.

One of the petty humiliations to be endured in Thagaste seems to have been the routine expressions of the father’s masculine self-importance:

when one day at the baths my father saw that I was showing signs of virility and the stirrings of adolescence, he was overjoyed to suppose that he would now be having grandchildren, and told my mother so. His delight was that of the intoxication which makes the world oblivious to You, its Creator, and to love your creation instead of you. (2.3.6)³

Behind the charge that Patricius had forgotten to honour God one senses an understandable feeling of discomfort with the father’s jubilation at the son’s sexual development.

Years later, when Augustine came to tell the story, he was safely past his own years as a Roman husband and father. If he had felt pride in his own boy’s emerging sexuality, he had nonetheless rejected the culture of the baths – his own father’s culture – with its easy male sexual display. By the time Augustine’s son Adeodatus was a teenager, both he and his father were living together in a monastic community – an atmosphere of male sociability, to be sure, but one where talk about sex was firmly discouraged. By the time Augustine wrote his Confessions, Adeodatus had been dead for a decade.

This is something we must remember when we return to the story of Monnica. Among many losses, the loss of his mother was one that Augustine was drawn to talking about. However, if he was willing to speak expansively about her, this is by no means because this loss was the most painful. Rather, it was somehow the most manageable. There were regrets, but they were regrets that could be laid to rest. He was able to tell himself – and to believe it – that whatever the petty deceptions and betrayals of their long relationship, he had in the end been true to her.

The relationship with Monnica had been, as Augustine now saw it, a perfect instrument for drawing him towards God. Sometimes unwittingly, Monnica’s desires had been aligned with God’s deeper purpose for her son, and the most bitter of her disappointments had turned out to be indispensable steps towards realizing the dearest hopes of her heart.

This point is nowhere more visible than in Augustine’s account of his departure for Rome. At twenty-eight, after he had been teaching rhetoric at Carthage for a number of years, he had been met with a blow that had darkened his outlook. Augustine had long waited for the opportunity to consult with the Manichaean bishop Faustus, whose arrival in Carthage, it had been promised, would offer a resolution to some inconsistencies in the Manichaen teaching that were a source of intellectual agitation to the younger man. Yet Faustus brought only disappointment. Augustine could see why others loved him – he was a generous and humane teacher – but he was by no means a great light intellectually,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction Henrietta Leyser
• Chapter 1 Augustine and Monnica
• Chapter 2 From Maternal Kin to Jesus as Mother: Royal Genealogy and Marian Devotion in the Ninth-century West
• Chapter 3 Dhuoda on Dreams
• Chapter 4 Motherhood and Power in Early Medieval Europe, West and East: The Strange Case of the Empress Eirene
• Chapter 5 In Search of the Good Mother: Twelfth-century Celibacy and Affectivity
• Chapter 6 Twelfth-century English Mothers
• Chapter 7 Did Mothers Teach their Children to Read?
• Chapter 8 Who is my Mother? Honouring Parents in Medieval Exegesis of the Ten Commandments
• Chapter 9 Making Motherhood in Medieval England: The Evidence from Medicine
• Chapter 10 Obstacles to Motherhood
• Chapter 11 A Mother’s Past and her Children’s Futures: Female Inheritance, Family and Dynastic Hospitals in the Thirteenth Century
• Chapter 12 Becoming the Theotokos: Birgitta of Sweden and Fulfilment of Salvation History
• Chapter 13 Mothers and Orphans in Fourteenth-century London
• Chapter 14 Mother or Stepmother to History? Joan de Mohun and her Chronicle
• Bibliography
• Henrietta Leyser: Principal Publications
• Index