ABSTRACT
In recent years, Dhuoda's Handbook for her son William has become familiar to historians of earlier medieval Europe, in a surprising but wholly welcome way: surprising because it languished for so long in a limbo of obscure yet difficult texts, despised for its allegedly poor latinity and very limited contemporary impact in or after the ninth century, and consigned to a shelf marked spirituality'; welcome because it is recognized nowadays as the original work of an able writer with a distinctive take, and hence valuable evidence, on contemporary politics, social life and cultural values. Dhuoda demands to be taken seriously as an author. Her prefatory materials provide explanations of her choice of genre and her motives for writing, an eighty-seven-line acrostic poem and short prose prologue dedicating her opus to her son, and an account of the context in which she wrote, while the concluding section gives the exact dates on which she began and ended her work.
