ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst

Charges of Abuse and Motherhood in the Carolingian World

Scholars have examined prescriptive and instructive sources that discuss or mention the abuse of children in the Carolingian world, whether infanticide, neglect, or corporeal punishment.  But no one has yet examined what this body of evidence reveals about contemporary ideas of motherhood. Rather, historians have mainly argued about how widespread such practices were. Instead I will focus on what these textual passages reveal about the ways Carolingian religious men understood mothers and their roles in the lives of their children. Ecclesiastical authorities wrote nearly all of the texts that touch upon these violent acts, including church councils, clerical letters, episcopal capitularies, penitentials, hagiography, and lay mirrors. These documents nearly always mention mothers' possible roles in instances of abuse or bodily punishment and therefore offer an opportunity to learn something about how clerics understood motherhood among a rather wide range of women. While Carolingian historians have learned a great deal about elite mothers such as queens and about the spiritual motherhood of abbesses and holy women, we know little about how the majority of women were expected to parent their children. My sources cannot offer proof of practice, but they can reveal how churchmen thought about elite and more humble mothers' relationships with their children. Often clerics had similar beliefs concerning the ways in which wealthy and poor mothers should behave, but they believed that poor mothers could be more prone to abuse their offspring. Clerical differentiation among the motivations for abuse shows some recognition of the difficulties of motherhood.