The Seclusion of Eustochium: Paschasius Radbertus and the Nuns of Soissons

Abstract

This article examines three works by the ninth-century theologian, Paschasius Radbertus, all addressed to the Carolingian community of religious women at Notre Dame de Soissons. In addition to being valuable sources for the Mariologist, these sources provide insights into the complex social world of Carolingian religious women. Written at the time of the implementation of the monastic reforms of Benedict of Aniane, Radbert's texts can be read as responses to the imposition of a stricter form of claustration on women's communities. Drawing on the patristic model of Jerome and Eustochium in particular, the spirituality of these texts stresses the contributions of religious women through intercessory prayer, liturgy, and correct doctrine. Radbert alternately emphasizes the important role played by widows in Carolingian religious houses and encourages younger members not to leave the shelter of the religious life. In particular, Radbert's commentary on Psalm 44 (45) meditates on a text that would have been significant at the nuns' consecrations, deliberately employing language that would have paralleled the conventions of secular marriage. In conclusion, Radbert's three texts for Carolingian nuns bear interesting resemblances to twelfth-century Cistercian spirituality.

Sometime after 785, the community of nuns at Notre Dame de Soissons would take in a foundling child who would become perhaps the greatest theologian of the Carolingian world: Paschasius Radbertus. According to the Bollandist life of Radbert, as I will call him here, his mother had died when the boy was very young, and the nuns arranged for him to receive his early education at the nearby monastery of St. Peter. Radbert was tonsured, however, before the altar of Notre Dame and “in the presence of the nuns,” and he later told the abbess of Soissons, Theodrada, that he considered himself as a puero uester alumnus. He would not remain at Soissons, but instead entered briefly into secular life. This was a decision he would later deeply regret, however, and Radbert eventually retired to the monastery at Corbie, whose abbots, Adalhard and Wala, were Theodrada's brothers. ¹

Radbert continued to hold Theodrada and her daughter Imma (or Irma), who succeeded her mother as abbess at Soissons, in deep gratitude, affection, and respect throughout his life. In a sense, Radbert never strayed far from the social, religious, and political orbit of Theodrada and her two powerful brothers, all cousins to Charlemagne. Radbert remained a passionate partisan of Adalhard (r. 780–815) and Wala (r. 826–835), despite upheaval and political disfavor under Charlemagne's son, Louis the Pious. Precisely insofar as they represented an older political world, Adalhard and Wala found themselves isolated in Louis's court, and Radbert would craft two highly erudite vitae to memorialize at Corbie the brothers' somewhat ambivalent legacy. Although he remained only a deacon, Radbert eventually followed the brothers as abbot of Corbie himself (r. 843–851). At the same time, Radbert also maintained an ongoing relationship with the community of Soissons, writing over the course of his life three significant treatises specifically for them: a lengthy sermon on the Assumption, known as Cogitis me, purporting to be from Jerome to the widow Paula and her daughter Eustochium; a treatise, De partu Uirginis, on the perpetual virginity of Mary and the birth of Christ; and, the longest of these works, a three-book commentary on Psalm 44 (45 by contemporary numbering).

While Cogitis me and De partu Uirginis have obvious significance from the perspective of a Mariologist, all three treatises have seldom been considered together, and even more rarely read as sources contributing to our understanding of Carolingian religious women or in light of the often checkered progress of the Carolingian reform. ² These texts have valuable insights to offer if read in this way, however. Radbert's treatises are works written out of a deep familiarity with the Soissons community, marked by warm affection and notable respect for both the nuns' spirituality and their level of learning. In all three works, Radbert addresses the nuns habitually with such endearments as carissime and dilectissime, cajoling, flattering, and admonishing them in turn. These works are strikingly intimate examples of a Carolingian abbot offering nurturing pastoral care to women who had been his own former foster-mothers, who continued to direct and offer counsel to their own community. Moreover, as with his Eucharistic work dedicated to Warin of Corvey, Radbert wrote these treatises for the Soissons community at their behest and in response, at least in part, to their questions and concerns about their liturgical practices and about existing theological controversy. The commentary on Psalm 44 (45) in particular represents a complex and creative response to the reforms of Benedict of Aniane, which called, among other things, for increased claustration of monastic houses and particularly of women. Taken together, Radbert's works for the nuns of Soissons both assumed and celebrated a model of female monastic spirituality which emphasized the nuns' aristocratic status, their learning, and their seclusion, thereby heightening the value of their spiritual contributions through prayer and the liturgy toward the welfare of the Empire. This model was based on patristic sources, particularly the writings of Jerome, and was superficially, at least, in keeping with the aims of the Benedictine reform. Radbert's model, however, posited a different, and arguably more rigorously ascetic, form of spirituality than was usually predominant in the Carolingian world, either for men or for women, which may well have been intended to subvert, or to outdo, the prevailing monastic culture propounded by Benedict of Aniane.

Throughout Radbert's career, the nuns of Soissons can be said to have played a vital role in encouraging their former protegé to develop as a writer, biblical scholar, and theologian. Like the small circles of monks who populate Radbert's Epitaphium Arsenii, the nuns of Soissons were intimate acquaintances, both political and spiritual, drawn even closer to Radbert in the adverse climate of the 830s and 840s. They represented, therefore, a comparatively safe and limited audience for Radbert, continuing and encouraging a conversation in which he pursued and developed certain themes within his body of writing. ³ Cogitis me, Radbert's treatise on the Assumption, is not securely dated, but he dedicated it to both “Paula” and her daughter “Eustochium,” no doubt Theodrada and her daughter Imma. ⁴ E. Ann Matter, the editor of De partu Uirginis, has dated this second text to between 844 and 846, the year of Theodrada's death; Radbert himself says that the request for the work had come not long before he was able to complete it. ⁵ The commentary on Psalm 44 (45) is the latest, longest, and most complex of the three works. Radbert opens the work by eulogizing Theodrada to Imma, apologizing for his tardiness in completing the work Theodrada had once requested. This would, therefore, place the text after 846, and probably in his years of voluntary exile to Saint-Riquier after 851. ⁶ At the same time, the reforms of Benedict of Aniane had been implemented at Corbie, at least in part, from 819, and presumably at Soissons as well from around the time of Amalarius of Metz's Institutio sanctimonialium of 817. If Theodrada herself had requested the commentary on Psalm 44 (45), as Radbert mentions, then all three works would have been commissioned to address concerns that arose within the first generation of reform at Corbie and Soissons, and in some respects they reflect that wider experience.

I. Women's Monasticism, Claustration, and the Carolingian Reform

A richer understanding of women's monasticism in the ninth century calls for a reassessment of the impact of the Carolingian reform on women's houses and the potential impact of strict claustration on their ties with local communities. The groundbreaking work of Suzanne Wemple argued for an inverse correlation between women's influence in the church and the existence of centralized reform in the early medieval period. In this model, the Merovingian period and the tenth century, respectively, would see a pattern of women's involvement in the church and dramatic individual cases of female sanctity, whereas the ninth century would bring about the “waning influence of women in the Frankish church.” ⁷ At the same time, Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg has suggested that the procedural structures of the Carolingian reform, specifically the formalizing of the canonization process replacing local, public consensus with “increased episcopal and synodic control,” were actively responsible for “a detrimental effect on the promotion and ultimate selection of female saints.” Elsewhere she has argued that Carolingian reform legislation, such as the Institutio sanctimonialium, made the strict active enclosure of women a priority, with the consequence that female monastic houses became increasingly dependent on male authorities for sponsorship. ⁸

Recently scholars have questioned the extent to which the reforms of Benedict of Aniane targeted women's communities in particular, and have suggested that the reasons for the decline in the number and prominence of women's houses at this time may be both more complex and more indirect. As Wemple herself noted, a decline in women's ascetic monasticism may well reflect overall improvement in the legal position of women, in part due to the reformers' advocacy of marriage. ⁹ Strict claustration could accompany special attention to and support of women's houses, as in the sixth-century communities founded by Caesarius of Arles, and alone it need not necessarily have stifled women's houses—or at least not immediately. Sarah Foot has noted the extent to which Louis the Pious and his successors encouraged and patronized certain all-female houses, precisely as part of an effort to supplant the fast-disappearing double houses. ¹⁰ With such royal and elite support, an aristocratic community like Soissons might continue and even flourish. Moreover, reacting against top-down models of reform by Semmler and Oexle, Katrinette Bodarwé’s recent study reveals a process of reform in which the Benedictine Rule was adapted for women's houses in a bewildering variety of ways. Moreover, she demonstrates that, in this process, women's monastic communities had tremendous powers of passive resistance, with reformers often having to wait decades to re-found communities with entirely new members. ¹¹ Thomas Schilp has questioned the extent to which women's houses were considered “Benedictine” at all in the early medieval period, arguing that the terminology used to describe them is indistinguishable from canonesses. ¹² Franz Felten, likewise, has noted the highly regional nature of women's monasticism in Frankish lands throughout the early medieval period, the vague terminology applied to it, and its often ephemeral nature, not necessarily connected directly to the implementation of reform. ¹³ The recent work by Alan Zola on Corbie itself notes the slow and piecemeal implementation of reform there from 819, with the community continuing to retain practices not at all in accordance with the Rule even when it was, in theory, compliant; this stage of reform would peak, in fact, during the abbacy of Radbert's hero, Adalhard, between 821 and 826. ¹⁴

Sources such as Radbert's three treatises for the nuns of Soissons can provide insights into the culture of Carolingian monasticism, particularly with regard to the complex crosscurrents swirling about the implementation of Benedictine reform. In her survey of Carolingian hagiography for women, Julia Smith has argued for a qualitative shift between Merovingian and Carolingian models of sanctity that stressed, in place of the flamboyant wonder-working of Merovingian saints, both male and female, a more confined, interior spirituality for women that would ultimately lead, perhaps unintentionally, to an emphasis on the individual soul. ¹⁵ Radbert's treatises take up similar themes, although without the hagiographers' emphasis on visionary spirituality, in particular glorifying the seclusion of the community of Soissons. For Radbert, however, seclusion hardly meant simple submission: instead, his form of aristocratic seclusion placed the nuns paradoxically beyond the reach and above the criticisms of the reformers. In their almost epicurean withdrawal from the world, the nuns were strategically placed to offer intercession for the welfare of the Empire. In keeping with the Carolingian impulse to clarify and distinguish monastic and clerical modes of life, and to enrich the understanding of these modes of life through allegorical exegesis and commentary, Radbert sought to create a complementary ideal, inspired primarily by the writings of Jerome, for communities of women.

II. Carolingian Soissons

Soissons was an important late Merovingian and Carolingian center, situated in the heart of ancestral Carolingian lands. The site of the anointing of Pippin the Short by Boniface in 751, it was also where Louis the Pious had done public penance in 833. ¹⁶ In many ways the community of nuns at Notre Dame had as proud a history as the more famous monastery of St. Medard, and possessed equally aristocratic connections. The house had originally been founded by the notorious Merovingian mayor of the palace, Ebroin, in 658/659, and followed a mixed rule of Columbanian and Benedictine elements, including the laus perennis. ¹⁷ Charlemagne's redoubtable sister Gisela seems to have been abbess of both Chelles and Soissons until her death in 810. Gisela lived primarily at Chelles, but she installed her niece Rotrud, the eldest daughter of Charlemagne, at least temporarily in Soissons, although Rotrud appears not to have been formally made abbess of the community. ¹⁸ Gisela was a highly educated woman, a noted correspondent of Alcuin, and possibly the guiding intelligence behind the Prior Metz Annals; her involvement with Notre Dame as Theodrada and Imma's immediate predecessor may have helped to promote a certain degree of learning at Soissons. ¹⁹ In a letter from Gisela and Rotrud to Alcuin from around 800, they liken Alcuin to Jerome, who “in no way would reject the requests of noble women,” but would aid them in their study of scripture, a precedent that may well have acted as inspiration for Radbert's own complex variations on this theme. ²⁰ Given the association between Soissons and Corbie, and certainly while Theodrada and Imma were abbesses contemporaneously with Adalhard, Wala, and Radbert, David Ganz has suggested that the Soissons community may have been responsible for the distinctive AB scriptorium, associated with, but not located at Corbie itself, and which borrowed manuscripts from numerous other Carolingian libraries. ²¹ T. A. M. Bishop independently reached a similar conclusion, suggesting that the AB scribes were female, that they represented a community of nuns under Adalhard's protection at Corbie which was dissolved with the imposition of the Benedictine reform, and that they probably resided at least for a few years at Notre Dame de Soissons before forming the Benedictine daughter-house of Herford in Saxony. ²² If a distinctive feature of Adalhard's abbacy at Corbie was his close relationship with a group of religious women, it suggests that Radbert's writings to Soissons, however orthodox in doctrine and reformist in tone, were not politically neutral for either Radbert or the nuns; like the life of Adalhard and the Epitaphium Arsenii, they were partisan works which carried within them the memory of exile and political defeat. ²³

Whether or not the nuns of the Soissons community were, in fact, the AB scribes, all three works by Radbert contribute to the impression that the nuns were literate in the works of the fathers and shared, to some extent, Corbie's pretensions to classicism. In his sermon on the Assumption for Theodrada, Cogitis me, Radbert adopts an easy, even playful pose as Jerome in which, for example, he quite unabashedly reminds “Paula” of the empty tomb of Mary in Jerusalem, “which you, o Paula, have seen with your own eyes.” ²⁴ As with Alcuin and Gisela, this suggests, at the very least, that Theodrada was able to appreciate Radbert's role-playing and had a certain amount of learning to offer to the nuns herself. Indeed, in a complex passage Radbert alludes to Paula's near-visionary experiences in Bethlehem, as described in Jerome's eulogy of Paula, and Radbert suggests to Theodrada's “daughters” that they should seek her out as someone capable of sharing insights beyond his own. ²⁵ In his commentary on Psalm 44 (45), Radbert similarly defers to Imma's spiritual authority over her community, addressing her as optima nutrix. ²⁶

Moreover, in this later work, Radbert also appears to be very much on his mettle as a Latin stylist, beginning the work with a Virgilian hexameter and closing it with an apology to the nuns for his rusticitas.

There is more to this, arguably, than a touch of tactful flattery on Radbert's part. In book one of the commentary on Psalm 44 (45), when he describes to the nuns the difficulties he encountered when he began to fulfill their request, Radbert launches into a long excerpt from Cicero's De officiis and a passage recording what Cato had once famously said of Scipio Africanus: “that he was never less idle (otiosum) than when idle and never less alone than when alone.” ²⁷ While Radbert means to use Scipio as a model for monastic life and for the nuns' spiritual development only in this particular respect, it is nevertheless an unusual and striking choice to present to a community of nuns for emulation. Radbert's other quotation from Virgil in the same work, this time from the first Eclogue, echoes the same theme: Deus nobis haec otia fecit, “God has made this leisure for us.” Transplanting the late Roman ideal of otium into a monastic context, Radbert evokes the late antique ideal of a sophisticated, leisured correspondence between aristocratic, educated parties. ²⁸ However, Radbert's seemingly neutral and detached language should be read in light of an ongoing and at times vehement conversation in the ninth century about the nature of monastic life. James Williams has recently suggested that one of the hallmarks of reform under Benedict of Aniane was not so much its individual rules and regulations as the Spaniard's broader emphasis on work and manual labor to counteract the creeping effects of accedia. ²⁹ This aspect of reform was, as one might imagine, fiercely resisted or, if implemented, resented, particularly in aristocratic communities. If Williams is correct, Radbert's glorification of monastic otium and his insistence on its paradoxical productivity should be read at least as subversive and possibly as polemical, a mutter of coded protest to the nuns of Soissons against the prevailing culture of work within the Benedictine reform.

III. Intercession, Liturgy, and Devotion

The central patristic model for Radbert's interactions with the nuns of Soissons is the correspondence of Jerome with young ascetic women, and with Paula and Eustochium in particular, just as Jerome's Epitaph o Paula would do much to set the tone for Carolingian women's vitae. ³⁰ Jerome and Paula's positions on the fringes of the late Roman aristocracy made this an ambivalent model even in its own time, juxtaposing as it did Jerome's spiritual and literary authority over Paula with his dependence on Paula's patronage, together with his controversial eulogizing of women's radical asceticism and the perpetual virginity of Mary. ³¹ In the letter that would serve as the model for Radbert's commentary on Psalm 44 (45), Jerome could say, on the one hand, that he preferred writing to women, and on the other, that he would not have been writing to women at all if men had asked him similar questions. Women could, however, take advantage of the blessings of God if and where it was perceived that men had neglected them. ³² Grudging though this might be, in practice it opened up an opportunity for women to take a certain amount of initiative with regard to their own spirituality. As Peter Brown has argued, the real radical nature of Jerome's ascetic program lay not so much in the asceticism itself as in its call for privacy; the seclusion of Eustochium simultaneously perpetuated deeply traditional and aristocratic Roman values, yet was potentially troublesome to the clerical hierarchy because it cut her off from their direct supervision. ³³ Radbert, significantly, would not replicate Jerome's blistering satires of married life, but he did retain the exclusive ethos of his patristic exemplar and the sense of women's monastic life as a process of perpetual spiritual grooming.

Instead of the collective church and the mediatory role of the Carolingian doctores, Radbert focuses on the nature of the community of Soissons itself and the direct access of the nuns to their bridegroom. In his commentary on Psalm 44 (45), Radbert describes the almost palpable connection he believed the chapel to have to the life of heavenwhenever I enter in my mind the oratory of the Blessed Virgin Mary, I see that ladder of Jacob raised up by which, I do not in the least hesitate to say, the angels ascend to you and descend, in which place, I do not doubt, is the house of God and the gate of heaven. ³⁴ As in his life of Adalhard, in his works for the nuns, Radbert conveys a passionate love of the music of the divine office, which he likens to David's lyre in its ability to drive away demons. ³⁵ Radbert makes it clear, in all three works, that the nuns' intercession on his behalf is deeply precious to him, and he is always highly conscious of the value of their liturgical labors: “since no action in present times is more blessed or more true than to be among angelic offices, to be mingled with divine conversations, and to be present among their faces.” ³⁶ In a very real sense, the intercession and commemoration offered by the nuns was what a Carolingian community of women was for. A “powerhouse of prayer,” in Peter Brown's phrase, prayer, intercession, and commemoration were significant contributions a cloistered community could make toward the welfare of the Empire. ³⁷ Women's houses large and wealthy enough to be equipped with scriptoria were also responsible for producing liturgical manuscripts, just as they frequently produced liturgical textiles. ³⁸ The Old Gelasian Sacramentary was produced around 750 by female scribes, either at Chelles, as Bischoff once posited, or alternately its mother-house at Jouarre, as Rosamond McKitterick has since argued, and it would not be surprising if the nuns of Soissons were similarly engaged. ³⁹

IV. Soissons and Theological Controversy

The community at Soissons was dedicated to the Virgin, and the nuns might be expected to take a certain proprietary interest in matters concerning her, “since,” as Radbert tells the nuns, “I do not doubt that you love her very greatly.” ⁴⁰ The nuns' questions show themselves to be highly aware of contemporary theological controversy. As Leo Scheffczyk noted long ago, the ninth-century controversy over adoptionism, or what might more precisely be called the Carolingian response to the teachings of the Spaniard, Felix of Urgel, provided the immediate impetus for a whole series of questions surrounding the status of the Virgin as Dei genetrix. To these polemical concerns the Carolingians responded not only with formal theological treatises, but also with devotion to the Virgin, strengthening the impulse to commemorate in the liturgy the historical events of her birth, death, and, in the absence of her body, her assumption into heaven. As Rachel Fulton has shown, liturgical innovation certainly preceded and inspired Radbert's use of the Song of Songs as a narrative for the Assumption in Cogitis me. However, that need not preclude the broader context of the Carolingian response to Felicianism for first inspiring that liturgical innovation. In this light, in Cogitis me, when Radbert in his guise as Jerome warns the Soissons nuns about the apocryphal Transitus Mariae which might come into their hands, his caution suggests the pressing general interest of questions about Mary, that Theodrada and the Soissons community kept themselves informed about these debates, and that the nuns could acquire an apocryphal text if they thought that it would address these questions.

In all three texts sent to Soissons, Radbert shows himself to be deeply fascinated by these Christological debates arising from the adoptionist controversy and their ramifications for devotion to the Virgin, including in-depth, complex discussion of Trinitarian theology and Christology. However, Radbert's overall approach to the Soissons community suggests that the nuns' questions and concerns, however educated they might be, were urgent, immediate, and personal rather than simply academic. As their patroness, whatever touched Mary touched the identity and spirituality of the nuns. In particular, debates around Mary's perpetual virginity and the status and spiritual cachet of virginity generally speaking could be genuinely agonizing and even potentially explosive in the context of a community of women, many if not all of whom were aristocratic, encompassing a range of ages and sexual experience, many of whom would have been placed in the Soissons community without a clear vocation for the monastic life before—or after—marriages were arranged for them by their families. Radbert himself suggests that he is writing this text in part for the simpliciores in the care of “Paula” and “Eustochium” as a reading to accompany their participation in the liturgy, as a pastoral letter aiming to steady and reassure them in their present vocation. ⁴¹ The alacrity with which Cogitis me was itself taken up into the ongoing Carolingian conversation about Mary shows how well Radbert's letter satisfied contemporary needs: made a lesson at Matins on the Feast of the Assumption by Hincmar of Rheims, the letter, taken to be genuine, quickly achieved popularity and a wide circulation.

It is worth noting that, however cloistered the Soissons community may have been, a work addressed to them could quickly find its way into the intellectual and liturgical bloodstream of the Carolingian world. Likewise, when Theodrada asked Radbert to address the question of the perpetual virginity of Mary, her timing was extremely adroit. Hard on the heels of the eucharistic controversy, Theodrada's request allowed Radbert an opening to respond to the arguments of his fellow monk, Ratramnus of Corbie. ⁴² To counter Ratramnus, Radbert resurrected the fourth-century dispute between Jerome and Helvidius, who had questioned the post-partum virginity of Mary, and recast the ninth-century debate in those terms, with Ratramnus portrayed as the late antique heretic and himself cast, however unworthily, in the dual roles of Jerome and Ambrose. ⁴³ Significantly, in the eucharistic controversy proper, Radbert had rededicated the second version of De corpore et sanguine Domini to Charles the Bald, but in debating the perpetual virginity of Mary, it is not the king but the nuns of Soissons who enable and embolden him in his task:

But I pray, most consecrated virgins of Christ, through the mediation of your merits, that He Who granted to him [Jerome] such skill in speaking and strength in fighting against adversaries, may also deign to give me grace in speaking, and grant it to me to open those things which are worthy of this mystery in the spirit of truth, insofar as I, who am supported by no merits of my own, may be found so greatly worthy, from both directions by you and for your sake, o matronae of Christ, that I might be able to defend fitly the chastity of the mother of my Lord and to lay bare the truth to those not believing rightly, so they might come to their senses and cease to speak falsehood any further. ⁴⁴

Radbert is, of course, invoking the trope of the humility of the monastic writer, but, nevertheless, he addressed the nuns in such a way as to suggest that they were not merely passive recipients of his teaching, but also his supporters in controversy who cast themselves as fellow defenders of the Virgin.

V. Widows, Virgins, and Devotion to the Virgin Mary

In this passage, Radbert addresses himself to both consecrated virgins and matronae, or widows, and is actually quite respectful about the spiritual status of the latter. In both Cogitis me and De partu Uirginis, in fact, as well as in the Life of Adalhard, Radbert is extremely supportive of widows in monastic life and sympathetic toward their contributions. At the same time, he repeatedly portrays the Virgin as the ideal model for both virgins and widows, arguing that the Virgin exemplifies both the purity of virgins and the fruitfulness of the married. In Cogitis me, Radbert enjoins the nuns to “imitate she whom you love, imitate the blessed and glorious Virgin, whose feast you celebrate today,” and goes on to make it clear that his words are applicable to everyone, “whichever of you are young women, whichever of you are mothers” ⁴⁵ For Radbert, the performance of the liturgy became such a conduit of divine grace that it had the potential, if not to erase distinctions between groups, then certainly to create community around and in spite of them:

Therefore, dearest ones, because the way of our salvation is in the praises of the Savior, I urge and remind you, on this holy festivity of Mary the bearer of God: do not cease from [her] praises. But if you are a virgin, rejoice that you have deserved to be, even you, that which you praise; only take care that you may be someone who is fit to praise worthily. If, rather, you are continent and chaste, honor and give praise, because it does not come about through any other source that you may be chaste other than from the grace of Christ, which existed most fully in Mary, whom you praise. If, rather, you are married, or even a sinner (peccatrix), nevertheless confess and give praise, since from that source mercy has flowed out to all and grace that they may give praise. ⁴⁶

In the concluding sections of the treatise, the two modes of religious life for women, with the Virgin as the most perfect model for both, become Radbert's central theme, and he returns to Paula and Eustochium, too, as historical types of the virgins and the married for the nuns to imitate. ⁴⁷ Similarly, in De partu Uirginis, Radbert is able to appeal to the nuns' own experience as women to inflect their devotion to Mary, while at the same time setting the Virgin categorically apart from both virgins and widows:

Because we men do not know the nature of that sex, let us question the virgins, and let us also question the matrons joined in marriage. The virgins indeed, so that we may know what the intact nature (integritas) of flesh and blood is; but the married, [so that we may know] if there is any corruption or suffering in giving birth, if contamination of the blood and reception of seed has not preceded it. For we do not freely disturb your modesty, dear ones, who do not speak about these things without great shame; but the honor of outstanding piety is yours and the glory of virtue, to proclaim the incorrupt and unpolluted chastity of the most blessed Virgin and to confess her free from all taint of original sin. Concerning her, if we should ask the virgins, they know the grace of incorruption, but they do not know the fertility of offspring. But if we should ask those given in marriage, they know indeed the labors and groans of the curse of Eve, just as they also know the fertility of seed among afflictions and sadnesses, but they do not know the intact nature of virginity, neither in conception nor in birth. But the blessed Mother of the Lord remained a virgin in both, that is, as a mother in conception and as a virgin in birth, because contaminated in neither of these [states] she was a model to the rest of women ⁴⁸

As John Williams has shown, differences in ninth-century gynecological theory between Spanish adoptionists and the Carolingians—namely, one-versus two-seed theories of reproduction—had a direct impact on their respective understandings of the role of the Virgin in the Incarnation and, in turn, on their Christologies. ⁴⁹ For Radbert, the Virgin was not merely a conduit of divinity, but the bearer of God, in whose physical body and blood Christ shared. As in anti-adoptionist polemic, which stressed the special nature of Christ in comparison with humanity, Radbert repeatedly emphasizes, in both Cogitis me and De partu Uirginis, the extent to which the Virgin is qualitatively different from other, ordinary women; however, it is precisely because of that difference that it is possible for the Virgin to be appropriated through devotion by virgins and widows alike.

Theodrada herself had, of course, been previously married, and almost certainly other prominent and aristocratic widows played an important role in a community like Soissons. Particularly when contrasted with Jerome's acid screeds, Radbert's insistence on the place of the married within Soissons suggests a tactful acceptance of social reality among the ninth-century Carolingian aristocracy. ⁵⁰ Radbert shared with Louis the Pious and the legislators at the Council of Paris biblically derived notions of the king's responsibilities toward widows from which Louis's legislation had sprung. Radbert's encouragement of widows likely reflects the Benedictine reformers' insistence, in turn, that widows become a formal part of cloistered monastic communities instead of setting up for themselves, but it may equally show Radbert's experience of the complex strategies that wealthy widows employed to maintain some control over property, in which relationships with individual monasteries like Corbie and Soissons often played prominent roles. ⁵¹ Radbert alludes to the important, and probably steadying, influence exerted by older, married women within Carolingian nunneries, suggesting that both grades were necessary and mutually reinforcing elements in community life:

Therefore, widows are always well joined together with virgins, as the apostle says: “The unwed woman and the virgin thinks on those things which are the Lord's, so that she might be holy in body and spirit” [1 Cor. 7:34]. For in a certain way the school of virginity grows and is strengthened by examples of widows who have preserved chaste marriage with men. They teach that integrity should be all the more preserved by virgins to God, and they teach that it is almost of no less virtue to abstain from marriage, which has at one time given delight, than not to know the delights of marriage. In either grade, accordingly, firmness is praised, and the strength of heavenly life is proclaimed. ⁵²

In small monastic communities, perceived differences in the spiritual status of virgins and widows almost certainly created lingering resentments and factionalism over time, and in all his works dedicated to Soissons, Radbert's pastoral approach aims to create consensus among the community. Radbert's tolerance almost certainly draws on the thought of Gregory the Great, which accepted the existence of multiple forms of life within the church, but nevertheless, the extent to which he encourages virgins and widows to aid one another is striking, particularly his sympathetic understanding of the difficulties of chaste life for the previously married, and his view that widows had any spiritual counsel whatsoever to offer.

VI. Radbert's Commentary on Psalm 44 (45) and the Benedictine Reform

When Radbert undertook his commentary on Psalm 44 (45), he was, very characteristically, attempting something that was simultaneously original and deeply traditional. His most immediate literary model was a fairly lengthy letter of Jerome to a young woman named Principia—not Eustochium, but clearly of her ilk—and Radbert also draws on such familiar patristic authorities as Augustine's Enarrationes in Psalmos and Cassiodorus's Expositio psalmorum. ⁵³ But to compose a three-book, free-standing commentary on a single psalm, and, moreover, to direct that commentary very explicitly to a community of nuns, was nevertheless an unprecedented feat for a Carolingian theologian. As with Cogitis me, the immediate cause for Theodrada's original request appears to have been to reinforce already existing liturgical practice. Psalm 44 (45) is an epithalamium and, like the Song of Songs, it contains extensive descriptions of the beauty of its two main figures, the king and his young bride, enjoined to “forget your people and your father's house” as she enters this new phase of her life. ⁵⁴ The psalm would have recurred with some frequency, of course, in the nuns' performance of the Office, and in later years it would form an important part of the Common of Virgins. ⁵⁵ In the course of the commentary, however, Radbert repeatedly refers to the psalm as the nuns' titulum dotis, or “deed of dower” in their marriage to Christ, and his commentary as the epithalamium celebrating the marriage, the carmen pro nuptiis. ⁵⁶ Dos would have been a highly charged term for Radbert to use, potentially referring either to the gift to a bride from her bridegroom, the dower, or as a gift to a bride from her parents, the dowry. To refer to a piece of scripture as the deed of dos of the nuns suggests that Radbert intended the first of these possible meanings: the psalm as the documentary promise of Christ's future dower of the nuns. For Carolingian aristocratic women, the dower was the part of a woman's property most unquestionably hers outright, to keep or dispose of as she, and she alone, wished. ⁵⁷ As such, Radbert's use of the term would have been intended to have a powerful, even visceral, impact on his female audience, arguing, as Jerome had once done, for the paradoxically liberating power of claustration. Moreover, it also suggests that Psalm 44 (45) was associated with, and in all likelihood sung, during the ceremony of the consecratio virginum itself, which increasingly in this period north of the Alps imitated many of the conventions of secular marriage. ⁵⁸ As with his other works to the nuns, the commentary on Psalm 44 (45) is interspersed with passages of direct, even impassioned, speech in which Radbert addresses the nuns directly in the second person, suggesting that the commentary was intended not so much as a reference work as a piece to be read aloud—in chapter, for example. If this were indeed the case, then the collective reading of Radbert's commentary would have given the nuns a way to commemorate and reaffirm the moment of their own consecratio at the same time as they meditated on the words of the biblical text.

Alongside the intimate, personal meaning Psalm 44 would have had for the nuns, the text had a wider, more corporate resonance within the Carolingian reform and the monastic reforms of Benedict of Aniane. A paraphrase of Psalm 44:11, Obsculta, o filii, praecepta magistri, et inclina aurem cordis tui, forms the opening words of the Benedictine Rule, although the original text of the psalm would have addressed the young bride of the psalm—Audi, filia—rather than Benedict's male hearers. ⁵⁹ In all, the text's editor, Paulus, has traced at least twenty-two extracts from the Rule that appear in Radbert's commentary on Psalm 44 (45), some employed multiple times. Radbert's commentary, therefore, should probably be understood in parallel with other Carolingian commentaries on the Rule by Hildemar and Smaragdus of St. Mihiel, and with the commentaries on the liturgy by Amalarius of Metz and Walahfrid Strabo. At the same time, however, Radbert never refers to the Rule or to (either) Benedict directly, integrating his quotations and paraphrases from it into the text of the commentary. This certainly suggests that Radbert and the nuns of Soissons were so deeply familiar with the Rule that its language had been internalized. At the same time, the use of the language of the Rule may have been a tacit argument that meddlesome intrusion from outside the community was unnecessary. In a passage in book one, for example, Radbert drops single phrases (here italicized) from the Rule into a discussion of the nature of monastic life at Soissons: “For what else is this house, dear ones, in which you dwell, other than the fortress of God and the school of divine service, the workshop of the virtues, the tower of eternal contemplation, the defense of perpetual chastity.” ⁶⁰

Radbert's commentary envisions the life of the community at Soissons, therefore, in terms consistent with the Benedictine reform: the nuns “never less alone than when alone,” suggesting claustration had been imposed, with a significant number of both widows and young women living under the Rule. The psalm was particularly associated with the ceremony of the nuns' own consecratio; taken as a whole, the commentary ultimately becomes a kind of apologia for women in regular monastic life, intended to build on, and perhaps to go beyond, the mere observance of the Rule itself. ⁶¹ Throughout the first book of the commentary, part of Radbert's rhetorical strategy is to provide the nuns with an elaborate sequence of images by which they were supposed to understand the life they had chosen: the wise virgins of the gospel parable, the adulescentulas of the Song of Songs, the classic patristic metaphor of bees in a beehive, gathering honey from the fields of scripture. ⁶² Radbert continually likens the nuns to lilies, “the flowers of Christ and the lilies of the churches,” imitating Christ, the lily of the valley of the Song of Songs, “who browses among the lilies,” the lilies whose whiteness stands in contrast to the roses of the Soissons martyrs Crispin and Crispinianus. ⁶³ Radbert seems particularly pleased by analogies of flowers: he encourages the nuns to consider the flowers with which the church is adorned, the “humble violets” and, most charmingly, certain “yellow flowers,” probably daisies or sunflowers, which follow the sun's progress across the sky. ⁶⁴ Radbert plays on and even emphasizes the comparison between his daisies and the secluded condition of the nuns: “And if, as though at night, you shut yourselves up (clausistis), most dear ones, it is so that, because you do not know the darkness, at the rise of the eternal sun, as if reborn, you will soon be able to receive the light.” ⁶⁵ Later in book one, he repeats the same verb, admitting that, to some degree, he was trying to avert potential claustrophobia among the community: “And so I ask,” he says, “so that that place where you have shut yourselves in (clausistis), most dear ones, may not seem narrow to you, since the house of the Lord into which you have entered is huge and great.” ⁶⁶ Even such an enthusiast for spiritual withdrawal as Radbert had to concede that complete claustration had the potential to be stifling.

Radbert's understanding of the exalted condition of the nuns, like that of the Virgin, arises out of, and is contingent upon, his Christology: the nature of the Sponsus defines the nature and status of his sponsae. As a consequence, Radbert returns again and again, particularly in book two, to the importance of the nuns' correct and creedal understanding of the nature of Christ, as expressed through the language of Psalm 44 (45) and the Song of Songs, with book two corresponding to the first half of the psalm text, which focuses on the person of the Bridegroom. ⁶⁷ Book three of Radbert's commentary corresponds to the second half of Psalm 44 (45), which focuses on the person of the young bride of the king, and Radbert uses the language of the psalm to underscore the royal status of the nuns and the exalted nature of their chosen way of life, provided that they persevere within the community at Notre Dame. Throughout book three, he addresses the nuns as uos felices, “you fortunate ones,” perhaps as a classicizing alternative to beatae, even repeating himself at times to drive the point home. ⁶⁸ The bride of Psalm 44 (45) is regina exaltata, filia renata et adoptata, coniux; “And let not the unfaithful soul say,” Radbert cautions, “that this crown is not mine but is promised in common to one and all,” which suggests that such objections did, in fact, occur to Carolingian nuns, and that the individual possession of their heavenly dower did matter considerably to them. ⁶⁹ As in Cogitis me and De partu Uirginis, Radbert speaks to all grades of women within Soissons, assuring them of their place within the community. To those who had once fallen, meretricabatur post idola fornicationis, they had been made faithful, having chosen the “so-tiny nook of confined Soissons,” angulum tantum angustae Suessionis. ⁷⁰ In one passage Radbert speaks directly to the child oblates among the community of Soissons, urging them to continue in the monastic life:

Therefore, sister, let not the vows of your parents, who have chosen what is better [cf. Mary and Martha, Luke 10:41–42], displease you. Rather consider carefully what you owe to your parents, and what to God. . . . And so, most beloved ones, complete in yourselves the fortunate (felicia) vows of your parents. Complete what you vowed to God. . . . Before you left the womb of your mother, you began to be the spouse of Him in an eternal bond. Therefore it is fitting that all of us might be His—but you especially, because you were promised from your parents, because you accepted the deed of dower [titulum dotis] so that you might remain, fortunately [feliciter] consecrated in virginity to a virgin spouse. Therefore all things which were promised in this epithalamium of dower are prepared for you.” ⁷¹

In this passage, Radbert may be more or less delicately privileging the claims of the religious life and the past promises of the oblates' parents over those parents' potential future claims, should they belatedly attempt to withdraw their young daughters from the community.

VII. Women's Monasticism, Claustration, and Spirituality

The constant tension in monastic life, rarely resolved, between the ideal of solitude and the reality of layers of community and social ties in which a community was embedded, has often been hardest on women's houses, simultaneously the least capable of surviving independently and the most criticized for failing to live up to the ideal. At the same time, seclusion for women's houses has often been a deeply ambivalent ideal: alternately empowering and isolating, seeming to posit an independent value for women's existence and spirituality apart from society, and then cutting them off from the vitality of that society necessary to keep a community functioning healthily in practice. In the tradition of Paula and Eustochium, seclusion for women was the aristocratic prerogative of wealthy widows, a feasible and even a desirable and admirable course for them to follow. For all of the misogyny of which Jerome has stood accused, he was far too ambitious and adept not to advocate a way of life that would have been flattering on some level to his female audience, his social superiors, even if it set him at odds with the broader circles of Christian society. Five hundred years later, the secluded lifestyle Jerome eulogized was not open to everyone, but for those for whom it was an option, we should not automatically assume that it was not still appealing, particularly where aristocratic ideals and values also remained very much alive. In Radbert's hands, his portrayal of monastic life might well have been attractive to certain communities of aristocratic nuns, particularly when seclusion did not necessarily mean intellectual isolation and they felt that their performance of the liturgy was recognized as being of spiritual benefit to their families and to the empire as a whole. How the Soissons nuns felt about the imposition of full claustration, we do not and cannot know, but responses were, no doubt, as variegated as the cases of the individual women themselves.

Overall, Radbert's commentary on Psalm 44 (45) suggests a felt need to provide a Carolingian women's community with a powerful rationale for claustration, detailing the spiritual benefits that would accrue to the nuns if they maintained their way of life. In particular, their seclusion is understood to heighten their spiritual contributions made through liturgy and commemorative prayer. Almost inevitably, therefore, Radbert's model, like Jerome before him and the Cistercians after him, emphasizes the value of the spiritual experience of the individual soul, to which Radbert added weight by illustrating its near-mystical relation to its bridegroom, Christ. To praise a life of claustration, to describe it in terms of heroic solitude, almost necessitates placing a value on women's spirituality independent of their involvement in society. That this same emphasis appears in other works of Carolingian hagiography, as Julia Smith has shown, suggests that Radbert's writings participated in broader Carolingian conceptions of sanctity for religious women, even if those were not as fervid or stylized as Radbert's efforts for the nuns of Soissons. A large part of these shared conceptions must stem from Jerome's influence, unimpeachable and widely recognized, although Radbert was hardly a slavish imitator of his patristic model.

We need further research to enrich our still very shadowy understanding of the experience of Carolingian religious women. But it seems clear, nevertheless, that Radbert's continuous involvement and dialogue with the community of nuns at Soissons deeply impacted his conception of monastic life as a bridal relationship with Christ. Originally crafted for its female audience at Soissons, the ideal could be reappropriated and made applicable to the experience of male abbots like Adalhard and to Radbert himself in a chaotic political landscape. One could take refuge in the cultivation of a personal, individual, direct response to Christ the Bridegroom and to the Virgin Mary, with the poetry of the Song of Songs acting as both script and emotional touchstone. Given the similarities between these works of Radbert for the Soissons community and later works of twelfth-century spirituality, it is at least worth asking the extent to which Bernard of Clairvaux and others adopted, adapted, or were influenced by Radbert's model. And if so, it is worth remembering that the individualistic and bridal spirituality of Bernard of Clairvaux was based on an ideal of the monastic life originally intended for, in the late antique and early medieval period, and rooted in the experience of aristocratic women, and that Bernard was following in Radbert's footsteps in his recognition that an ideal predominantly associated with women's religious experience could, in fact, be universal.