Stephen D. White - Custom, Kinship, and Gifts to Saints: The Laudatio Parentum in Western France, 1050-1150

Studies in Legal History

Published by The University of North Carolina Press in association with the American Society for Legal History

G. Edward White

Both the initial research and the publication of this work were made possible in part through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency whose mission is to award grants to support education, scholarship, media programming, libraries, and museums, in order to bring the results of cultural activities to a broad, general public.

1988 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

92 91 90 89 88 54321

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

White, Stephen D., 1945-

Custom, kinship, and gifts to saints: the laudatio parentum in western France, 1050-1150 / by Stephen D. White.

p. cm.(Studies in legal history)

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-8078-6640-7 (alk. paper)

1. Transfer (Law)FranceHistory. 2. Kinship (Law)FranceHistory. 3. Law, MedievalHistory. 4. KinshipFranceHistory.

I. Title. II. Series.

KJV1238.W48 1988

346.4404'36dc1987-30028

[344.406436]CIP

WHEN I FIRST decided to examine the history of the laudatio parentum, I planned on writing a brief, narrowly focused study that would be securely located in the field of medieval legal history. Gradually, however, I realized that I could make better sense of this subject by broadening and reconceptualizing my approach to it. Without abandoning my original intention to focus primarily on the legal or normative aspects of the laudatio, I tried to consider its history in relation to several other topics in the history of medieval kinship and monasticism.

At the same time, as I became dissatisfied with my own ideas about what earlier medieval law or custom consisted of, what the medieval family was, what medieval people were doing when they made or participated in gifts, and what constitutes a satisfactory way of explaining a medieval custom or social practice, I turned for help to various writings of social theory and to anthropological studies of law, kinship, and gift-exchange because I was convinced that historians, as various scholars have recently shown, can learn a great deal from anthropology, even though they can hardly expect to master the intricacies of this field.

Finally, while retaining considerable scepticism about the meaning and even the meaningfulness of certain kinds of tables designed to represent the statistical prevalence of medieval practices such as the laudatio, I decided to construct and present some tables of my ownpartly because I myself sometimes found them meaningful, interesting, or at least suggestive and partly because I wanted to allow readers to decide for themselves what meaning, if any, to give them and to judge how effectively I had dealt with certain problems that are partly statistical in character.

If the resulting book seems longer and more analytically complex than one might expect, this is mainly because I follow many other historians in treating the laudatio as an important practice that is itself worthy of close study. In addition, I believe that a detailed discussion of this practice provides a useful framework for considering more general problems in medieval history, notably the role of law or custom in societies that lacked many of the features of more familiar legal cultures. Even though it is dangerous simply to assume that obscure rituals and puzzling customs provide important evidence about an entire society, I think that this assumption is justified in the case of the laudatio.

Because the history of the laudatio parentum in many parts of France has been treated in detail by earlier writers, I have seen no need to retrace their steps, but have concentrated instead on several thousand charters from several religious communities in the Touraine, the Vendmois, Anjou, and Maine during a period running from the mid-eleventh to the mid-twelfth century. Although I hope that my conclusions based on these materials will prove illuminating, I trust that future writers will extend, modify, and correct my arguments by studying evidence I have not considered. In particular, I hope that conclusions drawn from the study of monastic charters can be developed and criticized by historians working on other kinds of evidence. Possessing some of the trappings of a monograph, the book is an analytical essay, in which notes and bibliographical references have been kept to a minimum.

The book is meant to be read as a consecutive, integrated argument, in which many topics first discussed and documented in earlier chapters are considered in later ones from a different perspective. , especially, draw very heavily on material presented in earlier parts of the book. Although I have therefore included a fair number of cross-references, I have tried to avoid wearying readers with too many of them and have often proceeded on the assumption that once arguments or data have first been introduced, they will be familiar to readers and need not necessarily be documented when they reappear later on.

In referring to many individuals who play a part in the history of the laudatio parentum, my main concern has been to ensure that readers will be able to locate them in medieval sources, if they wish. In giving the first element of a medieval name, I have therefore followed the practice, in almost all cases, of using one of the Latin forms employed by a medieval scribe. I have translated the second element of a name only when I felt certain about the translation of a toponym or when I could not resist translating colorful and fully comprehensible cognomens. Translations from the Vulgate have been taken from the Douay/Rheims version.

I WISH TO THANK two teachers of mine, Giles Constable and Samuel E. Thorne, for introducing me to many of the issues considered in this book and for encouraging me to do further work on the laudatio parentum. Special thanks are due as well to Fredric L. Cheyette, who taught me a great deal about the subjects treated in this book, and to Caroline Walker Bynum and Patrick J. Geary, both of whom provided valuable comments on earlier drafts. I am also deeply indebted to Paul R. Hyams and William Ian Miller, who have generously shared with me their own ideas about medieval legal and social history and constructively criticized my own efforts to keep up with them. Although my footnotes mark many specific places where I have drawn on the writings of Georges Duby, they cannot indicate the full extent of my debt to him and his work. I have also learned a great deal from correspondence and conversations with Henry D. Abelove, Elizabeth A. R. Brown, Samuel K. Cohn, Natalie Z. Davis, Kate Gilbert, Thomas A. Green, Clark Maines, Richard T. Vann, G. Edward White, Lucia Perry White, and Morton G. White, several of whom also took great pains in reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this book. None of these people bears any responsibility for errors that I have doubtless made in trying to develop my argument. My thanks to Megan McLaughlin, who kindly allowed me to read and quote from her recent thesis on prayers for the dead.