Contesse, Duchesse, Marchise, Viscontesse:

The Appearance of Feminine Forms of Titles of Dignity in France, 850每1200

 

D＊A. J. D. Boulton

University of Notre Dame

 

    Historians interested in the origins of the high medieval nobility of France have spent a good deal of time in recent years tracing the ways in which the categorical titles miles, nobilis, and dom(i)nus-dom(i)na (and from about 1125 such vernacular equivalents as cheval[i]er, nob[i]le, sire, messire, and dans-dam[n]e, madame[1]) were employed to designate and distinguish the members of the highest strata of French society in the period between about 950 and 1250 AD.[2] For some years now I myself have con­centrated my attention on the use between about 1180 and 1500 of a different set of nobiliary titles:[3] those which, because they designated the holders of what had been the highest offices or dignitates of the sub-Roman r谷gime in France, I call ※dignitarial§ titles or ※titles of dignity,§[4] and which, because the dignities in question had been con­verted by 1050 into a form of dominium or territorial

lordship, I have termed ※dominical titles of dignity.§[5] Be­cause I was primarily interested in the titular expression of dominical authority, which in practice was very largely re­stricted to men, I initially devoted most of my energies to examining the history of the masculine versions of these titles〞the cognates and equivalents of the modern English titles ※duke,§ ※marquis,§ ※count,§ and ※viscount§〞and their abstract derivatives that acquired a territorial sense equivalent to those of the modern English series ※duchy,§ ※marquisate,§ and so forth. Recently, however, the correc­tive rhetoric of some of my feminine (and feminist) col­leagues made me realize the error of my ways in thus re­stricting my attention to masculine titles, and forcibly reminded me of something that I should have considered from the start: that each of my titles eventually gave rise to at least one feminine equivalent, both in Latin and in all of the vernacular languages of Europe.

    On consideration of the subject it appeared likely to me that an examination of the early history of these feminine titles in France would shed some light on the nature of the status designated by the masculine version, as well as on the status of the wives, widows, and daughters of the dig­nitaries who came to share their position in society. I therefore began an investigation of the early history of the forms and use of the feminine titles of dignity that even­tually took on a dominical sense, beginning with sources in Latin and moving on to those in the various dialects of Old French and Old Occitan when they began to appear. Given the conservatism of scribes, it is probably safe to assume that vulgar or vernacular versions of most femi­nine titles appeared in speech some time before their Latin equivalents were put into a written form, but this is of course impossible to prove. So far as I have been able to discover, although various lexicographers and historians have made lists of the earliest attestations of the various titles in question known to them, the questions of when the various titles came into general use, and why they were adopted at those particular times and places, had never been approached in a systematic way. In this paper I shall present the results of a preliminary review of the ev­idence, in both Latin and French, so far collected by lexi­cographers[6] and historians[7] of the period 750每1200, sup­plemented by a very partial review of literary works〞principally epics〞composed in French before about 1200.[8] From these sources I shall finally draw a few ten­tative conclusions about the origins and early development of feminine versions of the titles of gubernatorial and do­minical dignity.

    I should begin with a very rapid review of the history of the masculine forms of the four titles in question. Since no vernacular forms for any of these are attested before about 1125, I shall refer to them for convenience under their Latin forms, which continued to be used throughout the medieval period and beyond. Two of the titles〞comes ※traveling companion§ and dux ※leader§〞were common nouns in Classical Latin, and only became titles around 300 AD when they were adopted to designate the holders of newly-created dignitates.[9] Under the Roman Dominate, the title dux designated the holder of a high military office that entailed the command of the forces of a particular province or group of provinces, while comes designated a quasi-official status that could be purely honorific, but could entail military duties either comparable to those of a dux or on the lower level of a single civitas. For complex reasons, out of dozens these titles were the only non-pala­tine titles of dignity to survive the Germanic conquests of the fifth century in most regions of France,[10] and they were adopted by the Merovingian kings of the Franks to designate the most important officers of their civil and military administration, roughly equivalent to the Roman duces and comites civitatis. The title dux was also used under the Merovingian and early Carolingian kings to des­ignate the rulers of certain tribes who lived on the fringes of Frankish territory but were only nominally dependant on the Frankish crown. It was thus the oldest of what I have called the ※subregal§ dominical titles.[11]

    The remaining two masculine titles〞vicecomes ※vis-count§[12] and marchio or marchisus (comes) ※marquis§[13] 〞were invented in the ninth century to designate (in the latter case irregularly and informally) the holders of admin­istrative offices created under Charlemagne: respectively that of deputy to the count, and that of commander of a border region including several counties. Partly out of a desire to employ Classical language, and partly because the marchiones occupied a position roughly equivalent to that of the suppressed dux of the Merovingian period, the scribes of the period commonly referred to the march commanders as duces rather than marchiones or marchisi, and by 900 dux and marchio were virtually synonymous titles, often used in combination and alternation by the handful of men who exercised this office or the dominical authority that derived from it in the two centuries after the final partition of the Frankish empire in 888.[14]

    All four of the titles in question continued to be used by the heirs of the late Carolingian officials who succeeded in converting their administrative districts into hereditary dominions in the period between about 850 and 1000 AD (see Appendix 1), and both comes and vicecomes were usurped by a handful of men who managed to carve out wholly new dominions on the basis of their private lands and castles in the eleventh century.[15] Between about 900 and 1075 most of the great men who used the titles dux and marchio continued to use them in random alternation, not only with one another, but with the titles comes (since all marchiones held at least one civitas or pagus in their march) and princeps (a Classical Roman title long used to indicate sovereign authority). Between 1075 and 1125, however, although they survived elsewhere, the ti­tles princeps and marchio were abandoned completely as titles indicative of the lordship of territories dependent on the kingdom of France.[16] The latter title continued to be used in respect of the lordship of Romance-speaking terri­tories just beyond the borders of the Capetian kingdom throughout the medieval period〞in Catalonia, in the Kingdom of Burgundy or Arles, and in Lotharingia〞but it was never borne by more than three princes at the same time before 1506.[17] The title dux and its derivatives con­tinued to be borne simultaneously by no more than five men in France between 1088 and 1360, and usually by no more than two or three.[18] The titles comes and vicecomes and their derivatives were always much more common, as there were normally more than seventy comitatus, cont谷s, or ※counties.§ and an even larger number of vicecomitatus, vescont谷s, or ※viscounties,§ in the hands of lay barons, and the latter were normally referred to by their territorial title (comes Andgavie or cuens d＊Anjou, for example) in­stead of by their personal name, and almost always em­ployed at least the generic title of their dignity.

   It is important to note at this point that none of the four titles in question here is known to have been used to designate a woman before the last decades of the tenth cen­tury, and none seems to have acquired a feminine equiva­lent〞either cognate or otherwise〞until long after its adoption as a formal title. For the older titles, at least, this is not really surprising, for the Romans neither con­ferred public offices upon women, nor allowed to the wives or widows of public officials of any rank titles cor­responding to those of their husbands, and this prohibition seems to have endured throughout the centuries of Roman rule in the West. Instead, from the second century of the Principate female members of the senatorial nobility had employed feminine versions of the purely honorific predi­cate-title vir clarissimus that indicated membership within their order, and when under Constantine and his successors such titles were both given a legal standing and divided into a growing hierarchy of grades〞vir spectabilis, illus­tris, magnificentissimus, gloriosissimus〞the wives of such dignitaries were given the legal right to assume fem­inine equivalents.[19] All women noble by birth or mar­riage had thus enjoyed at least the basic predicate-title fem­ina clarissima, and the grandest had rejoiced in the title femina illustris et gloriosissima. In addition, from about 320 the wives of men who received the newly-interpreted dignity of patricius or ※patrician§ were permitted to bear the title patricia,[20] but the wives of both traditional urban magistrates and the holders of imperial administrationes of all kinds were give no such privilege before the loss of the Western provinces in the fifth century. Not surprisingly, the sub-Roman Kingdom of the Franks that succeeded the Roman r谷gime in Gaul in the fifth century seems at first to have maintained a simplified version of both the admin­istrative and the honorific system of titulature,[21] but the suppression of the Roman senate at the beginning of the seventh century seems to have led to the abandonment of all but one of the lay predicate-titles〞that of illustris, at­tached to the now gubernatorial offices of comes, dux, and patricius〞and it would appear that the feminine equiva­lent of vir illustris met a similar fate.[22]

    Even before that, however, some attempts had been made to create new feminine titles on the basis of mascu­line ones still in current use. In the sixth century a femi­nine version of the generic title senator〞senatrix〞is at­tested in a few documents as a term for women of the old senatorial class, but it survived only as long as its mascu­line equivalent.[23] More significantly, in the present con­text, a feminine version of comes〞by far the most com­mon title of high office under the Merovingians〞is at­tested in English documents of the same period: the title comitissa.[24] Not only the existence, but the form of this title is of considerable interest, for the ending -issa at­tached to the masculine stem was destined to become the normal one for feminine titles of dignity in both Latin and (with modifications) the Romance vernaculars, and it had very rarely been used for such a purpose in Latin before the appearance of comitissa. Of Greek rather than Latin origin, it had long been employed to form the normal feminine of the Greek title basile迆s (bas赤lissa), and as basile迆s had become around 620 the official title of the ※emperor§ in Constantinople,[25] the attachment of the end­ing of its feminine equivalent to the stem of comes sug­gests an assimilation of the lesser to the higher dignity. Because bas赤lissa is not itself attested in any Latin docu­ment of this period, however,[26] it seems unlikely that that Greek word was the direct model for the Latin comi­tissa. In fact, it is more likely that the latter word was a direct transliteration of the Greek title kom谷tissa, one of a large series of new feminine titles in -issa that were cer­tainly in official use in Constantinople by the tenth cen­tury, and may well have been in unofficial use by the sixth.[27] Since the Byzantine empire long maintained Greek equivalents of the Latin titles of the Constantinian era, often produced (as in the cases of k車mes and do迆x) by simple transliteration, the usage of the Byzantine nobility could be easily transferred to the Latin West when circum­stances made such emulation either possible or socially useful. It is not without significance that by the end of the sixth century the Greek feminine ending had come to be used in Latin to create a feminine version of the monastic title abbas ※abbot,§ both because abbots and abbatissae or ※abbesses§[28] came from the same 谷lite stratum of society as counts, and enjoyed a roughly comparable social sta­tion, and because the status of abbess was the only one before about 1070 that gave a woman an authority that did not derive from that of her husband.

    Somewhat surprisingly, at the time of its appearance in England in the sixth century the title comitissa is not at­tested as a feminine correlative of the official title comes (not in use in England in that period), but as a categorical term for women of the highest stratum of society, whose husbands and fathers were known in contemporary English as gesithas or ※companions (of the king)§〞the older but obsolescent sense of the Latin title comes.[29] Comitissa was thus the equivalent in England of the equally obsoles­cent Roman title femina clarissima or the contemporary Gallo-Roman neologism senatrix. Neither of the two new titles for lay women introduced into Latin before 600 seems to have been in common use, however, and comitissa is not attested even in English documents of the seventh or eighth centuries. Clearly neither the Franks nor the Saxons of the Merovingian period felt that the wife of a royal official ought to be distinguished by a personal ti­tle indicative of that status, and it is worth noting that English had no feminine correlative to the vernacular titles ealdorman and eorl (treated as equivalent to comes and dux) until after the Norman Conquest. At that time both comes and its Anglo-Norman equivalent cuens: cunte were intro­duced as the official equivalents of the Anglo-Danish eorl or earl, and at some time before 1154 (when it is first at­tested in an English document) the Norman cuntesse (itself only attested about three decades earlier) was adopted for the purpose of designating the wives of earles in Mid­dle English.[30]

   Among the Franks the negative attitude toward titles for wives does not seem to have changed during the reigns of the first three Carolingians〞Pepin, Charlemagne, and Louis ※the Pious.§ The new gubernatorial titles vicecomes and marchio/ marchisus informally introduced in this pe­riod were employed in very much the same way as the older titles of office, and are not known to have been ap­plied in any form to women. It may be of some signifi­cance that a feminine version of the old title dux〞ducissa〞first appears in three documents of this period (tentatively dated to 772, 787, and 816),[31] but in each case it was apparently applied to the wife of a Germanic tribal duke, whose status more closely approximated that of a client king than that of a Frankish official, and it may well have been created to translate a Germanic title.[32] Like that of comitissa, the form of ducissa was clearly based on that of the Greek title bas赤lissa, and the word probably represented either a transliteration of the Byzan­tine title doukissa or a new formation on the model of the Latin abbatissa, by this time well established. In any case the title ducissa〞though destined to be the normal correl­ative of dux in Latin〞is not attested again until 986, and no other title is known to have been used to distinguish the wives of duces until 965. In fact, as long as most of the men who bore the titles in question remained true ser­vants of the Frankish crown, it would appear that their wives had to content themselves with the aristocratic pre­fix domina or domna.

   It was in the troubled years immediately following the partition of the Frankish kingdom among the sons of Louis ※the Pious§ in 843 that the comites of the western and southern divisions of the kingdom, including those who bore in addition the titles dux and marchio or marchisus, began to throw off their effective dependence upon the Frankish monarchy, and to convert themselves into the hereditary and proprietary lords of their adminis­trative districts. It is surely significant that it was in pre­cisely this period that the wives of certain of these would-be princes, at least, began to be distinguished in contem­porary documents by a feminine version of their husband＊s title of dignity. In all likelihood these women (like the wives of the dukes of the Bavarians a century earlier) were assimilating themselves to the status of the wives of the kings of the Franks, who had long borne the distinctive ti­tle regina, roughly equivalent to the Greek bas赤lissa. It is likely that they also derived some encouragement from the doctrine then being promoted by the leaders of the Frank­ish church that the partners in a Christian marriage were equal in the eyes of God. In keeping with this idea (closely linked to the new theological conception of mar­riage as a Christian sacrament which could not ordinarily be dissolved) the status of queen was gradually converted into a functional office or dignitas, and from 856 Frankish queens were normally crowned in an elaborate ceremony very much like that which consecrated their husband＊s right to rule.[33] It would be difficult to believe that the proud daughters of the Frankish Reichsaristocratie who married the territorial governors of the ninth and tenth cen­turies were wholly uninfluenced by these developments, but it is very difficult to estimate either the absolute or the relative importance of any particular factor.

   Since all of the governors involved in the earliest phase of the struggle for independence commonly bore the title comes, and since fewer than a dozen out of the roughly two hundred counts in these regions bore any higher title, it cannot be surprising that the first feminine title to ap­pear in the surviving documents was comitissa. I have nevertheless found only five attestations of this title cer­tainly antedating the year 900, and all five can probably be dated to the second half of the century.[34] Comitissa first occurs in two undated letters, one probably written to and the other issued by Pope Leo IV, whose pontificate spanned the years 849每855.[35] The letter written to the Pope was ordered by a Languedocian count named Bera and his wife Romella. The title was next employed by the consort of the Marquis and Count of Toulouse in 865,[36] and by the consort of the Count of Urgell in the Spanish March in 885.[37] The title also occurs in a document from Ravenna in Lombardy dated 896.[38] How common the use of the title had become by the end of the century is diffi­cult to judge, but it may well have remained rare, for I have found evidence of its employment by only three ladies in the first third of the tenth century. Ingelberg, wife of the first self-styled dux of the Aquitanians, styles herself comitissa in three documents (dated 912, 917, and 917/18),[39] and Adelaide, wife of the prince of upper Bur­gundy, does likewise in four documents of the period 921每929.[40] Since all of the women who are known to have called themselves comitissa in the period before 930 lived in the southern part of France, Catalonia, and Lombardy, it may be that the usage was confined to those regions, whose societies were in many respects quite different from those of the northern and eastern parts of the old Frankish kingdom. Needless to say, we have no direct evidence for vernacular usage in this period, but it is likely that those ladies who styled themselves comitissa in their diplomas used a Romance version of the title (probably something very like the later Occitan and Italian contessa) in daily life.

    It must be noted at this point that most of the ladies who are known to have called themselves comitissa before the year 1000 were married to men who used the titles dux, marchio/ marchisus, and princeps in addition to the title comes. For some reason, however, none of these ladies is known to have employed a feminine correlative of any of her husband＊s grander titles until the end of the second third of the tenth century, and no distinctively fem­inine form was introduced into the Latin of the charters and chronicles until the last quarter of that century. Why the greatest comitissae refrained for more than a century from adopting such titles, and even then continued in most cases to use a simple comital style for two further centuries, is something of a mystery, but it may be that the wives of lesser counts continued to be content for some time with the purely social title domina, so that be­tween 850 and 965 the feminine comitissa was more dis­tinguished socially than the masculine comes.[41]

    In any case, in the late tenth century certain of the most eminent comitissae seem finally to have decided that the time had come for them to assume a title more clearly in­dicative of their high rank, and chose to employ a femi­nine version of one of their husband＊s grander titles. Per­haps because the first princesses to adopt such a title were the wives of German tribal duces and spoke a Germanic rather than a Romance dialect, the obvious and historical title ducissa was rejected by most scribes of the tenth and eleventh centuries, at least, in favor either of the title dux itself used with feminine gender (attested in at least seven documents, mostly produced in Germany, between 965 and 1093), or of the Classical word ducatrix, which in Classical Latin had meant ※female guide§ or ※leader.§ The latter (or its late variant ductrix) is attested in no fewer than eleven documents produced between 976 and 1076〞most of them, again, in Germany, but some in Italy as well.[42] Between 816 and 1141 the word ducissa itself ap­pears only in one isolated document written in 986,[43] and as no vernacular forms derived from ducatrix are attested in any language, it is unclear whether a Romance feminine for dux even existed before about the middle of the eleventh century.

    Not surprisingly, perhaps, the first women in the Ro­mance-speaking parts of the old Frankish kingdom to make regular use of feminine forms of either dux or mar­chio in their Latin diplomas, at least, were Beatrice of Bar, consort of the Duke of Lorraine, and her daughter Mathilda, ※the Great Countess§ of Tuscany, who had the distinction of being (from 1052 to 1115) one of the first women to rule a territorial principality in her own right. Although the title marchionissa is attested in an isolated Italian document of 967,[44] it does not appear again in any surviving text antedating the year 1060, when Beatrice styled herself for the first time ducatrix et marchionissa.[45] Mathilda used a similar style in a number of diplomas is­sued between 1073 and 1108, and her novel employment of feminine versions of masculine titles to proclaim her own novel dominical status seems to have been imitated by the wives of other princes. Her title marchionissa is also attested in the last third of the eleventh century in three German annals, in which it appears under the years 1071, 1080, 1089, 1092, and 1097.[46]

    After the turn of the twelfth century, the title mar­chionissa〞a word clearly derived from the then-standard marchio〞is largely replaced in the surviving French sources by the previously unattested marchisa, a feminine form of then archaic title marchisus. Marchisa is attested in eight documents of the first quarter of the century (two, dated 1116, written in France) while marchionissa is at­tested only once, in a German source of 1124.[47] Since the only known vernacular forms of both the masculine and feminine versions of this title in all of the Romance di­alects are those derived from the adjectival marchisus rather than the substantive marchio〞marchis and marchise in Old French, marques and marquesa in Old Oc­citan〞the prevalence of marchisa in the early twelfth cen­tury may indicate that a vernacular version had come into use in some Romance-speaking regions, including France, but this is far from certain. Both Latin versions of the feminine title occur relatively rarely in surviving docu­ments of the twelfth century, and although the masculine vernacular marchis occurs up to a dozen times in most of the chansons de geste currently dated to the first three quar­ters of the twelfth century,[48] the feminine marchise is not known to occur in any work written before the last quarter of the century.[49] As the masculine title marchis had been abandoned by 1125 by all French princes except the Counts of Toulouse (who persisted in styling themselves ※marquis§ as rulers of their portion of the old principality of Provence), the rarity of the feminine correlative title in France after 1125 was only to be expected, however, and it is difficult to draw any conclusions about its earlier use. The vernacular marchise (or marquise as it was normally spelled from the fifteenth or sixteenth century) was of course the exception to the rule that the feminines of dig­nitarial titles should end in -issa or some derivative thereof, but it is worth noting that in Latin the older form marchionissa finally prevailed even in France, and remains the normal form even today in all of the countries of Eu­rope except Germany.

   By 1100 the Latin title dux was still used by only five French princes〞the lords of Normandy, Brittany, Bur­gundy, Aquitaine, and Gothia or Narbonne〞but all five now used it with much greater consistency than they had done previously, and all but the lord of Brittany (who still on occasion styled himself comes to 1297) used the ducal title exclusively in connection with the names of the do­minions just listed, which had come to bear the fixed do­minional title ducatus or ※duchy.§ The masculine vernacu­lar title dux or ducs is attested 43 times in the Chanson de Roland alone,[50] and was clearly in widespread use in Old French in the first half of the twelfth century. Despite this, no feminine version of the title in either Latin or the vernacular is known to occur in French sources between 993 and 1152, and this suggests (if it does not actually prove), that despite the custom established in Germany in the late tenth century and in Italy in the late eleventh, the wives of French duces never used an equivalent title before the later decades of the twelfth century. The first French princess known to have used the title ducissa was in fact Alienor of Aquitaine, like Beatrice of Tuscany a ruler on her own right, who on a seal still attached to a document dated 18 May 1152 styled herself Alienor. ducisse Aqui­tan.[51] It is possible that she was inspired by the current usage of the Duchesses of Saxony and Bavaria, who had just begun to use the title ducissa (not previously attested in German documents) in the previous decade.[52] In any case she was followed a decade later by Constance, consort of the Count of Toulouse, Duke of Narbonne, and Mar­quis of Provence, who on her seal attached to a diploma dated 1163/4 styled herself ducisse Narbone marchise,[53] and two decades later still by Constance〞daughter and heiress of Duke Conan IV of Brittany, Count of Rich­mond, and wife of Duchess Alienor＊s younger son Geof­frei Plantagenet〞who in a diploma dated 1181 styled her­self ducissa Brit. comitissa Rich.[54] The vernacular duchesse (or duchoise) is first attested in works of the same general period, including Floire et Blancheflor, dated 1150/75, the Roman de Rou, dated 1174, and the Cheva­lier au Cygne.[55] This appears to indicate that by the time of the accession of Philippe ※Auguste§ in 1180 both ducissa and duchesse, though unknown in France before 1150, were well on their way to being accepted as the normal titles for the wives and heiresses of dukes in France.

   The only title whose origins we have not yet considered is the feminine equivalent of the Latin title vicecomes. Perhaps because most vicecomites remained more or less thoroughly subordinated to the comites whose deputies they were until the late tenth century, the feminine vice­comitissa (clearly modelled on comitissa) is not attested anywhere until ca. 1020, roughly half a century after the earliest appearances of feminine versions of dux and mar­chio. Like the latter, however, vicecomitissa seems to have remained quite unusual before the middle of the fol­lowing century, as I have found only four examples of its use before 1100: one ca. 1020, one in 1030, one ca. 1066, and one in 1068.[56] Despite the events of 1066 and the in­troduction of the masculine title vicecomes as the equiva­lent of the English ※sheriff,§ the feminine title is not at­tested in England before 1125, (when it appears in the un­usual sense ※female sheriff§[57]), and is not attested there in the sense of ※wife of a dominical viscount§ until 1157.[58] Since the latter referred to a viscountess in France (there being none in England before the fifteenth century), its use strongly suggests that both vicecomitissa and its ver­nacular derivatives viscontesse, vescontessa and the like were firmly established in France by about 1150, but so far the earliest use of the vernacular derivative viscontesse I have found is in Aucassin et Nicolette, a work of the first half of the following century.[59]

    To summarize, it would appear that the wives and wid­ows of Frankish dignitaries first began to use an equiva­lent title of dignity in the last third of the ninth century, when their husbands began to assert their independence from the Frankish king and to convert their administrative districts into proprietary dominions, but that the custom may have been confined at first to the wives of the more important dignitaries in southern regions. In any case the evidence suggests that for the next century the only titles in current use were the feminine equivalents of comes〞comitissa and its vernacular derivatives〞and that feminine equivalents of the higher and much rarer titles dux and marchio/ marchisus were not adopted anywhere until the 960s, while equivalents of the lower title vicecomes did not appear until half a century later still, in the 1020s. The feminine equivalents of the two higher titles may have come into common use in Italy in the last third of the eleventh century, under the influence of the Duchess and Marchioness of Tuscany, but no feminine title of dig­nity except comitissa〞whose vernacular derivative cuntesse first occurs in a surviving document in a version of the Song of Roland possibly composed at the end of the eleventh century〞seems to have been current in France until the second half of the following century, when both ducissa and marchisa and their vernacular derivatives appear in French documents for the first time. Vicecomitissa, although attested as early as 1020, does not seem to have been a title in common use in France until the same period, as its vernacular form first appears in documents only in the early thirteenth century.

    While it is not difficult to account for the appearance of comitissa in the late ninth century, it is hard to understand why the wives of French duces and marchiones waited a further three centuries before adopting titles suggestive of their full social equality with their husbands. In the end it took women who held the dignities in question in their own right to initiate the use of feminine versions of these titles in both Italy and France, and the wives of other dig­nitaries did not follow their example until some decades later. It is tempting to see the general adoption of femi­nine titles of dignity in the second half of the twelfth cen­tury as being related in some way to the changes in the prevailing attitude towards noble women promoted in the same period by the poets of northern France. The timing is certainly suggestive, and it may well be that the new ideas about the treatment of ladies being promoted in the courts of northern France encouraged the chastelaines of those courts to assert their dignity in a less equivocal fash­ion than previously. The adoption of feminine dominical titles in this period must also be seen, however, as part of the general process whereby the nobility of France as a whole was redefined and restructured between about 1180 and 1220 on the basis of the new principles of territorial lordship and knighthood. This complex process saw not only the final stabilization of the use of masculine titles of dignity already alluded to, but the assumption of the prefix dominus and its vernacular equivalents sire, mes­sire, and en by members of the newly noble order of knighthood, the assumption of the feminine equivalents domina, dame, madame, and na by their wives, and the (often simultaneous) adoption of seals and armorial bear­ings by all members of the greatly expanded nobility, male and female alike.[60]

Appendix 1

 

Sets of dominical dignities in kingdoms

derived from the partition of Francia, existing in 1205

 

 

                              NAVARRE          ARAGON-             FRANCE                BURGUNDY/        LOMBARDY/       GERMANY

DIGNITY                                            CATALONIA                                       ARLES                   ITALY                    (LOTHARINGIA)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

1. Princeps                                                                         (prince

                                                                                             〞> 1120)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

2. Dux                                                                                 1. duc(s)                                                 1. duca                   1. herzog

                                                                                                                                                                                            (1. duc)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

3. Marchio                                        1. marques             (marchis                 1. marchis              2. marchese           (2. marchis)

Marchisus                                         (1149)                     〞> 1120)                                                                            

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Margravius                                                                                                                                                                       2. markgraf

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Landgravius                                                                                                                                                                     3. landgraf

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

4. Comes                                                                            2. cuens                 2. cuens                                                 4. pfalzgraf

Palatinus                                                                          palatins                palatins

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Burggravius                                                                                                                                                                     5. burggraf

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

5. Comes              1. conde               2. comte                 3. cuens:                3. cuens:                3. conte                  6. graf

                                                                                             conte                    conte                                                    (3. cuens)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

6. Vicecomes       2. vezconde         3. vescomte           4. vesconte            4. vescomte           4. visconte             (4. vesconte)

 

 

Appendix 2

 

The Feminine Titles and their Earliest Attestations to c. 1220

(Attestations of Latin titles in France are given in boldface)

 

 

                                  Latin                                                                                                    Old French

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

1       comitissa, cometissa                                                      1 contesse, cuntesse, contasse, countasse

          a.   noble woman c. 590                                                                 1095/ 1125, 12th century passim

          b.   wife or widow of a count = countess consort

                c.     850, 865, 926, 963, 980, 1004, 1085

          c.   daughter of a count

                1075/ 81

          d.   countess dominant 12th century

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

2A    ducissa                                                                                      2A duchesse, duchoise, ducoise

          772, 787, 816, 986, 1152, 1190                                                        c. 1150/ 75, c. 1174, c. 1190

2B    ducatrix, ductrix                                                              2B 〞

          984, 993, 1015, 1076

2C    dux (f)                                                                                          2C 〞

          965, 983, 990, 1093

                                                                                                                  2D duchaine

                                                                                                                        L12th century

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

3a    marchionissa                                                                       3A 〞

          967, 1071, 1080, 1089, 1092, 1097, 1124, 1159

3b    marchisa, marchisia, marc(h)issa                         3b marchise, marcise, markise

          1085/ 1109, 1101, 1104, 1116, 1117, 1125                                          c. 1181, 13th century

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

4 vicecomitissa                                                                             4 viscontesse, vescontesse

          c. 1020, 1030/5, c. 1066, 1068, 1125, 1157                                   c. 1200/50

 


[1]These are the usual forms of the words in Old French; precise equivalents existed in both Old Occitan and Old Catalan.

[2]See, for example, Lucien Foulet, ※Sire, Messire,§ Romania 71 (1950): 1每48, 180每221; 72 (1951): 31每77, 324每67, 479每528; Pierre Feuch豕re, ※La Noblesse du Nord de la France,§ Annales: Economies, Soci谷t谷s, Civilisations 6 (1951): 306每18; J. Balon, Etudes franques, 1. Aux origines de la noblesse (Namur: n.p., 1963); L谷opold G谷nicot, ※La noblesse dans la soci谷t谷 m谷di谷vale: A propos des derni豕res 谷tudes relatives aux terres d＊Empire,§ Le Moyen Age 71 (1965): 539每60; P. Van Luyn, ※Les milites dans la France du XIe si豕cle,§ Le Moyen Age 77 (1971): 5每51, 193每238; Georges Duby, The Chivalrous Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1977); Timothy Reuter, The Me­dieval Nobility: Studies in the Ruling Classes of France and Germany from the Sixth to the Twelfth Centuries (Amsterdam, New York, Oxford: North Holland, 1978); and Jean Flori, L＊id谷ologie du glaive: Pr谷histoire de la chevalerie (Geneva: Droz, 1983).

[3]I am currently completing a book entitled Grants of Honour: The Origins of the System of Nobiliary Dignities of Tradi­tional France, c. 1100每1515, scheduled to be published by Boydell & Brewer by 1995.

[4]These titles have long been described in French as titres de dignit谷 and in English as ※titles of dignity.§ The word ※dignitarial§ is a neologism I created to avoid the constant repetition of the phrase ※of dignity.§ The word dignitas was employed from Classical times to designate any of the magis­tracies or comparable offices of the Roman state, and contin­ued to be used throughout the ※medieval§ period to designate statuses that conveyed high rank to their occupants. Down to the ninth century it was commonly employed in this sense in alternation with its partial synonym honor, but the latter came to be attached to the territories and estates of gubernato­rial dignitaries and other magnates of the empire.

[5]In my forthcoming book Grants of Honour I adopted the word ※dominical§ to describe the type of lordship exercised over territories (which I call ※dominions§), and to character­ize anything pertaining to this type of lordship. The words most commonly employed by historians in roughly the same sense〞※feudal§ and its foreign equivalents〞are quite inap­propriate, because they refer properly to fiefs, whose essen­tial nature was that of a vassalic service-tenement, not a terri­tory ruled by a territorial lord. While many French dominions were fiefs after about 1100, and many fiefs were dominions, the two phenomena never corresponded completely, and al­ways remained conceptually distinct.

[6]I have so far consulted the following works for Latin forms: Charles Du Fresne, sieur Du Cange, Glossarium Mediae et In­fimae Latinitatis, ed. L. Favre (Niort, 1883每87; Graz: Akademische Druck, 1954); R. E. Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Word List from British and Irish Sources (London: Ox­ford UP, 1965; abbreviated RMLW); O. Prinz, J. Schneider, Mittellateinisches Wörterbuch bis zum Ausgehenden 13. Jahrhundert (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1967每); J. F. Niermeyer, Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus (Leiden: Brill, 1976; ab­breviated MLLM); J. W. Fuchs, et al. Lexicon Latinitatis Ned­erlandicae Medii Aevi (Leiden: A. M. Hakkert, 1984每); and Novum Glossarium Mediae Latinitatis ab anno DCCC usque ad annum MCC (Hafnia: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1967). For French forms I consulted F. Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l'ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe si豕cles (Paris: Librairie des Sciences et des Arts, 1881每1902); A. To­bler, E. Lommatzsch, Altfranzösisches Wörterbuch (Berlin, Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1925每); and W. von Wartburg, Französisches etymo-logisches Wörterbuch (T邦bingen: Mohr 1928每). In each case I have examined the articles so far pub­lished on all of the titles in question in all of their variant forms, and all related words. Several of these present partial lists of early attestations, and cite both sources and dates.

[7]Principally the study by Walther Kienast, Der Herzogstitel in Frankreich und Deutschland (9. bis 12. Jahrhundert) (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, Vienna, 1968).

[8]I have also searched a number of chansons de geste dated to the period before 1180 for instances of the various titles of dignity and related terms: specifically the Chanson de Roland of c. 1095每1130; the Charroi de Nîmes of c. 1130每50; Le Voyage de Charlemagne of c. 1115每1170; and Li Corone­menz Looïs of c. 1130每1150. Although all four included the masculine titles ducs, marchis, and cuens, so far as I could find none contained a single feminine equivalent to any of these titles.

[9]Comes: comitis was derived from comitus, the perfect par­ticiple of the verb comeo: comire ※to go or travel with.§ It was first employed as a title in an informal way of the travel­ling companions of a magistrate, who served as his staff offi­cers, and came to be restricted to the companions of the Prin­ceps. Although it retained its basic sense in Latin, in the Ro­
mance vernacular it was always employed in its post-Roman titular sense, formerly rendered into English by the equivalent but unrelated title ※earl,§ but for some time now rendered by the derivative ※count.§

    Dux: ducis was derived from the main stem of the verb duco: ducere ※to lead.§ Like comes, it continued to be used in Latin in its basic sense of ※leader,§ but was from the beginning re­stricted in the Romance vernaculars to its post-Roman titular sense, rendered in English by the derivative ※duke.§

[10]The title patricius ※patrician§ and its equivalent rector were also employed in essentially the same sense as dux, but with a higher rank, in certain regions under the Merovingian r谷gime, but both were abolished, along with the office of dux, under the first Carolingians.

[11]I.e., inferior in rank to that of rex or ※king,§ which always implied dominical authority.

[12]The title vice comes was a new formation of the period. On the history of the institution and title, see esp. W. Sickel, Die fränkische Vicecomitat (n.p., 1907); and M. Garaud, ※Les vi­comtes de Poitou (IXe 每XIIe si豕cles),§ Revue historique du droit français et 谷tranger 4 ser. 6 (1937): 426每49.

[13]The title marchio ※march-man§ was a neologism derived from the Latinized Frankish word marca ※a march, border, or border region.§ Often one or the other of the two Latin adjec­tives formed on the same stem〞marchisus and marchensis〞were employed in a substantive sense in place of the noun marchio, and it was from the former of these that the vernacu­lar titles in all Romance languages and dialects were formed. On the early history of these titles, see esp. Jan Dhondt, ※Le titre de marquis 角 l＊ 谷poque carolingienne,§ Bulletin du Cange 19 (1948): 407每17; and Herwig Wolfram, Intitulatio, vol. 1. Lateinische f邦rstentitel bis zum Ende des 8. Jahrhunderts, Er­ganzenband XXI of Mitteilungen des Instituts f邦r Öster­reichische Geschichtsforschung (Graz, Vienna, Cologne: Böhlau, 1967).

[14]The rulers of the following nine regions employed the title dux and (or) marchio in France during some part of the period between 888 and 1120: Toulouse, Francia, Barcelona, Bur­gundy, Gascony, Poitiers or Aquitaine, Gothia or Narbonne, Normandy, and Flanders.

[15]The title comes was assumed illegally by some 25 local rulers between about 950 and 1220, but only 14 of these as­sumptions resulted in the permanent promotion of the domin­ion to comital rank.

[16]In contrast to the official titles of dignity, princeps did not give rise to a regular feminine equivalent until the fourteenth century. The word principissa〞the earliest and eventually the normal Latin feminine of princeps〞is attested in a single isolated instance as early as 989, but did not come into regu­lar use until around 1400, four centuries later. The alternative Latin word princissa and the closely related vernacular princesse both made their appearance only at the end of the second decade of the fourteenth century, in 1321 and 1320 re­spectively. It would thus appear that, despite the usage of many modern historians, France did not even possess a word for ＆princess＊ until the later medieval period.

    It is worth noting the the title baro, used like princeps as a categorical term for the greater lords of France and England from the late eleventh century onwards, did not give rise to a feminine until the middle of the thirteenth century; baronissa is first attested in France in 1258 and in England in 1278, while the vernacular barnesse is first recorded in a document of ca. 1250.

[17]The Count of Barcelona and King of Aragon was Marquis of Tortosa and Lerida; the Count of Toulouse and Duke of Nar­bonne was Marquis of Provence; and the Count of Flanders was for a time Marquis of Namur.

[18]The only duchies in existence between 1088 and 1327 were those of Brittany, Aquitaine, Burgundy, Normandy, and Nar­bonne, and they were sometimes held by pluralists, or by the King himself.

[19]See Andr谷 Chastagnol, ※Les femmes dans l＊ordre s谷nato­rial: titulature et rang social 角 Rome,§ Revue historique 262 (1979): 3每28, and Rodolphe Guilland, ※La Collation et la Perte ou la d谷ch谷ance des titres nobiliaires 角 Byzance,§ Revue des 谷tudes byzantines (1946): 24每69, esp. 49每56. The title clarissima et inlustris femina is attested from 390, that of clarissima et spectabilis femina from 454.

[20]Stuckelberg, Der Konstantinische Patriziat (Basel and Geneva, 1891) 64; Guilland, ※Collation§ 49.

[21]On this see Karl Friedrich Stroheker, Der senatorische Adel im spätantiken Gallien, (T邦bingen: Alma Mater, 1948); K. F. Stroheker, ※Die Senatoren bei Gregor von Tours.§ in Ger­manentum und Spätantike (Stuttgart: Antemis Verlag, 1965) 192每206; F. D. Gilliard, ※The Senators of Sixth-Century Gaul,§ Speculum 54 (1979): 685每97; and Brian Brennan, ※Senators and social mobility in sixth-century Gaul,§ Journal of Medieval History 11 (1985): 145每61.

[22]The titles spectabilis femina and illustris femina are at­tested throughout the West down to the end of the sixth cen­tury, but disappear shortly after the suppression of the Senate in 610 (Chastagnol, ※Les femmes§ 28).

[23]Senatrix is attested in several documents of this period both with the sense ※female member of the senatorial nobil­ity§ and with the sense ※wife of a senator§ (MLLM 956). In Adam of Bremen (d. c. 1081), Gesta Hammaburgensis eccle­siae pontificum (ed. Schmeidler, Monumenta Germaniae His­torica, Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum, 1917) lib. 2 c. 80, it is used to designate the wife of a count.

[24]RMLW 98.

[25]See especially L. Br谷hier, ※L＊origine des titres imp谷riaux 角 Byzance,§ Byzantinische Zeitschrift 15 (1906): 161每78.

[26]Other forms of basile迆s, including basilea, seem to have been used in preference to basilissa in Latin documents.

[27]See Rodolphe Guilland, ※La Collation et la Perte ou la d谷ch谷ance des titres nobiliaires 角 Byzance,§ Revue des 谷tudes byzantines (1946): 24每69, esp. 49每56. Other such titles〞first clearly attested in the tenth century work called the Cer­emonial of Constantine X〞included hupatissa ※consuless,§ tribounissa ※tribuness,§ kaisarissa ※caesaress,§ strategissa ※generaless,§ and doukissa ※duchess.§

[28]The Latin title abbatissa is first attested in a letter of Gre­gory ※the Great.§ c. 600. MLLM 4.

[29]See H. R. Loyn, ※Gesiths and Thegns in Anglo-Saxon Eng­land from the Seventh to the Tenth Century,§ English Histor­ical Review 277 (1955): 529每49.

[30]OED, compact edition, 1: 580. The form contesse is at­tested from 1297, countas from 1380, comytiss from 1450, and the modern form countess from 1474.

[31]These appear in Th. Bitterauf, Die Traditionen des Hochstifts Freising, 2 vols. (Munich, 1905, 1909; Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1967) 1: nos. 46, 368; and Monumenta Ger­maniae Historica, Diplomata Karolinorum 1: no. 156.

[32]It is not known by what title the rulers of the tributary ducatus were known, but it was probably some version of the title herizogo.

[33]On these developments, see Edward James, The Origins of France, From Clovis to the Capetians 500每1000 (New York: St. Martin＊s, 1982) 80每81.

[34]Two refer to the dates 811 and 813 respectively, but were actually written after 849. One of these〞※Amaltrudis comitissa§〞is in J. Tardif, Monuments Historiques (Cartons des rois) (Paris: J. Claye, 1866), no. 101, pp. 74 ff. and Baluze, Capitularia regum Francorum . . . 2 vols. (Paris, 1677; 3rd ed. Paris 1780), col. 1061, Lasteyric, Paris 37 no. 29. The other is published in Doms Cl. De Vic and J. Vais­sette, Histoire g谷n谷rale de Languedoc, 3rd ed., 16 vols. (Toulouse: E. Privat, 1872每1904) 2: preuve no. 23 col. 79.

[35]Leonis IV pap. epist. Epp., 5: 598.

[36]※Berteiz comitissa.§ pub. in De Vic, Histoire de Languedoc, no. 164 col. 339 (a. 865, Toulouse).

[37]※Ego Ermesinda comitisse . . . et Quixilo comitissa.§ pub. in Kienast, Herzogstitel 90 n. 22: 7.

[38]MLLM 210.

[39]See Kienast, Herzogstitel 90 n. 22b.

[40]Ibid. 89 n. 22a. She styles herself ※Ego Adeleydis condam comitissa.§

[41]An example of a great prince and his wife referred to with unequal titles is ※Adelberti marchionis et Berte comitisse.§ published in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Diplomata Otton. 1: 238, p. 330, 21.

[42]MLLM 361 and Kienast, Herzogstitel 393 n. 194.

[43]Codex Diplomaticus Cajetanus, editus cura et studio mona­chorum S. Benedicti archicoenobii Montis Casini, 4 vols (Montecassino: Archicoenobium Montis Casini, 1887每1960) 2: 238.

[44]MLLM 654每55.

[45]Kienast, Herzogstitel 385 n. 151.

[46]Ibid., and MLLM 655.

[47]Ibid. 655.

[48]The title is applied to relatively few characters in the chan­sons de geste I reviewed. In Roland, to Roland himself and Otes; in Charroi to Guillaume and Berengier; in Voyage to no one in particular (the Twelve Peers being collectively referred to as ※li cunte et li marchis§); and in Coronemenz only to Guillaume ※li marchis au vis fier.§

[49]It appears in the Vengeance Alixandre, composed c. 1181.

[50]Eleven different men are so titled in Roland, only one of whom〞Sansun〞is also one of the Twelve Peers.

[51]Kienast, Herzogstitel 244 n. 462.

[52]The former styled herself ※Gertrudis totius Saxoniae ducissa§ in a document of 1141 (pub in G. W. Leibnitz, Orig­ines Guelficae, ed. C. L. Scheidt, 5 vols. [Hannover: H. E. C. Schl邦ter, 1750每1780] 2: 550). The second wife of Duke Hein­rîch ※Jasomirgott§ used the title in a document of 1143 (cited in Kienast, Herzogstitel 375), and a later duchess styled her­self ※Mathilde Bawariae et Saxoniae ducissa§ in a document of c. 1154.

[53]Kienast, Herzogstitel 309; pub. L. Douët d＊Arcq, Inven­taires et documents . . . Collection de sceaux, 3 vols. (Paris: H. Plon, 1863每1868) 1: 381, no. 741.

[54]Kienast, Herzogstitel 156 n. 54; pub. A. [Le Moyne] de la Borderie, Recueil d＊actes in谷dits des ducs et princes de Bre­tagne (Rennes: C. Catel, 1888) 119 ff., no. 60.

[55]Godefroy 2: 418; Tobler-Lommatsch 2: cols. 2093每94.

[56]MLLM 1093.

[57]RMLWL 511.

[58]Ibid. It was also used to designate a sheriff＊s wife c. 1170.

[59]Aucassin et Nicolette: Chantefable du XIIIe si豕cle. Ed. Mario Roques, Classiques français du Moyen Age 41 (2nd ed., Paris: Champion, 1967): XL, 29, 31.

[60]On this process, see esp. Georges Duby, ※The transfor-mation of the aristocracy,§ The Chivalrous Society 178每85.