Forschungen zur' . - ~. ~. . . Reichs-, Papst- und Landesgeschichte

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PETER HERDE ZUM 65. GEBURTSTAG'i i von Freunden, Schülern und Kollegen dargebracht .

Herausgegeben von Karl Borchardt und Enno Bünz

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Anton Hiersemarm . Stuttgart 1998

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Widukind's Mirror for a Princess - An Exercise in Self-Knowledge

1. History as a Medium of Self-Knowing

From time out of sight, narrators have told history to shape, or re-shape, minds and hearts. Whether narration were oral or written, raconteurs intended to imprint the future with the image of a remembered past. Scholars of historical writing and literary critics now recognize all narration as an exercise in consciousness'. Their interest generally is in the consciousness of the author, the unspoken and declared choices by which the raconteur unfolded a story. The identity of the intended audience and its expected response has also to be taken into account. Evidently, it is not always clear whether a narrator in some distant age told a history with the deliberate intent of imprinting a mind with the character of a past. But this is the declared intention of some genres, including the category of works written for the instruction of rulers and known as Fürstenspiegel. In these works, narrators held up the mirror of the past as a kind of portrait in which rulers could recognize their true selves, exemplars for imitation. Monastic discipline was nothing if not an exercise in using history - above all, Biblical narratives - as a tool of self-knowing for the purpose of mimetic reform. Not unexpectedly, the Fürstenspiegel as a machine of spiritual reform by recognizing oneself in a historical model was a monastic invention. Widukind's Res Gestae Saxonicae is a book written by a monk for an abbess, and designed to serve as a kind of mirror of self-knowledge for the recipient delivered by a man fully aware of serving both his monastic profession and his ethnic devotion. Composed in stages and completed shortly after 973, it supplies a historical topo- graphy of the reigns of Henry I and Otto I. By contrast, without any counterpart to Widu- kind, the reigns of the last Ottonians seem quite indistinct patches on the map. The historical nature of Widukind's work is exactly what makes it an anomaly among early medieval Fürstenspiegel and by no means a continuation of the genre as practiced by Carolingians. It is , not, as they were, an exercise in philosophical or theological abstractions, made up of excerpts from Scripture, patristic writings, and canon law. Indeed, there is no thought that action should be tailored to any abstract reasoning or to the authorities of a distant age of grace. In the medium of history, Widukind was free, as his predecessors in philosophy and theology were not, from the problem of evil. Certainly, Widukind's history is incomparable with Carolingian Fürstenspiegel in content. But there is no reason to conclude that he did not follow where they had led',

1 Timothy REUTER, Germany in the Middle Ages, c. 800-1056(London 1991)p. IS, identifies Helmut BEU- MANN's Widukind von Korvei: Untersuchungen zur Geschichtsschreibung und Ideengeschichte des 10. Jahrhunderts (Weimar 1950) as the debut of historiography as the history of consciousness in Germany. 2 Bemd SCHULTE, Untersuchungen zu den Lebensbeschreibungen der Königin Mathilde (Hannover 1994) pp. 15-16. On the cluster of historical writings to which Widukind's belongs, see Ernst KARPF, Van 50 Morrison Between the beginning and the third quarter of the tenth century, Saxony was trans- formed from a nebulous border province to the political nucleus of northern Europe. Widu- kind's history belonged to a little cluster of historical writings which took shape as intellec- tual reflexes to, and monuments of, that astonishingly sudden transformation). In other epochs of sudden transition, tribal peoples have assimilated alien cultures by improvision, rather than by mechanical duplication. The ingenuity of Widukind's book is exactly in how he improvised on the themes and objectives of the Fürstenspiegel in a novel medium, the medium of historical self-consciousness to which he and other Saxons turned at the decisive moment when their people, passing from servitude to freedom, was transformed from a payer of tribute into the mistress of many nations", The ingenuity of Widukind's improvisation on a philosophical, or theological, theme in the medium of history was all the more distinct because, while the models for emulation were men, the intended emulator was a woman. In later centuries, men commonly wrote works of spiritual guidance for women to read. Drawing on metaphysics, Scripture, and traditions of biblical interpretation, male authors attempted to edify their intended female disciples with themes and variations on misogyny, insisting that to advance in virtue, women should east off their womanly nature and put on the virtues of manliness', But Widukind evaded the con- ventions of misogyny. Without condescension, he presented to the young Abbess Mathilda of Quedlinburg the deeds of her grandfather, Henry I, and her father, Otto I, he wrote, so that she might be made better and more glorious, supremely good and glorious as she already was6• Though she was only in her thirteenth year, Mahilda appears to have had the chance to give Widukind the benefit of her responses at some stage, or stages, in the composition. For he invited her to act in some senses as an editor, or co-author, of the book', Widukind's dedication of his book to Mathilda testifies to the political power her father intended for her to wield, and which, in fact, she did exercise until her death (999). But, like the cultivation of historical conscious- ness in tenth-century Saxony, the chance for a woman's partnership in dynastic power and, consequently, for a book designed, without misogyny, to educate a woman to govern, were artefacts of a fleeting epoch, «an exceptional moment in the history of women in the Middle Ages»l.

Widukinds Sachsengeschichte bis zu Thietmars Chronicon: Zu den literarischen Folgen des politischen Aufschwungs im ottonischen Sachsen, in: Angli e sassoni al di qua e al di la del mare (Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull'alto medioevo 32, 1984) p. 548. 3 KARPF (note 2) p. 548. 4 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.34; MGH SSrG (1935) p. 48. 5 For the general context, see Anne Cl ark BARTLETT,Male Authors, Female Readers: Representation and Subjectivity in Middle English Devotional Literature (lthaca/N.Y. 1995) especially pp. 1-55. 6 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae l.pref. (p. 1). 7 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 2.pref. (p. 61). 8 Patrick CORBET, Les saints ottoniens: Saintete dynastique, Saintete royale et saintete feminine autour de l'an Mil, Francia Beiheft 15 (Sigmaringen 1986) p. 267. Karl J. LEYSER,Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society: Ottonian Saxony (London 1979) pp. 49-73. Widukind's Mirror 51 2. Widukind's Version of «Harmonious Discords

For philosophers and theologians, self-knowledgebegan with the problem of knowledge itself. What was the nature of any knowledge? Was there ever any greater correlation between the world as it was and perceptions of the world - between reality and appearance - than there was in a dreamer's nightmares or a madman's delusions? For philosophers and theologians, epistemology was generally the door to self-knowledge, and epistemology presupposed developed theories about the mind and its functions. Widukind's narrative gives no hint of general doctrines about human psychology or the truthfulness of perceptions to reality. However, by its very character, the narrative is evidence of a way of thinking. It is composed in episodes. While the episodes follow a chronological (or annalistic) progression, there are frequent discontinuities', The work is divided into three books. Yet, in the process of revision, whatever organizing principles of substance or style this division was originally intended to serve have become obscured. The episodes in the third book are, on balance, shorter, sketchier, and more numerous than those in the first two books, and, as an annalist would, Widukind updated the third book once or twice after 973 in a patchwork way. Occasionally, but by no means regularly, in the third book, he dates events according to great Church festivals, such as Easter and Pentecost. Whatever else style can establish, Widukind's episodic narrative and bricolage revisions indicate a way of thinking which tolerated discontinuities alien to syllogistic reasoning, and which did not require either author or reader to comprehend a text as a closed, self-explanatory whole. How people thought about the beauty in works of art often elucidates how they thought about the creative process of thinking. Analogies were commonly drawn between the visual arts and pictures in the mind, and between music and harmonies in the soul. A clue to Widukind's way of thinking lies in his apparent indifference to esthetics. To judge from the Res Gestae Saxonicae, the word «beauty» hardly existed in Widukind's vocabulary. His referen- ces to works of art uniformly accent the costliness of their materials. And while, as we shall see, concord was one of his main principles, he refered to music only as one item in an inventory of cult practices10. For Widukind, the word an meant «talents, «cleverness»,or, most often, «trickery», The Greeks, and the Lotharingians, deceived by what he called their «ancestral,. or «accustomed» arts!', But he appears to have assumed no underlying esthetic

9 There are discontinuities of interpretation as well as of sequence, as when Widukind wrote how Conrad I designated Henry I as his successor, because the Franconian line was deficient in the fortuna and mores which kingship required, and later stated that Henry owed the kingdom to himself and to God. Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1, 25, ~1 (pp. 37-38, 60). 10 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 3.4 (p. ISO). 11 On the Greeks, Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 3.71, 74 (pp. 148, ISO). On the Lotharingians, ibid. 1.30 (pp. 42-43). Cf. Satan, ibid. 3.18 (p. 114), carte antiqui hostis constriai •. In her monastic retirement, Queen Mathilda trained men and women servants of her household variis artibus. Ibid. 3.74 (p. 151). For referen- ces to works of art, see 1.11, 38 (pp. 18, 57); 3.44 (p. 125) {battle ensigns}; 1.25, 29 (pp. 38, 42) and 2.2 (pp. 65-66) (royal ornaments and insignia); 2.38 (p. 98); 3.76 (p. 154) (architecture); and 1.5, 6 (pp. 21-22, 32), 2.11, 35 (pp. 77, 94-95); 3.9, 30, 56 (pp. 109, 118, 135) (various objects of gold, silver, and other precious materials). . 52 Morrison unity, mathematical or otherwise, among the visual and performing arts. Although it did accommodate concord, the coherence in Widukind's way of thinking was not esthetic, Widukind's celebrated silences might seem to confirm a purely episodic bricolage, but, in fact, they point to the principles which gave coherence and direction to his exercise in self- knowing. There appear to be numerous categories of silence. The Res Gestae Saxonicae itself presupposed a lost work on triumphs won by God's militia; for Widukind declared that no one should be surprised that he had moved from a work declaring the triumphs of the Supreme Emperor's soldiers to the deeds of the Saxon princes. He was working within the same network of associations which gave him his identity. In the first treatise, he said, he had rendered what was due to his monastic profession; in the second, he recorded what he could out of devotion to his folk and family (genus gensque)'2. Whatever logical connection Widu- kind drew between this pair of texts has been lost with the work on God's militia. Since Widukind wrote to celebrate Saxon dominance over Europe, he understandably preferred to pass over in silence some devastating calamities which impeded Saxon ascendancy, but he also left aside reports of miracles attending a victory of Henry I because he had not been able to verify them", He gave no explanations for failing to identify some important figures in his story, bitter conflicts among members of the Saxon dynasty, and lines of kinship which raised up potential rivals to Otto I and his descendants", Widukind's most frequently noted silence is his omission of any reference to Otto I's imperial coronation (962), despite his rather condensed account of Otto's victories in Italy, and, indeed, the siege and conquest of Rome which prepared the way for his coronation'S. Moral and political reasons for these omissions have been offered, necessarily reflecting the perspectives of modern historians inclined to consider historical writings political by nature and thus studies in dominance and subjection. Widukind's omission of the imperial coro- nation (962) has been explained as expressing an unspoken insistence that Otto owed his imperial title, not to any papal action, but to God, who gave him the victory over the Magyars on the Lechfeld (955), and to his people, who acclaimed him as emperor on that battlefield. According to this interpretation, Widukind thought that the papal consecration seven years later added nothing worth mentioning. And Widukind's silence represents an opposition to Otto's whole policy of collaborative interdependence with the papacy which included, not only imperial interventions in Italy, but also the construction of an elaborate hierarchical order in Saxony and, by missions, in adjacent areas of conquest", One of many other silences also explained in this way is Widukind's failure so much as to mention St. Mauritius, whom Otto I adopted as the patron both of his personal devotions and of ecclesiastical politics he advanced with papal blessing. Incidentally, Mauritius was

12 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.1 (p. 4). 13 Widukind, res Gestae Saxonicae 1.32, 35 (pp. 45, 50-51). 14 CORRET (note 8) p. 48; LEYSER (note 8) pp. 11, 12-14,20,28,87. 15 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 3.63 (pp. 137-138). 16 For this position, see Helmut BEUMANN,Historiographische Konzeption und politische Ziele Widukinds von Korvei, in: La storiografia altomedievale (Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull'alto medioevo 17, 1970) pp. 857-894. Widukind's Mirror 53 associated with the Holy Lance, the relic which (as Widukind did report) Otto chose above all others to carry with him into battle on the Lechfeld", Read from the aspect of politics by modern scholars, Widukind's text has quite a different character from the one it has when read from the aspect of self-knowledge by his intended audience, above all by the Abbess Mathilda and her entourage. Of course, political relations of dominance and subjection are the stuff and substance of what Widukind wrote. But they by no means exhaust either his unspoken principles of composition or even his stated objectives. It is implausible to think that Widukind imagined having a monopoly over collective memories. For the intended audience, Widukind's silences about identities, kinship, strife within the royal family, and such great events as Otto I's Roman coronation would have been, not suppressions of uncongenial facts, but invitations to expand the text. This kind of audience participation in reconstituting the text can only have been part of the response anticipated and elicited by Widukind as part of the exercise of self-knowing. By the same token, it can only have contributed also to what appears to modern readers, outside the corporate associations Widukind took for granted and unable to play the game he intended, an episodic, bricalage composition. In the game played by Widukind with his intended audience, defined by collective associations of folk, family, and profession, there were no irrelevances or digressions!'. There might be diversions, variations, and broken sequences {suchas Widukind acknowledged when he wrote that he narrated events out of temporal sequence if they were connected)" to delight the Abbess's mind, distract her from cares, and grace her leisure hours", Part of the fun for the intended audience came from filling in the blanks. For the rest, the episodes and apparent disconrinuities did not make up a continuous story, so much as an album of il- lustrations, all reflecting a common principle. Widukind stated that principle to Mathilda in the preface to his third book. To one familiar with diversity within corporate associations such as folk, family, and monastic life, it must have seemed evident that, as he wrote, the worlds of nature and human society were not of one piece, but a cancan discardia21• Long before Widukind, Scriptural interpreters had postulated an unseen harmony beneath the discordances within and among biblical texts. Long after Widukind, Gratian made this paradoxical concept the leitmotif of canon law, seeking to discern the concord of discordant canons. And still, it is not surprising to find that modern scholars let this passage pass as an «oxymoron», a classicaltag, rather than an organizing principle for the grandest of intellectual ventures, among them, Widukind's project of self-knowing", Shaped to Enlightenment

17 BEUMANN (note 16) pp. 858·864, 879, 888. K. H. KRÜGER, Dionysius und Vitus als frühottonische Königsheilige: Zu Widukind 1, 33, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 8 (1974) pp. 147·149. Percy Ernst SCHRAMM, Kaiser, Rom und Renovatio: Studien zur Geschichte des römischen Erneuerungsgedankens vom Ende des karolingischen Reiches bis zum Investiturstreit, 2d ed., vol. 1 (Darmstadt 1929) pp. 80-8t. 18 BEUMANN (note 16) pp. 860-861. 19 Widukind, Res Gestae saxonicae 2.28 (p. 91). 20 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae l.pref. (p. 2). 21 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 3.pref. (p. 100). 22 BEUMANN (note 1) p. 215. Beumann was, quite logically, repeating a judgment passed earlier on Widu· kind's ancient sources. Cf. Horace, Opera Omnia, ed. Wilhelm DILLENBURGER(Bonn 1844)p. 491 note. 54 Morrison values of clarity and logical exposition enshrined in academic disciplines from their begin- nings, modem scholars incline to discount the deliberate use of paradox and enigma in historical writings of distant epochs. Even more, they find something alien in delight taken by writers and their audiences in texts constructed around labyrinthine riddles, no matter that writers and audiences were convinced that, in Scripture, God too had hidden truth beneath shadows of allegory, not only to shield it from unbelievers, but, by making the way hard for the faithful, to strengthen their minds by exercise, to arouse the ardor of their laborious search for truth by making it hard to attain, and thereby to heighten the joy of its discovery. The proposition that the discordant elements of the world were so balanced off against each other as to make a harmonious cosmos derived from ancient philosophy. Pliny the Elder wrote that the Greeks spoke of the discord and the concord, the hatreds and friendships, in nature as «antipathies» and «sympathies». One practical application of this natural interplay of opposites, he wrote, was in medicine. Physicians commonly treated diseases by applying contraries to contraries, hot to cold and cold to hot, in an attempt to restore elements in the patients' bodies to equilibrium. Of course, the magnet, too demonstrated the harmonious interplay of attraction and repellence in the nature of things", Although Widukind's term, cancan discordia, does occur in some late ancient writings, classicaltexts commonly made concord the noun, the primary term, and discord the secon- 4 dary qualifier • Widukind's choice of discord as his primary term, qualified by harmony, is a clue to how he read the political flux of dominance and subjection. Indeed, he drew an exact analogy between the cancan discardia in the cosmos and that in politics. Like the faces of heaven and earth, he wrote, the speech, physiognomies, and practices of human beings varied in a thousand ways. But they comprised a cancan discordia because the providence of God, who ruled all things, forced them to follow one light, one attitude. By the same token, the glory of the Empire brought public and private matters under one rule of justice, one norm of righteousness. Imperial glory beamed forth the Abbess Mathilda into the world as its most serene ray. In another place, Widukind compared her father, Otto I, with «the most brillant sun»25. The dynamic of harmonious discord, with its counterbalancing antipathies and sym- pathies, bears a family resemblance to that of the Hegelian triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. However, there are important differences. For, according to the theory of har- monious discord which Widukind inherited, the divine stood above, and directed, change, rather than being both agent and subject of change. Hegel's triad had passed through the filter of Kant's antinomies, which is to say that it carried with it Kant's distinction between the world of consciousness (naumena) which could be known from the inside, using the key of

23 Pliny the Eider, Historia Naturalis 20.1, 37.5. See also Kar! F. MORRISON, 'Unum ex Multis': Hincmar of Rheims' Medical and Aesthetic Rationales for Unification, in: Nascita dell'Europa ed Europa Carolingia: Un'equazione da verificare (Settimane di Studi dei Centro italiano di studi sull'alto medioevo 27, 1981) especially p. 619. 24 Horace, ep. 1.12.12·20. Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.432-435. Marcus Manilius, Astronomica 1.137·148, ed. Theodor BREITER (Leipzig 1907) p. 5. Maximus the Grammarian to Augustine of Hippo, in: Augustine, Epistolae 1.16.4; CSEL 34 p. 39. 25 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 3.pref., 62 (pp. 100, 137). Widukind's Mirror 55 logic, and the world of phenomena which could be known only from the outside, if at all. Thus, in the dialectical movement of thesis and antithesis, synthesis was always possible. However, the great difference between antipathies and antitheses, and between sympathies and syntheses, is exactly that antipathies and sympathies exist as reciprocal actions in the per- manent natures of things, while antitheses and syntheses are in the changing dialectical relationships drawn by the conscious mind. From his conception of the world as a permanent harmonious discord, Widukind could not make the leap to anything approximating Hegel's idea that the transformations of history comprised a logical process. Widukind was not the first to interpret human affairs as expressing a primal harmony of dissonances, or to think that dissonances were forced into harmony by divine providence. Boethius worked from the same propositions in The Consolation of Philosophy. Love from heaven served as reins by which God controlled warring elements in their «everlasting alli- ance» f/oedus perpetuum), the same love which bound men and women in chaste marriage and kept allies faithful. «0 happy the human race,» Boethius wrote, «if the same love which rules the skies rules your mindss". Through many direct and indirect sources, including Boethius's treatise on music, these ideas remained current in Western thought. They regained intellectual vigor in the Carolin- gian era, particularly in writings which postulated mathematical identity between the har- monies of music and those of the cosmos, and, from the Carolingians, they passed to Widu- kind's contemporaries, including notably Regino of Prüm", Without needing to infer that Widukind had any direct knowledge of Boethius, therefore, it is helpful to notice some resemblances between their use of the idea of harmony through reciprocating dissonances. One of the most obvious is the object of self-knowing itself. Disgraced and imprisoned, Boethius grieved, perplexed above all by how, if there were a good and just God, the injustice of ill fortune happened to good people. His distress, Philosophy argued, was not in his bad luck so much as in his thinking. He was sick at heart because he had forgotten himself. By nature, other animals were ignorant of themselves. But, by virtue of their distinctive rationali- ty, human beings were impaired by self-ignorance. Boethius would be cured of his misery by introspection. God was the principle of reason; by the reins of love, providence governed all things in the beauty of a cosmos according to reason. Remembering the rationality which linked him to God, he would escape the passions of joy, fear, hope, and grief which he had allowed to enslave him to the illusion that there was any luck, bad or good. He would realize that, since God is the source, ruler, and goal of all things, all fortune is good. Knowing his true self, he would participate in God, and, transcending the limits of humanity, he would enter into the tranquil happiness, the universal good and beauty, which God was". In his history, Widukind set forth no transcendence of human nature, such as was Boethi- us's objective. The individual, Widukind thought, was defined by corporate associations. But

26 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy 2.met.8. See also 4.met.6. 27 See Karl F. MORRIS ON, 'Know Thyself': Music in the Carolingian Renaissance, in: Committenti e produ- zione artistico-letteraria nell'alto medioevo occidentale (Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull'alto medioevo 39, 1991) pp. 369-479. 28 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy l.pros.6; 2.pros.4; 3.met.ll; 5.met.5. 56 Morrison these were not abstract and universal. They were properties particular to each member of the corporation: «my,. folk or family, «my» profession", Widukind's subject was particularities of existence, rather than universal categories, such as Being, Beauty, and Truth. Consequently, Widukind's chart of self-knowing lacks Boethius's metaphysics as well as its epistemology and esthetics. It is a venture of knowing about circumstances in which a person, or persons, lived, rather than knowing the self's (or soul's) nature. Yet, there are several points of convergence between his inquiriy into the persona and Boethius's into the soul. While Widukind lacked Boethius's evident opposition between reason and passionJO, there is a family resemblance between their teachings on the emotions. According to Boethius, the emotions were to be restrained as perturbations of the soul. Self-knowledge led to serenity of unruffled virtue. Likewise, in Widukind's history, exemplars of virtue were not subject to perturbations of soul, while their enemies were driven hither and yon by such passions as grief, envy, and hatred. There may be some resonance between Boethius's call to freedom from the passions and the adamant Saxon choice, repeated by Widukind at several moments in his narrative, to live free or die. As the Saxons rose to dominance, Widukind observed, lust of rule and fear had debased this ancestral virtue and engendered fraternal discord among them)'. Indeed, even the Slavs, brushing aside every misery for the sake of freedom, put the modern Saxons to shame by bearing as though in pleasure labors and blows which Saxons regard as grievous burdens", Yet the Slavs exemplified the tooth-gnashing savagery common to barbarians, and the vaunting arrogance which Otto I crushed by force of arms", Emotions among the Saxons were to be carefully watched. It was right for the crafty, thwarted in their plots, to die in grief, and for subjects to carry their great rulers to the grave with tears and lamentations, though Widukind omitted this stock feature from reports of the burials of two of his prin- 34 cipal figures, Queen Mathilda and Otto 1 • But, among nobles, grief arising from a sense of injury provoked rebellion". It was right for Saxons to rejoice over brilliant marriages, over the victories, hostages, and booty they worr". But, among nobles, joy could deceive, and

29 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.1 (p. 4). 30 Ratio has hardly any place in Widukind's story. However, he did report that Archbishop Bruno of C0- logne purged Lorraine of brigands and so bound it under the discipline of law that «supreme ratio» and «supreme peace» found a place there. Widukind. Res Gestae Saxonicae 3.36 (p. 97). 31 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.9, 11j 2.12,15,31 (pp. 15, 19,78,79,92·93). On Jraterna discordia, see ibid. 2.11, 15 (pp. 77, 79). 32 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 2.20 (p. 84). 33 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae H6, 54 (pp. 128, 134). On barbaric saevitia, see 2,4; 3.75 (pp. 70, 153). Yet, Widukind's contemporary Franks in Lorraine, by no means among the barbari, similarly displayed bestial ferocity. Ibid. 3.17 (p. 113). 34 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.22, 25, 43j 2,41; 3. 47, 57 (pp. 35, 38, 61, 99-100, 128, 135). On the burials of Mathilda and Duo I, see 3.74, 75 (pp. 151, 153). 35 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 2.9; 3.9 (pp. 73, 109). 36 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.36; 2.40j 3.10, 42, 49 (pp. 53, 99, 109, 122, 129). Cf. 3.17 (p. 117). Widukind's Mirror 57 hopes for the spoils of war fed envy, pride, hatred, anger, and rivalry. Among nobles, even when directed against barbarian enemies, ardor of spirit was an ambivalent virtue", In portraying exemplary rulers, Widukind allowed some of them the emotion of joy (laetitia). Otherwise, with one exception, he allowed them the virtues of wisdom, prudence, clemency, and open-handedness, but excluded every emotion. Even when Henry I rejoiced at banquets, Widukind wrote, he did nothing to diminish the royal discipline, so conveying favor and fear to his warriors that they could not imagine his falling into any wantonness. Otto I, too, was careful to exhibit royal dignity in its fullness, displaying kingly gravitas even when on horseback, and Widukind allowed no flicker of emotion to enter his portrayal of Queen Mathilda's religious exercises and works of rnercy", The one instance in which Widukind appears to have allowed an emotion into the characterization of an exemplary ruler is his portrayal of Otto I, the chief exemplar held up for emulation by the Abbess Mathilda. His comment that Otto loved gaming tables seems almost incidental until one realizes that Widukind portrayed Otto as «the Love (amor) of the world and the world's head (caput),.J9. Boethius used the word amor, rather than the theologi- cally-laden caritas, to name the force by which God drew the world's antipathies into har- mony. He intended a passionless natural attraction, as conceived by Plato, rather than the fervent personal engagement set forth, for example, by Augustine. Widukind's amor was without passion, and he limited the words amo and amor to Otto I, the emperor who had drawn the world into one, the love and the sun of the world, and to the Abbess Mathilda, the ray of the most serene light shot into the world by imperial glory40. Yet, there was ambivalence here too; for Otto's love toward Adelheid, who became his second wife, brought sorrow to the son of his first marriage, Liudolf; and Liudolf's grief, flowering into rebellion, rewarded with bitterness the «maternal love» in which Otto had held him", It is remarkable how thoroughly Widukind ignored the theological affect of hope, as well as that of charity42, except to portray the division among troops before one battle, some downcast, fearing the onslaught, others rejoicing, the whole army swerving between hope and fear, or to accent the hope taken from a portent before a battle", Widukind likewise ignored faith insofar as it can be considered a passion, though he had much to say about it as a formal bond of association among allies in war. As it happens, in Widukind's glossary, a form of passionless love, which he called friendship (amicitia), was the basis of political fidelity, or concord.

37 On deceptive joy, Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 3.18 (p. 114). Cf. 1.36 (p. 53). On envy, ibid. 2.4j 3.10 (pp. 71, 110). On pride, ibid. 2.8 (p. 72) (cf. Otto's victories over barbarian superb; bostes, 3.75 [p, 153]. On hatred, 2.30 (p. 92). On anger, 1.9, 22j 3.18, 25 (pp. 12, 34, 114, 116). On ardor of spirit, 3.54 (p. 134). 38 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.39; 2.36; 3.74-75 (pp. 58-59,96-97, 150-153). Cf. the characterizations of Duke Eberhard of Franconia and Count Gero, 2.7: 3.54 (pp. 72, 133). 39 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 2.34: 3.36 (pp. 48, 97). 40 On Otto I, Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.31, 34j 3.29 (pp. 43, 48, 117). 41 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 3.1, 9, 32 (cf. 104, 109, 118). 42 Cf. Widukind's single reference to caritss, Res Gestae Saxonicae 2.12 (p. 78). 43 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.36 (pp. 52, 53). 58 Morrison Thus, far, we have traced some lines of similarity between the venture of self-knowing (knowing the soul) through philosophy in Boethius's Consolation and the venture of self- knowing (knowing the persona) through history in Widukind's Res Gestae Saxonicae. Both began with the proposition that nature and society were harmonies made up of dissonant elements controlled by love. Both held up models of emotional restraint in which adepts of self-knowledge were free of bondage to the passions, though they participated and in some sense embodied the cosmic ordering principle of affinity called love. In his captivity, Boethius lamented the bad fortune which had befallen him. How could his upright life and justice in public office have been rewarded with evil if the world were governed by a good, omnipotent, and omniscient God? How could the randomness of for- tune, good or ill, be reconciled with the premise that a rational providence ruled the world? Was God responsible for evil and injustice? Boethius resolved the quandary by teaching that under the aspect of providence all fortune was good, and evil did not exist. True to his antique models, such as Sallust, Widukind often referred to providence in his narrative. But he differed both from them in pairing fortune with providence, as Boethius had done, and from Boethius in how he reconciled those apparent opposites. In his frequent refer- ences, Widukind generally equated fortune with catastrophe", Rarely, he characterized a happy event as «!ortuna.,.4S. In a key passage, he represented the Franconian King Conrad I designating, not his own brother, but the Saxon Duke Henry, as his successor because, despite all its glory, the Franconian house fell short in the «fortune and bearing» required by the royal office", Kings who loved the hunt and the play of gaming tables may have had some sense of Lady Luck's caprices", But, when he represented Henry I grieving over Charles the Simple's fall, wonder-struck at the common fortuna of human mutability, Widukind at- tributed Henry's attitude to his well-known religious sensibility", Setting out from preoccupation with universal Being, Boethius had resolved the apparent contradiction between fortune and providence by denying the reality of fortune. Setting out from preoccupation with individual events, Widukind resolved it by regarding fortuna as an intervention by providence into the concordant dissonance of human events, specifically in the rise of the Ottonian dynasty to kingship and empire. Accenting the dominance of the Saxon kings over their amici, the Carolingians, he paralleled Henry I's grief over the fortuna of the imprisoned Charles the Simple with Ono I's grief over the imprisonment of Louis IV. It was perhaps narrator's license that Widukind mistakenly gave both kings' captors the same name. For Boethius, the apparent contraries of fortune and providence raised the problem of evil. He disposed of that problem by reasoning away the contrariety. The principle that God, as absolute good, ruled the world so governed his thinking that syllogistic consistency denied

44 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.9, 30, 36; 2.4, 11, 15, 39 (pp. 15,42, 53-54, 54-SS, 71, 77, 80, 99). 45 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.5 (p. 6). Cf. indifferent fortune, ibid. 3.44 (p. 125). 46 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.25 (p. 38). See SCHULTE (note 2) p. 54. CORBET (note 8) pp. 75, 125, 243. 47 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 2.36 (pp. 96-97). 48 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.30 (p. 42), quia non minori daruit religiositatequam annorum 'Virtute. Widukind's Mirror 59 any real existence of evil, bad fortune, and, consequently, injustice. For him, the serenity of self-knowing demanded this conclusion. Widukind was also convinced that providence ruled supreme, but he reached this con- clusion in an un-Boethian way. For Widukind, the apparent contrariety of fortune and providence left the problem of evil untouched. As narrator, he exercised the power over his story to keep his heroic figures immune to ill fortune. Moreover, he was governed neither by absolutes nor by rules of syllogistic consistency. Even theology failed to obtrude the problem of evil upon his story; he referred to Satan's wiles as rarely as he did to charity", Being free of Boethius's absolute good, he was also free to write of actions, even legal ones, in a prag- matic way, without reference to good or to justice, and to portray providence itself, far from standing in opposition to fortune, as working through it. In addition to the illusory conflict between fortune and providence, Boethius recognized another serious difficulty for his theory of universal concord. If providence ruled the world according to its perfect reason, what room was left for individual choice? Did providence extinguish free will? Widukind left no trace of concern for the integrity of free will. To be sure, this matter pertains to the wider moral dilemmas of good and evil which he also left untouched. Yet, any invitation to self-knowledge, whether of persona or of soul, invites choice, and it is worth- while to consider what field of moral attraction and repulsion Widukind sketched out for the Abbess, and how he planned to exercise her moral imagination in his narrative silences. From Aristotle's doctrines about catharsis through pity and fear onward, authors had aimed to engage audiences' imaginations by stirring their emotions. Often, rationales for those efforts were found in theories of beauty. But, as we have seen, Widukind dispensed almost entirely with the affects and with esthetic psychology. The guiding principles in his history were not overtly inward, and this disposition is evident in the complete lack of compassion or empathy from the Res Gestae Saxonicae. Emotionless, he drew his readers' eyes over battles of fearful carnage, landscapes scorched and left barren and deserted by war, captured enemies mutilated, hosts of non-combatants slaughtered or starved into submission and enslaved. He narrated acts of perjury and deception, ambushes, conspiracies, public places running with blood, crimes beyond imagination, all with Tacitean detachment. To be sure, something quite other than detachment is apparent in Widukind's allusion to rejoicing over massacres of enemies, particularly when rejoicing over such victories coincided with royal marriages", Indifference gave way to aversion when Widukind turned to the numerous peoples he called barbari, «proud enemies» encircling the Saxons. They lay beyond whatever limits of compas- sion he may have had, as, for that matter, did the Greeks, whom he thought congenitally deceptive. Neither the legend, which he heard as a young man, that the Saxons descended from Alexander the Great's troops nor the presence of the Abbess's sister-in-law, the Empress Theophano, appears to have inspired fellow-feeling toward the Byzantinesl', .

49 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 3.18 (p. 114). LEYSER (note 8) p. 37. 50 E. s- Widukind. Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.37 (p. 54). 51 On Greeks, Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.2i 3.71-73 (pp. 4. 148-150). 60 Morrison

Indifference to sufferers and aversion toward aliens served Widukind's project of self- knowing: for they defined the serene, emotionless love which, in the Boethian scheme, characterized the love which bound antipathies and sympathies into one concord of dissonan- ces, and which, in Widukind's venture of the persona's self-knowing, was embodied by rulers, including the Abbess Mathilda, «rightly mistress of all Europe-'". The Empire was an analogue of divine providence in drawing antipathies and sympathies into one harmonious discord, and those who ruled the Empire were characterized, not by the passions, but by universal virtues of prudence and wisdom. Thus, without a trace of mise- gynistic traditions, Widukind invited the Abbess into narrative dialogue by elucidating what her grandfather and father had achieved when they applied those virtues, by affirming her own role (persona) in consolidating and advancing Saxony's passage from servitude to world dominance, and by assuring her of the concord placed by providence even amid civil and foreign wars, a concord in which she participated directly as a keeper of the sacred cult. The venture of the persona's self-knowing which Widukind prepared for the Abbess followed the same categories of corporate association to which he pegged his own writings: people (gens) and family (genus), easily interchangeable, and monastic profession (professio).

3. The Abbess Mathilda's Persona and a Story about Two Relics

To elucidate how Widukind worked the associative categories of people, family, and monastic profession as political aspects of the enigmatic concors discordia into the venture of self- knowing, we must turn to the very passage in which he applied the signature of love (amor), not to Otto, the love, or sun, of the world, but to his daughter, the Abbess Mathilda, the ray, Widukind wrote, shot forth by the sun into the world. Rudiments of Widukind's thinking about people and families as associations exist in Boethius's characterization of the love which established an «everlasting alliance» (foedus per- petuum) among dissonant elements in nature as the same love by which spouses and allies kept faith with each other. Fidelity (fu1es) in social or political associations belonged to the cosmic harmony (concordia). Similarly, love, as amicitia, was the basis of the fidelity sealing alliances which Widukind called treatises, or «concords,.53. They were acts by which human beings, with all their variable speech, physiognomies, and customs deliberately entered corporations of «harmonious discord». In his account of Henry I, Widukind inserted, as a kind of parenthesis, remarks on two saints", He placed these sections between one passage recording a nine-year truce which

52 Widukind, Res Gestae ·Saxonicae 2.pref. (p. 61). 53 See the glossary of terms used to denote peace negotiations given by Ingrid Voss, Herrschertreffen im frühen und hohen Mittelalter: Untersuchungen zu den Begegnungen der ostfränkischen und westfränki- schen Herrscher im 9. und 10. Jahrhundert sowie der deutschen und französischen Könige vom 11.-13. Jahrhundert (Cologne 1987) p. 182, omitting concordia. . 54 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.33-34 (pp. 45-48). See KRÜGER (note 17) p. 136. In 1.33, Widukind actually resumed his account of conflict between Carolingian rulers (reges Carolorum) and east Frankish kings over Lotharingia (1.29-30 [pp. 42-43]. A digression begins in 1.31 (pp. 43-44) with a record of Henry Widukind's Mirror 61 Henry I concluded with the Magyars (924)and another celebrating the shrewdness with which Henry used time given by the truce to consolidate and expand his power. In fact, Widukind's comments on the two saints, Denis and Virus, both resume the narrative broken off in an earlier chapter and conclude his narrative of Henry I's dealings with the West Franks", As we shall see, Widukind drew into these chapters, not only a hagiographical climax for Henry's reign, but also a critical object lesson for the Abbess Mathilda's project of knowing her persona as a projection of the glory which her grandfather had kindled and her father magnified. In an earlier chapter, Widukind recounted Henry's campaign againt Charles the Simple (920-923),who had incorporated Lotharingia into his kingdom. Fortune, he wrote, smiled on Henry, the strong man. For Charles's armies had killed his rival, Robert; but, in turn, Robert's son, Hugh of Vermandois, tricked Charles into capitivity (923)and kept him under lock and key until his death (929).Henry grieved over Charles's misfortune, Widukind wrote, and wondered at the ever-changeful fortune in human events. However, he spent little further time in trying to acquire by force of arms what he could get by cunning. He arranged a marriage between his daughter, Gerberga, and Duke Giselbert of Lorraine, who had lately come to him as a captive of war, establishing by their marriage an alliance (amicitia) which brought all Lotharingia in subjection to himself56.One of Widukind's celebrated silences is the omission of an alliance which Henry had concluded with Charles the Simple in 921, and which his amicitia with Charles's enemies nullified", Widukind's hagiographical climax to his account of Henry's dealings with the West Franks begins with a chapter about a relic of Dionysius the Areopagire. While Henry was

I's marriage to Mathilda and of their children and continues with comments on the Magyar invasion of 924. The chapters immediately following the hagiographical interlude state that Henry took advantage of a truce with the Magyars to build up his kingdom and to conquer all neighboring peoples (omnes in cir- cuitu nationes, 1040 [po 59], and that he came eventually to be called pater patriae, rerum dominus, impera- torque by his warriors (1.39 [p. 58]. The next reference to the West Franks is incidental (1.39 [po 58]. 55 For the general context of this event, see REUTER (note 1) pp. 144-145, and Johannes FRIED, Die For- mierung Europas, 840-1046 (Munich 1991)p. 75. For general evaluations ofWidukind's connection between the translation of St. Vitus and the rise of Saxony, see KARPF (note 2) p. 565; Heinrich FICHTENAU, Zum Reliquienwesen im früheren Mittelalter, MIÖG 60 (1952)pp. 71-74; SCHULTE (note 2) p. 53. On the importance which St. Denis achieved in the cult patronized by Queen Mathilda and Otto I, and on the possible subsequent history of the relic of St. Denis presented to Henry I, see the very careful detective work of KRÜGER (note 17) pp. 141-146. 56 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.30 (pp. 42-43). Widukind similarly approved how Charlemagne had won the Saxons to Christianity nunc blanda suasione, nunc bellorum inpetu. Ibid. 1.15 (p. 25). However, he did not admire the Greeks, and there is some ambivalence in his observation that, almost from the beginning of the world, the Greeks were the lords of many peoples, conquering some by power (virtute) and the rest by cunning (artibus). Ibid. 3.71 (p. 148). Karl SCHMID, Unerforschte Quellen aus quellenarmer Zeit: Zur amicitia zwischen Heinrich I. und dem westfränkischen König Roben im Jahre 923, Francia 12 (1984)pp. 1-4. Thomas ZOTZ, Amicitia und Discordia: Zu einer Neuerscheinung über das Verhältnis von Königtum und Adel in frühottonischer Zeit, Francia 16 (1989) pp. 170-175. 57 For evaluations of Henry's progessive alliances, see SCHMID (note 56) pp. 119-120, 141-142. The presen- tation was certainly more than a diplomatic gift. Cf. Voss (note 53) p. 93. D. W. ROLLASON. Relic-cults as an Instrument of Royal Policy, c. 900 - c. 1050, Anglo-Saxon England 15 (1986) p. 93. 62 Mormon crossing the Rhine to extend his power over the Lotharingians, an envoy of Charles the Simple inter-cepted him. Charles, the envoy said, who once basked in the eminence of kingly power, had been stripped of his office. He had instructed the envoy to say that, encompassed as Charles was by enemies, nothing would bring him more delight than the advancement of Henry's glory and news of his powerful acts. Charles had sent a sign of good faith and truth. Here, the envoy reached into his bosom and drew forth a hand of the precious martyr, St. Denis, encased in gold and gems. Alluding to the un mentioned amicitia of 921, the envoy said that the relic was a sign of faith and truth (signum fidei et veritatis) and a token of everlasting alliance and mutual love (pignus foederis perpetui et amoris vicariJ). Through this relic, Charles wished to share with Henry part of Denis, the only solace of Franks living in Gaul- the only solace, that is, since 836, when the relics of the holy martyr Virus were translated from West Francia to Widukind's own monastery, Corvey in Saxony. Beginning in that year, the envoy concluded, Danes and Norsemen invaded the region that Virus had deserted. West Francia declined into ceaseless civil and foreign wars, while Saxony flourished in everlasting peace (perpetua pax). Henry prostrated himself in veneration and kissed the relics, the munus dioinum. At this stage, Widukind completed his hagiographica1 climax without returning to St. Denis and his hand. Two aspects of the relic of St. Denis underscore the amicitia of which Charles wished to remind Henry; and, indeed, they resonate throughout many other episodes in Widukind's history of his people and family as political associations. The fact that the relic was a hand vividly recalled, not only the oath on relics, but also the handclasp which sealed amicitiae or concordiae. Widukind and his readers were well aware that the giving of hands in amicitia was possible only among free men5l• In his narrative, this custom received a liturgical apogee when the magnates gathered for Otto I's coronation in Aachen, giving him their hands, promised him their fidelity f[ulem) and committed their strength to support him against all enemies'". Further, Widukind represented Charles's envoy as denoting the relic as signum of faith and truth. The word signum, normally in the plural, occurs frequently in Widukind's history. Though it names different objects, it uniformly denotes a battle ensign or something that had the symbolic function of an ensign'". Interestingly, Widukind did not refer to the Holy Lance as signum when Otto I carried it into the battle of the Lechfeld", By naming the relic signum, the envoy explicitly identified it as a talisman to be followed into battle. The intersecting lines of Widukind's narrative also establish an analogy between the hand of St. Denis and an earlier ensign which the as yet pagan Saxons regarded as holy (sacrum). Raising it, the senior warrior (pater patrum), Hathagat, exhorted his companions to

58 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.9 (p. 12), against giving hands to one's own slave. 59 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 2.1 (p. 64). Cf. ibid. 2.11; 3.11, 69 (pp. 17, 110, 145). Voss (note 53) pp. 46-49, 138-140, 193-194. 60 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.11, 27, 33, 35, 38; 2.14, 17; 3.8, 17, 18, 44,61,69 (pp. 18, 33, 40, 53, 54, 57, 79, 81, 109, 113, 114, 124, 125, 137, 144, 145). A possible exception exists in the reference to the rod and scepter in Otto's coronation ritual as signa, though in this passage Widukind appears to have quoted a liturgical formula. Ibid. 2.1 (p. 66). 61 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 3.46 (p. 127). Widukind's Mirror 63 uphold their ancestral ideal of preferring death to defeat", Such implicitly was also the charge to Henry, pater patriae, when he received and venerated the ensign, the munus divinum of St. Denis's hand, prostrating himself before it as did the defeated before their conquerors and subjects before their kings", Even in the section on the translation of St. Denis's hand, Widukind had strained forward to correlate the rise of the Saxon people and the Ottonian dynasty - gens and genus - with the translation of Vitus's relics. Now, luxuriating in details of the holy boy's butchery at the express command of the Emperor Diocletian, he recounted how, long after, his corpse had been taken first to Paris, and then to Saxony. As Charles's envoy had said, the kingdom of the Franks began to decline, and that of the Saxons to rise from that moment until, under the Abbess Mathilda's father, it encompassed Germany, Italy, and Gaul- indeed, almost all Europe". Another of the silences Widukind left to be supplemented by common knowledge was the posthumous connection between the two saints. The body of St. Virus had been translated to Corvey from the monastery of St. Denis. Evidently, Widukind chose to mention the relic of St. Denis, while ignoring many other relics assiduously collected by the Ottonians {above all those of St. Mauritius}, in order to allude to this connection with the patron of his own community. He also chose to give priority in his narrative to St. Virus in order to counter- balance the enthusiasm for St. Denis which had already inspired Queen Mathilda to foster his cult at Quedlinburg and elsewhere, and which eventually led to his adoption, under the Abbess Mathilda, as a patron of Quedlinburg. In the new and expanding Ottonian constel- lation of saints, Denis was one with which Corvey could claim affinity. By allusion, he linked Virus to that new star, but he did so in such a way as to assert Vitus's priority as the historic polestar of Saxon glory. Considered under the aspects of people and family (gens and genus), the two sections are connected by a deliberate counterpoint of love. In the section about the relic of St. Denis, Charles's envoy refers to the Saint's hand as «a token of everlasting alliance and mutual love». Widukind concluded this section with an extraordinary portrayal of Henry I venerating the relic with full devotion, prostrating himself before it and kissing it. In the second section, Widukind wrote, he transcribed Vitus's prayer on the verge of death so that from it Mathilda could bum with his love and, with the heat of that love, merit his everlasting patronage (perpetuum eius pairocinium). Evidently, this love was to have political effects. For, in a rhetorical parallel with his portrayal of Henry's veneration of the hand of St. Denis, Widu-

62 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.11 (p. 18-19). Percy Ernst SCHRAMM,Herrschaftszeichen und Staats- symbolik, vol. 1 (MGH Schriften 13,1, Stuttgart 1954) p. 245. 63 For the phrase munus divinum, cf. Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 2.7; 3.75 (pp. 72, 152), munus regale being perhaps equivalent with regaledonum, ibid. 2.9 (p. 73). On various meanings of the term, munus divinum, in the Carolingian era, see Karl F. MORRISON, The Gold Medaillons of Louis the Pious and Lothaire I and the Synod of Paris (825), Speculum 36 (1961) pp. 592-599. Compare, with Henry 1's pro- stration before the relic of St. Denis, the prostrations of Eberhard before Henry the Younger, and of Liudolf before Otto Iwhen the tables of war turned against them. Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 2.11; 3.18 (pp. 78, 114). 64 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.34 (pp. 46-48). 64 Morrison kind urged Mathilda, burning with Vitus's own love, to stand on earth as advocate of Corvey before her kinsmen and kings, receiving in turn Vitus's heavenly advocacy of her before God as one benefit of his patronage. Virus, great friend of God as he was, had no need of Mathil- da's favor, but «we," his servants at Corvey, did. Widukind urged Mathilda to stand as ad- vocate for Vitus's servants, the monastery of Corvey, before the earthly king, her father and brother, so that she might claim Vitus's intercession before God, the heavenly Emperor. There is, therefore, another parallel between the amicitia which Charles's envoy invoked by calling the hand of St. Denis pignus foederis perpetui et amoris vicarii and Widukind's reference to Virus as God's amicus, a word which, in his vocabulary, regularly had the sense, «ally,.6s.Thus, he used the standard language of political relationships when he urged Mathil- da, in love, to place herself under the patronage of God's amicus, Virus, Apart from these evident linkages between the two hagiographical sections, Widukind embedded in them other allusions to the Abbess under the categories of «people» and «fami- ly». For example, he referred to St. Denis as «the only consolation (solatium) of the Franks inhabiting Gaul», and subsequently to Mathilda as the consolation (solatium) left by Otto I to the Saxons'", By contrast, direct or implied connections between the hagiographical sections and Otto I himself are not apparent, except in Widukind's report that, by the merits of the saints and most of all by St. Vitus's patronage (patTocinium) - the same heavenly patronage available to Mathilda in return for her earthly benefactions to Corvey - the Emperor, her father, was cured of a grave illness (ca 958) and restored to the world as is the sun after the shades of night pass away". Under the categories of people and family (gens and genus), as political corporations, Widukind's object in the hagiographical climax of his account of Henry I's dealings with the West Franks was to assert that political dominance had passed, with the relics of the Saints, from the Carolingians to the Saxons. Elsewhere, he also contended that, though they were not originally of the house and lineage of Charlemagne, the Saxons were as one with them. By force and enticements, Charlemagne had effected the conversion of the Saxons to Christianity, thereby making them socii et amici, «brothers and as though one people- with them. The apex of this theme was Otto's election as king by «the whole people of Franks and Saxonss in Aachen and his coronation, in Frankish costume and at the hands of a Frankish Archbishop, in Charles the Great's basilica". The Carolingians had made St. Denis their special patron, and his monastery their necro- polis. Charles the Simple's gift of a relic of St. Denis to Henry I was a symbolic acknowledge- ment of assimilation to the Frankish heritage. However, even as a young ruler, Mathilda would have recognized the reference to the relic as a «token of everlasting alliance and mutual love». This technical language of love (amor) and friendship (amicitia), denoting military

65 Cf. the parallel phrase, inimicitiae 'fIicariae, Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 3.68 (p. 142). 66 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.33; 3.63 (pp. 26, 138.139). 67 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 3.62 (p. 137). 68 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.13-15; 2.1 (pp. 23, 25, 63-66). See Franz STAAB,Der Oberrhein und die Szenarien des Übergangs von der Antike zum Mittelalter: Eine Einführung - zugleich ein Versuch über den Sinn von germanischer Geschichte des Oberrheins in einer deutschen Geschichte, in: Zur Kontinuität zwischen Antike und Mittelalter am Oberrhein, eel Franz STAAB (Sigmaringen 1994) p. 29. Widukind's Mirror 65 alliance pervades Widukind's narrative. From her perspective the Abbess Mathilda could see a convergence between the alliance referred to by Chalres's envoy and another alliance between the Saxons and the Carolingians. Lorraine was a continuing preoccupation for the Ottonians. The marriage alliance which Henry I concluded by marrying his daughter, Gerberga, to Duke Giselbert of Lorraine, whom he had taken into custody, had mixed results. Giselbert joined in rebellion against Otto I and apparently drowned without trace when his overladen ship sank (939). Widukind reports this unhappy event, which the Ottonians attempted to repair by remarrying Gerberga to King Louis IV (reigned 936-954), a lineal descendent of Charlemagne. Like Gerberga's first marriage, this alliance had the character of amicitia: for, when, on the advice of Heribert of Vermandois (whom Widukind mistakenly called «Hugh.), the Northmen captured and imprisoned Louis (954),Otto grieved deeply over the fortune of his friend (amicus) and launched an expedition into Gaul against Heribert. As a major player in the political game, Mathilda had much to learn from the exercise in diplomatic amor. Representing the fragility of Saxon dominance over Lorraine appears to have been a major objective of Widukind's narrative. The task could not have been hidden from Mathilda, aware as she must have been, that her cousins, King Lothar (reigned 954-986)and his brother, were put for a time under the protection of their common uncle, Archbishop Bruno of Cologne, who had taken great and not entirely successful pains to put down insurgents, brigands to Saxon eyes, in Lorraine", Lothar's rebellion against Saxon dominance may still have lain ahead in 973, when Widukind put the Res Gestae Saxonicae aside. But, even when Lothar entered Bruno's custody, no Saxon ruler could have overlooked the possibility that Lothar and his brother might cast off the series of amicitiae which had done Charles the Simple and Louis IV so little good. Widukind's parenthesis on Sts Denis and Virus resonates with Boethius's paradoxical harmony of discordant elements articulated by love. The story about Charles the Simple, at least, and its sequel in Louis IV's similar imprisonment disclose another aspect of the Boethian paradox: the counterpoise of fortune and providence. Thus far, we have examined two corporations in the project of self-knowing which Widukind prepared for the Abbess: «people. and «family•. Under these categories, the venture of self-knowing set forth by Widukind's exemplary characters did not lead, as for Boethius, to abstract virtue or contemplative discipline, but to pragmatic zeal for religious cult. Retur- ning from his defeat of the Magyars (933),Henry I acknowledged that heaven had given him the victory and dedicated to the divine cult the tribute normally paid by the conquered, ordering also that provision be made for the poor", In his cultic religiosity, he prostrated himself before and kissed the hand of St. Denis. And, in all portrayals of exemplary rulers, Widukind established reciprocal action between the bounties of providence and ruler's observance and patronage of cult. It is remarkable how completely Widukind avoided representing members of the Church hierarchy as spiritual directors of princes. Widukind's passageson the relics of Sts Denis and Virus illustrate the unmediated connection between cult and the project of self-knowing he intended to lay before the Abbess Mathilda. They do this

69 Widukind, Re3 Gestae Saxonicae 2.26, 36; 3.17 (pp. 88-89, 97, 113). 70 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.39 (pp. 57-58). 66 Morrison in part by their silences, one of which concerns Widukind's third category of corporate association, monastic profession. In particular, this silence concerns the function of women in the cult of saints. It is true that Widukind included a fair number of women in his history, almost all of them in connec- tion with marriage or cohabitation. The array of subjects alluded to is wide: the status of mothers (alien, noble, wife or concubine), difficulties in the marriage of a noble woman to a man of lower (but still free) status, property rights (whether those conveyed by inheritance through the female line or those which a husband could exercise over the patrimony of his wife), the rights of a child born after his father's death, dynastic marriages and their offspring, including relations between a mother's children and her brother and rivalries among children of the same father in different marriages. Occasionally, in a history full of warfare, Widukind recalled women in distress: Avar women giving birth on a military campaign, wives and children who shared exile with their husbands and fathers, an exiled husband who attempted covertly to return to his wife, a woman fleeing from a demolished and starving city who carried the story of its destruction to the outside world. The two Mathildas had privileged positions in this narrative, the Queen acting both inside and outside conjugal relations, the Abbess, apart from her own parentage, acting entirely outside them. Widukind mentioned only Queen Mathilda and her granddaughter and namesake, the Abbess, as devotees and, in some sense, custodians of religious cult", A diplomatic evasion applicable to both women is evident in Widukind's statement that the virtue of so great a woman as Queen Mathilda surpassed any statement he could devisen. Such evasions invited contemporaries to supply the unmentioned family turmoil which ushered Queen Mathilda into monastic life, and Otto's desire, by consigning his daughter to a convent, to avert for the future the kind of dynastic rivalries which had threatened his own reign and life. And yet, when Otto made the young Mathilda's veiling a state occasion, attended by the entire German episcopate and a large proportion of the Saxon nobility, he certified that he intended, not to exclude her from politics, but to include her as a dominant agent in religion as a vernacular of politics", When she designated the young Mathilda to succeed her as abbess of Quedlinburg and ruler of other extensive holdings, monastic and otherwise, Queen Mathilda gave that role a specific function by conveying to her granddaughter the calendar which she used to pray for deceased members of the royal family and others, asking her, when death came for the Queen, to include her also in the rota of intercessions", Widu- kind's exaltation of Queen Mathilda as a paradigm of wondrous sanctity and his references to

71 On women as keepers of religious cult in the Saxon era, see CORBET (note 8) pp. 264-265. KARPF (note 2) p. 563. 72 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 3.74 (p. 150). 73 LEYSER(note 8) p. 49. 74 LEYSER (note 8) p. 72. Winfrid GLOCKER, Die Verwandten der Ottonen und ihre Bedeutung in der Politik: Studien zur Familienpolitik und zur Genealogie des sächsischen Kaiserhauses (Cologne 1989) pp. 201-211. Widukind's Mirror 67 her as Otto I's «holy mother» indicated the footsteps in which the young Abbess had already begun to tread", Widukind's sections on Sts Denis and Vitus addressed the Abbess's office as an overseer of sacred rites. The actions of women in the legends about Denis and Virus identify another area in which, by combining omission with allusion, Widukind invited audience response and, indeed, accented the Abbess Mathilda's similar position. He recalled that Virus was martyred with two others, his tutor, Modestus, and «a certain noble woman, Crescentia». Florentia, another «woman of exalted standing», gathered up and buried their corpses's, In the original version, Florentia, at least, was a woman of distinguished standing, but Widukind omitted the miraculous apparition in which Virus both saved her life and commanded her to see to the burial of the three martyrs". Likewise, he omitted the entire account of how Vitus's relics were carried in ceremonial procession from the monastery of St. Denis to Corvey. The most striking feature of the translation was the great number of miracles, more than thirty, performed along the way. Together with the abundance of miracles, Widukind omitted the fact that more than two-thirds of them were cures on women and girls, or on children carried to the saint's bier by mothers. Apart from massive omissions, Widukind took a number of liberties with the original account of Vitus's passion. According to the original version, Vitus's companions were both servants, Modestus, his tutor, and Crescentia, his nurse, and Vitus had attempted to save Crescentia by urging the persecutor, Diocletian, that it was ridiculous to torture a woman. Widukind mentioned no woman in connection with the relic of St. Denis. But, again, the legend provided information which Widukind could have expected his informed audience to supply. And, again, that information portrayed women as promoters and beneficiaries of the saint's cult. Like Vitus, Denis died with two companions, though both Denis's fellow martyrs . were men. Denis took his severed head into his hands and walked to the place he had chosen for his burial. Wishing to deny them the dignity of burial, the persecutors cast out the bodies of the other two. However, a noble woman, Catulla, who was still nominally pagan, used a ruse to gather their bodies and to bury them secretly, with Denis's, in a cornfield. When per- secution abated, she revealed their burial place and constructed an appropriate mausoleum. Eventually, she was baptised and, when she died, she merited to pass into the glory of Christ and the holy martyrs by their intercession". Given the political importance of the cults of Sts Denis and Vitus to the Ottonian dynasty and the liturgical orders for those cults in which the Abbess Mathilda and her entourage participated, there is every reason to think that Widu- kind's intended audience knew these legends and that Widukind expected his audience to

75 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 2.36; 3.12, 49,74 (pp. 95, 111, 129, 150). CORBET (note 8) pp. 35·36,203 note 71. 76 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.34 (p. 47). 77 Acta Sanctorum, 15. June. June. vol. 2 pp. 1025·1026. 78 Hilduin, Passio Sanctissimi Dionysii c. 33; MIGNE, PL 106 col. 97-98. Acta Sanctorum, 9. Oct., Oct., vol. 4 p. 794. For the earlier and subsequent career of this legend, see Gabrielle M. SPIEGEL. The Cult of St. Denis and Capetian Kingship, in: Saints and Their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore and History. ed. Stephen WILSON (New York 1983) pp. 141-168. 68 Morrison expand the text by supplying them. This was one way in which he could rely on Mathilda's grace to complete his literary task". Plainly, Widukind's explicit and implicit references to the Abbess's role as custodian of religious cult served the venture of self-knowledge directly. But they also served that venture by analogy. For, in his narrative of providence, they ran parallel with Widukind's portrayals of kings' devotion to religious cult. Far from being a rare excursion into the supernatural'", Widukind's sections on the relics of Sts Denis and Vitus conform entirely with his premise that God's providence ruled the harmonious discord of the world. Widukind records as omens comets, an eclipse, a massive hailstone, thunderbolts, and other prodigies and portents. He reports to the same effect that Quedlinburg, the mountain where Henry I was buried, erupted in flames at numerous points, and, as a sign of grace, he holds up a vision of two blessed souls swept up to heaven with unspeakable glory by a countless multitude of angelsl1• What appear to be traces of an original plan indicate that Widukind once intended to end books I and IT respec- tively with the deaths of Henry I and Otto I's first wife, Edith, and, in the chapters just preceeding these, there is a suggestive correspondence between the section in book I on the relics of Sts Denis and Vitus and another, less expanded one, in book II on astronomical portents", Widukind's history, therefore, was not «secular» in any modern sense of the word", To be sure, he refrained almost completely from drawing analogies between events in his account and Scripture, and, by itself, his occasional dating of events with reference to major feasts in the Church calendar (entirely in book Ill) hardly indicates a religious frame of mind". Still, he wrote under the conviction that God made and ruled all things, and that no one could oppose his ordering of affairs", Battles were won and lost, kings were spared from assas- sination, peoples were converted, and whole kingsdoms were gained by God's direct action". Quite naturally, Widukind characterized exemplary rulers as recognizing the security and power God bestowed upon them and as responding to a gracious providence with personal devotion, bounty for the poor, vengeance against the enemies of Christ, and wealth aboun- ding for churches. Widukind praised even Charlemagne, against whom the still pagan Saxans

79 Cf. Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 2.pref. (p. 35). 80 BEUMANN (note 1) pp. 220-221. 81 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 2.32; 3.11, 46, 61, 74 (pp. 93, 110, 127, 136-137, 151). 82 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 2.32 (pp. 93-94). 83 BEUMANN (note 16) p. 870. 84 His only explicit Scriptural analogy came when he argued that Archbishop Bruno of Cologne was not to be faulting for combining the religious office of «supreme pontiff» with the temporal one of duke, since similar pluralisms had figured in the careers of Samuel and many other priests and judges. Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.31 (p. 25). Cf. his datings to Christmas [In an official document, rather than in Widu- kind's own text), ibid. 3.70 (p. 147); to the beginning of Lent, ibid. 3.51 (p. 131); to Easter, ibid. 3.10, 14, 52 (pp. 109, 111, 131); and to Easter and Pentecost, ibid. 3.75-76 (pp. 152-153). 85 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 2.11, 17; 3.58 (pp. 75, 82, 136). 86 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.26, 36, 38, 41; 2.10 (trial by combat), 26, 31; 3.65 (trial by ordeal) (pp. 39,54,55,57, 60, 89,92, 140-141). Widukind's Mirror 69 waged war for almost thirty years, for being unwilling that so noble a people should remain fettered by its ancestral error, and for bringing it over so long a time by enticements and ~ force of arms to the true way87. In so far as Widukind had a concept of «sacralkingship», his ideas of God's direct inter- vention in human affairs and of the immediate personal obligations of rulers to God qualified the role of bishops as mediators and interpreters of providence. Thus, although Henry I had declined to be crowned as king by the Archbishop of Mainz and never sought imperial coronation, Widukind was able to acclaim Henry both as king and as emperor, and as a most zealous and munificent custodian of religious cult". Likewise, as we saw, Widukind con- sidered Otto emperor by divine favor and popular acclamation after the battle of the Lechfeld, years before his papal coronation as emperor. Widukind's comments on Charlemagne illustrate how providence working through time preserved the harmonious discord of the world. For not only did Charlemagne's long campaigns join Franks to Saxons by conversion as comrades and allies, indeed brothers and after a fashion one people, but, by God's election, the family of Charlemagne's tenacious enemy, Duke Widukind, came to the throne in the person of Otto I, garbed in Frankish dress, anointed as king by a Frankish prelate, in the basilica which Charlemagne had built", Even among brothers, or between fathers and sons, discord was both the reason and the ever- present danger for the treaties which Widukind called concordiae". And yet, in the long view of his narrative, providence set eventual harmony even in the discords of a thousand tongues, faces,and customs - indeed, even in long-continuing warfare such as once divided Franks and Saxons, and even when a son withstood God himself by rebelling against his father",

4. Power and Gender

One particular interest of Widukind's Res Gestae Saxonicae is how Widukind adapted late Roman ideas to a society which was entirely aware of being alien to Roman civilization and of having entered its ambit recently by way of conversion to Christianity. It is notable, too, that, as a male author, Widukind considered his intended female reader a major agent in the cultural transition of his people, perhaps also of his family. The very language of Widukind's work is an artifact of this assimilation of mutually repellent foreign elements, the footprint as it were of a harmonious discord in movement. The Abbess Mathilda belonged to a new generation of rulers, who were literate, and literate in Latin. Widukind related how, after his first wife's death, Otto I displayed his astonishing mental capacity by learning to read so well that he would read and understand entire books. He could speak the languagesof the Romans and the Slavs, but rarely chose to do so. Queen Mathilda taught her household servants -

87 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.12, 14-15, 31 (pp. 21, 25, 44). 88 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.25, 38, 39 (pp. 38, 57-58). 89 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.15,31; 2.1 (pp. 25, 44, 64-65). 90 E. g., Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.9; 2.11 (pp. 11-12,77). 91 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 3.18 (p. 114). 70 Morrison men and women - various arts, including letters", Clearly, the Abbess's intellectual for- mation was so marked by this enthusiasm of her father and grandmother for an alien language and culture that, at an early age, she could be expected to grasp the content of Widukind's text, his classical models and allusions, and, to be sure, his toying with the idea that the Saxons were descendents of Alexander the Great's troops, rather than, less exotically, of Danes or Norsemen'). Experience of the clash and assimilation of rival cultures had some resonance in the Widukind's picture of the cosmos as a harmonious discord of reciprocating antipathies and sympathies. And, in the venture of self-knowing which he prepared without misogyny for the Abbess, Widukind used this paradoxical guide, directing her, not according to the way of spiritual and intellectual inwardness pursued by Boethius himself, but according to external categories of association: people, family, and monastic profession. Strictly speaking, he guided her to know about her persona (that is, about the circumstances of her existence), rather than to know herself (that is, any abstract, universal nature individualized in her soul). He pro- mised no such transcendence of human nature as Boethius considered life's supreme archieve- ment. In each category of association, Widukind invited the Abbess to follow negative and positive lines of analogy. He invited her to know herself by contrast with those - such as barbari, pagans, Greeks, and persons of low estate - with whom she had nothing in common. Likewise, he invited her to consider sympathies which associated her with the great rulers of her people and family, with their saintly patrons, and thereby with the unseen hand of providence which, working through the love embodied by her father and herself, had drawn her dynasty to govern almost the whole world. In an explicit parallel, Widukind wrote in his excursus on St. Vitus, that Saxony had be- come «mistress of many peoples, almost all Europe» labouring under the majesty of Otto I's power, and again, that the Abbess was «by right mistress of almost all Europe», her father's power stretching even into Africa and Asia~. Working through love, providence did not suppress conflict so much as it used mutual antipathies to achieve a harmony of dissonances. Yet his classical models, notably Sallust, portrayed societies which disintegrated into civil war when moral decay grew apace with political and military power. Now, when Saxony was mistress of almost the whole world, he recognized that Saxon warriors had likewise fallen away from their ancestors' fortitude. The despised, barbarian Slavs surpassed Saxons in their virtuous determination to live free or die. Women, rulers though they might be, did not normally find themselves on the battlefield. How were they, especially professed religious, to sound the harmonious discord of providence running through the Saxons's retreat from ancient virtues, and their wars against each other and against outsiders? Dedication to religious observance gave one answer. Much in Widu- kind's account points to an analogue in the legend of St. Denis not invoked by him: namely, to Catulla, the heroine of legend, who contrived a ruse to give the bodies of St. Denis and his companion martyrs reverent burial, subverting the intent of the persecutors who had killed

92 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 2.36; 3.7-4(pp. 76, 151). 93 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.2 (pp. +5). 9-4 Widukind, Res Gestae Saxonicae 1.3-4;2.pref. (pp. -48,60). Widukind's Mirror 71 them. In fact, there is a double parallel; for the narrator of their martyrdom recalled that God, acting through that benevolent woman's prudence, had thwarted men's evil intent, just as He had done when, by another ruse, Judith beheaded Holophernes", But these analogues would have carried him close to the misogynies of metaphysics and Scripture, which he had scrupulously avoided in so many ways, perhaps most evidently when he omitted St. Vitus's attempt to save his nurse, Crescentia, pleading that it was ridiculous to torture a woman. Of course, Widukind knew that all such eerie harmonies were in the legends and could readily be supplied by those who knew them.

95 Hilduin, Passio Sanctissimi Dionysii c. 33; MIGNE, PL 106 p... s,