Carolingian Experiments (Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1) 9782503594101, 2503594107

Table of contents :
Front Matter
Matthew Bryan Gillis. Introducing Carolingian Experiments
Part One. Structures, Familiar and Otherwise
Valerie L. Garver. Carolingian Boyhoods
Paul Edward Dutton. Carolingian Experiments with Family
Abigail Firey. The Paper Chase
Anne Latowsky. Carolingian Imperial Biography and the Memory of Spain
Matthew Gabriele. The Historian Hrabanus Maurus and the Prophet Haimo of Auxerre
Andrew Romig. Strange Natures
Part Two. The Struggle against Sin
Lynda Coon. The Call of the Siren
Courtney M. Booker. By the Body Betrayed
Martha Rampton. Why the Carolingians Didn’t Need Demons
Matthew Bryan Gillis. Pleasures of Horror
Back Matter

Citation preview

Carolingian Experiments

Interdisciplinary Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Publications of the Marco Institute

Volume 1

Editorial Board under the auspices of the Marco Institute for Medi­eval and Renaissance Studies, University of Tennessee, Knoxville Gregor Kalas (General Editor), Justine Andrews, Manuela Ceballos, Heather Hirschfeld, Robin Jensen, Roy Liuzza, James T. Palmer, Alison Vacca

Carolingian Experiments

Edited by

Matthew Bryan Gillis

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

© 2022, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978-2-503-59410-1 e-ISBN: 978-2-503-59411-8 DOI: 10.1484/​M.ISMAR-EB.5.123002 Printed in the EU on acid-free paper. D/2022/0095/95

Table of Contents List of Illustrations

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Introducing Carolingian Experiments Matthew Bryan Gillis 9 Part One Structures, Familiar and Otherwise Carolingian Boyhoods Valerie L. Garver 27 Carolingian Experiments with Family Paul Edward Dutton 47 The Paper Chase: The Pursuit of Carolingian Legal Innovations Abigail Firey 71 Carolingian Imperial Bio­graphy and the Memory of Spain Anne Latowsky 123 The Historian Hrabanus Maurus and the Prophet Haimo of Auxerre: Experiments, Exegesis, and Expectations Emerging from the Ninth Century Matthew Gabriele 149 Strange Natures: Theodulf ’s Letter to Moduin in Context Andrew Romig 165

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Part Two The Struggle against Sin The Call of the Siren: Sex, Water, and Salt in the Sacramentary of Gellone Lynda Coon 185 By the Body Betrayed: Blushing in the Penitential State Courtney M. Booker 221 Why the Carolingians Didn’t Need Demons Martha Rampton 245 Pleasures of Horror: Florus of Lyons’s Querela de divisione imperii Matthew Bryan Gillis 269 Index 291

List of Illustrations Figure 1. ‘The Virgin Mary confronts a mermaid’, Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century. 

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Figure 2. ‘Kinetic Chi-Rho symbols with Alpha and Omega signifiers, Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

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Figure 3a. ‘Name of the scribe David featured along the left, vertical bar forming the letter B’, Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

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Figure 3b. ‘Name of the scribe David etched in the blank space below an ornamental F topped with an animal head’, Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

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Figure 4. ‘Christ Crucified on the letter T’, Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

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Figure 5. ‘Carolingian cavalryman’, Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

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Figure 6. ‘Job pulls worms from his feet with his wife observing’, Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

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Figure 7. ‘Mermaid swimming in between the lines of the Gospel of Luke’, Book of Kells. Early ninth century.

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Figure 8. ‘Christ calms the storm at sea accompanied by a mermaid blasting a horn’, Stuttgart Psalter. First quarter of the ninth century.

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Figure 9. ‘Monstrous draco besieges a ship’, Stuttgart Psalter. First quarter of the ninth century. 

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Figure 10. ‘Mermaid occupies the space between Psalm 13 (12) and Psalm 14 (13)’, Gallican Psalter. Early ninth century.

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Figure 11. ‘Coiled aquatic creatures biting one another’, Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

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Figure 12a. ‘Opening of the ears ritual with evangelist symbols of Matthew and Mark’, Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

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Figure 12b. ‘Opening of the ears ritual with evangelist symbols of Luke and John’, Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

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Figure 13. ‘Mermaid frames the VD of the Vere Dignum prayer of Holy Thursday’, Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

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Figure 14. ‘Bifid mermaid’, Cathédrale Notre-Dame-del’Annonciation, Le Puy-en-Velay, France. Twelfth century. 

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Figure 15. ‘Hebrew matriarch Sarah frames prayers recited over sterile women’, Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

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Figures 16a. ‘Fish form the E of Ex with one biting a cross’, Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

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Figure 16b. ‘Fish form the letter S’, Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

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Figure 16c. ‘Twisty, serpentine figure licks the letter O’, Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

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Figure 17. ‘Sea-woman blows horn while maritime monster swallows the prophet Jonah’, Stutt­gart Psalter. First quarter of the ninth century.

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Matthew Bryan Gi ll i s

Introducing Carolingian Experiments In a survey on the history of the Middle Ages, Chris Wickham singles out the Carolingians for their penchant for political experimentation, highlighting ‘the forcefulness of the Carolingian experiment in very large-scale moralised government’.1 This is a provocative claim, since connecting the Carolingians (c. 700–c. 900 ce) — a regime known especially for concerns over imperial power, order, and moral correction — with a willingness to experiment has not often seemed particularly obvious.2 Certainly, the Franks, not only during the reign of Charlemagne (768–814) but also throughout the eighth and ninth centuries, shaped many of medi­eval Europe’s political and religious institutions, social structures, cultural and intellectual traditions, and collective identities.3 Yet they were generally hostile towards apparent novelties, which easily encourages scepticism about their openness to experimentation.4 The Carolingians appear rather as ‘innovative despite themselves’ (to borrow a

* The author expresses his gratitude to Courtney Booker, Lynda Coon, Paul Edward Dutton, Anne Latowsky, and the anonymous reader for their help with versions of this introduction. Thanks are also extended to James Palmer, who offered helpful comments on the entire volume, to Guy Carney at Brepols for his assistance over the course of publication, and to Deborah A. Oosterhouse, the volume’s excellent copyeditor. Finally, this collection also appears thanks to the encouragement of two directors of the Marco Institute at the University of Tennessee, Jay Rubenstein and Gregor Kalas, who supported the initial 2017 symposium and the publication of this volume respectively.  1 Wickham, Medi­eval Europe, p. 1.  2 For an overview of the Carolingian period, see Costambeys, Innes, and MacLean, The Caro­ lingian World. Regarding early medi­eval conservatism, see Fouracre, ‘Cultural Conformity and Social Conservatism’.  3 On Charlemagne’s reign, see Story, ed., Charlemagne; McKitterick, Charlemagne; Davis, Charlemagne’s Practice of Empire; and Nelson, King and Emperor.  4 Two controversial intellectuals stand out as examples, Amalarius and Gottschalk of Orbais. Regarding Amalarius, see Zechiel-Eckes, Florus von Lyon, pp. 21–76; Chazelle, ‘Amalarius’s Liber Officialis’; Czock, Gottes Haus, pp. 265–71; and Czock, ‘Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft’. On Gottschalk, see Gillis, Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire; and Pezé, Le virus de l’erreur. Matthew Bryan Gillis ([email protected]) is Associate Professor in the History Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the author of Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire: The Case of Gottschalk of Orbais (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), and Religious Horror and Holy War in Viking Age Francia (Budapest: Trivent Publishing, 2021). Gillis is also the series editor for Renovatio – Studies in the Carolingian World (Trivent Publishing). Carolingian Experiments, ed. by Matthew Bryan Gillis, ISMAR 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022) pp. 9–24 10.1484/M.ISMAR-EB.5.127244

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phrase from John Contreni), reformers who operated as the continuators of tradition engaged in an ongoing effort to return the realm to an imagined glorious Christian past.5 Indeed, many recent scholars have highlighted the creativity of the Carolingians, who acted simultaneously as preservers and developers of Christian Roman traditions in the new environment of early medi­eval Europe.6 Yet Wickham’s argument frames the Carolingian project somewhat differently, since he focuses on the Carolingians as the premier medi­eval political experimenters.7 He writes that they ‘presided over the largest-scale attempt to rethink politics in the whole of the middle ages’.8 Although the Carolingians’ methods and ideo­logies were essentially all inherited, they adapted these traditions in order to build their empire in a way they saw as morally and spiritually correct, or as Wickham puts it: ‘they were just trying to do it right’.9 Wickham follows the lead of Edward James, who decades earlier had already regarded the Carolingian imperial project by the mid-ninth century as a failed ‘experiment to create a unified monarchy and Church administered by a united and loyal aristocracy’.10 Wickham writes that many of the Carolingians’ efforts failed because of political infighting and competition, yet he also emphasizes that understanding the Carolingian experiment is critical for appreciating how much it shaped the subsequent medi­eval world.11 Throughout later medi­eval centuries, Europeans frequently looked back to the Carolingian Empire as a model to emulate in their own times. The essays in this volume seek to reframe the issue of Carolingian experimentation with two questions in mind: What other kinds of experiments occurred within this larger effort to reimagine and transform politics within a context of

 5 Contreni, ‘Carolingian Biblical Culture’, p. 12; Booker, Past Convictions, p. 8. For classic studies of ancient and Carolingian reform, see, respectively, Ladner, The Idea of Reform; and McKitterick, The Frankish Church and the Carolingian Reforms.  6 See, for example, the essays collected in McKitterick, ed., Carolingian Culture, as well as several of those in Hen and Innes, eds, The Uses of the Past, and Gantner, McKitterick, and Meeder, eds, The Resources of the Past. See also the website for the historical project ‘The Transformation of the Carolingian World’, which notes that today the Carolingians are recognized as part of a longer early medi­eval tradition of such activity as well as ‘of cultural and social experimentation’.  7 For an insightful analysis of numerous aspects of Carolingian political experimentation, see also Airlie, Making and Unmaking the Carolingians.  8 Wickham, Medi­eval Europe, p. 61. See also Davis, Charlemagne’s Practice of Empire, pp. 278–92, who identifies Charlemagne’s experimentation with capitularies in conquered territories, where he developed policies that were then implemented throughout the whole empire.  9 Wickham, Medi­eval Europe, p. 61.  10 James, The Origins of France, pp. 157–69, here p. 157; and Wickham, Medi­eval Europe, p. 61. Other historians who describe the Carolingian imperial project overall as an experiment include Reimitz, History, Frankish Identity and the Framing of Western Ethnicity, pp. 304, 411, and 454; Kramer, Rethinking Authority in the Carolingian Empire, pp. 57 (citing James), 162, and 225; and Chandler, Carolingian Catalonia, p. 14 (citing Wickham).  11 Wickham, Medi­eval Europe, p. 61.

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moral reform?12 Could modern scholars better identify and understand some of this innovation by conducting imaginative and methodo­logical experiments of their own? The contributors here first began discussing these issues at an academic conference — the University of Tennessee’s Marco Institute for Medi­eval and Renaissance Studies’s 2017 Annual Symposium, ‘Carolingian Experiments’, for which Paul Edward Dutton presented the well-attended plenary address, ‘Carolingian Experiments with Family’. At the symposium, the authors presented papers on Carolingian experimentation, while proposing a modern scholarly experiment for consideration. The result of this event was a rich conversation that continued until the publication of this collection.13 The two questions about experimentation posed above are meant to inspire new thinking about the Carolingians. The first is designed to help us see the Franks differently, one might say even strangely, as a people whose seemingly straightforward imperialism and reform were effective precisely because they stimulated and nurtured potent, creative impulses.14 To that end, the essays presented here focus on a wide array of themes — cultural and social, familial and political, religious and spiritual, literary and historio­graphical, legal and hierarchical, epistemo­logical and scientific — which collectively offer a sense of the degree to which people living in the Carolingian Empire were willing to experiment in various aspects of their lives. The second question about scholarly experimentation is intended to be more provocative. The contributors here conduct experiments of various kinds by asking new questions and using new methodo­logies. Some of these essays even go so far as to challenge readers with a destabilizing encounter with the familiar Franks, one that is intended to be productive intellectually because it recasts them also as seemingly unknown subjects of an alien past, requiring us to reorient ourselves to them with a disciplined imagination.15

 12 In a recent collection of essays, Stella, The Carolingian Revolution, pp. 1–7, highlights the Carolingian penchant for innovation in similar terms, noting that they had various kinds of cultural and intellectual ‘laboratories’ at work in their realm. For other examples of scholars who previously identified examples of Carolingian experimentation, see de Jong and Lake, trans., Confronting Crisis in the Carolingian Empire, pp. 4–5, who regard Paschasius’s text as a ‘daring experiment’; Rankin, Writing Sounds in Carolingian Europe, esp. pp. 358–62, who identifies experiments in musical notation; Fichtenau, The Carolingian Empire, p. 109, who argued that Carolingian marcher lords experimented when ruling their territories; and, in this volume, see my discussion of Florus’s Querela de divisione imperii and Anne Latowsky’s on Einhard’s Vita Karoli for previous assessments of those works as experimental. Regarding an earlier debate about the Carolingian adoption of the stirrup as an innovation, see Worthen, ‘The Influence of Lynn White’.  13 The editor would like to thank Beatrice Kitzinger, whose participation in the symposium greatly enriched the event, but who was unfortunately unable to contribute to this volume.  14 Ginzburg, ‘Making It Strange’.  15 For earlier examples of such an approach, see Coon, Dark Age Bodies, who offers a potent and epistemo­logically transformative reimagining of Carolingian monastic experience; and Gillis, ‘Confessions and the Creation of the Will’. On the use of a ‘disciplined imagination’ to

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The contributors hope that the fresh perspectives and insights rendered from this process will foster future scholarly experimentation. Indeed, this volume appears after a period in recent decades when the study of the Carolingian world’s Christian political culture of reform and the power structures linking dynasty, aristocracy, clergy, and monasteries has proved a rich area of research.16 Such scholarship includes explorations of particular rulers and their reigns, in which the authors consider not only the transformation of the realm under individual kings and emperors, but also how elites cooperated with them to frame and articulate power through Christian concepts and traditions.17 Other scholars have investigated specific regions of the empire in depth, considering the development of political structures and religious institutions in those areas.18 Numerous volumes have greatly enriched our knowledge of the Carolingian period as a whole by examining topics and themes that reveal the complex intersections between religion and politics in the eighth and ninth centuries.19 Likewise, historians of gender, identity, emotion, and historical memory have significantly transformed and deepened our understanding of Carolingian subjectivities.20 Some researchers have brought important areas of study for the Carolingian world to our attention, including the experimental development of musical notation and the links between the ideo­logy of correction and the

reconstruct often elusive historical phenomena, see Garver, Women and Aristocratic Culture, pp. 12–13.  16 The scholarship on these subjects is vast and beyond the scope of this introduction to explore. Therefore, the following notes in this para­graph contain only a sampling of references to some key mono­graphs in English.  17 Nelson, Charles the Bald; Fouracre, The Age of Charles Martel; MacLean, Kingship and Politics in the Late Ninth Century; Goldberg, Struggle for Empire; McKitterick, Charlemagne; Booker, Past Convictions; de Jong, The Penitential State; Davis, Charlemagne’s Practice of Empire; Kramer, Rethinking Authority in the Carolingian Empire; and Nelson, King and Emperor.  18 Innes, State and Society in the Early Middle Ages; Hummer, Politics and Power in Early Medi­ eval Europe; West, Reframing the Feudal Revolution; Rembold, Conquest and Christianization; and Chandler, Carolingian Catalonia.  19 Gerberding, The Rise of the Carolingians; McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word; Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming; Chazelle, The Crucified God in the Carolingian Era; Dutton, Charlemagne’s Mustache; Claussen, The Reform of the Frankish Church; van Rhijn, Shepherds of the Lord; Firey, A Contrite Heart; Palmer, Anglo-Saxons in a Frankish World; Kershaw, Peaceful Kings; McCormick, Charlemagne’s Survey of the Holy Land; Moore, A Sacred Kingdom; Raaijmakers, The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda; Noble, Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians; Phelan, The Formation of Christian Europe; Faulkner, Law and Authority in the Early Middle Ages; Choy, Intercessory Prayer and the Monastic Ideal; Gillis, Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire; de Jong, Epitaph for an Era; Kitzinger, The Cross, the Gospels, and the Work of Art; van Renswoude, The Rhetoric of Free Speech; and Gillis, Religious Horror and Holy War.  20 McKitterick, History and Memory; Garver, Women and Aristocratic Culture; Coon, Dark Age Bodies; Stone, Morality and Masculinity in the Carolingian Empire; Koziol, The Politics of Memory and Identity; Lifshitz, Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia; Reimitz, History, Frankish Identity and the Framing of Western Ethnicity; Romig, Be a Perfect Man; Goldberg, In the Manner of the Franks; and Rampton, Trafficking with Demons.

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control of the natural world.21 Others have pushed beyond the end of the ninth century to explore the prevalent Carolingian influence on subsequent centuries.22 Indeed, the achievement of this extensive and productive period of historical research is that the Carolingian world has become more familiar to us now than ever before. While such a result is important and exciting for medi­eval history, one wonders whether current scholars might not benefit imaginatively and intellectually from having this well-developed vision of the Carolingian world somehow set askew.23 Therefore, this volume offers a series of academic experiments designed to foster just such an experience of defamiliarization. The essays consider how Carolingian innovation can be found in places both more and less known to scholars, employing experimental approaches to get at those medi­eval developments. In this way, the contributors to this volume seek to present a disorienting vision of the Carolingian world for their readers. Collectively, they aim to make the familiar Carolingian world appear also somewhat unfamiliar, even strange at times, in order to encourage different kinds of questions and alternative pathways for research. In order to render the Carolingian world uncanny — meaning to appear simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar — the essays themselves analyse both familiar and unfamiliar eighth- and ninth-century phenomena.24 The chapters appear under two expansive headings: ‘Structures, Familiar and Otherwise’, and ‘The Struggle against Sin’. Adopting a loose definition of a ‘structure’ as a conceptual mode of organizing thought and practice, the essays in the first section examine various forms of Carolingian structural experimentation. For instance, these include re-envisioning fundamental aspects of everyday life, such as imagining imperial life from a child’s perspective and uncovering untraditional modes of Frankish family planning. Other structural investigations focus on the learned and arcane, including seeing the empire as the product of experiments with canon law or revealing Carolingian anxieties about their failure to comprehend time and nature. Some topics will be relatively familiar to readers. Historical memory and biblical commentary, for instance, have been long-term staples of medi­eval studies. Others, such as nonhuman agency, might seem novel or unexpected. Yet each essay, whatever its subject matter, reassesses aspects of Carolingian experience and thought so as to represent that world as familiar and yet somehow strange.

 21 Rankin, Writing Sounds in Carolingian Europe; and Blan, ‘Sovereignty and the Environment in Charlemagne’s Empire’.  22 Gabriele, An Empire of Memory; Latowsky, Emperor of the World; and Greer, Hicklin, and Esders, eds, Using and Not Using the Past after the Carolingian Empire.  23 For examples of studies representing the Carolingian world from the perspective of outsiders and otherwise, see Gillis, Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire; Dutton, ‘The Desert War of a Carolingian Monk’; and Riess, The Journey of Deacon Bodo from the Rhine to the Guadalquivir.  24 On the uncanny, see Freud, ‘The Uncanny’; and Royle, The Uncanny.

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The second group of researchers focuses more specifically on the moral aspect of the Carolingian imperial project — the struggle against sin and evil. They take it as their task to explore in new ways how clerics envisioned this conflict and acted to combat sin through various means, while often consolidating their own power in the process. Topics here include aspects of clerical procedure, including links between manu­script illuminations of female figures and liturgical practices or how the physio­logy of sin informed the practice of confession, as well as more speculative matters, such as the role of demons in spreading evil or spiritual visions of the Franks as horrifying persecutors of God’s elect. Together these essays suggest that Carolingian moral reform was both ruthlessly rationalizing in its efforts to eliminate sin from the Church, while also embracing experimentation with spiritual powers and practices that readers, phenomeno­logically speaking, may find arresting, even eerie. As noted above, identifying Carolingian innovation necessitates creative methodo­logical experimentation from the authors included in this volume. The goal of the researchers’ efforts here extends beyond the claims of their individual essays. They model new approaches and avenues for future research. The volume’s contributors also speculate about the Carolingian imperial project as a whole, by mining the range and depth of structural and spiritual experimentation that took place during that time. In fact, one might argue that the Carolingian world’s conservative, moralizing authorities — despite, or perhaps at times because of, their fierce determination to instil correct thought and behaviour in their subjects — fostered many varieties of invention. In revealing this side of the Carolingians, the authors here encourage readers to see that much remains unexplored, unknown, and even unexpected about the Franks and their world.

Part One: Structures, Familiar and Otherwise The first group of essays begins with Valerie L. Garver’s ‘Carolingian Boyhoods’, which reconstructs the lived experiences of Carolingian elite boys. Garver’s experiment is to use fragmentary evidence from many sources, some regarding specific boys and others not, to conjure up a panoramic ‘approximation’ of the life of aristocratic male youths. Yet she regards boyhood as a developmental process as well as a form of social identity, so that through the course of the essay readers observe how Carolingian elite males grew up according to particular practices and experiences. In this way, we can imagine the Frankish world through the eyes of children. Garver notes that typical boys would be dressed in ways that reflected their martial training as future adults, and they seemed prone to aggression and displays of emotion. Those displaying adultlike temperance and self-control, as well as an ability to defend themselves and hunt, were praised. Parents were expected to oversee their boys’ moral

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education, and learning to read for the majority focused on the psalter. Adolescence differed from boyhood through a growing independence, which brought with it new experiences and expectations. For example, adolescents carried out some adult activities, such as taking oaths and participating in the events of important households, including hunting. They also received their sword belt, which marked them out as men with the power to inflict violence when necessary and the responsibility accompanying such power. Yet inexperienced adolescents did not generally participate in combat, though Garver notes that playing could sometimes lead to debilitating and mortal accidents. Likewise, youth was a time when many elite men enjoyed games, jokes, pursuing sexual relationships outside of marriage, and other activities that were sources of pleasure as well as moral corruption. While sexual activity and high office might spell the end of adolescence, Garver indicates that elite boys’ youth seems to have extended into their twenties, unlike young women of child-bearing age or peasant boys who were put to work in the fields. Next follows Paul Edward Dutton’s essay, ‘Carolingian Experiments with Family’, in which he examines the dynasty’s experimental approaches to family as a means of maintaining power. After problematizing and historicizing Carolingian notions of family, Dutton explores how the dynasty tried out new approaches to solve their familial problems, especially regarding their heirs. Some of these experiments succeeded, others failed. First, he considers the well-known case of Charlemagne’s numerous concubines. Dutton argues that the ruler — no doubt aware that his practice could draw religious censure — used it to prevent the danger of numerous and competing heirs, which could lead to conflict and increase the nobles’ power. Dutton then investigates two of Charlemagne’s less successful successors, Lothar II and Charles III (the Fat), both of whom lacked legitimate heirs. Lothar II sought to divorce Queen Theutberga for this reason in order to marry his lover Waldrada, with whom he had two children (including their son Hugh). While Charlemagne had been able to divorce twice, Lothar II was prevented from doing so by his dynastic relations and many clerical authorities, including Pope Nicholas I. Turning to Emperor Charles III, Dutton notes that the emperor and Empress Richardis had no heirs, so Charles tried unsuccessfully to preserve the dynasty’s hold on power with several strategies, including legitimizing his bastard son Bernard, adopting Louis of Provence as his heir, and finally, like Lothar II, a failed attempt to divorce Richardis. Dutton returns to Charlemagne to argue that he kept numerous unmarried female family members at court in order to avoid competitors to the dynasty’s power, which Dutton regards as the most novel and daring of family innovations. Ultimately, the author renders Charlemagne’s court — a place too easily familiar to readers thanks to Einhard’s famous portrayal of it in his bio­graphy — into a centre for experimental dynastic engineering. Seeing Charlemagne as the most successful Carolingian family planner, Dutton argues that his heir, Louis the Pious, disregarded his father’s approaches and subsequently had many family problems in his reign.

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Abigail Firey’s chapter, ‘The Paper Chase: The Pursuit of Carolingian Legal Innovations’, studies not only Carolingian developments in canon law, but also the frequently problematic experiments of modern historians seeking to understand it. In particular, she reorients our vision of the Carolingian imperial project by placing Church law at its centre. Firey highlights how the court and the episcopate experimented as partners with earlier canon law texts to articulate and disseminate a vision of their authority over the realm. Firey notes, however, that modern scholars failed to notice these developments, because they were concerned instead to uncover a Carolingian source or model for Gratian’s Decretum. Therefore, they tended to ignore other early medi­eval motivations for gathering and studying Church law texts. Such an approach stemmed from the numerous difficulties of studying Carolingian canon law, which included the generally anonymous nature of the law collections, their frequent tendency only to reproduce earlier texts, and their bewilderingly complicated textual relationships. Nevertheless, Firey argues that the collections reveal how the Carolingians possessed a vast interest in legal texts, including a concern both to collect them and to use them to make policy. She argues that the court and episcopate cooperated in councils, where they created and then circulated capitularies in order to create their form of theocratic government. Related to this last point, she cites not only regular governance but also the role of authorities in demanding obedience according to legal traditions during the theo­logical disputes of the reigns of Charlemagne and Charles the Bald. While the degree to which canon law precepts reached every parish is debatable, Firey contends that the sources nevertheless reveal the regime’s powerful intention to spread its vision of faith and practice to every Christian within the realm. Firey’s essay is followed by Anne Latowsky’s ‘Carolingian Imperial Bio­graphy and the Memory of Spain’, in which she highlights Carolingian imperial bio­graphy as a new, experimental form of historical writing. Einhard originated the genre when he wrote his bio­graphy of Charlemagne. Those authors depicting the reign of Charlemagne’s heir, Louis the Pious, had the challenge of praising an emperor who had not extended the boundaries of the realm. Latowsky focuses on two events — the Frankish defeat at Roncesvalles (778) and the siege of Barcelona (801) — to argue that the earliest articulations of the story of Charlemagne’s defeat in the Pyrenees in 778 were shaped not by historio­graphical impulses to recount or suppress what happened, but rather as part of the Carolingian adaptation of the practice of imperial bio­graphy during the reign of Louis the Pious. Einhard used the disaster at Roncesvalles during the Spanish campaign to reveal how Charlemagne, like Emperor Augustus before him, had suffered defeats that he could not avenge. Yet Charlemagne’s failure could also serve to make his son look better. In their accounts of Louis’s deeds, the Astronomer and Ermold the Black took advantage of the memory of Charlemagne’s defeat to highlight Louis’s own success in Spain at Barcelona. Because of this Spanish connection, these

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authors were able to use one of Louis’s only real military successes to glorify their subject’s status as a divinely favoured emperor. With the next essay comes a transition from bio­graphy to biblical exegesis. Matthew Gabriele’s ‘The Historian Hrabanus Maurus and the Prophet Haimo of Auxerre: Experiments, Exegesis, and Expectations Emerging from the Ninth Century’ argues that the Franks thought of time as moving not in lines — like nineteenth-century Europeans and antebellum Americans — but in cycles. In such a system of time and history, apocalypse was a moment of divine will revealed in the world, while prophecy was a reading of sacred history’s cycle. Gabriele examines two exegetes, Hrabanus Maurus and Haimo of Auxerre, who read the movement of sacred history in relation to the Frankish civil war and the division of their empire. Hrabanus, representing the era of Louis the Pious and writing for kings, believed the empire could be restored by rulers; therefore, he documented the unfolding connections between God and his chosen people. Writing in the era of Charles the Bald (who never requested a biblical commentary from any author), Haimo instead warned monks and nobles that a new Babylonian Captivity had begun, but God’s chosen people, the Franks, could be restored to divine favour through repentance. Though both authors experimented with the tradition of the Church Fathers, Hrabanus looked for hope among his rulers, while Haimo anticipated it coming from the realm’s monks and aristocrats. Their two sets of experiments yielded different results in the long term. For, as Gabriele indicates, Haimo’s message garnered him a much wider audience and popularity throughout the Middle Ages, which is reflected by the fact that manu­scripts of his works far outnumber those of Hrabanus. Likewise, Haimo trained students, who began a highly influential tradition that helped to spread his message of hope among Frankish nobles and monks as the New Israel. The final essay in this section is Andrew Romig’s ‘Strange Natures: Theodulf ’s Letter to Moduin in Context’. Drawing from scholarship on ‘new materialism’, he uses a puzzling poem about vicious avian conflicts, written by the disgraced and exiled courtier and bishop Theodulf of Orléans, as a jumping-off point to reveal how the Carolingians displayed a remarkable awareness that human beings were not in complete control of the universe. While Theodulf hinted that there was likely some significant meaning to be drawn from the strange bird battles he depicted, he refused to offer his own speculative interpretation. Romig asserts that Theodulf ’s position reflects a wider Carolingian acceptance that humans did not fully understand how the cosmos operated. Accordingly, the author considers several learned debates about the nature of Christian physics and computistical mathematics during Charlemagne’s era to show that the emperor and his helpers were deeply concerned about their limited knowledge of the workings of the natural world. In a spirit of experimentation, Romig suggests that early medi­eval ‘religion’ was closer to our understanding of cosmo­logy and evolutionary bio­logy than our modern notions of religion. Carolingians sought to comprehend better the universe through their theo­logical, computistical, and astronomical

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experiments by pushing the limits of human knowledge. Yet, as Romig argues, Theodulf and others perceived that these limits were real and definite for fallen humanity, since — as the mysterious and ultimately inexplicable bird battles proved — the cosmos was not anthropocentric and would not lend itself fully to human comprehension.

Part Two: The Struggle against Sin Section two opens with Lynda Coon’s ‘The Call of the Siren: Sex, Water, and Salt in the Sacramentary of Gellone’. Here she reveals how Homeric bird-women became diabolical mermaids in eighth-century manu­scripts — in particular, in the Gellone Sacramentary. Coon offers an experimental reading of images and text in order to argue that the codex’s illuminators cast the Virgin Mary as a priestly figure supported by male clerical servants who, armed with the power of celestial fertility, collectively waged a cosmic war against the sterile, saline sirens, who were none other than the scaly spawn of demonic Venus. She notes that the male clerics in the codex ritually usurped womanly reproductive power through their control of spiritual procreation in baptism and other rites, while the mermaids represented negative human behaviour, such as sexual depravity, fleshy temptation, and demonic urges. In other words, the sirens infected, while the Virgin’s male servants purified. Examining several of the codex’s liturgical rites, the author identifies how the clerics used them to impose their power over the cosmos, deploying salt and water to overcome the satanic sirens and take spiritual control over tainted creation. Coon concludes that the codex stands out as a striking example of male priests portraying women as practitioners of evil, whose bodies served as a conduit to diabolic forces. Nevertheless, the siren is the long-term victor in the battle over spiritual fecundity. Courtney M. Booker’s essay, ‘By the Body Betrayed: Blushing in the Penitential State’, serves as an exploratory experiment that reconstructs and evaluates Carolingian ideas and experiences of blushing, which were intimately connected to the process of confessing and correcting sins. Booker shows that the blush was long believed to reveal involuntarily one’s conscience, one’s inner disposition, which was especially significant when someone refused to disclose, or sought to conceal, their true intentions or sinful state. Conversely, the absence of the blush among particularly flagrant sinners revealed their absolute moral depravity, since even their body itself had lost its innate moral compass on account of their wickedness. Such a natural sign, whether by its presence or absence, was seized upon by Carolingian moralists and quickly employed as a trustworthy forensic means by which to identify sin — one that was impervious to the will of the sinner. As Booker argues, the blush was intimately tied to the Carolingian process of correction in complex ways, since preachers themselves were not to blush lest they undermine their mandate

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as the voice of biblical and moral authority. Indeed, Booker concludes, the countenance of Carolingian correction should be equally stony and severe in order to bring ‘hardened’ sinners to repentance. Speculations about sin continue in Martha Rampton’s essay, ‘Why the Carolingians Didn’t Need Demons’, which examines the changing role that demons played in Christian theo­logy during its first millennium. Indeed, demons served many theo­logical functions, since they embodied evil as the original rebels against God, they enticed humans to sin, they served as wicked agents of destruction and perversion, and they collaborated with humans, whose collusion empowered them to practise magic. Rampton argues, however, that an important shift occurred in the relationship between human beings, sin, and demons during the Carolingian era. This remarkable transformation involved what one might call theo­logical experiments in the anthropomorphizing of evil. Indeed, among the Carolingians sin became associated foremost with the sinner’s internal weakness rather than with an outside demonic force that could compel them to evil. Accordingly, reformers — who saw their role as guardians of the Church’s purity — sought to keep all Christians vigilant lest they fall prey to their own failings and depravity. Rampton argues that Carolingian authorities were largely sceptical of the powers of demons and magic and, correspondingly, uninterested in prosecuting the latter except as a crime involving sinful intentions. In the Carolingian world, therefore, it was sinful humans rather than demons that were the true sources of evil. The volume finishes with my essay, ‘Pleasures of Horror: Florus of Lyons’s Querela de divisione imperii’. Experimenting with approaches to literary horror, I examine Florus’s lament about evil, violence, and disaster during the Frankish civil war of the 840s as an experimental poem offering its audience a literary-spiritual encounter with the suffering caused by human sinfulness. I argue that the text’s horrifying vision enabled readers to experience their own evil as inseparable from the debased wickedness happening all around them during that tragic era, which was an event that could engender a sense of catharsis among the spiritually sensitive. Pushing this argument further, my essay reads Florus’s lament as a strange encounter with grace and predestination, which were revealed to knowing readers in the process of reading, singing, or hearing the text. For such an audience, the encounter with Florus’s poem amounted to a conversion experience, in which they recognized their election through confessing their own sinfulness along with a desire to become victims of persecution at the hands of Christ’s newly revealed reprobate enemies — the Franks. *    *    * To sum up, these experiments — when viewed separately and collectively — underscore the Carolingian penchant for cultivating various kinds of creative energies within their world. Therefore, their empire might well be understood as a wellspring of experimentation, whose most visible feature was its large-scale transformation of politics according to visions of moral reform.

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Certainly, expanding our view of Carolingian experimentation will give us a richer and more nuanced sense of how power functioned within the imperial programme of correction. Indeed, doing so might help us better understand the seemingly contrary impulses of coercion, consensus, and cooperation that made the imperial project possible. Yet the authors here also suggest that we might take this investigative trajectory further. Several essays highlight phenomena that transcend contradictory interpretations of politics and reform or incongruent spiritual experiences, further suggesting that the complexities of the Carolingian project were not necessarily delineated by the concerns of individuals or groups about power, authority, and legitimacy. Instead, we might begin to concentrate more on other currents of thought and experience, as well as other historical phenomena, that while not entirely divorced from questions of power and reform were not entirely bound by them either. The Carolingian Empire might come to be seen as a large laboratory, where many kinds of practitioners found space to engage in their experiments — some seemingly familiar to us, others apparently against the Carolingian imperial project itself or somehow cosmically extraordinary — all provoking us to rethink what we know about the medi­eval past. The Carolingian world might indeed have been more foreign to us and more inventively diverse than we currently think. The results of the investigations in this volume offer some hints about what such reimaginings might entail. Further research is required to consider what the possibilities of these and other experimental approaches might yield both for experts of the Carolingian world and for medi­evalists generally. For if the Carolingian Empire was often a source and model for Europeans through later centuries, then it behoves us to ask what role their propensity for experimentation played in the development of European history and beyond.

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Biblio­graphy Secondary Works Airlie, Stuart, Making and Unmaking the Carolingians, 751–888 (London: Bloomsbury, 2021) Blan, Noah, ‘Sovereignty and the Environment in Charlemagne’s Empire’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan, 2018) Booker, Courtney, Past Convictions: The Penance of Louis the Pious and the Decline of the Carolingians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) Chandler, Cullen J., Carolingian Catalonia: Politics, Culture, and Identity in an Imperial Province, 778–987 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) Chazelle, Celia, ‘Amalarius’s Liber Officialis: Spirit and Vision in Carolingian Litur­ gical Thought’, in Seeing the Invisible in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. by Karl Morrison and Marco Mostert (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 327–57 —— , The Crucified God in the Carolingian Era: Theo­logy and Art of Christ’s Passion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) Choy, Renie, Intercessory Prayer and the Monastic Ideal in the Time of the Carolingian Reforms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) Claussen, Martin, The Reform of the Frankish Church: Chrodegang of Metz and the ‘Regula canonicorum’ in the Eighth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) Contreni, John, ‘Carolingian Biblical Culture’, in Iohannes Scottus Eriugena: The Bible and Hermeneutics, ed. by Gerd van Riel, Carlos Steel, and James McEvoy (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1996), pp. 1–23 Coon, Lynda, Dark Age Bodies: Gender and Monastic Practice in the Early Medi­eval West (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) Costambeys, Marios, Matthew Innes, and Simon MacLean, The Carolingian World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) Czock, Miriam, Gottes Haus: Untersuchungen zur Kirche als heiligem Raum von der Spätantike bis ins Frühmittelalter (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012) —— , ‘Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft – Konstruktionen von Zeit zwischen Heilsgeschichte und Offenbarung: Liturgieexegese um 800 bei Hrabanus Maurus, Amalarius von Metz und Walahfrid Strabo’, in ZeitenWelten: Zur Verschränkung von Weltdeutung und Zeitwahrnehmung, 750–1350, ed. by Miriam Czock and Anja Rathmann-Lutz (Co­logne: Böhlau Verlag, 2016), pp. 113–34 Davis, Jennifer, Charlemagne’s Practice of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) Dutton, Paul Edward, Charlemagne’s Mustache and Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004) —— , ‘The Desert War of a Carolingian Monk’, in ‘Microhistory and the Historical Imagination: New Frontiers’, ed. by Thomas Robisheaux and Thomas V. Cohen with István M. Szijártó, special issue, Journal of Medi­eval and Early Modern Studies, 47 (2017), 75–120

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—— , The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994) Faulkner, Thomas, Law and Authority in the Early Middle Ages: The Frankish leges in the Carolingian Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) Fichtenau, Heinrich, The Carolingian Empire, trans. by Peter Munz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978) Firey, Abigail, A Contrite Heart: Prosecution and Redemption in the Carolingian Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2009) Fouracre, Paul, The Age of Charles Martel (New York: Routledge, 2000) —— , ‘Cultural Conformity and Social Conservatism in Early Medi­eval Europe’, History Workshop Journal, 33 (1992), 152–61 Freud, Sigmund, ‘The Uncanny’, in Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, ed. and trans. by David McLintock (New York: Penguin, 2003), pp. 123–61 Gabriele, Matthew, An Empire of Memory: The Legend of Charlemagne, the Franks, and Jerusalem before the First Crusade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) Gantner, Clemens, Rosamond McKitterick, and Sven Meeder, eds, The Resources of the Past in Early Medi­eval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) Garver, Valerie, Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009) Gerberding, Richard, The Rise of the Carolingians and the ‘Liber Historiae Francorum’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) Gillis, Matthew Bryan, ‘Confessions and the Creation of the Will: A Weird Tale’, postmedi­eval, 5 (2014), 72–91 —— , Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire: The Case of Gottschalk of Orbais (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) —— , Religious Horror and Holy War in Viking Age Francia (Budapest: Trivent Publishing, 2021) Ginzburg, Carlo, ‘Making It Strange: The Prehistory of a Literary Device’, in Carlo Ginzburg, Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance, trans. by Martin Ryle and Kate Soper (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 1–23 Goldberg, Eric, In the Manner of the Franks: Hunting, Kingship, and Masculinity in Early Medi­eval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) —— , Struggle for Empire: Kingship and Conflict under Louis the German, 817–76 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006) Greer, Sarah, Alice Hicklin, and Stefan Esders, eds, Using and Not Using the Past after the Carolingian Empire (New York: Routledge, 2020) Hen, Yitzhak, and Matthew Innes, eds, The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) Hummer, Hans, Politics and Power in Early Medi­eval Europe: Alsace and the Frankish Realm, 600–1000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) Innes, Matthew, State and Society in the Early Middle Ages: The Middle Rhine Valley, 400–1000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) James, Edward, The Origins of France: From Clovis to the Capetians, 500–1000 (London: Macmillan, 1982)

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Jong, Mayke de, Epitaph for an Era: Politics and Rhetoric in the Carolingian World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) —— , The Penitential State: Authority and Atonement in the Age of the Louis the Pious, 814–840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) Jong, Mayke de, and Justin Lake, trans. and annot., Confronting Crisis in the Carolingian Empire: Paschasius Radbertus’ Funeral Oration for Wala of Corbie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020) Kershaw, Paul, Peaceful Kings: Peace, Power, and the Early Medi­eval Political Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) Kitzinger, Beatrice, The Cross, the Gospels, and the Work of Art in the Carolingian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) Koziol, Geoffrey, The Politics of Memory and Identity in Carolingian Royal Diplomas: The West Frankish Kingdom (840–987) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012) Kramer, Rutger, Rethinking Authority in the Carolingian Empire: Ideals and Expectations during the Reign of Louis the Pious (813–28) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019) Ladner, Gerhart, The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959) Latowsky, Anne, Emperor of the World: Charlemagne and the Construction of Imperial Authority, 800–1229 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013) Lifshitz, Felice, Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia: A Study of Manu­script Transmission and Monastic Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014) MacLean, Simon, Kingship and Politics in the Late Ninth Century: Charles the Fat and the End of the Carolingian Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) McCormick, Michael, Charlemagne’s Survey of the Holy Land: Wealth, Personnel, and Buildings of a Mediterranean Church between Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2011) McKitterick, Rosamond, ed., Carolingian Culture: Emulation and Innovation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) —— , The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) —— , Charlemagne: The Formation of a European Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) —— , The Frankish Church and the Carolingian Reforms, 789–895 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977) —— , History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) Moore, Michael, A Sacred Kingdom: Bishops and the Rise of Frankish Kingship, 300–850 (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 2011) Nelson, Janet, Charles the Bald (New York: Routledge, 1992) —— , King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019) Noble, Thomas, Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)

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Palmer, James, Anglo-Saxons in a Frankish World, 690–900 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009) Pezé, Warren, Le virus de l’erreur: La controverse carolingienne sur la double prédestination. Essai d’histoire sociale (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017) Phelan, Owen, The Formation of Christian Europe: The Carolingians, Baptism, and the Imperium Christianum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) Raaijmakers, Janneke, The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda, c. 744–c. 900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) Rampton, Martha, Trafficking with Demons: Magic, Ritual, and Gender from Late Antiquity to 1000 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021) Rankin, Susan, Writing Sounds in Carolingian Europe: The Invention of Musical Notation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) Reimitz, Helmut, History, Frankish Identity and the Framing of Western Ethnicity, 550–850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) Rembold, Ingrid, Conquest and Christianization: Saxony and the Carolingian World, 772–888 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) Renswoude, Irene van, The Rhetoric of Free Speech in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) Rhijn, Carine van, Shepherds of the Lord: Priests and Episcopal Statutes in the Carolingian Period (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007) Riess, Frank, The Journey of Deacon Bodo from the Rhine to the Guadalquivir: Apostasy and Conversion to Judaism in Early Medi­eval Europe (New York: Routledge, 2019) Romig, Andrew, Be a Perfect Man: Christian Masculinity and the Carolingian Aristocracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) Royle, Nicholas, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003) Stella, Francesco, The Carolingian Revolution: Unconventional Approaches to Medi­ eval Latin Literature I (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020) Stone, Rachel, Morality and Masculinity in the Carolingian Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) Story, Joanna, ed., Charlemagne: Empire and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005) ‘The Transformation of the Carolingian World: Plurality and its Limits in Europe, 9th to 12th Century’, http://postcarolingianworld.ac.at/ [accessed 9 June 2020] West, Charles, Reframing the Feudal Revolution: Political and Social Transformation between Marne and Moselle, c. 800–c. 1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) Wickham, Chris, Medi­eval Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016) Worthen, Shana, ‘The Influence of Lynn White, Jr.’s Medi­eval Techno­logy and Social Change’, History Compass, 7.4 (2009), 1201–17 Zechiel-Eckes, Klaus, Florus von Lyon als Kirchenpolitiker und Publizist (Stuttgart: Thorbecke, 1999)

Part One

Structures, Familiar and Otherwise

Valer i e  L. Garver

Carolingian Boyhoods Perhaps the best known account of a Carolingian boy is that of three-year-old Charles the Bald killing a deer on a royal hunt. This vignette from Ermold the Black’s mid-ninth-century poem In Honour of Louis the Pious takes place at the start of the hunt when the women of court came to see the men off on this dangerous pursuit. Accompanying his mother, Judith, and with a tutor or guardian nearby, Charles was present when Forte canum infestante fugit damella caterva Per nemus umbriferum, perque salicta salit; Ecce locum, quo turba potens et Caesera Judith Constiterant, Carolus cum quibus ipse puer, Praeterit instanter, pedibus spes constat in ipsis; Ni fuga subsidium conferat, ecce perit: Quam puer aspiciens Carolus cupit ecce parentis More sequi, precibus postulat acer equum; Arma rogat cupidus, pharetram celeresque sagittas, Et cupit ire sequax, ut pater ipse solet; Ingeminatque preces precibus; sed pulcra creatrix Ire vetat, voto nec dat habere viam. Ni pedagogus eum teneat materque volentem, More puer pueri jam volet ire pedes. Pergunt ast alii juvenes capiuntque fugacem Bestiolam, inlaesam mox puero revehunt. Arma aevo tenero tunc convenientia sumit, Perculit atque ferae terga tremenda puer. Hunc puerile decus hinc inde frequentat et ambit, Hunc patris virtus, nomen et ornat avi. Valerie L. Garver ([email protected]) is Professor and Chair in the Department of History at Northern Illinois University. Her research centres on questions concerning the history of women, gender, childhood, and family and the historical and interdisciplinary study of material culture. She is the author of Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009) and co-editor (with Owen M. Phelan) of Rome and Religion in the Medi­eval World (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). Currently she is finishing a book, Clothing, Textiles, and Society in the Carolingian World. Her most recent publication is ‘Sensory Experiences of Low Status Textile Workers’, which appeared in the collection Sensory Reflections: Traces of Experience in Medi­eval Artifacts, ed. by Fiona Griffiths and Kathryn Starkey (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018). Carolingian Experiments, ed. by Matthew Bryan Gillis, ISMAR 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022) pp. 27–46 10.1484/M.ISMAR-EB.5.127245

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(It happened that a little deer, chased by dogs, fled the hunters through the undergrowth in the woods and went jumping through a thicket. Behold, putting its hope in its feet, it went right through the spot where a mighty band and Empress Judith were waiting; the boy Charles was with them. Flight was of no help. Its end was near. When little Charles saw it, he wanted to follow it like his parents and asked for a fast horse. He asked insistently for weapons and a quiver of arrows. He wanted to go in pursuit, just like his father. He pleaded and pleaded, but his lovely mother forbade him to go, unwilling to yield to his plea. But neither his guardian nor his mother could break his will, and just like a boy, the youngster rushed ahead on foot. Other young men went out and seized the fleeing little beast and promptly brought it back to the boy. He picked up weapons suited to his tender years and struck the animal’s quivering hide. It was a boyish achievement this time, but more would follow, and he would go forth marked by his father’s strength and adorned with his grandfather’s name.)1 Ermold’s description emphasizes both Charles’s desire to act as an adult — to ride a horse and to seize the weapons of a man — and his boyish enthusiasm and pestering. His inability to recognize the danger that the adults perceive conveys an impetuous nature yet seems understood as natural in a child. Without his mother and a guardian hindering him, he would have tried to act as a man, a sign to Ermold of the great deeds to come in Charles’s adulthood. Via their actions the young men (iuvenes), whether sympathetic to the boy’s desire to hunt or commanded to fetch the animal, demonstrated the training involving the hunt and martial skills that little Charles could expect to acquire as he grew. Charles stood at the beginning of childhood, the young men near its end. This essay consists of an experiment in reconstructing what lay between Charles and the iuvenes, the results of which indicate that elite Carolingian boyhoods extended into the late teens and early twenties. More scholarly attention should be devoted to medi­eval boyhoods, for examining them can shed light on the gendered experience of growing up. The lack of evidence left by early medi­eval children has made it difficult to discern anything about how they perceived the world around them. Most studies have rather focused on adult perceptions of children. It is clear that boys and girls did not receive the same treatment or education; the Carolingian aristocracy differentiated by gender from a young age, with boys arguably receiving more resources than girls. The activities and expectations of boys differed substantially from those

 1 Ermold the Black, In honorem Hludowici Pii, ed. and trans. by Faral, p. 183, lines 2394–2415; Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, ed. and trans. by Noble, p. 181. This chapter benefited from the feedback of the anonymous reader, Matthew Gillis, and all those who gathered in Knoxville to discuss Carolingian experiments. Special thanks are also due to Robert Feldacker, Amanda Littauer, Emma Lloyd, and Euneta Weeks.

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of girls. Yet what was elite boyhood like, and to what degree is it possible to learn more about it? Through careful reading of texts and consideration of their contexts and authors, it is often possible to discover information regarding the lived realities of aristocratic Carolingian boys. The passage above from Ermold the Black, for example, drew from Virgil and hearkens back to the ancient literary device of offering tales from childhood, indicative of laudable character. It is therefore difficult to argue with certainty that Ermold actually perceived some greatness in little Charles. Rather the attendant details, logical reactions, and plausibility of certain features of the story provide a sense of boyhood. My examination draws from boyhood studies, a growing field, especially in North America. Although Paul Willis’s 1977 book Learning to Labour remains seminal, boyhood studies took off in the 1990s as gender studies and the history of childhood increasingly intersected.2 Understanding what a boy is, what others expected a boy to be, and what boys experienced is essential to defining masculinity. I therefore seek to examine the lived experiences of boys in the Carolingian world as a means to consider how age, status, and gender together shaped childhood. Historians of childhood have tried to account for gender when considering the experiences of non-adults but have often focused on the goals of adults.3 Understanding what adults thought of children and gender offers opportunities to try to constitute possible boyhoods and girlhoods. Recognizing the plurality of childhoods is crucial, particularly because gender identities are fluid, not stable, and they are contingent upon culture, status, specific age, and other intersections of identity. When scholars have examined early medi­eval childhood and sometimes specifically boys’ experiences, most have employed the rich evidence from monastic contexts.4 Monks wrote about boys because they often had oblates in their midst. Families took these children to monastic houses and promised that they would take up the religious life. Many such boys remained in Carolingian monasteries. Some became men who wrote about the treatment and expectations of male oblates, particularly about their education.5 Because male religious wrote most surviving Carolingian texts, it is hardly surprising that the preponderance of evidence concerns boys destined for that life. Yet royal and aristocratic boys also number among the best documented of all Carolingian children because they appear in roughly the same range of texts in which elite men appear (hagio­graphy, historical works, poetry, legal sources, etc.), though at a lower rate. Evidence for elite boys is more abundant than that for non-aristocratic boys and for all girls.  2 Willis, Learning to Labour; Steinberg, Kehler, and Cornish, eds, Boy Culture, p. xiii.  3 See for example Mintz, Huck’s Raft, pp. 34–35, 40, 82–85, and 281–86.  4 McCormick, Education of the Laity; Riché, ‘L’enfant dans le haut Moyen-Âge’; Meens, ‘Children and Confession’.  5 De Jong, ‘Growing up in a Carolingian Monastery’; de Jong, In Samuel’s Image; Diem, ‘The Emergence of Monastic Schools’; de Jong, ‘From Scholastici to Scioli’.

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The Carolingian era saw a significant number of rulers who had yet to reach their majority upon inheriting the throne.6 Some scholars have investigated secular male youth and children, particularly their incorporation into the male aristocratic world via education and life at court.7 Knowing more about such boyhoods may seem difficult in the face of surviving sources. No single text provides an extended consideration of the experience of being a lay boy in the Carolingian world. Perhaps the closest is the handbook that the noble woman Dhuoda wrote for her adolescent son William, hostage at the court of Charles the Bald, over the years 841 to 843, when William was age fourteen to sixteen and when civil war raged in the Carolingian Empire. The text provides a mother’s perspective, rare in the Carolingian corpus, and, rarer still, an early medi­eval female view into male adolescence. It is not a first-hand account by a youth. Yet it provides tantalizing hints of boyhood and confirms other texts’ depictions of the experiences of elite male youth. Educated Franks and other early medi­eval scholars employed the framework of the ages of man, a model that lacked both legal bearing and full applicability in life.8 The typical division of infantia (to the age of seven), pueritia (usually seven to fourteen), and adolescentia (usually fourteen to twenty-one) can supply a guide to modern scholars, but it functions better in regard to expectations than experiences.9 In his study of early medi­eval boy kings, Thilo Offergeld argued that legal age did not necessarily match up to the moment that others recognized a boy’s coming of age or to a young king’s ability to act independently.10 Here I will explore three stages that fit the sources. Pairing infancy and toddlerhood works well for an early medi­eval study because so little textual information survives for these stages of life. Boyhood, in its prime, refers to the time when most male children could walk, talk, and exert some degree of agency yet remained dependent on the assistance and care of adults. Adolescence stands as perhaps the most nebulous of these life stages. It is marked by increased independence, new adult experiences, and lingering, intermittent dependence on adults for help, protection, and guidance. Investigating the Carolingian transition to adulthood offers a valuable corrective to many studies of modern adolescence by demonstrating that a concern with this transitional age has existed for many centuries.11 Carolingian texts support this imprecise division. Dhuoda, for example, noted that if her younger son were the same age as William (sixteen), she would have made a second copy of the book for him. In one especially poignant passage, she noted: ‘Et si tantum et aliud tantum, et medium dimidi  6 Offergeld, Reges pueri, pp. 300–648.  7 Dette, ‘Kinder und Jugendliche’; Innes, ‘“A Place of Discipline”’.  8 James, ‘Childhood and Youth in the Early Middle Ages’, pp. 13–18; Halsall, ‘Growing Up in Merovingian Gaul’, pp. 385, 392, and 402.  9 Dette, ‘Kinder und Jugendliche’, pp. 4–6; Innes, ‘“A Place of Discipline”’, p. 64.  10 Offergeld, Reges pueri, p. 40.  11 On the utility of the term ‘transition to adulthood’, see Kimmel, ‘Guyland’.

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tantum, | In annis volvens ut specium cernerem tuam, | Fortiora tibi in verbis copularem prolixis’ (And if in twice as many years and half again I were to see your image, I would write to you of more difficult things, and in more words).12 Her explicit recognition of growth in maturity from early childhood to adolescence to adulthood suggests a lay understanding of boyhood that differed from the more theoretical ages of man. I posit that masculinity, for elite boys in the Carolingian world, was as much a process as it was a social identity, a configuration of interrelated practices and discourses. Here I draw on the definition of masculinity advanced by the socio­logist C. J. Pascoe who explored masculinity and the rhetoric regarding masculinity in an American high school.13 Just as she crafted a meaningful exploration of American boyhood from examples drawn from interviewing and observing students at a single American school, so, too, can I confect a reasonable sense of what Carolingian boyhoods were like from the limited available sources. Exploring boyhoods allows one to consider how gendering worked both in terms of everyday experience and in regard to the ways adults discussed what boyhood was and should be. By exploring what boys did, probably did, and were expected to do, one can discover what constituted elite Carolingian boyhoods as social identities, configured of interrelated practices and discourses. Yet our view must remain fragmentary; this experiment provides an approximation of aristocratic boyhoods, not a single boyhood, even for members of the elite. Gerald of Aurillac’s boyhood differed from that of Dhuoda’s son William, which was not the same as that of Charles the Bald, Einhard, or Benedict of Aniane. Yet the overlapping characteristics of their boyhoods as well as those of others make clear that their childhoods lasted longer than those of girls and the non-elite.

Male Infants and Toddlers The first experiences of elite boys included nursing, sleeping, and the care of parents and other adults. Carolingian texts provide only a little information about these life stages, and small children’s experiences may have differed little on the basis of gender. Some have suggested that male infants received preferential treatment generally, but evidence for favouritism directed to elite baby boys is far from clear. In lean times, poor parents may have faced difficult decisions regarding the allocation of food to their children, and many children, male and female alike, probably suffered from nutritional deficiencies.14 The elite, however, had the best access to food and resources,  12 Dhuoda, Liber manualis, ed. and trans. by Thiébaux, 10.1, p. 218; Dhuoda, Handbook for William, trans. by Neel, 10.1, p. 95.  13 Pascoe, Dude, You’re a Fag, p. 5.  14 On nutritional deficiencies in the Carolingian world, see Pearson, ‘Nutrition and the EarlyMedi­eval Diet’, pp. 5–30.

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so insufficient nutrition was far less likely to affect aristocratic boys at any age than all other children. Nevertheless elite baby boys were not immune to the high infant mortality that marked the Middle Ages. Louis the Pious’s twin brother Lothar died when he was only a few months old.15 Writers discussing elite boys sometimes offer tantalizing details. Like most other early medi­eval babies, aristocratic male infants’ first food was breast milk, even if it is not always clear who exactly nursed them. According to his bio­grapher the Astronomer, Louis the Pious (778–840) had a connutritus, Adhemar, who was his same age. Although this term may refer to their having been raised together, it could equally mean that the same woman breastfed them.16 The boyhood of Gerald of Aurillac (855–909) is among the best documented. Explicating childhood was not among Odo of Cluny’s purposes in writing a saint’s life, but because Odo (879–942) wished to indicate that Gerald was destined, even before birth, to a life of extraordinary piety, he included significant material regarding Gerald’s noble upbringing.17 We know that Gerald was nursed because Odo mentions his having been weaned (ablactatus).18 In addition to his tale of little Charles the Bald at a hunt, Ermold the Black’s brief mention of Charles at the baptism of Harold Klak captures the joy young children can (and apparently did) take in auditory sensations. ‘Ante patrem pulcher Carolus puer inclitus auro, | Laetus abit, plantis marmora pulsat ovans’ (The handsome boy Charles resplendent in gold happily goes ahead of his father, exulting in striking his feet on the marble floor).19 Small children sometimes required their own material culture. The Astronomer mentions that three-year-old Louis the Pious sat in a child’s chair (cunarum adhuc utens gestatorio) when Pope Hadrian I crowned him in 781.20

The Prime of Aristocratic Boyhood Activity, physical training, and play marked the period when an elite boy was roughly seven to fourteen, a period of life often termed pueritia in Carolingian sources. According to the Astronomer, Charlemagne insisted that the boys at court, including his own son Louis, wear clothing in the Basque style. This attire consisted of ‘amiculo scilicet rotundo, manicis camisae diffusis, cruralibus distentis, calcaribus caligulis insertis, missile manu ferens’ (a round mantle, shirts with wide sleeves, baggy leggings, boots ornamented with

 15 Astronomer, Vita Hludowici, ed. and trans. by Tremp, c. 3, p. 288; Paul the Deacon, Carmen 39, ed. by Dümmler, pp. 71–73; Paul the Deacon, Gesta episcoporum Mettensium, ed. by Pertz, p. 265.  16 Astronomer, Vita Hludowici, ed. and trans. by Tremp, Pro­logue, p. 284; Garver, ‘Childbearing and Infancy’, pp. 235–36.  17 Odo of Cluny, De vita sancti Geraldi, 1.3, cols 643–44.  18 Odo of Cluny, De vita sancti Geraldi, 1.4, col. 644.  19 Ermold the Black, In honorem Hludowici Pii, ed. and trans. by Faral, lines 2300–2301, p. 176.  20 Astronomer, Vita Hludowici, ed. and trans. by Tremp, c. 4, pp. 292–94.

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spurs, carrying a spear in his hand).21 Such dress suited the martial training that ideally marked Carolingian elite boyhood. Cases of pious boys reveal alternative boyhoods, marked by less activity. Gerald of Aurillac’s infancy and toddlerhood appear to have been typical and merited little comment from Odo, but once Gerald manifested his own personality, Odo noted what an unusual child he was. Rather than falling prey to jealousy, anger, and a desire to avenge any perceived wrongs, Gerald was a sweet and modest child.22 This contrast between Gerald and typical boys shows adult expectations that very young children would be self-interested and prone to emotional outbursts. It may even relate to a conception that men (and boys) by nature were some combination of aggressive, combative, confident, confrontational, and/or unable to regulate their feelings. Other boys exhibited similarly exceptional behaviour. According to Paschasius Radbertus (d. 865), Abbot Wala of Bobbio (c. 773–836), a first cousin of Charlemagne, showed great devotion to learning even as a young boy (puero) ‘pollens morum nobilitate ac probitate sensus’ (exhibiting noble conduct and an honest disposition).23 Paschasius knew Wala as an adult, not a child, and wrote the first part of his epitaph not long after Wala’s death in 836, but given Paschasius’s proximity to Wala’s contemporaries, this statement cannot be dismissed as a trope but rather reflects some reality. Similarly Ardo, a monk at Aniane, wrote a vita of his former abbot Benedict of Aniane (b. c. 750) sometime after Benedict’s death in 821. Benedict of Aniane was the son of a count in what is now southern France. His father sent him as a boy ‘in aula gloriosi Pipini regis reginae tradidit inter scolares nutriendum’ (to the court of King Pippin to be educated among the queen’s scholars). Those at court recognized his innate intelligence and adaptability, and he learned military skills in addition to less active studies, which he later put to use as a young adult. He even earned the office of cupbearer at court, and following Pippin the Short’s death, Benedict served his son Charlemagne.24 Ardo emphasizes Benedict’s talents on the field and off, suggesting that this combination made him unusual. The case of Einhard (770–840) confirms an expectation that most lay boys should excel more at martial pursuits than at assiduous textual study. Known throughout his life for his short stature, Einhard was described by his fellow courtier Walahfrid Strabo as ‘homuncio — nam statura despicabilis videbatur’ (a little man whose height seemed contemptible).25 Some scholars believe Einhard’s diminutive size explains how, as a layman, he ended up a court scholar: physically he was ill-suited to hunt and engage in

 21 Astronomer, Vita Hludowici, ed. and trans. by Tremp, c. 4, p. 296.  22 Odo of Cluny, De vita sancti Geraldi, 1.4, cols 644–45.  23 Paschasius Radbertus, Epitaphium Arsenii, ed. by Dümmler, 1.6, p. 28. On the epitaph, see de Jong and Lake, ‘Introduction’.  24 Ardo, Vita Benedicti, ed. by Waitz, c. 1, p. 201.  25 Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, ed. by Holder-Egger, p. xxix.

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battle.26 Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne advances an ideal balance of studying texts to active, preparatory play and training. Writing in the 820s not long after Charlemagne’s death, Einhard discussed the ways the king educated his children. He thought both his sons and daughters should first study the liberal arts, just as he had himself. All his children had ample opportunities to learn by observing their father in action, for Einhard writes that he took such care in rearing them that he always ate with them at home and that he took them, along with guards to watch over them, whenever he travelled, ‘adequitabant ei filii, filiae vero pone equebantur’ (his sons riding beside him, while his daughters followed behind). This was not the only difference in the royal children’s experience. ‘Tum filios, cum primum aetas patiebatur, more Francorum equitare, armis ac venatibus exerceri fecit’ ([Charlemagne] had his sons, when they reached the right age, trained to ride in the Frankish fashion, to wield weapons, and to hunt).27 Learning to defend themselves was a key element in the transition from boyhood to manhood. Few elite lay boys appear to have engaged in highly rigorous study; rather they most probably learned only as much as they needed in order to navigate the secular aristocratic world. Odo had to emphasize Gerald’s talent for both martial skills and book learning in order to explain how such a holy man could successfully fulfil a lay office. Gerald applied himself to learning to read, but his parents were satisfied once he could read the psalter and wanted him to instead engage in training that prepared boys for their future duties as lords. Gerald learned to ride a horse, to hunt with dogs, falcons, and hawks, and to shoot a bow and arrow.28 These were practical skills for noble boys because hunting was a means of learning the skills of warfare, a marker of aristocratic status, and a means to gain proximity to Carolingian kings.29 When Odo indicates that it took an act of God to cause Gerald’s parents to allow him to return to studying Scripture, it reveals that more typical elite boys regularly engaged in martial training involving outdoor activities, proximity to animals (including potentially dangerous ones), and strenuous physical activity. Divine providence made Gerald temporarily too ill to engage in the more typical boyhood pursuits and instead let him engage in the kind of learning that prepared boys for the religious life: chant, grammar, and the study of letters.30 As he grew, Gerald’s ‘robur nocivum corporis consumpsit humorem’ (increasing bodily strength destroyed the noxious humours) that had afflicted him. Gerald therefore remained a male heir, unable to pursue a monastic

 26 Dette, ‘Kinder und Jugendliche’, p. 3.  27 Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, ed. by Holder-Egger, c. 19, pp. 23–25. On Einhard’s emphasis on hunting as a royal attribute, see Goldberg, ‘Louis the Pious and the Hunt’, pp. 613 and 631–32.  28 Odo of Cluny, De vita sancti Geraldi, 1.4, col. 645.  29 Irslinger, ‘On the Aristocratic Character of Early Frankish Society’, p. 119; Hennebicque, ‘Espaces sauvages et chasses royales’, pp. 36–39; Nelson, ‘The Lord’s Anointed and the People’s Choice’, pp. 121–24.  30 Odo of Cluny, De vita sancti Geraldi, 1.4, col. 645.

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vocation. Rather he eventually had to acquire the same skills that other elite boys did. ‘Tam velox autem factus est, ut equorum terga facili saltu transvolaret. Et quia viribus corporis fortiter agiliscebat, armatam militiam assuescere quaerebatur’. (He was so swift that with a spring he could mount the backs of horses with ease. And because he moved powerfully due to his bodily strength, it was demanded of him that he become accustomed to armed military service.)31 Yet Odo explains that Gerald did not enjoy such activities and that later Gerald sometimes ordered his men to fight with the backs of their swords and the shafts of their spears. He himself never shed human blood.32 As Stuart Airlie has argued, his distaste for hunting made Gerald a ‘misfit’ among the Carolingian male elite even as it meant he conformed to expectations of those in the religious life, thereby rendering him worthy of recognition as a saint.33 The rest of the vita reveals that Gerald’s childhood experiences indeed prepared him well for his office and activities. His success on the battlefield, at court, in his dealings with his dependents and merchants, and in his crafty dodging of marriage stemmed from skills he had honed as a boy. Dhuoda’s allowances for her sons’ level of learning suggests an expectation that future lay magnates learned less from books than their peers destined for the religious life. She noted that she wrote in a way that a boy could understand, employing ‘childish’ (pueriliter) means. She used the words of Paul of Tarsus to explain her approach, noting how she provided ‘milk rather than solid food’ which William may not have been able to digest.34 Specifically she drew from i Corinthians 3. 1–2 in which Paul wrote to the church at Corinth: ‘And so, brothers, I could not speak to you as spiritual people, but rather as people of the flesh, as infants (parvulis) in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food’. She also took up the words and ideas of Hebrews 5. 12–14: ‘You need milk, not solid food; for everyone who lives on milk, being still an infant (parvulus) is unskilled in the word of righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have the perception, honed through practice, to distinguish good from evil’. Dhuoda further wrote that her ‘eorum testimoniis secundum tuae qualitatis mensuram digno affect inserere malui’ (loving intent here has been to refashion their content in a manner appropriate to your age).35 Dhuoda urged William to teach his younger brother morality and right Christian practice, essentially to pass on the knowledge he acquired from her handbook. His mother believed that as a youth William was prepared to instruct his younger sibling. She further noted that her younger son needed to learn to talk and read before William Odo of Cluny, De vita sancti Geraldi, 1.5, col. 645. Odo of Cluny, De vita sancti Geraldi, 1.8, cols 646–47. Airlie, ‘The Anxiety of Sanctity, pp. 392–93. ‘Non ut solido cibo capax, sed in similitudine lactis degustans’: Dhuoda, Liber manualis, ed. and trans. by Thiébaux, 6.1, p. 182.  35 Dhuoda, Liber manualis, ed. and trans. by Thiébaux, 9.1, p. 210; Dhuoda, Handbook for William, trans. by Neel, p. 91.  31  32  33  34

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would be able to instruct him with the handbook.36 Later in the text, she reminded William of the books he possessed and those that he ought to read. She urged him to ‘legendo, volvendo, ruminando, perscrutando, intelligendo’ (read, ponder, contemplate, scrutinize, [and] understand) books and to heed the help of the teachers available to him.37 Reading played an essential role among the wider Carolingian aristocracy as a necessary skill and one that could aid in promoting morality. In his treatise on a moral lay life directed to a lay aristocrat, De institutione laicali, Jonas of Orléans (d. 843) ostensibly expounded on the ways parents ought to educate their children, but in terms of content, his chapter on this subject focuses on boys. It therefore provides information regarding expectations of elite lay boyhood education. Jonas provided the biblical examples of Job and David as fathers who taught their sons to honour God and to keep God and God’s words in their hearts. Most of his advice appears in the form of biblical quotations underlining the importance of parental attention to the moral education of children. He wrote that parents who fail to provide such instruction often raise sons who, upon reaching the age of reason, begin to do bad deeds.38 This text then parallels Dhuoda’s concern with William’s morality, religious practices, and secular ethics; both authors believed that elite boys in the transition to adulthood required a moral compass to lead them in navigating the dangers of elite lay society.

Adolescence Adolescence continued to be marked by dependence on adults but involved increasing independence and new experiences and expectations. Elite boys at this stage sometimes acted as adult men while at other times they could not. In addition to relying on family members, male Carolingian youth sought new experiences and training in the houses of aristocrats and at the courts of kings.39 It was also an age of legal and social responsibility, new pastimes and pleasures. Frankish capitularies often protected boys under the ages of around twelve to fifteen from punishment or certain duties, such as taking oaths. These protections afforded legal recognition that boys differed from adults enough that they were not always liable for their actions.40 Such attention to age would have required both the boys and their parents or guardians to track their age. Some texts reveal the precarious position of such little lords. Boys may have been able to inherit lands, offices, and responsibilities, but they may not have

 36 Dhuoda, Liber manualis, ed. and trans. by Thiébaux, 1.7, p. 70.  37 Dhuoda, Liber manualis, ed. and trans. by Thiébaux, 4.1, p. 128.  38 Jonas of Orléans, De institutione laicali, 2.14, cols 192–93.  39 Innes, ‘“A Place of Discipline”’, pp. 61–62.  40 Yver, ‘Note sur la protection des mineurs’, pp. 61–63.

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always been able to handle them. Some saints’ lives demonstrate their young subjects’ extraordinary sanctity by having them reject the expected acts of elite youth. According to his late eighth-century vita, an adolescent Trudo, future founder of the monastery of St Truiden, declined an invitation to hunt with his aristocratic lay peers, despite the author noting that it was customary for boys at court to hunt.41 Odo of Cluny wrote that ‘non ut solent adolescentes, qui in matura dominatione superbiunt, Geraldus intumuit’ (Gerald was not puffed up, as youth are wont to be, who take pride in grown-up lordship).42 Odo praised Gerald’s preternatural wisdom and humility, atypical among aristocratic youth. More typical elite male adolescents required greater supervision than these saints. In a letter of 857–862 to Bishop Aeneas of Paris (856–870), Abbot Lupus of Ferrières mentioned the need to find a guardian or tutor (tutorem) for his great nephew because Aeneas had endowed the boy with a benefice after the death of the boy’s father, who was Lupus’s niece’s husband and whom Lupus referred to as ‘Hildegarium vestrum’ (your Hildegar). Lupus wrote that the tutor must both sympathize with Aeneas’s morals and carry out military service. He was also careful to note that both sides of the family, recognizing his proximity to Aeneas, had approved of his request to have a tutor appointed.43 The letter can appear as flattery, a petition meant to make Aeneas feel generous, wise, and needed, and it is clear that Aeneas had some personal relationship with the unidentifiable Hildegar, whether by blood or other means. Regardless Lupus’s letter provides a case of an adult, with the agreement of other adults interested in the boy’s welfare, expressing concern for a youth faced with adult responsibilities for which he may not yet have been ready. Poor judgement seems at the root of the letter’s concern and suggests recognition that a boy could benefit from a good man’s guidance. The request for a tutor who could aid the boy with military duties conveys a worry about the boy’s ability to exercise sound judgement. Lupus recognized that experience could aid men in warfare. During adolescence some elite boys received a sword belt and other accoutrements associated with grown men because they marked the ability to threaten and participate in acts of violence. The act of girding male youth with sword belts could have acted as a means to inculcate in them a sense of responsibility and remind them to use their new power judiciously. A sword belt served as a constant reminder to a boy and others of his high status. It aided in his transition to adulthood for which hunting, active play, and practice warfare had prepared him. A roughly thirteen-year-old Louis the Pious travelled with his father to Regensburg where he was girded (accinctus) with a sword

 41 Vita Trudonis, ed. by Levison, c. 4, p. 278. The vita, composed at Metz, dates to the rule of Bishop Angilram of Metz (769–791).  42 Odo of Cluny, De vita sancti Geraldi, 1.6, col. 645.  43 Lupus of Ferrières, Correspondance, ed. by Levillain, no. 122, pp. 186–88; Yver, ‘Note sur la protection des mineurs’, p. 74.

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belt before travelling as far as Chuneberg, the so-called ‘Hun Mountain’, with his father’s army as it travelled to meet the Avars in battle. Charlemagne then sent Louis back to his wife Fastrada, not allowing him to engage in battle.44 Although this decision could have resulted from a number of concerns, not least protecting a child and male heir, it suggests that adolescence could be an in-between state in the Frankish male aristocratic experience — old enough for the markers of adulthood but perhaps not quite yet trustworthy enough to employ them in dangerous situations. An example of these dangers was the accidental maiming of young Charles of Aquitaine (b. 848/49), son of Charles the Bald, in 864, which led to his death in 866. Here one must stretch the bounds of adolescence to include Charles’s practical joke gone awry, because he had been married for around two years by then, having wed a noble widow without his father’s permission in 862 when he was fourteen.45 This case of a married teenager demonstrates the potential recklessness of adolescents and young men, underlining the fact that, even though such young male aristocrats may have married, possessed and employed arms and horses, participated in hunts, and inherited titles, their ability to exercise sound judgement was not fully in place. In 864, the Annals of St Bertin relate that young Charles, described here specifically as a youth (iuvenis), wanted to horse around with some other young men in the woods near Cuise, but ‘because of the work of the devil’ (operante diabolo) he instead suffered a terrible blow to his head at the hands of one of those young men, named Albuin. ‘In capite spatha percutitur pene usque ad cerebrum, quae plaga a timpore sinistro usque ad malam dexterae maxillae pervenit’ (The blow penetrated almost as far as the brain, reaching from his left temple to his right cheekbone and jaw).46 According to Regino of Prüm’s chronicle, written later and at a greater distance from the events, young Charles had decided to test the courage of Albuin with a youthful prank (levitate iuvenili). ‘Alium se esse simulans, cum ex venatione vespertinis horis idem Albuinus quadam die reverteretur, super eum solus impetum fecit, veluti equum, in quo sedebat, violenter ablaturus. Ille nihil minus existimans quam filium regis, evaginato gladio ex adverso eum in capite percussit moxque terrae prostravit, deinde multis vulneribus confossum semivivum reliquit, arma pariter et caballum secum auferens’. (When Albuin was returning from the hunt one evening, [Charles] pretended to be someone else and, all alone, attacked Albuin pretending that he was going to use violence to steal the horse Albuin rode. Albuin, who was expecting almost anyone except the king’s son, unsheathed his sword and struck him on the front of his head, quickly throwing him to

 44 Astronomer, Vita Hludowici, ed. and trans. by Tremp, c. 6, p. 300. On the identification of Chuneberg, see Pohl, The Avars , pp. 381 and 541, n. 328.  45 Nelson, Charles the Bald, pp. 201–02.  46 Annales Bertiniani, ed. by Grat, Vielliard, and Clémencet, 864, p. 105; The Annals of St-Bertin, trans. by Nelson, p. 112.

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the ground. He left him half-dead and pierced with many wounds, and took away his weapons as well as his horse.)47 Regardless of the exact circumstances, both accounts lay blame on Charles’s youth. Charles survived another two years, disabled in his limbs, debilitated by epileptic attacks, and with a terribly scarred face, but eventually he died from his wounds in 866.48 Young Charles’s nephew, Louis III son of Louis the Stammerer, died foolishly when he was sixteen to eighteen years old. As he chased a girl into her father’s house on horseback, he struck his shoulder so hard on a door lintel that he died. The annalist notes that he did this ‘quia iuvenis erat’ (because he was a youth).49 The lack of foresight for his own safety does much to explain his death but so does his sense of entitlement in regard to women. His brother Carloman died young but under more tragic circumstances in December 884. Accidentally wounded by a companion in the thigh while hunting with a few youth in the woods, Carloman died seven days later at the age of eighteen.50 These accidents help to explain the concern of elder statesmen regarding young princes and kings. In 882, Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims (d. 882) wrote a treatise, On the Governance of the Palace, for Carloman, the young king of West Francia, in the hope that he would restore the order that had once existed in Carolingian government. Hincmar wrote: ‘Verbis et scriptis laboravi, ad institutionem istius iuvenis et moderni regis nostri […] regni ordinem ecclesiasticum et dispositionem domus regiae in sacros palatio, sicut audivi et vidi, demonstrem; quatinus in novitate sua ea doctrina imbuatur, ut in regimine regni Deo placer et in hoc saeculo feliciter regnare et de praesenti regno ad aeternum valeat pervenire’. (For the instruction of this young man, our new king, I have worked with words and writing in order to describe […] the governance of the church and the administration of the royal household within the sacred palace, as I heard of it and saw it. Thus, in his inexperience our king may advance in learning, and in governing the kingdom, he may please God, rule happily in this world, and from the present kingdom attain an eternal one.)51 Hincmar mentioned a group of young men who followed office-holding lords at the palace so that they could learn from them and thereby ‘be encouraged’ (consolarentur). Further he said that office holders sought to have boys and vassals (pueris vel vasallis) among them at the palace so long as they could ‘gubernare et sustentare absque peccato, rapina videlicet vel furto’ (direct and support them without sin, that is, without robbery

 47 Regino of Prüm, Chronicon, ed. by Kurze, 870, p. 101. See also History and Politics in Late Carolingian and Ottonian Europe, ed. and trans. by MacLean, p. 163.  48 Annales Bertiniani, ed. by Grat, Vielliard, and Clémencet, 866, p. 130; Regino of Prüm, Chronicon, ed. by Kurze, 870, Chronicon, p. 101; Nelson, Charles the Bald, p. 68.  49 Annales Vedastini, ed. by Simson, 882, p. 52.  50 Annales Vedastini, ed. by Simson, 884, p. 56.  51 Hincmar of Rheims, De ordine palatii, ed. by Gross and Schieffer, Pro­logue, pp. 32–34; translation draws heavily from Hincmar of Rheims, ‘On the Governance of the Palace’, ed. and trans. by Herlihy, p. 209.

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or theft).52 For some decades, historians have recognized the difficulties the Carolingian elite faced in dealing with a large number of young male aristocrats.53 From the perspective of the adolescents in these groups, texts do little to reveal whether or not these interferences may have seemed futile, annoying, helpful, or pivotal. On the Governance of the Palace provides an opportunity to consider the means of persuasion directed to young men. Hincmar discussed the youth of his addressee at some length, offering two classical analogies to explain the utility of his endeavour to instruct a young ruler, both emphasizing the way youth could absorb and retain far more than their elders. Hincmar alluded to Horace’s statement that new jugs keep the smell with which they are first imbued and then recalled Alexander the Great’s relationship with his tutor Leonidas, an immoral man. According to Hincmar Alexander had adopted his teacher’s faults ‘quasi lac adulterinum sugens’ (like [he was] sucking spoiled milk). As an adult ruler, Alexander attempted to vanquish these faults but could not despite his ability to conquer kingdoms.54 Here Hincmar draws on the same biblical language regarding milk and teaching as Dhuoda, and he includes a historical figure who was likely exciting and relatable for the young royal and aristocratic male elite — a youth who conquered a vast empire. Hincmar later mentions that he himself had learned about the proper running of the palace from Adalhard of Corbie, Charlemagne’s cousin and advisor, during his ‘youth’ (adolescentia).55 In so doing he emphasizes the need for the young to heed the advice of older men, and he argues for the influence that adult men rightly should exert over adolescent boys. Further he reveals a desire to remind the young that he, by then an old man, was once a youth like them. While in his mid-forties, Notker the Stammerer (c. 840–912) wrote his Deeds of Charlemagne as a mirror for Charles the Fat (839–888). He took care to warn the king about the foolish pastimes of youth, presumably to encourage him to instil a serious sense of purpose among the adolescent elite boys at his court. Notker told a story of Charlemagne praising boys of humble background who had been studying letters and poetry with Clement, a court scholar. Those boys’ impressive knowledge gave Charlemagne cause to chastise the noble youth at court: ‘Vos nobiles, vos primorum filii, vos delicati et formosuli, in natales vestros et possessionem confisi, mandatum meum et glorificationem vestram postponentes, litterarum studiis neglectis, luxuriae ludo et inerciae vel inanibus exercititiis indulsistis’ (You nobles, you sons of magnates, you delicate and pretty boys, you who trust in your birth and wealth, setting aside my command and your own advancement, you neglected the study of letters, and you indulged in luxury, games, idleness,

 52  53  54  55

Hincmar of Rheims, De ordine palatii, ed. by Gross and Schieffer, c. 28, pp. 80–82. Innes, ‘“A Place of Discipline”’, p. 60. Hincmar of Rheims, De ordine palatii, ed. by Gross and Schieffer, Pro­logue, p. 34. Hincmar of Rheims, De ordine palatii, ed. by Gross and Schieffer, c. 12, p. 54.

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and useless pastimes).56 Notker sounds rather like Hincmar here, wagging his finger at callow aristocratic boys via a text he presumably hoped would circulate at court. This statement further supports the existence of a culture of entertainment among elite youth, whose wealth enabled them to spend time in horseplay, practical jokes, pursuing relationships or sex with women or girls, hunting, riding, and presumably games for which little documentation survives. In order to make a point, Dhuoda wrote: ‘Tabularum lusus maxime iuvenibus inter ceteras atrium partes mundanas congruous et abtus constat ad tempus’ (Games of dice are the most pleasurable to youth of all the other games that they enjoy).57 She used this image to encourage William to pay close attention to her advice, advocating that he take the same interest in her book that he would give to a game of dice. This statement reveals the intense pleasure some boys derived from games of chance and other such pastimes. Being away from their parents and natal homes set elite male adolescents free from familial confines, letting them exert their own judgement for good or ill. When Charlemagne sent his cousin Wala to live away from court in the service of some magnates in order to humble him, the experience worked so well that Wala gave away his arms and sword belt to a more poorly armed agricultural worker (ruricolam) he encountered on the road one day. Once Wala was brought sufficiently low, Paschasius writes that God then restored his honour and brought him back to court and the favour of the king.58 Personal relationships concerned Dhuoda. Drawing from the Rule of St Benedict, she urged William to associate with ‘iuvenibus Deumque diligentibus et sapientiam et discentibus’ (youths who love God and seek wisdom), noting that Samuel and Daniel, when boys, served as judges.59 Just as those two biblical figures possessed virtue and good judgement later in life, so, too, would William and other moral youth. She equally admonished her son to seek the counsel of good and trustworthy men at court, noting the dangers of poor advice and imploring him to ‘flee evil men’.60 As a little boy (puerulus) who was growing up (adcrescens), she recommended that he learn from older men with ample understanding of whatever is good. She then hoped that he would stand as an example to his peers, pleasing to God and in service to men. She noted that because God made even the tongues of infants speak his praise (Psalms 8. 3, Wisdom 10. 21), she hoped that God would eventually cause William, filled with eloquence, to ascend with noble, God-fearing men to heaven.61 Another experience of youth was the beginning or intensification of sexual longing. Dhuoda offered William advice regarding sexual temptation. Setting  56 Notker the Stammerer, Gesta Karoli, ed. by Haefele, 1.3, p. 4; Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, ed. and trans. by Noble, p. 61.  57 Dhuoda, Liber manualis, ed. and trans. by Thiébaux, Pro­logue, p. 46.  58 Paschasius Radbertus, Epitaphium Arsenii, ed. by Dümmler, 1.6, p. 29.  59 Dhuoda, Liber manualis, ed. and trans. by Thiébaux, 3.5, p. 98.  60 Dhuoda, Liber manualis, ed. and trans. by Thiébaux, 3.7–8, p. 104.  61 Dhuoda, Liber manualis, ed. and trans. by Thiébaux, 3.9, p. 108.

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virtue against lust could aid him in avoiding fornication and maintaining chastity. She specifically warned him to stay away from prostitutes and to avoid sex outside marriage. She explained that lust begins through the eyes: catching sight of a woman causes the feeling to start, and it becomes harder to resist temptation as one experiences ‘hac occupationum titillatione’ (the thrill of arousal).62 One cannot help but wonder how William received such motherly advice and whether Dhuoda’s admonishments resembled those of other mothers. In his De institutione laicali, Jonas, drawing from Augustine of Hippo’s sermons, wrote that young men who wished to marry chaste wives ought to approach such marriages in chastity and purity themselves, that they should not fall prey to lust. He wrote: ‘Puram quaeris, noli esse impurus. Non enim illa potest, et tu non potes’. (Whoever seeks purity should not be impure. If she cannot be [impure], then you cannot be [impure].)63 Continuing to draw from Augustine’s sermons, Jonas emphasized avoidance of fornication whether with prostitutes or others.64 Many young men, however, had sexual relationships with women outside marriage, some lasting and monogamous.65 Some resisted that temptation. Gerald of Aurillac experienced strong desire in his youth, especially for a particular girl with clear skin. When he decided to act on his sexual attraction to her, God intervened and made her appear deformed so that Gerald came to his senses and arranged her freedom and marriage. Odo wrote that it confounded the devil that Gerald did not act upon his lust. ‘Novum namque et inusitatem illi erat, quod aliquis iuvenculus naufragium pudoris tutus evassit’ (For it was something new and unusual to him that some cautious youth should have avoided the shipwreck of his virtue).66 The line between youth and adulthood was often unclear. Sexual activity may have marked the beginning of the end to adolescence. Marriage, a grant of land, or receipt of a royal office involved adult duties and expectations.67 Yet textual evidence indicates an understanding among the elite that Carolingian boyhoods did not necessarily end during the teenage years and could extend into young men’s twenties. The situation differed for elite girlhoods, because girls, once married, perhaps even once fertile, became women even if they were the same age as male youth. The sources suggest outsized boyhoods, lasting longer than those of rural, non-elite boys put to work from a young age. Such a situation offers a useful corrective to the idea that adolescence or extended childhood is a product purely of the last few centuries, and it underlines the ways childhoods differed based on gender and status. It

 62 Dhuoda, Liber manualis, ed. and trans. by Thiébaux, 4.6, p. 142. I follow Neel (Dhuoda, Handbook for William, p. 52) in translating occupationum here as ‘thrill’.  63 Jonas of Orléans, De institutione laicali, 2.2, col. 171.  64 Jonas of Orléans, De institutione laicali, 2.2, col. 172.  65 Innes, ‘“A Place of Discipline”’, p. 67.  66 Odo of Cluny, De vita sancti Geraldi, 1.9, col. 648.  67 Innes, ‘“A Place of Discipline”’, p. 65.

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also argues for further exploration of Carolingian children and the rhetoric surrounding them. The interrelated practices and discourses that shaped elite Carolingian boyhoods appear to have produced a common social identity, marked by an extended transition to adulthood that blurred the line between elite boys and men, but the inapplicability of that social identity to the majority of Frankish children demands deeper consideration of what it meant to be a child in the Carolingian Empire.

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Biblio­graphy Primary Sources Ardo, Vita Benedicti abbatis Anianensis et Indensis, ed. by Georg Waitz, in Monu­ menta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores, 15.1 (Hanover: Hahn, 1887), pp. 198–220 Annales Bertiniani: Annales de Saint-Bertin, ed. by Félix Grat, Jeanne Vielliard, and Suzanne Clémencet (Paris: Librairie C. Klincksieck, 1964) Annales Vedastini, ed. by Bernhard von Simson, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi, 12 (Hanover: Hahn, 1909), pp. 40–82 The Annals of St-Bertin, trans. by Janet L. Nelson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991) Astronomer, Vita Hludowici imperatoris, ed. and trans. by Ernst Tremp, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi, 64 (Hanover: Hahn, 1995), pp. 279–555 Charlemagne and Louis the Pious: Lives by Einhard, Notker, Ermoldus, Thegan, and the Astronomer, ed. and trans. by Thomas F. X. Noble (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2009) Dhuoda, Handbook for William: A Carolingian Woman’s Counsel for her Son, trans. by Carol Neel (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1991) —— , Liber manualis, in Dhuoda. Handbook for her Warrior Son. Liber manualis, ed. and trans. by Marcelle Thiébaux (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, 6th edn, ed. by O. Holder-Egger after G. H. Pertz and G. Waitz, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi, 25 (Hanover: Hahn, 1911) Ermold the Black, In honorem Hludowici Pii, in Poème sur Louis le Pieux et épitres au roi Pépin, ed. and trans. by Edmond Faral (Paris: Librairie ancienne, 1932) Hincmar of Rheims, De ordine palatii, ed. by Thomas Gross and Rudolf Schieffer, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Fontes iuris Germanici antiqui in usum scholarum separatim editi, 3 (Hanover: Hahn, 1980) —— , ‘On the Governance of the Palace’, ed. and trans. by David Herlihy, A History of Feudalism (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), pp. 208–27 History and Politics in Late Carolingian and Ottonian Europe: The Chronicle of Regino of Prüm and Adalbert of Magdeburg, ed. and trans. by Simon MacLean (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009) Jonas of Orléans, De institutione laicali, ed. by Jacques-Paul Migne, Patro­logiae cursus completus: series latina, 106 (Paris: Garnier, 1864), cols 121–278 Lupus of Ferrières, Correspondance, vol. ii, ed. by Léon Levillain (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1935) Notker the Stammerer, Gesta Karoli, ed. by Hans F. Haefele, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores rerum Germanicarum, nova series, 12 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1959)

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Odo of Cluny, De vita sancti Geraldi Auriliacensis comitis, ed. by Jacques-Paul Migne, Patro­logiae cursus completus: series latina, 133 (Paris: Garnier, 1853), cols 639–704 Paschasius Radbertus, Epitaphium Arsenii, ed. by Ernst Dümmler, Abhandlungen der königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Philo­logie und historische Klasse, 2 (Berlin: Verlag der königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1900), pp. 1–98 Paul the Deacon, Carmen 39, ed. by Ernst Dümmler, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Poetae Latini medii aevi, 1 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1881), pp. 71–73 —— , Gesta episcoporum Mettensium, ed. by Georg Heinrich Pertz, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores, 2 (Hanover: Hahn, 1829), pp. 261–70 Regino of Prüm, Chronicon, ed. by Friedrich Kurze, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi, 50 (Hanover: Hahn, 1890) Vita Trudonis confessoris Hasbaniensis, ed. by Wilhelm Levison, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum, 6 (Hanover: Hahn, 1913), pp. 264–98 Secondary Works Airlie, Stuart, ‘The Anxiety of Sanctity: St Gerald of Aurillac and his Maker’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 43 (1992), 372–95 Dette, Christoph, ‘Kinder und Jugendliche in der Adelsgesellschaft des frühen Mittelalters’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 76 (1994), 1–34 Diem, Albrecht, ‘The Emergence of Monastic Schools: The Role of Alcuin’, in Alcuin of York: Scholar at the Carolingian Court, ed. by L. A. J. R. Houwen and A. A. MacDonald (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1998), pp. 27–44 Garver, Valerie L., ‘Childbearing and Infancy in the Carolingian World’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 21.2 (2012), 208–44 Goldberg, Eric J. ‘Louis the Pious and the Hunt’, Speculum, 88 (2013), 613–43 Halsall, Guy, ‘Growing Up in Merovingian Gaul’, in Cemeteries and Society in Merovingian Gaul: Selected Studies in History and Archaeo­logy, 1992–2009 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 383–412 Hennebicque, Régine, ‘Espaces sauvages et chasses royales dans le nord de la Francie viième–ixème siècles’, Revue du Nord, 62 (1980), 36–57 Innes, Matthew, ‘“A Place of Discipline”: Carolingian Courts and Aristocratic Youth’, in Court Culture in the Early Middle Ages: The Proceedings of the First Alcuin Con­ fer­ence, ed. by Catherine Cubitt (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 59–76 Irslinger, Franz, ‘On the Aristocratic Character of Early Frankish Society’, in The Medi­eval Nobility: Studies on the Ruling Classes of France and Germany from the Sixth to the Twelfth Century, ed. and trans. by Timothy Reuter (New York: North-Holland, 1979), pp. 105–36 James, Edward, ‘Childhood and Youth in the Early Middle Ages’, in Youth in the Middle Ages, ed. by P. J. P. Goldberg and Felicity Riddy (York: York Medi­eval Press, 2004), pp. 11–23

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Jong, Mayke de, ‘From Scholastici to Scioli: Alcuin and the Formation of an Intellectual Elite’, in Alcuin of York: Scholar at the Carolingian Court, ed. by L. A. J. R. Houwen and A. A. MacDonald (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1998), pp. 45–57 —— , ‘Growing up in a Carolingian Monastery: Magister Hildemar and his Oblates’, Journal of Medi­eval History, 9 (1983), 99–128 —— , In Samuel’s Image: Child Oblation in the Early Medi­eval West (Leiden: Brill, 1996) Jong, Mayke de, and Justin Lake, ‘Introduction’, in Confronting Crisis in the Carolingian Empire: Paschasius Radbertus’ Funeral Oration for Wala of Corbie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), pp. 1–46 Kimmel, Michael, ‘Guyland: Gendering the Transition to Adulthood’, in Exploring Masculinities: Identity, Inequality, Continuity, and Change, ed. by C. J. Pascoe and Tristan Bridges (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 107–20 McCormick, Joseph, Education of the Laity in the Early Middle Ages (Washington, DC: Catholic Education Press, 1912) Meens, Rob, ‘Children and Confession’, in The Church and Childhood, ed. by Diana Wood, Studies in Church History, 31 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 53–65 Mintz, Steven, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004) Nelson, Janet L., Charles the Bald (New York: Longman, 1992) —— , ‘The Lord’s Anointed and the People’s Choice: Carolingian Royal Ritual’, in The Frankish World, 750–900 (London: Hambledon, 1996), pp. 99–131 Offergeld, Thilo, Reges pueri: Das Königtum Minderjähriger im frühen Mittelalter (Hanover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2001) Pascoe, C. J., Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007) Pearson, Kathy L., ‘Nutrition and the Early-Medi­eval Diet’, Speculum, 72 (1997), 1–32 Pohl, Walter, The Avars: A Steppe Empire in Central Europe, 567–822 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018) Riché, Pierre, ‘L’enfant dans le haut Moyen-Âge’, Annales de démo­graphie historique, 1973, 95–98 Steinberg, Shirley R., Michael Kehler, and Lindsay Cornish, eds, Boy Culture: An Encyclopedia, 2 vols (Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2010) Willis, Paul, Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977) Yver, Jean, ‘Note sur la protection des mineurs dans les capitulaires carolingiens’, in Album J. Balon (Namur: Les anciens établissements Godenne, 1968), pp. 59–76

Paul Edward Dutton

Carolingian Experiments with Family If by ‘experiment’ we mean the purposeful replacement of something standard by something non-standard in order to solve a perceived problem, then the Middle Ages was full of experiments, though we may not always recognize them as such. There was nothing more important to the Carolingian family than dynastic success, and its forefathers of the seventh and eighth centuries had succeeded under a series of effective leaders in promoting the dynasty’s interests, making critical marriages, and amassing land and power.1 But in the ninth century the Carolingians as a family found itself challenged by the many stresses of holding royal and imperial power, its commitment to defending and upholding Roman Catholicism, and changing social and religious rules about families, marriage, divorce, and legitimacy. Moreover, they too were subject to the vicissitudes that beset all families and their fortunes over time, which made it necessary for them on occasion to innovate, to bend family norms and practices for dynastic reasons. The provocative innovations to be examined here will be familiar ones, but their experimental character may be less so. Families are intimate human arrangements best known from the inside as lived experiences, precisely where the historian can rarely go. Were you to ask for a definition of the Carolingian family I for one would be hard pressed to answer.2 ‘Which families’, I might ask, ‘noble, common, servile,



* This paper began life as the keynote address to the University of Tennessee’s Marco Institute for Medi­eval and Renaissance Studies’s 2017 Annual Symposium, ‘Carolingian Experiments’, and has been only modestly changed here in order to preserve something of the character of its original presentation and its overview of some of the challenges faced by the Carolingian royal family.  1 See Riché, The Carolingians; Gerberding, The Rise of the Carolingians, particularly pp. 92–145. For the construction of elites and the role that families played, see Bougard, Bührer-Thierry, and Le Jan, ‘Elites in the Early Middle Ages’.  2 On family and marriage in the early Middle Ages, see Bitel, Women in Early Medi­eval Europe, pp. 158–96. And on the pre-modern family, see Herlihy, ‘Family’. Paul Edward Dutton ([email protected]), Professor Emeritus, Simon Fraser University. Among his publications are The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), Charlemagne’s Courtier: The Complete Einhard (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), Charlemagne’s Mustache and Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), and Carolingian Civilization: A Reader, 2nd edn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). Carolingian Experiments, ed. by Matthew Bryan Gillis, ISMAR 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022) pp. 47–70 10.1484/M.ISMAR-EB.5.127246

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royal, monastic, legal, merchant, town or country?’, for we should not assume that they were all the same. After looking at the families that fill the pages of the Polyptyque of St-Germain-des-Prés, one might be tempted to think that they look like familiar nuclear families: a father, mother, and their children with few obvious extensions or eccentricities.3 But when you begin to think critically about those peasant families, problems soon emerge. The partner of the plot holder, for instance, is called his wife (uxor), but both of them, whether coloni, lidi, or servi, were dependents and thus unfree. In what way, then, could they be said to be married? On several occasions, Einhard and his wife Emma found themselves seeking to regularize irregular marriages in which a servile male had not secured the permission of his master before marrying.4 In one difficult case, he tried to persuade one of his vassals, whose daughter had run off with one of Einhard’s own servants, to allow him to free the man so that the couple could wed, which he suggested would be best since otherwise the young woman would be scorned by all.5 What were peasant partnerships if only the free possessed the freedom to marry, the unfree only with the permission of their lord? At the very least that meant that such unions were legally and customarily different from those of the free, if not quite slave marriages or legal fictions. What we would not give to have a single contemporary observer report on how even one farm family lived, organized itself, apportioned domestic duties and power, dealt with life’s crises and stages, but we do not.6 Of the discontents that beset those small families we know next to nothing. No contemporary asked the questions that we would like answered: how stable were these family units, how uniform, how did family members get along with each other, what role did kin networks play in peasant lives and their ideas about family, how did family units in small communities interact with other families, what rates of mortality did they experience, how did they deal with the manse holder and other authorities, and how and when were new households established? To appreciate what these families were up against, one need only realize that had we a follow-up inventory of St-Germain’s holdings, perhaps from five or even as little as two years later, much would have changed. Disease, death, and separation would have remade whole families; many names would be gone, new ones now in their place. We know more about aristocratic families, though our knowledge is primarily genealogical rather than how one of those families worked in real time. When we do hear someone talk from inside an aristocratic family, she  3 See Polytyque de l’Abbaye de Saint-Germain de Prés, ed. by Longnon. See also Goetz, ‘Zur Namengebung bäuerlicher Schichten im Frühmittelalter’, which should also have been cited in Dutton, ‘The Identification of Persons in Frankish Europe’.  4 Einhard, Epistolae 37, 46, ed. by Hampe, pp. 128, 133.  5 Einhard, Epistola 60, ed. by Hampe, p. 139.  6 Eileen Power’s imaginative recreation of Boso’s peasant life notwithstanding: see Power, Medi­eval People, pp. 18–38.

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does not always tell us what we would like to know and what she does tell us can seem strange.7 At the time she was writing, Dhuoda was not living with her husband or her sons, one of whom was sixteen and a hostage, the other recently born and removed from her before being named. She never mentions any dependents or servants, but writes as if she were living alone in neglected and loveless isolation. Her book strives to bind together on parchment an absent family and to bring her missing sons home again, in spirit at least, to their dying mother. Dhuoda sketches for us a family divided by distance and disorder, one over which danger and death daily hovered. Even the memory of her marriage takes us to a strange place, for she proudly tells her sons of the exact date on which she was married in the palace at Aachen, reminding them of the public, prestigious, and legitimate nature of their parents’ marriage.8 But she tells them nothing about who witnessed the wedding, though ‘in Aquisgrani palatio’ is heavy with suggestion, and supplies them with no social details of the event: nothing on dress, ceremony, or celebration. We should take special note of the fact that she does not say that she was married in the palatine chapel of Aachen, though she may have thought of the chapel as simply part of the palace complex. Hers may have been a secular ceremony, but we cannot be sure. If so, it would suggest once again that Carolingian marriage was a civil arrangement based on an oral and ritual contract between families, not yet a fully Christianized institution though Christian expectations pressed down upon it and demanded something of it.9 The Carolingians had apparently still not crossed the great divide between civil contracts and church weddings, which Georges Duby believed was a critical medi­eval turning point.10 To confound things further for us, the Carolingians did not mean by familia what we mean by ‘family’.11 The primary meaning of familia for them was the collectivity of people associated with a household, estate, or even monastery. A familia included everyone attached to one living space not by blood, but by place. Dhuoda’s current familia would have been everyone under her roof at Uzès, whereas she thought of her son’s extended noble family as a genealogia or stirps, a lineage.12 Einhard spoke of the ‘gens Meroingorum’ and of Charlemagne’s ‘interior et domestica vita’, but never used the word familia in the way that we employ ‘family’ today.13

 7 See Dhuoda, Liber manualis, ed. by Riché; also Dhuoda, Handbook for William, trans. by Neel.  8 Dhuoda, Liber manualis, Praefatio, ed. by Riché, p. 84.  9 See Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church, pp. 315–412. On the changing partnering practices of early medi­eval Francia, see Wemple, Women in Frankish Society, pp. 9–123.  10 Duby, The Knight, the Lady and the Priest, p. 19. Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church, p. 410. And see Karras, ‘The Christianization of Medi­eval Marriage’.  11 See Bitel, Women in Early Medi­eval Europe, pp. 154–64.  12 Dhuoda, Liber manualis x.5, ed. by Riché, p. 354.  13 Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni 1, 18, ed. by Holder-Egger, pp. 2, 21. The word familia is, for instance, missing in Cahour, Petite Lexique.

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What we mean by ‘family’ is not simple and is becoming more complex by the day. My old Chamber’s Etymo­logical English Dictionary offers the following for family: ‘the household, or all those who live in one house (as parents, children, servants): parents and their children: the children alone: the descendants of one common progenitor: honourable or noble descent’,14 before moving on to groups of animals, plants, and languages. Even in those definitions we can discern older medi­eval meanings, though we might think that ‘parents and their children’ comes closest to what we mean by family. But might we be better off thinking of families as composed of bundles of features and functions: household habitabilities, consanguinities, bondings, child rearings, economies, social acts? In other words: who and what does a household contain, how does it function, and what do its members do? Sadly we know too little about Carolingian families and so, where doors do open, even a little, we had best proceed inside, but with caution and humility. Let us move to the issue of Carolingian experimentation. For us an ‘experiment’ suggests the testing of solutions to a problem, a word now permanently stained by scientific connotations, but for the Carolingians experimentum meant ‘proof ’, ‘outcome’, or ‘experience’.15 Here I shall hold to a modern non-scientific meaning of experiment as the testing of solutions to problems, for what I expect we would all like to know is how and why the Carolingians were trying out new approaches to solving their problems. But a caution: our bias in favour of the individual, the immediate, and quick historical time may impede our fair consideration of medi­eval experiments since we cannot gauge change in slow time as easily and so often overlook the incremental and collective, particularly innovations such as those in agriculture where a new plough, fertilizer, crops, or planting strategies may take decades to spread and become detectable. One way to detect ‘newness’ in the Middle Ages is to mark immoderate reaction to it. The voice of opposition is often the sign of offended community norms, the old rising up to challenge the new. Let us try, however faint the sound, to listen for notes of medi­eval surprise at the appearance of something new and of the shock over something offensive to expected standards. What I want to know in each of the cases considered here is what the provocation was, its circumstances, the reaction to it, and the reasons why the provoker took the risk of arousing opposition by testing family conventions.

 14 MacDonald, ed., Chamber’s Etymo­logical English Dictionary, p. 222.  15 See ii Corinthians 13. 3. When Einhard speaks of ‘experimentum somnii’ he means the experience of a dream, whose outcome in daily life will prove whether it was a true revelation or a vain illusion. Einhard, Translatio et miracula, 1.2, ed. by Waitz, p. 241.

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Experiment 1. Charlemagne’s Concubinage

The Provocation: Charlemagne was a lusty fellow, at least if we run the

numbers: five marriages, seven concubines that we know of, twenty children, eight of them illegitimate (see table below).16 Charlemagne’s Partners and Children by Birth Year

Partner Himiltrude ∞ ‘Desiderata’ ∞

Hildegard ∞

concubine ≈

Date

Child

769

Pippin (the Hunchback)

772/73

Charles (‘the Younger’)

773

Adelaide

775

Rotrude

777

Pippin (originally Carloman)

778

Louis (‘the Pious’)

778

Lothar

779/80

Bertha

781

Gisela

782

Hildegard

784

Hruodhaid Theodrada

Fastrada ∞ Liutgard ∞

Hiltrude 785

Madelgard ≈

Ruothild

Gersvinda ≈

Adaltrude

Regina ≈ concubine ≈ concubine ≈ Adalind ≈ 5 wives (∞) 7 concubines (≈)

801

Drogo

802/06

Hugh

800/805 807

Ricbod Bernard Theoderic

1 child born every 2.3 years on average 20 children 3 known infant deaths (Adelaide, Lothar, Hildegard)

 16 See also Nelson, ‘Women at the Court of Charlemagne’, and Rösch, Caroli Magni progenies. In many ways, the foundational study for sorting out Charlemagne’s family is Werner, ‘Die Nachkommen Karls des Grossen’. See also now Nelson, King and Emperor.

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Circumstances: Einhard sanitizes the king’s sexual history, which should

alert us that there was something to disguise. He presents the king as a serial monogamist, almost always with a partner, but one at a time, not several at the same time.17 One might call Einhard’s sleight-of-hand ‘the Vanishing Ladies Act’: now the women are there, now they’re not. To be fair, the bio­grapher had some difficulty in sorting out Charlemagne’s fuller social history. He did not know or chose not to report the names of Charlemagne’s first two wives and says that he had forgotten the name of one concubine, but there were others whom he did not know or chose not to mention. But as always with Einhard, readers should resist his measured rhetorical construct, and watch instead what he does. He refuses to humanize the king’s partners, so that he can move quickly to the children they bore him. The king’s partners end up seeming little more than named wombs and Einhard’s tactic a trick of parturient narration.18 We have no stories of randy Charlemagne as a banquet animal, though Notker the Stammerer does tell us of an occasion when an informer needed access to the king’s private chambers, which lay recessed behind seven guarded gates.19 The king sent out the queen’s maidens to find out what the insistent banger on his innermost door wanted; they found a beardless boy half dressed in ecclesiastical gown and began to titter and pull their dresses up over their faces to hide their giggling. The story leaves us with an impression of the king’s private chambers filled with women: the queen, his daughters, and their female attendants. Not perhaps quite a ‘monstrous regiment of women’,20 but a considerable female cohort separating the private Charlemagne from the male world outside his private rooms. Charlemagne’s love life may have been a busy one, but it was more acceptable, for a time, to a Christianizing realm than that of the early Merovingians who had practiced polygyny (one man, many women). Without explaining what he is trying to tell us, Einhard simply presents us with an imperfect chrono­logical sequence of Charlemagne’s couplings. When he was young the king had a first partner (his wife Himiltrude, whom Einhard calls a concubine), who bore him Pippin (the Hunchback), whose royal name suggests his legitimacy. But at the insistence of his mother, he left her for a Lombard princess, whom he soon sent away. As a mature man he had three consecutive wives: Hildegard, Fastrada, and Liutgard, with a concubine fitted between or alongside them.

 17 Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni 18–20, ed. by Holder-Egger, pp. 22–25. Notice that Einhard lists three daughters, two born to Fastrada and a third to a concubine whose name he does not remember. The way in which he presents this suggests that in between the marriages to Hildegard and Liutgard, there was a concubine, as indicated on the chart.  18 Note too that in Einhard’s preface to the Vita Karoli Magni he speaks of his embrace by Charlemagne and his children, but makes no mention of the wives, several of whom he had doubtless known.  19 Notker the Stammerer, Gesta Karoli 2.12, ed. by Haefele, pp. 71–72.  20 See Janet Nelson’s rich consideration of the topic in ‘Women at the Court of Charlemagne’.

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After the last of his wives died in 800, Charlemagne never married again, but took at least four concubines, one after the other, siring at least seven illegitimate children over the last fifteen years of his life. He, thus, ended his long life in a wilderness of forbidden fornication.

Reaction: The reaction to Charlemagne’s state of late reign concubinage

was dark, but delayed. There was little recorded criticism of his personal domestic behaviour while he lived, but not long after he died, monks began to mutter and then outright denounce the emperor’s late and unlicensed libido. The person who sanctioned that criticism was his son, Louis (the Pious), who disapproved of his father’s lifestyle. Immediately after the emperor’s death, Louis cleaned house, purging the palace of its large female cohort and setting up a commission to investigate the moral turpitude of the palace and Aachen at large.21 Thus, as so often, a new regime began by condemning the doings of the old. The monastic critique of the moral disorder of Charlemagne’s life surfaced slowly. The monk Rotcharius in a feverish state had a dream-vision in which he encountered Charlemagne among the saints in the other world. The emperor spoke to him and said that he had been rescued from punishment by the prayers of the faithful.22 But, punishment for what? Wetti, a monk of Reichenau, died in November 824, and Heito of Basle composed a prose account of Wetti’s deathbed dream-vision.23 Wetti had asked his brother-monks to read to him from Gregory the Great’s Dialogues whereupon he fell into a frightening dream in which an angelic guide led him to the other world. There he saw priests who had defiled women, both of whom, the defilers and the defiled, were forced to stand in raging fire that reached and seared their genitals. Every third day their genitals were beaten with sticks. The angel accompanying Wetti explained that these people were being punished for their worldly ambition and their involvement with the palace, which had brought these worldly priests and their prostitutes together for illicit commerce. Moving beyond that gruesome scene, but in that same place of punishment for sexual sin, Wetti saw an unnamed prince: Illic etiam quendam principem, qui Italiae et populi Romani sceptra quondam rexerat, vidisse se stantem dixerat, et verenda eius cuiusdam animalis morsu laniari, reliquo corpore inmuni ab hac lesione manente. Stupore igitur vehementi attonitus, ammirans quomodo tantus vir, qui in defensione catholicae fidei et regimine sanctae ecclesiae moderno seculo pene inter ceteros singularis apparuit, inuri tanta deformitate poenae potuisset. Cui ab angelo ductore suo protinus responsum est, quod quamvis

 21 The so-called ‘die Säuberung der Pfalz’: Capitulare de disciplina palatii Aquisgranensis, in Capitularia regum Francorum, ed. by Boretius, i, p. 298.  22 Visio Rotcharii, ed. by Wattenbach.  23 See Pollard, ‘Charlemagne’s Posthumous Reputation’.

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multa miranda et laudabilia et deo accepta fecisset, quorum mercede privandus non est, tamen stupri inlecebris resolutus, cum ceteris bonis deo oblatis longevitatem vitae suae in hoc terminare voluisset, ut quasi parva obscenitas et concessa fragilitati humanae libertas mole tantorum bonorum obrui et absumi potuisset.24 (Who had ruled Italy and the Roman people, and his genitals were being mangled by the teeth of a beast, although the rest of his body remained free from injury. Wetti was struck with violent bewilderment, wondering how so great a man, who had appeared almost alone among others in this modern age in defence of the catholic faith and direction of the holy church, could have been inflicted with such violent punishment. His angelic guide quickly answered that although he had done many wonderful and praiseworthy things accepted by God, for which he would not be deprived of his reward, nevertheless, alongside those other goods offered to God, he had given himself up to the delights of debauchery and had chosen to end his long life in this state. It was as though [he thought] the small obscenity and license allowed to human weakness could be covered over and completely hidden by the weight of his great good [works].) When the monk Walahfrid Strabo came to versify the Visio Wettini, he broke through the final threshold and named Charlemagne as that prince of Italy having his genitals mauled by an animal for the sin of lust. But the young poet marginalized the identification, setting the emperor’s name in acrostics; the capital letters of the first words of each line of verse about the sinning king spell out CAROLVS IMPERATOR.25 With Walahfrid’s poem, the identification was made even if still not spoken out loud. Wetti, Heito, and Walahfrid had posthumously outed the emperor. Writing in the 820s, Einhard’s presentation of the domestic life of Charlemagne as a long line of partners stripped of their personalities, quickening spirits, beauty, and animating interactions with the emperor and their children, tells us that he knew of the widespread post-mortem critique of Charlemagne’s life, but chose to respond to it by substituting a portrait of Charlemagne as a loving friend and father for that of the wanton king then being whispered about by monks. But the dream criticism of the king was still out there, representing the conviction of many in the know that Charlemagne had been a libidinous prince living in a state of sexual squalor at the end of his life. Serving Louis the Pious when he was king of Aquitaine was a cleric who apparently shared

 24 Heito, Visio Wettini 11, ed. by Dümmler, p. 271; and see Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming, pp. 61–63.  25 Walahfrid Strabo, Visio Wettini, ed. by Dümmler, pp. 318–19. And see Walahfrid Strabo’s Visio Wettini, ed. by Traill; Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming, pp. 65–67.

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his sovereign’s dismay with Charlemagne’s domestic disorder. In 818 the emperor appointed that cleric bishop of Orléans to replace the old regime’s stalwart supporter Theodulf. The new bishop, Jonas, soon published On the Lay Estate (De institutione laicali), which he had written for Count Matfrid of Orléans. In it he included a pointed warning that lay people needed to hold true to the Christian life until their last breath, shunning fornication, incest, and other vile sexual practices. If they did not they would suffer a fate after death worse than even that of faithless people who had done good deeds in their lives.26 When he came to write On the Royal Estate (De institutione regia), he repeated that chapter on late-life sin.27 Although Charlemagne is not named, his sinful state was the one that Jonas and his patron Louis found troubling. They were engaged in Christianizing and perfecting Frankish family life, and viewed kings and nobles as examples to the faithful and as judges who sat in judgement over a lay people, who had their own domestic lapses and squalid domestic crimes to overcome. By falling into sin late in life, rulers such as Charlemagne spoiled the good they had done, imperilled their souls, and jeopardized the lives of their sinful subjects. With Wetti and Walahfrid the great king’s secret was out, as Scripture insisted it would: ‘For nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is there anything secret that will not be known and come to light’.28 While the monks who corrected the memory of the emperor may have trembled at the thought of criticizing him, even though by then he lay safely in his tomb, they had an admonitory point to make about a great man’s fall into sin.

Reasons for Taking the Risk? Charlemagne surely knew that his

clerics would not be pleased with his domestic sins, but he was willing to risk their censure. For one thing, Charlemagne’s power was so complete by the late 790s that he knew that few if any would openly criticize him. He was the head of the Frankish Church, appointed or approved its bishops, oversaw its operation, called Church councils, rescued and investigated a pope, and disciplined ecclesiastics. Such a man, a colossus of his times, cannot have been overly worried that he would be damned for his disordered private life. But let us look at this another way, as one of problems, with each side assessing the dangers and solutions in different ways. The problem the Church was attempting to address was the future of Charlemagne’s everlasting soul and the example he set as the emperor and judge of living Christians; the problem Charlemagne was attempting to address was the future of his dynasty. His solution was a form of birth control by inheritance law that would limit the number of heirs who could claim to be his legitimate issue.  26 Jonas of Orléans, De institutione laicali 1.19, ed. by Dubreucq, i, pp. 280–90. See Veronese, ‘Contextualizing Marriage’.  27 Along with four other chapters from On the Lay Institution. Jonas of Orléans, De institutione regia 12, ed. by Dubreucq, pp. 252–58.  28 Luke 8. 17. See also Matthew 10. 26, Luke 12. 2, i Corinthians 4. 5, Numbers 32. 23.

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We could argue, of course, that the powerful Charlemagne just lost control of his sexual drive, but I doubt that. He was, as my students never tired of reminding me, something of a control freak. It was his famous discipline and determination, as praised by Einhard, that allowed him year after year to raise troops and take on and wear down such stubborn enemies as the Saxons, to fight wars on several fronts, and to reform Christendom. So why not just remarry and be done with it? Probably because he was still concerned about the safety, security, and endurance of his young royal dynasty. He knew how his own noble family had outmanoeuvred and displaced the previous dynasty. The critical flaw of the Merovingian house had been multiple succession, civil war, and reliance on noble families for support in those wars of succession. Charlemagne was driven to avoid that great Merovingian mistake. When Queen Liutgard died in 800, Charlemagne had three legitimate heirs and he knew something that his monks did not, that three was enough. His heirs would, as Germanic law and tradition demanded, each receive a fair portion of their father’s possessions of lands and goods. Charlemagne had experienced the problem himself, for a succession conflict had fallen over Charlemagne and his brother Carloman after Pippin the Short’s death. Carloman resisted cooperating with Charlemagne’s defence of Francia and was suspicious of his brother. Einhard may try to gloss over the tensions between them, but they were real, and when Carloman died prematurely his wife fled to the Lombards rather than risk living under her brother-in-law, whose good intentions she was wise to doubt. In 806, with three living legitimate sons, Charlemagne drew up his inheritance plan in the Division of Kingdoms (Divisio Regnorum),29 whose principal feature was a desire to foster cooperation and prevent conflict between his legitimate heirs: Charles, Pippin, and Louis. The document tells us, if we were in any doubt, that Charlemagne was worried about leaving his sons with a Merovingian morass of civil war on their hands if a clear succession plan and acceptable division of possessions was not already spelled out. What Wetti and the monastic critics of Charlemagne’s domestic life seem not to have understood (or could not accept if they did) was that Charlemagne had perfectly good reasons for spending his last years in a state of concubinage. He did not want to sire any more legitimate heirs, for that might have nullified the Division of Kingdoms and would have endangered the peaceful transfer and maintenance of dynastic power. Charlemagne was sixty-five when he sired his last illegitimate son and so had continued an active sexual life almost until the end. Churchmen were already mumbling about his sordid court and his libidinous behaviour, but Charlemagne’s commitment to the greater interests of his dynasty prevailed. The surprise of Wetti at seeing Charlemagne in purgatory with an animal chewing on his genitals was the surprise of a Church that could not understand how to reconcile the image of its great  29 Capitularia regum Francorum, ed. by Boretius, i, pp. 126–30.

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patron, protector, and promoter with the real man that he was over the last fifteen years of his life, and the shocking sight of him sinking into sexual sin and defiantly remaining there, recklessly endangering his soul. And so they did what they were expected to do; they exposed his sin, but found a way to forgive him. By the 830s, when the Frankish realm was overcome by confusion and revolt, Charlemagne’s sins no longer much mattered. The old man had been stubborn. He had balked when his physicians told him to cut back on his favourite food,30 and he would also ignore any soul doctors who dared to dictate with whom he could mate or under what conditions. The persistence of his family made the risk worth taking. His experiment was a dynastic success, which his lone successor may not have fully appreciated, but not a religious one, which his son did understand and made the most of.

Experiment 2. Lothar II’s Marital Mess Since the second experiment with family has too much detail to treat in any depth and the third too little, we shall consider them here only briefly. Both of these experiments share a common problem, a lack of legitimate heirs, which was the opposite of the family problem that had faced Charlemagne and Louis the Pious.

The Provocation: In 857 Lothar II repudiated and sought to divorce his

wife Theutberga, who was childless, in order to marry his long-time partner and love-mate, Waldrada, the mother of his two children. He would spend the final twelve years of his life trying to bring about the legitimization of his marriage to Waldrada and so their son, but without success.

Circumstances: The Catholic Church did little to assert a claim to supervise

and sanction marriage during the Carolingian period, believing apparently that marriage belonged to an extra-priestly, lay, sexual, and contractual realm.31 Instead it critically leveraged divorce as a way to assert its spiritual authority over one dimension of the lay estate. Sadly we still lack a systematic study of medi­eval and Carolingian divorce on the scale of Philip Reynolds’s majestic study of the sacramentalization of marriage in the twelfth century.32 But we can see the papacy early on using divorce as a way to exercise some control over Carolingian lay life, at least as it applied to the elite. When a report reached Rome that either Charlemagne or Carloman was thinking of marrying a daughter of Desiderius, the Lombard king, the pope [Stephen III (or IV),

 30 Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni 22, ed. by Holder-Egger, p. 27.  31 See Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church, pp. 314–412.  32 Reynolds, How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments.

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768–72]33 wrote to protest what a foul thing it would be for the Carolingians to mix their blood with that ‘most fetid brood of Lombards’.34 He claimed that they already had fine Frankish wives of their own and, moreover, that his predecessor [Pope Stephen II (III)] had implored their father Pippin never to dare divorce their mother [Bertrada].35 Despite that warning, Charlemagne did marry Desiderius’s daughter, but sent her away after a year. Only one Carolingian complained about Charlemagne’s second divorce. Adalhard, a young courtier and royal cousin, left the king’s palace in protest and became a monk at Corbie.36 Interestingly, the pope complained not at all about Charlemagne’s divorce of the Lombard princess, for the last thing that the papacy wanted was for its new protector, the Carolingian dynasty, to remain joined by marriage to the Lombards, the papacy’s prime Italian enemy. The incident does suggest how politically and religiously plastic divorce could be in the Carolingian world. The papacy was not entirely to blame for using divorce and legitimacy to leverage its religious powers over Carolingian rulers. Charlemagne, by choosing not to remarry after 800, had used legitimacy as the means of limiting the number of heirs who would compete for power after his death. In his defence, he may have thought that his experiment was a solution specific to his immediate family situation, a surfeit of sons. His silence on the subject is also Einhard’s. In contrast, Louis the Pious publicly embraced the necessity of legitimacy, insisting that his own sons enter into legitimate marriages.37 Bastardy was to be a permanent state of inferiority and exclusion in Louis’s remaking of the Carolingian world.38 But then both Charlemagne and Louis had the luxury of having more than enough legitimate heirs. Their successors would not always be so fortunate. One of those unlucky ones was Lothar II, the son of Lothar I.39 He had two children by his concubine Waldrada, but they were illegitimate, and no children by his wife Theutberga, and so he sought to divorce her and marry his fruitful concubine. The defence of the king’s desired divorce fell to his churchmen who, in their ingenious, if cold-hearted handling of the case,

 33 Mercati, ‘The New List of the Popes’, p. 75. On the politics of Lombard marriage, see Nelson, ‘Making a Difference in Eighth-Century Politics’.  34 Codex Carolinus, 45, ed. by Gundlach, p. 561. See Dutton, ed., Carolingian Civilization, p. 25.  35 Codex Carolinus, 45, ed. by Gundlach, pp. 561–62.  36 Paschasius Radbertus, Vita sancti Adalhardi 7, ed. by Migne, col. 1511C.  37 On the very public marriage of Lothar I, see Annales regni Francorum, 821, ed. by Kurze, p. 156, and Astronomer, Vita Hludowici 34, ed. by Pertz, p. 625. See also Astronomer, Vita Hludowici 34, ed. and trans. by Tremp, pp. 402, 404.  38 Ordinatio imperii 15, in Capitularia regum Francorum, ed. by Boretius, i, p. 273: ‘Si vero absque legitimis liberis aliquis eorum decesserit, potestas illius ad seniorem fratrem revertatur. Et si contingerit illum habere liberos ex concubinis, monemus ut erga illos misericorditer agat’.  39 For thorough recent reviews of the case, see Firey, A Contrite Heart, pp. 13–38; Heidecker, The Divorce of Lothar II; and The Divorce of King Lothar and Queen Theutberga, trans. by Stone and West, pp. 1–81.

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charged Theutberga with the crime of having, prior to marriage, committed incestuous sodomy with her brother. She chose a champion who proved her innocence by an ordeal of hot water. But God’s judgement counted for little since in 860 Theutberga was compelled to face a large council in Lothar’s kingdom at which, under some duress, she confessed and was divorced from the king. She fled to Charles the Bald’s kingdom of west Francia, recanted her confession, and appealed to the pope. Lothar sent emissaries to Pope Nicholas I to present his case. In the meantime, Lothar married (or remarried) Waldrada and declared her his queen. He claimed that he had been legitimately married to her first and should have been considered married to her still, whereas the marriage to Theutberga had been illicitly joined because powerful men had manipulated the young king into it and Theutberga had hidden her sins from him. Lothar’s episcopal emissaries to the pope were not well received. The pope dismissed their arguments, humiliated them, and then deposed them from office. In 865 Pope Nicholas forced Lothar to take back Queen Theutberga, but things did not go well. She was soon so fed up with Lothar that she was the one to ask for divorce.

Reaction: This case is one of the most prolonged and noisiest in Carolingian

history, with the deposed bishop, Gunther of Co­logne, damning the actions of a false and arbitrary pope, the king testing various solutions to his problem, and Hincmar of Rheims, the archbishop of Rheims, writing in favour of the legitimacy of Theutberga’s marriage.

Reasons for Taking the Risk? What Charlemagne had done easily

in dismissing two wives early in his reign, Lothar II found that he could not do at all. His uncles, Louis the German and Charles the Bald, were not ready to see the bastard son of Lothar, Hugh [of Lotharingia], legitimized, for they were hoping upon Lothar’s heirless death to divide up his kingdom, which was what happened in 869–870. Lothar was surely aware of how hard it would be to divorce Theutberga but took the risk anyway. He rightly believed that he had no prospect of ever having a son with the queen. The scandalous charges brought against Theutberga were one measure of just how frustrated he was, but they were also clever, for a charge of adolescent sodomy could hardly be disproved, and it was a charge that need not contest her virginity at marriage. No matter the sound theo­logical reasons at play, Pope Nicholas and the Church found that forbidding divorce was a way of keeping kings in line and the Church in charge of one aspect of lay life. Did they also see that the long-term effect of this policy might be to curtail the life blood of the Carolingian dynasty? One of the greatest weaknesses of royalty after all is its occasional lack of heirs — think of Henry VIII, whose royal rule was warped and ruined by his obsession with having a legitimate male heir. Notice what he did to solve his problem. He removed the pope as head of the English Church so that he could divorce the spotless Katherine of Aragon and marry the leopardine Anne Boleyn. But bastardy can have its dynastic moments.

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Charles Martel, through whom the Carolingian royal line and blood passed, was a bastard. Lothar II was understandably trying to preserve his line, but the times and powers raised against him had changed, and so another dynastic door closed for all time for want of a divorce.

Experiment 3. The Fantasy Experiments of Charles the Fat The emperor Charles the Fat was the most adventurous family experimentalist of the ninth century, probably because his domestic situation was the direst. He was also the least successful.

The Provocation: In 881 Charles the Fat (876–888) became the last

legitimate Carolingian emperor because no other legitimate Carolingian rulers were left. But he faced the same problem as Lothar II, a lack of legitimate heirs. He did have a son, Bernard (b. 875), with a lower-class woman, whose name we never learn. The emperor tried, in succession, three different approaches to remedying his heirlessness.

Circumstances: Charles had a career with many ups and downs. In 873

he broke down at a public assembly called by his father Louis the German to examine the state of the kingdom and the loyalty of his sons. There Charles abruptly announced his intention to abandon the world (that was, to become a monk). He renounced sexual intercourse with his wife Richardis and unbuckled his sword and let it fall to the ground. As he proceeded to divest himself of the things of this world, bishops and nobles rushed forward to restrain him. The major annalists saw the episode as the work of the devil, but as historians we might better understand it as something like a nervous breakdown brought on by the pressures of royal family life.40 Of most interest to us may be his threatened separation from his wife, Richardis. Their long marriage, which was to last over twenty-five years, produced no heirs. And so he sought the pope’s support for the legitimization of his illegitimate son, perhaps without divorcing his wife; the mechanism is unclear. Part of his plan was to depose, with Rome’s support, certain bishops who opposed that legitimization. But the unpopular pope Hadrian III died in September 885, thus stalling Charles’s campaign. A second drive to legitimize Bernard with papal support also came to nothing. In 887, he finally despaired of having his bastard legitimized and so took the unusual step of adopting, in some fashion, Louis of Provence [later to be called the Blind], the son of Irmengard, daughter of the emperor Louis II of Italy and Empress Engelberga, and the widow of the presumptuous Boso [of Provence], who had died in early 887. Adoption, if it had been better developed as a legal possibility in Francia, might have been one way to solve some of  40 Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming, pp. 210–19; Nelson, ‘A Tale of Two Princes’, p. 128.

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the late Carolingians’ succession problems. The Romans had used adoption and the creation of nominal descent lines as a way to maintain families and pass status and wealth forward.41 But Charles the Fat’s move was imperfectly imagined and too hastily executed.42 Charles’s last experiment was also to be his most forlorn. He finally formally attempted to divorce his long-standing, well-connected, and devout wife Richardis by accusing her of having committed adultery with Liutward, the bishop of Vercelli.43 Charles claimed that he had not had sexual intercourse with Richardis for more than ten years; she for her part claimed that she had never had sexual intercourse with any man. No divorce was obtained.

Reaction: The reactions to Charles the Fat’s experiments are thin, but

around 885 Charles asked Notker the Stammerer to relate his family history. In The Deeds of Charlemagne (Gesta Karoli), the monk of St-Gall plays the king’s emotional and political heartstrings. He has great fun demonstrating how ridiculous, puffed up, and vain bishops are, those comic sketches being written at the very moment when powerful bishops were resisting Charles’s efforts to have Bernard legitimized. Notker’s portrayal of Charlemagne as a sovereign who valued merit over noble blood might also be taken as a defence of a bastard boy of merit. It is Notker alone who tells us that the reason Charlemagne divorced Desiderius’s daughter was because she was barren, which would have pleased a sovereign facing the same dilemma.44 The monk touches Charles’s heart when he withholds telling certain stories until he sees a little Louis or Charles at his side or ‘until I see your little son Bernard with a sword girt to his thigh’.45 I know that today we read the Gesta Karoli as a funny book, but I have always found it tinged with autumn, falling leaves, and the thinning of the Carolingian dynastic dream, never more so than when Notker says to Charles: ‘Aside from that tiny splinter Bernard, only one small bough [Arnulf] now sprouts, under the solitary treetop of your protection, from that once most beautiful root of Louis the German’.46 The most important reaction to Charles’s extreme attempts to provide for his succession was an action. Arnulf of Carinthia, the bastard son of another of Louis the German’s sons, Carloman, was fed up with the fanciful scheming

 41 In general, see now Lindsay, Adoption in the Roman World.  42 On the episode, see Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming, pp. 227–51. In the Vision of Charles the Fat, written not long after his death, the figure of Charles visits the other world with a heavenly guide, sees his ancestors suffering for their sins, but chooses to sanction the imperial line of Lothar I and Louis II and so to pass his imperial title to Irmengard’s son, Louis of Provence. In a stunning image of translatio imperii, the golden thread by which Charles had been led through the other world rolls up into an imperial orb in the hands of the boy.  43 MacLean, Kingship and Politics in the Late Ninth Century, pp. 185–91.  44 Notker the Stammerer, Gesta Karoli 2.17, ed. by Haefele, p. 82.  45 Notker the Stammerer, Gesta Karoli 2.11, 12, ed. by Haefele, pp. 68, 74.  46 Notker the Stammerer, Gesta Karoli 2.14, ed. by Haefele, p. 78.

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of his uncle, machinations that might undo his own dynastic plans. And so he deposed Charles the Fat, who died the next year as the last representative of the legitimate male Carolingian line stretching back to the illegitimate Charles Martel.

Reasons for Taking the Risk? Charles had much to gain by his three needy experiments, but a world to lose. He had few cards to play and, though he played them with some imagination, it was too late in his game. Experiment 4. Charlemagne’s Stickiness I have left until the last what I think to be the most extraordinary family experiment in the Carolingian world, exceeding even that of the Ordinatio imperii for its sheer daring and novelty.

The Provocation: Charlemagne kept at his late court a crowd of female relatives: his partner of the moment, his five legitimate daughters (Rotrude, Bertha, Gisela, Theodrada, Hiltrude), three daughters (Hruodhaid, Ruothild, Adaltrude) by his various concubines, and five granddaughters (Adelhaid, Atula, Gundrada, Berthaid, Theoderada),47 who came to court after their father (Pippin) died in 810. That is fourteen female family members, plus their female attendants.

Circumstances: None of these royal women married, so far as we

know, while Charlemagne was alive, though at least two of his daughters, Rotrude and Bertha, took lovers and bore illegitimate children.48 This large female cohort gave his court a special imprint, as Janet Nelson has rightly emphasized, especially after 800 when there was no resident queen in charge. As strange as it was for Charlemagne to keep his daughters unmarried, the idea behind such a scheme may extend back to Pippin the Short, for his daughter Gisela entered into the religious life and became the abbess of Chelles, thus forfending marriage and children.49 The practice of not permitting Carolingian women to marry came to an abrupt end with the death of Charlemagne and the making of a new court by Louis the Pious, who banished the crowd of Charlemagne’s women (coetum femineum) from court, ordering his sisters to proceed to their properties.50  47 Charlemagne seems not to have had a policy of insisting strictly upon legitimacy since he sanctioned the kingship of his illegitimate grandson Bernard of Italy and welcomed the illegitimate daughters of his son Pippin of Italy to his court.  48 Rotrude’s lover was Count Rorico and their child Louis was the future abbot of St-Denis; Bertha’s lover was Angilbert of St-Riquier and their sons, with the curiously anagrammatical names, Nithard (the historian and warrior) and Hartnid.  49 Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni 18, ed. by Holder-Egger, p. 23.  50 Astronomer, Vita Hludowici 23, ed. by Pertz, p. 619. The Astronomer here voices a criticism of the new emperor and a defence of the sisters, who he said had not deserved the treatment

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Reaction: Einhard’s short account of Charlemagne and his daughters is an alluring masterpiece of suggestion and evasion: Filiorum ac filiarum tantam in educando curam habuit, ut numquam domi positus sine ipsis caenaret, numquam iter sine illis faceret. Adequitabant ei filii, filiae vero pone sequebantur, quarum agmen extremum ex satellitum numero ad hoc ordinati tuebantur. Quae cum pulcherrimae essent et ab eo plurimum diligerentur, mirum dictu, quod nullam earum cuiquam aut suorum aut exterorum nuptum dare voluit, sed omnes secum usque ad obitum suum in domo sua retinuit, dicens se earum contubernio carere non posse. Ac propter hoc, licet alias felix, adversae fortunae malignitatem expertus est. Quod tamen ita dissimulavit, acsi de eis nulla umquam alicuius probri suspicio exorta vel fama dispersa fuisset.51 (He was so attentive to raising his sons and daughters, that when he was home he always ate his meals with them and when he travelled he always took them with him, his sons riding beside him, while his daughters followed behind. A special rearguard of his men was appointed to watch over them. Although his daughters were extremely beautiful women and were deeply loved by him, it is strange to have to report that he never wanted to give any of them away in marriage to anyone, whether it be to a Frankish noble or to a foreigner. Instead he kept them close beside him at home until his death, saying that he could not stand to be parted from their company. Although he was otherwise fortunate, this situation caused him no end of trouble. But he always acted as if there was no suspicion of any sexual scandal on their part or that any such rumour had already spread far and wide.) This remarkable passage raises issues that Einhard could have avoided entirely by deleting just three or four sentences, but he felt compelled to defend Charlemagne and knew what his critics were saying about him and his court. In this passage, Einhard humanized Charlemagne in a way that Suetonius never could Augustus. But we need to remember that he was writing in the 820s, in a world that had recently rejected the model of Charlemagne’s court, and so he sought to excuse or obfuscate if not defend Charlemagne’s family practices. In general, I suspect that we have too easily conflated the issues of Charlemagne’s concubinage and that of the ‘crowd of women’ at court. They were different things, though Louis saw them as aspects of the same moral failing. His investigation of the moral turpitude of Aachen concentrated on the activities of his sisters, whose illegitimate children did not fit within Louis’s ideas of legitimate marriage as a Christian lay virtue and royal necessity. they received from their brother, but obeyed him nonetheless. Louis allowed the marriages of his own three legitimate daughters, Rotrude and Hildegard (by Irmengard) and Gisela (by Judith).  51 Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni 19, ed. by Holder-Egger, pp. 24–25.

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Reasons for Taking the Risk? I doubt that Charlemagne’s policy of holding his daughters at home under his care was understood by contemporaries. He seems once again to have remained quiet on what he was up to, but Einhard may have sensed a policy at play. Notice his mention of the rearguard appointed to watch over the princesses. Charlemagne regarded his daughters as treasures to be guarded, not just for their beauty and charm, but to deny them to others or to prevent them from wandering off on their own. When travelling, the rearguard protected his daughters from raptus, seizure, which in the ninth century could lead to marriages and legitimate offspring, and prevented any diversions that might lead to the same.52 The Astronomer in his bio­graphy of Louis suggests that even he was aware of the reproductive dangers posed by his sisters: Moverat autem eius animum iamdudum, quamquam natura mitissimum, illud quod a sororibus illius in contubernio exercebatur paterno, quo solo domus paterna inurebatur naevo. Cui mederi volens incommodo, simul et cavens ne, quod per Hodilonem et Hiltrudem olim acciderat, revivesceret scandalum, misit Walam et Warnarium, necnon et Lantbertum, sed et Ingobertum.53 (Although by nature very gentle, [Louis] had long been provoked over how his sisters had been behaving in his father’s common dwelling, by which fault alone his father’s house was tarnished. Wishing to be relieved of that trouble and, at the same time, being on alert, lest what had once happened with Odilo and Hiltrude should again create a scandal, he sent for Wala and Warnarius and also for Lantbert and Ingobert.) These men were Louis’s vice squad, searching out those who were disloyal and guilty of debauchery at court in Aachen. The reference to the scandal of ‘Odilo and Hiltrude’ is critical to unlocking the Carolingian policy Charlemagne pursued in not letting his daughters marry. Odilo was a duke of Bavaria who in 740 sought refuge at the court of Charles Martel. There he attracted the attention of Charles’s daughter Hiltrude and may have impregnated her.54 If that was not scandal enough, she ran away to marry him the next year. Before long her husband was waging war against her brothers Pippin the Short and Carloman.55 Carolingian females who married nobles outside the family could  52 See Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church, pp. 394–401. Parents and the Church often characterized the voluntary elopements of females as abductions by their partners, as was the case of Charles the Bald’s widowed daughter Judith. The train of Charlemagne’s family on parade might also remind us of the procession of Charlemagne’s army in 778 through the Pyrenees, with its baggage train holding the valuables following behind, including the king’s treasure, protected by a special rearguard.  53 Astronomer, Vita Hludowici 21, ed. by Pertz, p. 618.  54 See Fouracre, The Age of Charles Martel, p. 162.  55 Fouracre, The Age of Charles Martel, pp. 167–69.

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not be counted on to prevail upon their husbands to support Carolingian family interests. What was almost as bad was that Hiltrude gave birth to Duke Tassilo III of Bavaria, who bedevilled the Carolingian family, forsaking his oaths to them, which led ultimately to his overthrow.56 Here, I think, was the seed of Charlemagne’s reluctance to marry off his daughters. The royal female body, in its movability and capacity to empower, was a dynastic danger zone. Charlemagne may have loved his daughters deeply, liked having them dote on him, and valued what they contributed to making his court a lively place, but he saw to it, as Einhard confirms, that they did not marry, at least during his lifetime. He was practical in tolerating his daughter’s in-palace pregnancies and illegitimate children, but not their legitimate marriages to outsiders. The Division of Kingdoms did, however, anticipate his daughters being allowed to marry after his death,57 but that would be under the auspices of his reigning sons, who might also see the threat inherent in approving such marriages. The question has always been, as Einhard implied, why Charlemagne’s daughters did not marry while under his care. What has been unappreciated is just how novel his experiment was in the Middle Ages.58 Virtually every noble, magnate, and king in the Middle Ages was prepared to marry off daughters for family advantage — for wealth, property, and political support; not Charlemagne. Was he so powerful that he did not need the advantages he might have gained from marrying off his daughters to other powerful noble families, or was he alert to the dangers posed by such marriages to the fragile power of his own dynasty? He had once agreed to the marriage of his daughter Rotrude to the future Byzantine emperor, but after that arrangement fell apart in 787 he agreed to no such marriage alliances. In general the Carolingian dynasty frowned upon marriages to foreigners.59 Charlemagne’s was a great experiment in palacing royal females so that they did not marry and bear legitimate offspring for rival noble families and thus create lateral complications for his own continuing dynasty.60 As with the issue of his own concubinage, he chose by a policy of palacing royal women

 56 See Airlie, ‘Narratives of Triumph and Rituals of Submission’.  57 See Diviso Regnorum 17, Capitularia regum Francorum, ed. by Boretius, i, p. 129.  58 Both Nelson, ‘Women at the Court of Charlemagne’, and Scharer, ‘Charlemagne’s Daughters’, are primarily interested in assessing the impact of the women at court, not on why they could not leave. On the extraordinary nature of Charlemagne’s policy of not marrying off his daughters, one could not do better than to spend some time with Spieß, Familie und Verwandtschaft. Later medi­eval German families almost always married off their daughters for political, economic, and social advantage, and we never meet an elite father who refused to marry off all his daughters as a matter of deliberative dynastic management.  59 Ordinatio imperii 13, in Capitularia regum Francorum, ed. by Boretius, i, p. 273: ‘illud tamen propter discordias evitandas et occasiones noxias auferendas cavendum decernimus, ut de exteris gentibus nullus illorum uxorem accipere praesumant’.  60 One thinks here of Louis XIV’s policy of palacing nobles at Versailles, though the Sun King’s policy was a complex one that not only kept troublesome nobles under his command and eye by involving them in the doings of his compromising court, but also exhausted their

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to maximize the power and concentration of his own male line. His dynastic reasons, whose wisdom we can debate, won out during his own reign, and all was well so long as he did not mind the occasional bastard grandchild tugging at his knees and the rumours that circulated about his sexually charged court. *    *    * Just a few final thoughts. We have looked at three rulers and their experiments with family, some successful, most not. Unfortunately the cases have all been considered from the perspective of their primary movers, powerful royal men. One cannot but wonder what family purposes of their own the royal women involved might have had. Charlemagne’s daughter Bertha acted as an active agent in her own right when she decided to take a partner outside of marriage. What might she have been saying and trying to achieve by doing so? And Theutberga, the spurned wife of Lothar II, played the game forced on her by her husband about as well as it could be played, securing critical support outside the circle of Lothar’s loyal supporters. But to undertake a study of female agency within Carolingian families would be another essay, and probably a much shorter one given the sources we have. The implications of these male experiments with family are not unimportant. To give but one example: the pleasing fantasy we have of Charlemagne’s court ablaze with poets and dazzling princesses, who occasionally bedded courtiers, may be true, but we need to remember that the impactful female presence at court was a mere accident, albeit a fruitful one, of the king’s efforts to secure his male line’s dominance. Charlemagne was an astute family planner, quietly experimenting with his dynasty’s prospects as he understood them. One of the tragedies of Carolingian history is that he could not impart his intuitive grasp of family management to his successor. Louis’s Ordinatio imperii may well have been the greatest constitutional attempt to redo the way the Carolingian dynasty did things, but it addressed a different problem. The question answered by each of the experiments we have examined was ‘what is best for me and my lineage’s future?’; the question asked by the Ordinatio imperii in 817 was instead ‘what would best protect and preserve the indivisibility of a Carolingian Empire ordained by God?’.61 But, by the 830s, Louis himself had abandoned that inspired agreement with his nobles and sons. He mismanaged the ambitions of his sons, divided his territories, thus diminishing his power before due season (the King Lear dilemma), remarried, had another son, and abrogated the Ordinatio imperii. At its core, the Carolingian enterprise was a grand experiment with family, which Louis the Pious either misunderstood or deliberately overrode as he, for a time, subordinated family interests to institutional and religious ones.

resources and hence power by forcing them to travel to his court and draw on their resources to keep up appearances in dress and sociability while there.  61 See Ordinatio imperii [praefatio], in Capitularia regum Francorum, ed. by Boretius, i, pp. 270–71.

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No wonder that his chief problems were with family. The Carolingian family corporation had worked, when it worked, because of acts of sheer dynastic will and a determination to put family first, which Charlemagne never forgot and Louis, perhaps, sought to surpass.

Biblio­graphy Primary Sources Annales regni Francorum inde ab a. 741 usque ad a. 829, qui dicuntur Annales Laurissenses maiores et Einhardi, ed. by F. Kurze after G. H. Pertz, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi, 6 (Hanover: Hahn, 1895) Astronomer, Vita Hludowici, ed. by G. H. Pertz, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores, 2 (Hanover: Hahn, 1829; repr. Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1925), pp. 604–48 —— , Vita Hludowici imperatoris, ed. and trans. by Ernst Tremp, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi, 64 (Hanover: Hahn, 1995), pp. 279–555 Capitularia regum Francorum, ed. by A. Boretius, Monumenta Germaniae Histo­rica: Capitularia regum Francorum, 1–2 (Hanover: Hahn, 1883–1890; repr. 1960) Codex Carolinus, ed. by W. Gundlach, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Epistolae, 3 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1892; repr. 1957), pp. 476–67 Dhuoda, Handbook for William: A Carolingian Woman’s Counsel for her Son, trans. by Carol Neel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991) —— , Liber manualis: Dhuoda, Manuel pour mon fils: Introduction, Texte critique, Notes, ed. by Pierre Riché, trans. by Bernard de Vregille and Claude Mondésert, Sources Chrétiennes, 225 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1975) The Divorce of King Lothar and Queen Theutberga: Hincmar of Rheims’s ‘De divortio’, trans. by Rachel Stone and Charles West (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016) Einhard, Epistolae, ed. by Karl Hampe, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Epistolae, 5 (Hanover: Weidmann, 1898–1899), pp. 109–45 —— , Translatio et miracula sanctorum Marcellini et Petri, ed. by Georg Waitz, in Monu­menta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores, 15.1 (Hanover: Hahn, 1887), pp. 239–64 —— , Vita Karoli Magni, 6th edn, ed. by O. Holder-Egger after G. H. Pertz and G. Waitz, as Einhardi Vita Karoli Magni, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum, 25 (Hanover: Hahn, 1911; repr. 1965) Heito, Visio Wettini, ed. by Ernst Dümmler, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Poetae Latini medii aevi, 2 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1884; repr. 1964), pp. 267–75

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Jonas of Orléans, De institutione laicali, ed. by Odile Dubreucq, as Jonas d’Orléans, Instruction des laïcs, 2 vols, Sources Chrétiennes, 549–50 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2012–2013) —— , De institutione regia, ed. by Alain Dubreucq, as Jonas d’Orléans, Le métier de roi, Sources Chrétiennes, 407 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1995) Notker the Stammerer, Gesta Karoli, ed. by Hans F. Haefele, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores rerum Germanicarum, nova series, 12 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1959) Paschasius Radbertus, Vita sancti Adalhardi, ed. by Jacques-Paul Migne, in Patro­ logia cursus completus: series latina, 120 (Paris: Garnier, 1852; repr., Turnhout: Brepols, 1976), cols 1507–56 Polytyque de l’Abbaye de Saint-Germain de Prés, ed. by Auguste Longnon, vol. ii: Texte du polyptyque (Paris: H. Champion, 1886–1895; repr. Geneva: Mégariotis Reprints, 1978) Visio Rotcharii, ed. by W. Wattenbach, ‘Aus Petersburger Handschriften’, Anzeiger für Kunde der deutschen Vorzeit, 22 (1875), 72–74 Walahfrid Strabo, Visio Wettini, ed. by Ernst Dümmler, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Poetae Latini medii aevi, 2 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1884), pp. 301–33 Walahfrid Strabo’s Visio Wettini: Text, Translation, Commentary, ed. by David A. Traill, Lateinische Sprache und Literatur, 2 (Bern: H. Lang, 1974) Secondary Works Airlie, Stuart, ‘Narratives of Triumph and Rituals of Submission: Charlemagne’s Mastering of Bavaria’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 9 (1999), 93–119 Bitel, Lisa M., Women in Early Medi­eval Europe, 400–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) Bougard, François, Geneviève Bührer-Thierry, and Régine Le Jan, ‘Elites in the Early Middle Ages: Identities, Strategies, Mobility’, Annales: HSS, 68.4 (2013), 735–68 Cahour, Joseph, Petite Lexique pour l’étude de la ‘Vita Karoli’ d’Eginhard (Paris: Editions de la Pensée Latine, 1928) Duby, Georges, The Knight, the Lady and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medi­eval France, trans. by Barbara Bray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) Dutton, Paul Edward, ed., Carolingian Civilization: A Reader, 2nd edn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004) —— , ‘The Identification of Persons in Frankish Europe’, Early Medi­eval Europe, 26 (2018), 135–73 —— , The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994) Firey, Abigail, A Contrite Heart: Prosecution and Redemption in the Carolingian Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2009) Fouracre, Paul, The Age of Charles Martel (Harlow: Longman, 2000)

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Gerberding, Richard A., The Rise of the Carolingians and the ‘Liber Historiae Francorum’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) Goetz, Hans-Werner, ‘Zur Namengebung bäuerlicher Schichten im Frühmittelalter: Untersuchungen und Berechnungen anhand des Polyptychons von Saint-Germain-des-Prés’, Francia, 15 (1987), 852–77 Heidecker, Karl, The Divorce of Lothar II: Christian Marriage and Political Power in the Carolingian World, trans. by Tanis M. Guest (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010) Herlihy, David, ‘Family’, American Historical Review, 96 (1991), 1–16 Karras, Ruth M., ‘The Christianization of Medi­eval Marriage’, in Christianity and Culture in the Middle Ages: Essays to Honor John Van Engen, ed. by David C. Mengel and Lisa Wolverton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), pp. 3–24 Lindsay, Hugh, Adoption in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) MacDonald, A., ed., Chamber’s Etymo­logical English Dictionary, new edn with supplement (Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, 1963) MacLean, Simon, Kingship and Politics in the Late Ninth Century: Charles the Fat and the End of the Carolingian Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) Mercati, Angelo, ‘The New List of the Popes’, Mediaeval Studies, 9 (1947), 71–80 Nelson, Janet L., King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019) —— , ‘Making a Difference in Eighth-Century Politics: The Daughters of Desiderius’, in After Rome’s Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medi­eval History. Essays Presented to Walter Goffart, ed. by Alexander C. Murray (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 171–90 —— , ‘A Tale of Two Princes: Politics, Text and Ideo­logy in a Carolingian Annal’, Studies in Medi­eval and Renaissance History, n.s. 10 (1988), 105–40; repr. in Nelson, Rulers and Ruling Families in Early Medi­eval Europe: Alfred, Charles the Bald and Others, Variorum Collected Studies Series, 657 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), item XVI —— , ‘Women at the Court of Charlemagne: A Case of Monstrous Regiment?’, in Janet L. Nelson, The Frankish World, 750–900 (London: Hambledon, 1996), pp. 223–42 Pollard, Richard Matthew, ‘Charlemagne’s Posthumous Reputation and the Visio Wettini, 825–1851’, in Charlemagne: Les temps, les espaces, les hommes. Construction et déconstruction d’un règne, ed. by Rolf Grosse and Michel Sot (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), pp. 529–49 Power, Eileen, Medi­eval People (London: Methuen, 1924) Reynolds, Philip Lyndon, How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments: The Sacramental Theo­logy of Marriage from its Medi­eval Origins to the Council of Trent, Cambridge Studies in Law and Christianity, 6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)

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—— , Marriage in the Western Church: The Christianization of Marriage during the Patristic and Early Medi­eval Periods, Supplements to Vigilia Christianae, 24 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994) Riché, Pierre, The Carolingians: A Family Who Forged Europe, trans. by Michael Idomir Allen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993) Rösch, Siegfried, Caroli Magni progenies, vol. i, Genealogie und Landesgeschichte, 30 (Neustadt an der Aisch: Degener, 1977) Scharer, Anton, ‘Charlemagne’s Daughters’, in Early Medi­eval Studies in Memory of Patrick Wormald, ed. by Stephen Baxter, Catherine Karkov, Janet L. Nelson, and David Pelteret (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 269–82 Spieß, Karl-Heinz, Familie und Verwandtschaft im deutschen Hochadel des Spät­ mittelalters (13. bis Anfang Beihefte des 16. Jahrhunderts), Vierteljahr für Sozialund Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 111, 2nd edn (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2015) Veronese, Francesco, ‘Contextualizing Marriage: Conjugality and Christian Life in Jonas of Orléans’ De institutione laicali’, Early Medi­eval Europe, 23 (2015), 436–56 Wemple, Suzanne Fonay, Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister, 500 to 900 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981) Werner, Karl Ferdinand, ‘Die Nachkommen Karls des Grossen bis um das Jahr 1000 (1.–8. Generation)’, in Karl der Grosse: Lebenswerk und Nachleben, vol. iv: Das Nachleben, ed. by Wolfgang Braunfels and Percy Ernst Schramm (Düsseldorf: L. Schwann, 1967), pp. 403–82

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The Paper Chase The Pursuit of Carolingian Legal Innovations When Walahfrid Strabo, abbot of the imperially supported monastery of Reichenau, wrote between 840 and 842 a treatise on various liturgies and their histories, he closed with a chapter comparing secular and ecclesiastical rulers: Comparetur ergo papa Romanus augustis et caesaribus […]. Deinde archiepiscopos, qui ipsis metropolitanis praeminent, regibus conferamus; metropolitanos autem ducibus comparemus, quia, sicut duces singularum sunt provintiarum, ita et illi in singulis provintiis singuli ponuntur; unde in Calcedonenis concilio iubetur: ‘Ne una provintia in duos metropolitanos dividatur’. […] Quemadmodum sunt in palatiis praetores vel comites palatii, qui saecularium causas ventilant, ita sunt et illi, quos summos cappellanos Franci appellant, clericorum causis praelati. (The Roman pope may be compared to emperors and Caesars […]. Next let us compare archbishops, who are superior to metropolitans, to kings; in fact, we could compare metropolitans to dukes because, just as one duke controls a province, so also metropolitans are one to a province; this is why the Council of Chalcedon ruled: ‘One province should not be divided between two metropolitans’. […] Just as in palaces there are praetors or counts who set secular cases in motion, so also there are those whom the Franks call head chaplains, who are brought forward for cases involving the clergy.)1 Walahfrid’s comments are interesting not only for their depiction of matched, coequal governmental hierarchies and their judicial rôles, but also for his easy citation of the twelfth canon of the Council of Chalcedon (ad 451).  1 Walahfrid Strabo, Libellus, trans. by Harting-Correa, p. 193. Latin text p. 192, from Capitularia regum Francorum, ed. by Boretius and Krause, p. 515. The grounds for dating the work are given in Harting-Correa, pp. 21–22. Abigail Firey ([email protected]) is Professor of History and a University Research Professor at the University of Kentucky. Her research focuses on early medi­eval canon law, and her publications include numerous articles and A Contrite Heart: Prosecution and Redemption in the Carolingian Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2009). Firey is also the editor of A New History of Penance (Leiden: Brill, 2008), and the director of the digital Carolingian Canon Law Project, . Carolingian Experiments, ed. by Matthew Bryan Gillis, ISMAR 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022) pp. 71–121 10.1484/M.ISMAR-EB.5.127247

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Walahfrid’s treatise is riddled with citations from canon law, ranging from the Greek councils of Late Antiquity to early medi­eval Spanish councils, as well as from papal letters.2 In his work we see how deeply knowledge of canon law permeated the education of well-placed clergy, and was through them filtered to the parochial level, for Walahfrid’s book on liturgy was almost certainly intended to serve as a didactic text.3 Such familiarity with canon law was the result of decades of experimentation in developing the resources of canon law, disseminating those resources widely, applying them in governmental instruments, and, ultimately, deriving from them ideas about government. This essay surveys such experimentation, taking as a premise that law is — arguably — as fundamental to cultural identity as are language and religion; canon law brings together rich traditions of both Christian writing and legal aspirations. The corpus of Carolingian canon law is undeniably a bit unwieldy. Layers of historio­graphic and editorial attempts to impose descriptions that are in many ways ill-suited to the Carolingian perspectives on legal sources and their use comprise a problematic legacy. The following pages begin with excavation of the dominant narrative that emerged from accrued historio­graphy. It then turns to a review of some of the evidence for the Carolingian experimentation that earlier accounts largely have ignored or at times construed to support a particular teleo­logical agenda. Finally, it proposes that the symbiosis of the imperial court and the Carolingian episcopate — one of the most effective experiments in medi­eval government — was girded with intellectually agile experimentation in crafting theocratic perspectives from the canon law texts conserved from previous centuries and woven into new productions. Theocratic interpretations advanced ecclesiastical mechanisms that could be invoked for punition, curtailing the spread of heterodoxy, asserting authority, and implementing legal procedures that were themselves experiments in political theo­logy.

Mopping up Memory: Teleo­logy, Codification, Purification Except for a few, extraordinarily energetic investigators, past scholarship neglected the subject of Carolingian legal culture, and the place of canon law within it. This inattention resulted from the formation of a larger narrative shaped to accentuate the creativity and expansion of the universe of medi­eval legal studies after the publication of Gratian’s Decretum, which so effectively integrated canonistic and Roman legal perspectives. Since the Decretum was the foundation of the Corpus Iuris Canonici, the officially recognized body of law for the Roman Catholic Church from the Counter-Reformation until  2 Walahfrid Strabo, Libellus, trans. by Harting-Correa, pp. 28–31. Harting-Correa counts thirty-two conciliar decrees and seven papal decretals among Walahfrid’s citations, as well as nineteen ‘additional general references to rulings in canons and decretals’.  3 Walahfrid Strabo, Libellus, trans. by Harting-Correa, pp. 14–15 and passim.

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1918, it and the accretion of appended law and commentary were of much greater interest to scholars than the superseded earlier collections of canon law. Earlier medi­eval canon law was first studied largely in relation to the Decretum, as its sources and models.4 For legal historians, that perspective had multiple consequences. First, as textual antecedents to the Decretum, the ‘collections’ that encapsulate Carolingian canon law, rather than the use of canon law, became the primary objects of study. These ‘collections’ compile canons, drawn primarily from conciliar decrees and papal decretals, usually from late antique sources, in varying sequences. Nearly a hundred collections survive in several hundred manu­scripts of the tenth century or earlier, and more are still being discovered.5 Most of the ‘collections’ are anonymous, and often give little direct evidence of their place of origin or date of composition. Study of the collections, therefore, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tended towards technical analysis of textual variations that might signal different recensions of an identifiable composition, as part of the process of identifying the date and provenance of the root and branches of a collection. The scholars undertaking this work thus did not explore extensively the development or conservation of legal principles, or the social, political, or economic conditions in which canon law might have been applied.6

 4 There were two primary watersheds in early modern study of early medi­eval canon law. First, the research of the Correctores Romani, the papal commission convened in 1566 to establish the text of the Corpus Iuris Canonici, in many ways set a determinative course through the early medi­eval texts. Notes of the Correctores were published by Theiner, Disquisitiones. Some of Theiner’s documents were reproduced in Corpus Iuris Canonici, ed. by Friedberg, i, cols lxxvi–xc: ‘Prolegomena: De editionibus Decreti Gratiani’. For corrections to Theiner, see Schellhass, ‘Wissenschaftliche Forschungen unter Gregor XIII’. On the Correctores, see Sommar, The Correctores Romani. A second, definitive publication was the exposition of the early history of canon law by the brothers Ballerini, Disquisitiones. On the Ballerini, see Capitani, ‘Ballerini, Pietro’.  5 For example, the first report of a collection of some ninety-two canons in the manu­script Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Helmst. 1062, occurred in 2011 at a symposium on canon law manu­scripts: Firey, ‘Continuing Recourse to Roman Law in the Carolingian Period’.  6 Perhaps the greatest work on early medi­eval canon law, Friedrich Maaßen’s Geschichte der Quellen und der Literatur des Canonischen Rechts, exemplifies this technical approach. As its title states, it traces in stunning detail the sources of canonistic prescriptions, the collections in which each source is transmitted, and conversely, the composition of each collection known to Maaßen, with attention to the variety of forms present in individual manu­scripts. Published originally in 1870, the 982-page tome is still an invaluable resource for research. The manu­script citations were brought up to date and supplemented with relevant biblio­ graphy in another essential reference work for the study of early medi­eval canon law: Kéry, Canonical Collections. For more contextualized descriptions of the sources used in the collections, the circumstances of their composition, and biblio­graphy, Gaudemet, Les sources du droit de l’Eglise is also extremely helpful. Taking a large step to make use of new techno­logy, Fowler-Magerl, Clavis canonum allows researchers to locate about one hundred thousand individual canons within ‘virtually all systematically arranged canon law

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A second consequence of seeing the Carolingian collections in relation to Gratian’s compilation was an inclination to judge juridical accomplishment by quite rigid standards. The plethora of Carolingian collections, and the scholarly presumption that proper law should be systematized and codified, diminished appreciation of Carolingian canon law. To those for whom notable legal achievement displays uniformity, central authority, and fixity, the canon law of the Carolingian epoch seemed chaotic, indeterminate in scope and sources, and variable in its textual representation.7 This assessment was reflected in an early modern description with lasting effects: namely, that the early medi­eval collections were ‘private’, in the sense of having no governmental sanction, and hence no established authority.8 Compounding and reinforcing the description of early medi­eval canon law collections as ‘private’, a scholarly interest in defining sacramental penance as either ‘private’ or ‘public’ led historians to describe texts prescribing penances as ‘private penitentials’, for use in the personal and somewhat informal relation between individual penitents and confessors.9 The somewhat indeterminate place of penitentials in the sphere of canon law, and their prominence in Carolingian canon law manu­scripts, further complicated any sense that Carolingian canon law had secure, authorized boundaries.10

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collections compiled in Latin before 1140’, as well as ‘a handful of chrono­logically arranged collections’. Each collection in the Clavis is represented by one, selected manu­script, with a few exceptions. The CD-ROM was accompanied by over two hundred pages describing each collection, taking into account scholarship published before c. 2004; the CD-ROM has been superseded by an online database at the MGH. Similar observations regarding the historio­graphy of early medi­eval Byzantine canon law are made incisively by Wagschal, Law and Legality in the Greek East, pp. 4–11, 17–20. The designation runs throughout the descriptions of the collections in the Ballerini treatises: e.g. Disquisitiones cap. X, § 1 (PL, 56, col. 148), ‘Vetusti codices canonum apud Gallicanos plures privato studio conditi, nullus publica auctoritate digestus et editus’ (The oldest books of the canons among the Gallic people were all produced for private study; none were organized and edited with public authority). For reflections upon the term ‘private’ applied to other Carolingian legal texts, see Airlie, ‘“For It Is Written in the Law”’, who argues that assumptions about authority, mutually internalized by both rulers and their ministers — such as clerics who compiled legal collections — effectively collapsed the distinction between ‘private’ and ‘public’ compilations. Thus, as Airlie notes, the legally sensitive archbishop Hincmar of Rheims, when referring to the capitulary collection of Ansegis, abbot of St-Wandrille, in a letter to the emperor Charles the Bald, spoke of ‘the first book of the capitularies of our emperors, your ancestors’ (cit. Airlie, ‘“For It Is Written in the Law”’, p. 231), vesting full authority in the texts without hesitation over the nature of the collection. For a brief review of historio­graphic shifts in the description of ‘private’ and ‘public’ penance, see Meens, ‘The Historio­graphy of Early Medi­eval Penance’, pp. 87–90; more generally, Meens, Penance in Medi­eval Europe, pp. 2–10. Cyrille Vogel, whose work long influenced interpretation of the penitentials, wrote that ‘il ne faudrait pas conclure que le livre pénitentiel soit d’ordre purement juridique […]. Il est destiné à la pratique quotidienne de la discipline pénitentielle; or, celle-ci rentre dans la catégorie des actes sacrés d’Église que la scolastique qualifiera d’actes sacramentels. Il est donc aussi indirectement un livre liturgique’. Vogel, Les ‘Libri Paenitentiales’, p. 31. He

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A third, perhaps paradoxical legacy of the approach to early medi­eval canon law as ‘pre-Gratian’, however, was the elevation of one collection to special status. The collection given the modern appellation ‘the Collectio DionysioHadriana’ (hereafter referred to simply as ‘the Hadriana’) was identified by the early modern papal commission that produced the authorized version of the Corpus Iuris Canonici as a ‘codex’ that bore papal sanction.11 The suggestion that this collection had been specially bestowed upon Charlemagne by Pope Hadrian (hence the collection’s modern name) gained currency during the early modern rise of Gallicanism, and was enshrined in the eighteenth century by the Ballerini brothers, to become an ever more well-worn and elaborated account.12

had, however, noted that in medi­eval manu­scripts, the texts called by modern scholars ‘penitentials’ appeared under titles such as iudicium culparum (judgement of sins), dicta (‘opinions’, often in the legal sense), libellus, (term often used for a legal brief), canones (canons), etc. (p. 28) An excellent example of the integration of penitential sources, patristics, monastic rules, and canon law in the more traditional sense is the ninth-century Collectio Quadripartitus, a text that, to judge from the provenance of the surviving manu­scripts or their likely exemplaria, was widely disseminated; it is described by Kéry, Canonical Collections, as ‘Type: Penitential or Collectio canonum?’ (p. 168). See Kerff, Der Quadripartitus, for analysis of the sources, transmission, and reception.  11 Although the Correctores did not have a name for the collection, it is possible to identify it from their description: ‘In Ecclesia Romana, omnium ecclesiarum magistra, solitos esse asservari conciliorum canones et Pontificum decreta, ac ceteris Ecclesiis communicari, plane compertum est. Atque in usu praecipue videtur fuisse collectio illa, quam Nicolaus Papa in c. si Romanorum dist. 19 Codicem canonum nominat, in quo continebantur canones et regulae illae, quae recensetur a Leone IV. cap. de libellis, dist. 20. Huius codicis tria manu­scripta exemplaria Romae habentur in Vaticana bibliotheca. Exstat etiam impressus Maguntiae anno salutis MDXXV’. (In the Church of Rome, the mistress of all churches, it is clearly acknowledged that the canons of the councils and the decretals of the popes are accustomed to be preserved and to be communicated to other Churches. And that collection which Pope Nicolas called ‘the Codex of canons’ (in Gratian, the chapter ‘Si Romanorum’, Distinctio xix) seems principally to have been in use; in it are contained those canons and rules which were reviewed by Leo IV (in Gratian, the chapter ‘De libellis’, Distinctio xx). Three manu­script exemplars of this Codex are held in the Vatican library. Furthermore, it was printed at Mainz, in 1525.) Cit. in Corpus Iuris Canonici, ed. by Friedberg, i, col. lxxxiii. The Mainz edition to which the Correctores referred was that of Johannes Wendelstinus (Cochlaeus), printed by Johannes Schoeffer under the title Canones Apostolorum. Veterum Conciliorum Constitutiones. Decreta Pontificum Antiquiora. Images of this edition are available online at the Carolingian Canon Law Project, . The Cochlaeus edition was subsequently identified as a Hadriana text. Whether the Correctores distinguished this collection clearly from its myriad close relatives is an open question. Cochlaeus actually conflated the texts of the four manu­scripts he used: only one had the Council of Ephesus.  12 ‘De codicis Dionysiani usu in Galliis ante Caroli Magni aetatem cum quaeritur, ne aequivocatio fiat, duplex questio distinguenda est. Prima, num ille fuerit codex publicus, seu publica auctoritate editus, vel approbatus, omnium Ecclesiarum Gallicanarum usu receptus. Secunda, num fuerit codex privatus, qui ante Carolum Magnum in Gallias pervenerit, et, si non omnium, aliquarum tamen Ecclesiarum vel scriptorum usu aliquando saltem adhibitus sit. Primum cogitare vel suscipari inanissimum est. Nam neque Romae, ubi citius celebris exstitit, publicus, seu publica auctoritate probatus, sed privatus codex canonum

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It supplied a component in a narrative that cast Charlemagne as a fully imperial figure, whose rule shadowed that of Roman emperors who governed a polity illuminated by a great, codified legal system.13 The Hadriana became the cornerstone in the history of Carolingian canon law, to the extent that other texts or developments were assigned dates based on the putative moment when the Hadriana arrived in Francia, ad 774.14

diutius fuit; nec publicam auctoritatem obtinuit, nisi cum Hadrianus I summus pontifex ipsum Carolo Magno usui Galliarum tradidit […]. Cum porro ante hoc tempus nullus alius codex canonum publicus esset in Galliis, sed omnes essent collectiones privatae, quarum usus deficiente codice publico liber erat, uti probavimus’: Ballerini and Ballerini, Quesnelli Dissertationes, ‘de primo collectionis Dionysianae usu in Galliis’, § 1 (PL, 56, cols 1125–26). (When there is enquiry regarding the Dionysian manu­scripts in use in the Gallic domains before the age of Charlemagne, lest there be misunderstanding, the question should be distinguished in two ways. First, whether it was a public “code” [codex], either published or approved by a public authority, received for the use of all Gallican churches. Second, whether it was a private book [codex] which circulated in the Gallic domains before Charlemagne, and, if not in the use of all churches and authors, nevertheless it was at least sometimes employed in some. To think or adopt the first [proposition] is simply silly. For it was not public, or approved by any public authority, in Rome, where it soon was well known, but was for a long time a private book [codex] of canons; it did not obtain public authority except when Pope Hadrian I sent it to Charlemagne for the use of the Gallic [people]. […] Furthermore, since before that time there was no other public code [codex] of canons in the Gallic domains, but all collections were private, of those [this] book was used when a public code [codex] was lacking, as we proved.)  13 So, e.g., Schaff, and Schaff, History of the Christian Church, p. 390: ‘What Constantine the Great, Theodosius the Great, and Justinian did for the old Roman empire on the basis of heathen Rome and the ancient Graeco-Latin church, Charlemagne did for the new Roman Empire in the West on the basis of Germanic customs and the Latin church centred in the Roman papacy. He was greater, more beneficial and enduring in his influence as a legislator than as a soldier and conqueror. He proposed to himself the herculean task to organize, civilize and Christianize the crude barbarian customs of his vast empire, and he carried it out with astonishing wisdom’. See also Imbert, Les temps carolingiens, p. 135: ‘Lorsque Charlemagne reçoit en 774 du pape Hadrien la collection Dionysio-Hadriana, fixant la tradition universelle, capitulaires et canons conciliaires disposent alors d’une source considérable dans laquelle ils puiseront leurs références’. The notion was also entrenched in German scholarship: see Feine, ‘Die Periodisierung der kirchlichen Rechtsgeschichte’, p. 8: ‘In der Sammlung des Dionysius Exiguus, der um 500 in Rom entstandenen “Dionysiana”, erhielten die Quellen dieses Zeitraums eine weithin anerkannte Zusammenfassung, die auch im Frankenreich Karls des Großen offizielle Aufnahme gefunden hat’. For Carolingian perspectives on Charlemagne and his heirs as conforming to the image of Roman emperors with respect to law-giving, see Nelson, ‘Translating Images of Authority’.  14 For example, the Collectio Dacheriana is dated to ‘c. 800’ because it is thought to have drawn upon a Hadriana text. See Mordek, Kirchenrecht und Reform im Frankenreich, p. 259: ‘Die Entstehung der […] benannten Dacheriana fällt mit Sicherheit in die Zeit um 800. Mit einer breiteren Wirkung der Dionysio-Hadriana, einer der Quellen der Sammlung, ist vor 789 kaum zu rechnen’. As Mordek indicates in this citation, some authors use 789 as the key date for the ‘promulgation’ of the Hadriana: this was the date of the publication of Charlemagne’s comprehensive capitulary, the ‘Admonitio Generalis’, which scholars had thought used the Hadriana as a source. The ‘Admonitio’ does refer to councils included in the Hadriana, but there is no basis for attributing the citations to the Hadriana, rather than the Collectio

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The authenticity and authority of the Collectio Dionysio-Hadriana, however, had a counterweight in another collection featured in early modern religious polemics: the forged papal decretals of Pseudo-Isidore.15 A fourth effect of placing early medi­eval canon law in relation to the later Corpus Iuris Canonici was a pronounced interest in isolating Pseudo-Isidorian texts, which had been assimilated into parts of the Corpus, in an effort to purify canon law and ensure that its sources were authentic acts of legitimate councils and opinions of legitimate popes. While assigning a date, place, and personnel for the composition of the forged decretals has been an ongoing exercise in detective skills, for decades it was the consensus that they were written sometime in the mid-ninth century in northern Francia.16 Just as the Hadriana became a device for dating other texts and developments, so did the Pseudo-Isidorian decretals serve the same function. As ideas about the role of the Hadriana, penitentials, Pseudo-Isidore, and recensional relationships of the texts accrued, they coalesced into a peculiar narrative given its most influential expression in the first volume of the Histoire des collections canoniques en occident by Paul Fournier and Gabriel Le Bras (1931–1932).17 The Histoire is fascinating for its deployment of texts as Dionysiana or its larger derivatives (of which the Hadriana is but one). Because of longstanding use of the Dionysian version of late antique canons, they were well known in the Dionysian form. It is often difficult to distinguish a Dionysiana from a Hadriana as a source for other texts, and even for these collections themselves, there are cataloguing errors: see, e.g., London, British Library, MS Arundel 393. For reasons to doubt the dating of the Hadriana, and also its unique position among Carolingian canon law collections, see Firey, ‘Mutating Monsters’.  15 For a concise but thorough description of the Pseudo-Isidorian forged decretals, see Horst Fuhrmann’s contribution in Jasper and Fuhrmann, Papal Letters in the Early Middle Ages, pp. 135–95. More extensive study of the forgeries, and tables of incipits, etc., are in Fuhrmann, Einfluß und Verbreitung der pseudoisidorischen Fälschungen. The standard edition of the forged decretals is Hinschius, Decretales Pseudo-Isidorianae. Manu­scripts and biblio­graphy are listed in Kéry, Canonical Collections, pp. 100–117. A very helpful summary of the entire complex of the Pseudo-Isidorian forgeries and the problems they present to scholars, along with a review of their representation of papal power, is provided by Harder, ‘Pseudo-Isidorus Mercator’; full exposition is in Harder, Pseudoisidor und das Papsttum.  16 In 2001, the late Klaus Zechiel-Eckes published two articles that transformed discussion of the origins of the Pseudo-Isidorian decretals by proposing that they were written at Corbie by Paschasius Radbertus: ‘Ein Blick in Pseudoisidors Werkstatt’; ‘Auf Pseudoisidors Spur’. Subsequently, he pursued his thesis in Fälschung als Mittel politischer Auseinandersetzung. Papers from a symposium evaluating his findings and their implications, held in Co­logne in 2013, are in Ubl and Ziemann, eds, Fälschung als Mittel der Politik?. See also Patzold, Gefälschtes Recht aus dem Frühmittelalter. Eric Knibbs, who is preparing a new edition of the Pseudo-Isidorian decretals for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, at present subscribes to the older view associating their composition with the political difficulties of Bishop Ebo of Rheims, subsequently of Hildesheim: ‘Ebo of Reims, Pseudo-Isidore, and the Date of the False Decretals’.  17 On the influence of Fournier and Le Bras, Histoire des collections canoniques en occident, see now, although it focuses on the centrality of eleventh-century papal reform in the Fournier-Le Bras narrative, Rolker, ed., New Discourses in Medi­eval Canon Law Research.

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characters in a drama that, for the most part, lacks known personnel. Using value-laden language and casting the texts as symbols of national character, local conditions, and legal maturity, Fournier and Le Bras created a gripping tale of conflict, virtue (whose standard was borne by unnamed ‘réformateurs’), corruption (signified by disorder and use of poorly attributed or anonymous elements in the texts), and a teleo­logical ideal of authenticity and authorization by a recognized governing institution. Embedded in this framework is much information about the form and content of many early medi­eval canon law collections; as a mnemonic aide for organizing the collections chrono­ logically, by type, and in a scheme of relationships, the Histoire is superb. Yet it perpetuated the early modern, polemical discourse about canon law outlined above, which privileged, if not codification, at least systematization of a clearly defined and commonly received corpus, institutional authorization or validation of that corpus, and verifiable sources. The significance attached to the Hadriana, to the multiplicity of other collections, to penitentials, and to the Pseudo-Isidorian decretals within this framework probably reveals more about the narrators of legal history than about the Carolingians who copied, shared, and used these materials.

Revisiting the Evidence: Carolingian-Era Production, Distribution, Study of Canon Law Each of the narrative constructs outlined above, however, can be turned towards a potentially fruitful question for future research. What role did Charlemagne play in the formation, dissemination, and recognition of canon law? How did Carolingian prelates negotiate wide-ranging, complex, and varied canon law that was not codified? When did popes influence the content and reception of canon law, and was it through contact with kings and emperors, or in the course of communications with bishops across Europe? Why were the Pseudo-Isidorian decretals forged, when so much canon law was already available? How might a large body of inherited law retain its value and validity through a period of political and cultural change? How effective could dual jurisdiction (secular and ecclesiastical) be in a Carolingian context? Were penitential rituals implemented as a form of judicial sentencing, and were they hence fully imbricated in legal processes? Which areas of canon law were expanded or elaborated in the Carolingian period? What legal principles seem to have been especially respected or refined? How and where did Carolingians acquire legal knowledge and support legal culture? How did they interpret and apply canon law in particular situations? Fortunately, there is a considerable quantity of data for investigation of these and other questions. Among the most important sources for studying Carolingian canon law are the acta of the numerous Carolingian councils: these have been expertly edited in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica

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series Concilia.18 The Carolingian councils passed legislation that contributed to the expansion of the corpus of canon law, reiterated earlier canon law from that corpus in order to maintain continuity with a legal past that, theo­logically, should be immutable, and exercised judicial functions in major ecclesiastical cases.19 Their subscription lists preserve information about the names and dioceses of specific participants or cooperating subscribers, and often the texts include lengthy expositions of the rationale for the decisions, albeit in highly abstracted terms. The judicial resolutions recorded in some of the conciliar texts, although limited to causes célèbres, are valuable for studying particular cases, which — as was normal until the thirteenth century — were oral processes rarely documented in writing.20 Episcopal statutes (‘capitularies’) issued by individual bishops for circulation in their own dioceses also survive, and can reveal something of the dissemination of principles and solutions articulated at the conciliar level to local priests.21 In addition to episcopal capitularies, royal and imperial capitularies often were composed with large proportions of canon law, and served as yet another vehicle of transmission; ironically, the capitularies were sent to bishops as well as counts for implementation, so secular and ecclesiastical law and authority were all the more closely welded.22 The other contemporary sources of canon law, papal decretals of the Carolingian period, have been, for the most part, less well served by modern editors, although their significance in the longue durée is not slight: excerpts from letters by Pope Nicholas (858–867) are exceeded in Gratian’s citations only by citations of Gregory the Great.23  18 Concilia aevi Karolini [742–842], ed. by Werminghoff: vol. i has the councils held between ad 742 and 817; vol. ii has the councils held between ad 819 and 842; Concilia aevi Karolini DCCCXLIII–DCCCLIX, ed. by Hartmann; Concilia aevi Karolini DCCCLX–DCCCLXXIV, ed. by Hartmann. These volumes, as well as the volume for the Merovingian synods and the volumes in the Leges and Capitularia series, are all available and searchable on the dMGH (digital MGH) website. An essential guide to the Carolingian councils, with concise summaries of their contexts and acta, is Hartmann, Die Synoden der Karolingerzeit im Frankenreich und in Italien. Some minor or insufficiently authenticated councils that are not edited in the MGH volumes were printed in Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova Amplissima Collectio, ed. by Mansi, a work still worth consulting and available at several websites; volumes xii–xvii are those covering the Carolingian period.  19 A selective but useful précis of episcopal trials between 814 and 858 is in the Appendix to Knibbs, ‘Ebo of Reims, Pseudo-Isidore, and the Date of the False Decretals’, pp. 181–83.  20 Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, p. 99.  21 A short guide to the episcopal capitularies is Brommer, ‘Capitula episcoporum’. For editions of the episcopal capitularies, see the MGH series Capitula episcoporum. For insights into the faulty distinctions between concilia and capitularia, see van Rhijn, Shepherds of the Lord, pp. 13–33. New editions of the Carolingian capitularies are being produced under the direction of Prof. Dr Karl Ubl (University of Co­logne) for the MGH.  22 A detailed and important study of the genre accompanies the edition of one of the most important royal capitularies in Schmitz, Die Kapitulariensammlung des Ansegis.  23 Jasper and Fuhrmann, Papal Letters in the Early Middle Ages, p. 111. There are some excellent resources for finding and identifying papal letters of the Carolingian period: Jasper and Fuhrmann is an essential study and guide to editions and scholarly literature. The classic

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Mining these sources — especially the canon law ‘collections’ — for the valuable evidence they contain, however, is complicated by the textual conservatism that often pervades them. That is, they frequently cite, or wholly reproduce, earlier texts. The preference for older sources as legal authorities, be they conciliar, papal, patristic, or scriptural, increases the challenges in interpreting Carolingian canon law, especially in the absence of treatises explicitly directed towards legal education or setting forth a philosophy of law. It is the conservative content of the ‘collections’ that makes them especially difficult both to edit and to analyse for their historical import. Editors are understandably reluctant to re-edit texts already available in their original form in a modern, critical edition; historians are understandably reluctant to base arguments on evidence that was originally generated well before the Carolingian period. As Martin Brett memorably said (albeit about eleventh-century compilations), ‘These collections are overwhelmingly just that, combinations and recombinations of largely similar texts in a bewildering variety of configurations, often agonisingly familiar, and accompanied by a minimum of authorial comment. The amount of wholly new material an edition would provide will often be trivial, and very rarely extensive. Armed with an adequate concordance and a modest library of the material sources, one may usually determine the general content of the books without much difficulty’.24 That endless flood of ‘agonisingly familiar’ canons is evident in the several hundred surviving collections of canon law from the Carolingian period, which serve, if nothing else, as witnesses to the extensive spread of knowledge of canon law. While, at first glance, there may have been little obvious innovation in the content of the canon law used in the Carolingian realms, there was innovation in the escalation in study and recourse to canon law. The question is how best to develop methods for getting the large corpus of collections to yield information that can illuminate the history of canon law. To approach the collections, it is useful to understand the scholarly legacy. Surveys of the vast thicket of texts produced efforts to name the collections, which appear in medi­eval book catalogues with titles no more revealing than liber canonum (book of canons) and in manu­scripts with similarly unhelpful inscriptions, such as ‘sententiae de monachis et abbatibus’ ([legal] opinions concerning monks and abbots) or ‘de iniuria et honore episcoporum’ (about injury and the honour of bishops). Emulating the protocols of Linean

reference work for identifying specific letters, which supplies the standard system for referring to them by alphanumeric keys, is Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, ed. by Jaffé and Wattenbach. The decretals of Popes Leo the Great and Gregory the Great merit special mention as favoured sources in Carolingian compilations.  24 Brett, ‘Editing the Canon-Law Collections’, p. 91. For another historical survey of the difficulties in the production of modern editions of early medi­eval canon law collections, see Hartmann, ‘Schwierigkeiten beim Edieren’, echoing Ryan, ‘Observations on the Pre-Gratian Canonical Collections’. For discussion of the theoretical problems editors confront in the early medi­eval collections, see Firey, ‘Ghostly Recensions in Early Medi­eval Canon Law’.

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taxonomy, scholars named the collections after their discoverers (e.g. the Collectiones Dacheriana and Quesnelliana, named after Luc d’Achery and Pasquier Quesnel), the site of the discovered manu­script witness (e.g. the Collectiones Diessensis and Frisingensis (prima et secunda!) named for Diessen and Freising), and other such markers of discovery, and then created a system of genus and species (e.g. the Hispana, the Hispana Systematica, the Hispana Gallica, the Hispana Gallica Augustodunensis) in an effort to bring order to the welter of texts and their varying representation in different manu­scripts. Classification on these principles alone, however, has limited use for those seeking to understand the range of resources available to Carolingian-era scribes and readers. A fundamental problem was that the taxonomy did not actually establish secure lines of relationships or descent: the bio­logical model often does not accommodate the processes by which different collections might be generated, in which — depending upon purpose and circumstances — a ‘child’ could have multiple and sequential ‘parents’ from different ‘genera’. The problem went unnoticed for decades, because editors were themselves working within a ‘genetic’ framework and attempting to use Lachmannian analysis to establish a textual stemma by parsing the variant readings and ‘corruptions’ in the texts, so that they could reconstruct ‘the original text’. Brett’s reference to the ‘torrents of variants’ — the result of cross-fertilization as well as the introduction of new variants in each manu­script — explains why editors were drowning, rather than reaching the shores of publication.25 The texts mutated more efficiently than editors could arrest them. A major breakthrough came with Hubert Mordek’s publication of the Collectio Vetus Gallica (olim Collectio Andegavensis), when he elected to represent in different type sizes and appendices material that was ambiguously part of the collection.26 Even so, editorial methods and typo­graphy showed their limits. As Nicholas Álvarez de las Asturias showed in his study of a manu­script previously identified as ‘a second recension of the Hispana Gallica Augustodunensis’, a collection can have a complex history of substitutions, modifications, and additions in the canons that are not adequately represented in the term ‘second recension’.27 For Carolingian-era readers, it was not the compilation per se that gave it authority and utility; it was the canons themselves, and the applicability of the arrangement to particular needs, that mattered to those using, copying, and sharing it. This is why many collections accrue additional canons in some manu­scripts, without comment: the text is not ‘closed’ in order to assert its authoritative status. It seems that in some instances, formats found especially useful by medi­eval users, such as that of the Dionysiana collection of councils, were reproduced with slight variations. In those collections, the similarities are now, unfortunately, masked by a nomenclature that distinguishes the

 25 Brett, ‘Editing the Canon-Law Collections’, p. 93.  26 Mordek, Kirchenrecht und Reform im Frankenreich.  27 Álvarez de las Asturias, ‘On the So-Called Second Version’.

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derivatives too much from the basic model: there are a number of collections in early medi­eval manu­scripts that present the canons of the ecumenical councils and late antique papal decretals in chrono­logical order; it is not clear that one should elevate any one collection above other collections organized on the same principle. A coarser classification than the genealogical model of the collections attempted to identify them (following Fournier and Le Bras) as either ‘major’ or ‘of local or regional interest’. This, too, probably impeded rather than assisted scholars. First, it distorted the topo­graphy of canon law in the Carolingian Empire. That is, a distinction between ‘major’ and ‘local’ suggested an odd dichotomy in the study and application of canon law. The people most likely to have an interest in canon law, such as bishops, deacons (who seem often to have been the literary workhorses of the Church), abbots, polemicists, and advocates or defensores, formed a network that spanned the imperial domains, and they communicated across that network. They sent letters, they sent books, they sent messengers, and they met in conclaves that sustained their bonds outside purely local association.28 Indeed, it has been argued that one of the goals of secular rulers was to convene councils that encompassed as broad a geo­graphical range of participants as possible.29 In such a context, it is not clear what function ‘local’ collections would serve. Nor is it clear that geo­graphical clusters in surviving manu­scripts are a clear sign of local use, or of legal norms that were somehow localized. The description of canon law collections as ‘major’ and ‘local’ presumed that there were pockets of canonistic knowledge, and thus it fragmented the geo­graphy of transmission and resources. In some instances, it is clear that canonistic knowledge was not limited to particular sites but was disseminated across considerable distances. The manu­script provenance of even quite small compilations that survive in only a few manu­scripts can also show diffusion: for example, the ‘Lex Romana canonice compta’, thought to have been compiled in Italy in the middle of the ninth century, survives in a manu­script whose provenance has been described as ‘eastern Francia’.30 The model of limited, isolated, or localized sites of canonistic activity has been undermined, in fact, by research on such sites. Studies of the canon law manu­scripts traceable to the Carolingian libraries or scriptoria of particular

 28 For analysis of the varying forms of communications networks, and especially their impor­ tance in implementing imperial aspirations, see Gravel, Distances, rencontres, communications.  29 Nelson, ‘How Carolingians Created Consensus’, pp. 71–72, also notes the practice of inviting foreign emissaries to councils to intensify a sense of solidarity among the participants from within the Carolingian borders. A less expansive view of the rôle of councils as instruments of imperial governance is in Davis, Charlemagne’s Practice of Empire, pp. 243–59, who sees the implementation of Charlemagne’s agenda in regional councils in Bavaria and Italy as critical experiments that spread at the end of Charlemagne’s reign through other parts of the empire.  30 Kéry, Canonical Collections, p. 161, the first item in the section ‘Collections of Local Importance’.

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dioceses, regions, or monasteries, when taken in sum, suggest that it was not uncommon for bishops to accumulate texts that would aid them in their various episcopal activities, such as participating in councils, serving as judges in their own courts and those of others, educating suffragan clergy, and composing theo­logical and polemical treatises. Canonistic activity is attested throughout the Carolingian Empire, as shown in studies of the area around Lake Constance, including the Carolingian monasteries of Reichenau and St Gall,31 Lombardy,32 Bavaria (and also, more specifically, Regensburg),33 Autun,34 and Salzburg.35 From less canonistically focused research on particular scriptoria,36 one can also assemble information about the canon law manu­scripts present in Carolingian Lyons,37 Corbie,38 Freising,39 Bobbio,40 Fulda,41 Laon,42 Auxerre,43 Co­logne,44 etc. Even when there has been no focused study on a specific site, specialized studies of individual manu­scripts and of individual prelates contribute to understanding the presence and movement of particular canon law texts and codices from one scriptorium or library to another.45 These sites did not acquire their canon law only with the rise of the Carolingians.46 Using the information in E. A. Lowe’s Codices Latini Antiquiores: Latin Manu­scripts Written before a.d. 800, Rosamond McKitterick surveyed possible centres of Autenrieth and Kottje, Kirchenrechtliche Texte im Bodenseegebiet. Landau, ‘Kanonessammlungen in der Lombardei’. Landau, ‘Kanonessammlungen in Bayern’; Landau, ‘Kanonistische Aktivität in Regensburg’. Le Bras, ‘Autun dans l’histoire du droit canon’. Reynolds, ‘Canon Law Collections in Early Ninth-Century Salzburg’. All research on Carolingian-era scriptoria and manu­scripts relies on the massive work of Bernhard Bischoff. See especially his Manu­scripts and Libraries in the Age of Charlemagne; Katalog der festländischen Handschriften des neunten Jahrhunderts; Die südostdeutschen Schreib­schulen und Bibliotheken. Still very useful is Lesne, Histoire de la propriété ecclésiastique en France.  37 Lowe, Codices Lugdunensis antiquissimi; Tafel, ‘The Lyons Scriptorium’; Lauer, ‘Observations sur la Scriptorium de Lyon’.  38 Ganz, Corbie in the Carolingian Renaissance.  39 Daniel, Handschriften des zehnten Jahrhunderts aus der Freisinger Dombibliothek; Schäfer, ‘Freising und Lyon’; Vezin, ‘Dix reliures carolingiennes provenant de Freising’.  40 Engelbert, ‘Zur Frühgeschichte des bobbienser Skriptoriums’.  41 Spilling, ‘Das Fuldaer Skriptorium’.  42 Contreni, The Cathedral School of Laon from 850 to 930.  43 Of the essays in Iogna-Prat, Jeudy, and Lobrichon, eds, L’École carolingienne d’Auxerre de Murethach à Remi, see especially Vezin, ‘Le scriptorium d’Auxerre’, Lobrichon, ‘L’atelier aux­ errois’, Holtz, ‘L’école d’Auxerre’, and Nelson, ‘Charles le Chauve et les utilisations du savoir’.  44 Jones, The Script of Co­logne.  45 A model study in this vein is Roumy, ‘Remarques sur l’œuvre canonique d’Abbon de Fleury’. Devisse, Hincmar, archevêque de Reims, is rich with information about canon law and manu­script transmission; equally valuable is his Hincmar et la loi. For studies of individual manu­scripts, see the biblio­graphies for each collection in Kéry, Canonical Collections.  46 See Hen, Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul, passim; James, ‘Beati pacifici’; Mordek, ‘Das kirchliche Recht’; Mathisen, ‘The “Second Council of Arles”’; Elliot, ‘New Evidence for the Influence of Gallic Canon Law in Anglo-Saxon England’. Useful analysis of paradigms in transmission and use over the centuries is given by Wirbelauer, ‘Zum Umgang mit kanonistischer Tradition im frühen Mittelalter’.  31  32  33  34  35  36

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canonistic activity before 794, and found surviving manu­scripts can be traced to Lyons, Corbie, Co­logne, and Pavia in the sixth and seventh centuries, and after the seventh century to Fleury, Verona, Reichenau, Albi, Salzburg, Freising, Chur, Strasbourg, Tours, Cambrai, Bourges, Chelles, Würzburg, and the Rhine region.47 Using surviving manu­scripts to measure knowledge of canon law at particular places is a dangerous exercise at best: early medi­eval manu­script losses are not only extensive but also irregular, so there can only be assertions based on what remains, not on absences or slight representation.48 It is thus difficult, if not impossible, to trace with any accuracy a comprehensive geo­ graphy or chrono­logy of the production and use of canon law manu­scripts in the Carolingian domains; only vestiges remain. The evidence of the surviving manu­scripts can be somewhat supplemented with medi­eval library catalogues or book lists, although they present methodo­logical perils as well. The catalogue from the monastery of Reichenau, compiled in ad 822, lists, under the rubric ‘De libris canonum’ (Of books of canons), the ‘canon et dogmata ecclesiastica Gennadii episcopi et aenigmata Symphorosi’ in one codex and seven volumes of canons (!).49 The catalogue from the monastery of St Riquier, compiled in ad 831, lists under the rubric ‘De canonibus’ (Of the canons) the ‘canones apostolorum et Nicaeni concilii et XII concilia et decretalia apostolorum’ (canons of the Apostles and of the Council of Nicaea and twelve councils and the decretals of the apostles) in one volume; two volumes of ‘canons collected from diverse councils’, Cyprian on the canons and institutes of churches, Pope Gelasius’s ‘de libris recipiendis et non recipiendis’ (on which books should and should not be recognized), and fifty-five diverse epistolae (letters).50 Among the secular works, the library had ‘lex Romana’ (Roman law) and the ‘pactum Salicae legis’ (Salic law), in fifteen books. The ninth-century catalogue for St Gall has under the rubric ‘De legibus’ (Of the laws), ‘Lex theodosiana; lex ermogeniana; lex Papiniani; lex Francorum; lex Alamannorum in volumine I’ (Theodosian law, Hermogenian law, the law of Papianus, the law of the Franks, the law of the Alemanni, in one volume) before continuing into the capitularies of Charlemagne and Louis.51 The tenth-century catalogue of Bobbio notes one or more works ‘de canonibus’,

 47 McKitterick, ‘Knowledge of Canon Law in the Frankish Kingdoms before 789’.  48 Essential for statistical and methodo­logical considerations is Buringh, Medi­eval Manu­script Production in the Latin West. Among the many examples is the case of Co­logne: ‘of the nearly two hundred manu­scripts which it possessed in 833, only thirty are still existent, the greatest part of these losses probably occurred in the eighteenth century’ (p. 214). See also Esch, ‘Überlieferungs-Chance und Überlieferungs-Zufall als methodisches Problem des Historikers’.  49 ‘Item canonum volumina VII’. Becker, Catalogi, p. 11 (items 365–71).  50 ‘De canonibus et institutionibus ecclesiasticorum LXXXVII. I vol.’. Becker, Catalogi, pp. 26–27 (item 106).  51 Becker, Catalogi, p. 50.

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detailed as ‘among the major and minor are held fifteen books of canons, two books of the letters of pope Leo, likewise a book of canons in which is contained Isidore, de ordine rerum’.52 The tenth-century catalogue of Lorsch records among its vast holdings ‘liber sententiarum in uno codice […]; constitutio legis Iustiniani imperatoris; canones XII et epistolae diversorum in uno codice; actiones XV Chalcedonensis concilii in uno codice’ (a book of [legal] opinions in one volume […]; the constitution of the law of the emperor Justinian; twelve canons [councils?] and diverse decretals in one volume; fifteen acts of the Council of Chalcedon in one volume). The list continues with a reference to a ‘concordia canonum in uno codice’ (concordance of canons in one volume), and also ‘item ipse liber in alio codice’ and ‘item in tertio’ (the same book in another volume; the same in a third volume). The library also had one codex that was ‘excerptio canonum et epistolae’ (excerpts from canons and letters) and, likewise, ‘a book of canons in one volume’.53 It must be noted, however, that the catalogues and our current understanding of manu­script provenance do not always match. Almost matching the 822 catalogue, at least seven surviving canon law manu­scripts are currently assigned a Reichenau provenance; the earliest was there by the eighth century, five are dated to the ninth century, and one to the tenth century.54 St Riquier, by contrast, despite the catalogue of holdings, is at present not credited with any surviving canon law manu­scripts. St Gall seems to have produced at least six surviving canon law manu­scripts; others preserved at St Gall may have been written there as well.55 It may be reasonable to attribute five of our surviving canon law manu­scripts from the ninth and tenth centuries to Bobbio.56 At

 52 ‘Inter maiores et minores habentur libri canonum XV; libri epistolarum papae Leonis II; item librum canonum I in quo habetur Ysidori de ordine rerum’. Becker, Catalogi, p. 66.  53 Becker, Catalogi, p. 112.  54 Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, MSS Aug. XVIII (saec. ix in.: Kéry, Canonical Collections, p. 73), Aug. CIII (saec. ix 1/3: Kéry, p. 17), Aug. CXLII (saec. x in.: Kéry, p. 125); Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS Clm. 5508 (saec. ix ‘prov. Reichenau?’: Kéry, p. 2); Sankt Paul im Lavanttal, Stiftsbibliothek, MSS 6/1 (saec. ix 1/3: Kéry, p. 17), 7/1 (‘saec. viii, Italy; by the eighth century it was already on the island of Reichenau’: Kéry, p. 30); Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, MS HB.VII.62 (saec. ix ex.: Kéry, p. 168).  55 Berlin, Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, MS Lat. qu. 931 (saec. ix ex., St Gall?, Prov. Mondsee: Kéry, Canonical Collections, p. 93); Freiburg i. Breisgau, Universitätsbibliothek, MS 7 (saec. xi 2/4, ‘script of St Gall and Lorsch’: Kéry, p. 135); St Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, MSS 243 (saec. ix 1/2: Kéry, p. 73), 614 (‘c. 900; written in a hand characteristic of St Gall’: Kéry, p. 184), 670 (saec. ix: Kéry, p. 104), 676 (saec. xi, c. 1080–1100; later at St Gall: Kéry, p. 205), 679 (saec. ix 2/2: Kéry, p. 167), 728 (saec. ix 2/2, ‘(Eastern) France, Prov. St Gall’: Kéry, p. 96); Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, MS HB.VI.105 (saec. x, ‘written probably at St Gall or in a scriptorium influenced by St Gall’: Kéry, p. 104); BAV, Reg. lat. MS 421 (saec. ix 2–3/3: Kéry, p. 77).  56 Merseburg, Bibliothek des Domstifts, MS 104 (saec. ix ex. or x in., ‘Northern Italy or Southern France (Bobbio?)’: Kéry, Canonical Collections, p. 191); BnF, MS lat. 1536 (saec. x: Kéry, p. 11); BAV, MSS Vat. lat. 5748 (saec. ix–x, ‘Northern Italy, Prov. Bobbio’: Kéry, p. 34), Vat. lat. 5751 (saec. ix–x, ‘Northern Italy (Bobbio or Verona?)’: Kéry, p. 41); Vercelli,

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present, five surviving canon law manu­scripts from the early Carolingian period are attributed to Lorsch.57 Whatever the methodo­logical problems and deficits in information, the weight of the evidence encourages a shift from a presumption of widespread ignorance of canon law to a presumption of widespread availability of the core content most usually cited in Carolingian documents: the canons of the ecumenical and African councils, and the decretals of the late antique popes, up to and including Gregory the Great. There might well have been access in most places to the canons of the Spanish and Gallican councils of the fifth to seventh centuries, and to books containing secular and Roman law. There would have been an influx of royal, imperial, and diocesan capitularies. Through a network of contacts and relationships, commerce in books, conciliar pressures, and governmental activity, a fairly reliable level of legal competence seems to have developed throughout the Carolingian Empire; such competency would, in turn, support even more production and exchange of legal texts. A model of such activity is available in the imperial court. In a careful and detailed study of the use of documents written in order to muster troops, take stock of properties and obtain reports regarding estates, record legal decisions, arrange comital succession, transmit written agendas for meetings, instruct missi dominici, communicate with ambassadors, document rebellious subjects, certify manumissions and gifts, inform counsellors of matters for deliberation, disseminate the decisions of assemblies, and carry out the myriad other functions of government, Rosamond McKitterick established that the Carolingian polity was administered with massive circulation of legal material and directives.58 As McKitterick pointed out, the quantity of written instruction from rulers to local administrators in itself argues for the presumption that local administrators had the level of literacy and legal education to handle such directives.59 When that demonstration is combined with recognition that secular and ecclesiastical law and administration had ill-defined, porous boundaries, it becomes clear that her arguments hold for the circulation and implementation of canon law, as well. The places from which there are surviving manu­scripts of canon law should be seen, then, not Biblioteca Capitolare, MS CXI (saec. x: Kéry, p. 11). For early medi­eval canon law in northern Italy in the Carolingian period, see Heil, ‘Bishop Leodoin of Modena and the Legal Culture of Late Ninth-Century Italy’.  57 This census includes Freiburg i. Breisgau, Universitätsbibliothek, MS 7, noted above as in the ‘script of St Gall and Lorsch’. Other, less ambiguous attributions are BnF, MS lat. 3851 (saec. ix 1/2: Kéry, Canonical Collections, p. 35); BAV, MSS Pal. lat. 485 (saec. ix med.: Kéry, p. 83), Pal. lat. 574 (saec. viii–ix, ‘Upper Rhine Region, Prov. Lorsch’: Kéry, p. 49); and Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS lat. 2141 (39) (‘about 780, from the region around Lorsch’: Kéry, p. 28).  58 McKitterick, ‘Law and the Written Word’, ch. 2 in The Carolingians and the Written Word. These ideas are further developed by Davis, Charlemagne’s Practice of Empire, esp. pp. 303–22.  59 McKitterick, ‘Law and the Written Word’, pp. 27, 33, and passim. See also Nelson, ‘Literacy in Carolingian Government’.

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as static in their canonistic resources and use of them, but as part of a dynamic context in which both exposure to and application of canon law at each site was in constant flux. Changes in ecclesiastical personnel, political interests, scribal activity, connections to other scriptoria, disputes of varying degrees of localization, and economic conditions would affect canonistic activity.60 Very little in the Carolingian domains stood still. Situating canon law in this environment of extensive and active communication permits reclassification of the collections: instead of ‘major’ and ‘of local interest’, they can be approached in terms of genre, although without undue strictness. Some collections were likely used as convenient compendia of the fundamental components of canon law: the Dionysian family and other chrono­logical collections, such as the Collectio Vaticana (BAV, MS Vat. lat. 1342 et al.), the Collectio Mutinensis, the Collectio Quesnelliana, the Collectio Colbertina, the Collectio Sanblasiana, and the large, topically organized (so-called ‘systematic’) collections, such as the Collectio Hispana Systematica, the Collection of Cresconius, the Collectio Vetus Gallica, the Collectio Herovalliana, and the Collectio Dacheriana. These collections attracted glossing in both Latin and Old High German, suggesting that they were used in teaching and systematic study of canon law.61 A set of over two hundred glosses on late antique conciliar canons and decretals that is replicated in seven (known) surviving manu­ scripts with provenances of Bobbio, Freising, and central Italy shows traffic in information beyond the canons themselves.62 These glossed manu­scripts further test the classification of ‘regional’ and ‘major’: they contain a range of ‘local’ recensions of a ‘major’ canon law collection. One of the manu­scripts transmits a Collectio Dionysiana, perhaps the most common foundation for early medi­eval canon law collections. Another manu­script contains a Collectio Dionysio-Hadriana, whereas two others transmit a version of the Collectio  60 Groundbreaking work on the interplay between Church, society, and imperial power is in the many works by Bührer-Thierry; see now especially Aux marges du monde germanique.  61 Maaßen, ‘Glossen’; Patetta, ‘Glosse di diritto canonico’; Gaudenzi, ‘Il monasterio di Nonantola’. Many ninth- and tenth-century manu­scripts of canon law are glossed, but the glosses, unless they have attracted the attention of scholars of Old High German, are usually not reported. Transcriptions of glossed texts published on the Carolingian Canon Law Project include glosses.  62 The glosses were first reported in 1877 by Friedrich Maaßen, who had noted their appearance in four manu­scripts. Subsequently, in 1893, Francesco Patteta brought to light three additional manu­scripts containing these glosses. The manu­scripts come from both Francia and Italy. Six of the manu­scripts date to the ninth and tenth centuries. The shelfmarks are BAV, MS Vat. lat. 5748 (saec. ix–x; Bobbio) (Cresconius); BAV, MS Vat. lat. 5845 (saec. x; Capua) (Dionysiana) (glosses modified or differing); Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MS S 33 sup. (saec. ix; Bobbio?) (Dionysiana Bobbiensis); Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS Clm. 6242 (saec. ix (a. 815 × 825), Freising) (Dionysio-Hadriana); Rome, Biblioteca Vallicelliana, MS T. XVIII (saec. x–xi; Central Italy, near Rome) (Cresconius); Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare, MS CXI (saec. x; Bobbio) (Dionysiana Bobbiensis); Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS lat. 361 (saec. xii [Maaßen: saec. xi]) (‘Special form’ of Dionysio-Hadriana).

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Dionysiana marked by variants Maaßen considered eccentric enough that he classified it as a separate recension, which he called the Collectio Dionysiana Bobbiensis; yet another manu­script represents still another ‘special form’ of the Dionysio-Hadriana.63 Two other manu­scripts transmit the Collection of Cresconius.64 Unlike the other collections annotated with these glosses, Cresconius’s is ‘systematic’: instead of recording the canons of the councils in a set sequence, and the councils in chrono­logical order, ‘Cresconius’ took the canons of the Collectio Dionysiana and rearranged them into 301 chapters arranged by topic. The presence of identical glosses attached to different versions of the main text, and also to another text wholly different in its arrangement of canons, implies that the glosses form a composition that was independent of the main text as a whole. Early medi­eval readers seem not to have been concerned to use a particular collection or a particular ‘edition’ of a collection. It was the authority of the canons themselves, the canons issued by general councils and the judicial opinions of late antique popes, that made them objects of study.65

 63 Maaßen, Geschichte der Quellen und der Literatur des Canonischen Rechts, pp. 444–54, 471–76.  64 See Gaudemet, Les sources du droit de l’Eglise, p. 138, who reviews the arguments for Italian and African composition of this collection. For a critical edition and study: Zechiel-Eckes, Die Concordia canonum des Cresconius.  65 For a Carolingian comment on the authority of the councils, see the Council of Coetleu in Brittany (a. 848 or 849): ‘De libellis et commentariis aliorum non convenit aliquos iudicare et sanctorum canonum iudicia relinquere, vel decretalium regulas, id est, qui habentur aput nos simul cum illis in canone, et quibus in omnibus ecclesiasticis utimur iudiciis, id est apostolorum, Nicenorum, Ancyranorum, Neocaesariensium, Gangrensium, Antiocensium, Laodicensium, Calcedonensium, Sardicensium, Carthaginiensium, Affricanensium, et cum illis regule Romanorum pontificum Silvestri, Siricii, Inocentii, Zosimi, Celestini, Leonis, Gelasi, Hilarii, Simachi, Simplicii, Ormisdae et Gregorii iunioris. Isti omnino sunt, et per quos iudicant episcopi et per quos episcopi et clerici simul iudicantur. Nam si tale emerserit vel contigerit inusitatum negotium, quod minime possit per istos finiri, tunc si illorum, quorum meministis dicta, Hieronimi, Augustini, Isidori, vel ceterorum similiter sanctorum doctorum similium reperta fuerint, magnaminiter sunt retinenda ac promulganda vel ad apostolicam sedem referatur de talibus’: Concilia aevi Karolini DCCCXLIII–DCCCLIX, ed. by Hartmann, p. 189. (Concerning the legal briefs and commentaries of others, it is not fitting to judge [with] them and to deviate from the judgments of the holy canons or rules of the decretals, that is, those which are held by us together with these in this canon, and which we use in all ecclesiastical judgements, that is, the canons of the Apostles, of those at [the Councils of] Nicaea, Ancyra, Neocaesarea, Gangra, Antioch, Laodicea, Chalcedon, Sardica, Carthage, Africa, and with them the rules of the Roman bishops Silvester, Siricius, Innocent, Zosimus, Celestine, Leo, Gelasius, Hilary, Simmachus, Simplicius, Hormisdas, and Gregory II. These are generally [held], and through them bishops judge and through them bishops and clergy together are judged. For if such unusual business should surface or come to pass, that can hardly be resolved through these, then if those whose sayings you recall, of Jerome, Augustine, Isidore, or other similarly holy teachers have been discovered, they are graciously to be retained and published, or concerning such things the apostolic see should be consulted.) The Collectio canonum Hibernensis, which is in a number of manu­scripts from Brittany, also addresses the question of legal authorities: see Collectio canonum hibernensis, ed. by Wasserschleben, book xix, cap. 1 ‘De ordine inquisitionis causarum’, pp. 59–60,

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The salient feature of glosses is that they pertain to particular words, phrases, sentences, or short texts. It is therefore not necessary that the larger collections containing those words, phrases, and sentences wholly correspond to one another in each and every manu­script in order for the glosses to function as intended. Transmission of the glosses was not dependent upon the transmission of a particular collection. Rather, the transmission of the glosses was contingent on a collection’s inclusion of the specific canons to which the glosses were attached; those canons could be in any order, and the glosses would still be valid. Seen through the lens of the geo­graphical distribution of the manu­scripts, the glosses invite investigation into whether there were common interpretations across the empire of the standard canons of the general councils of Late Antiquity. Other collections were compiled as dossiers in preparation for debating particular issues, or preparing for a range of issues to be resolved in council. The Pittaciolus of Hincmar of Laon was compiled ‘for the defense of the Bishop of Laon against his uncle, the archbishop Hincmar of Reims’.66 The Collectio 44 capitulorum ‘De episcoporum transmigratione’ (Concerning the transfer of bishops), attributed to Anastasius Bibliothecarius, seems related to another dispute with Hincmar of Rheims, this one over the translation to another see of Actard of Nantes and papal rights over such relocations.67 Because of the multivalent properties of each canon, a collection created for one purpose might well have seemed useful for another, and have been copied, with or without modification, accordingly. The utility of the Collectio ‘De episcoporum transmigratione’ is evinced in its subsequent use in the tenth century by Auxilius of Naples in the controversy over ordinations (such as his own) made by Pope Formosus, who prior to his election had been condemned at the Synod of Troyes in 878, and was posthumously stripped of his papal regalia at the ‘Cadaver Synod’ in 897.68 The Collectio ‘De coertione Iudeorum’ (Concerning the coercion of Jews) of Florus of Lyons can be related to the debates of the Council of Meaux-Paris (ad 845), and his dossier for the predestination controversy drew upon canonistic resources at Lyons.69 Still other collections gathered canons pertaining to particular areas of legal which privileges Scripture, then patristic writings, then ‘canones apostolicae sedis’, then the example of the saints. Judgement then devolves to an assembly. See now The Hibernensis, ed. by Flechner, i, p. 111; ii, p. 556.  66 Kéry, Canonical Collections, p. 175.  67 Sommar, ‘Hincmar of Reims and the Canon Law of Episcopal Translation’.  68 On the legal principles, see Moynihan, Papal Immunity and Liability, pp. 34–37. For biblio­ graphy: Kéry, Canonical Collections, pp. 177–78. See also Lohrmann, Das Register Papst Johannes VIII., pp. 246–47, 135–36, and passim.  69 On Amulo and Meaux-Paris, see Heil, ‘Agobard, Amolo, das Kirchengut und die Juden von Lyon’; Bat-Sheva, ‘Adversus Iudaeos in the Carolingian Empire’; Raddatz, ‘Zur Vorgeschichte der Epistula seu Liber contra Judaeos Amulos von Lyon’; refining interpretation of Amulo’s use of Florus’s work is Amolo von Lyon, Liber de perfidia Iudaeorum, ed. and trans. by Herbers-Rauhut. For the letter of Pope Celestine I ‘Apostolici

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interest, such as monastic life, marriage, tort, tithes, etc.70 The ‘Argrim dossier’ assembles canons relating to the installation of bishops.71 Some collections were probably created to serve as concise handbooks for clergy in their parishes or dioceses: one could supply the title, ‘essential canon law for most occasions’.72 The challenges in identifying the purpose and contextualizing each collection, and sometimes each codex, are not to be underestimated, especially in the cases of anonymous collections. Almost any hypothesis will be debatable, given the sparse evidence for contextualizing, and the subjective nature of intertextual analysis, in which particular canons, all decontextualized from having been excerpted from their sources, are then related to each other to bring sense to their juxtaposition in a collection. The fundamental work to determine, as well as possible, the date and provenance of the manu­script(s) containing the collection, and also relations to other manu­scripts, will continue to be essential for understanding the significance and context of each work, even if the objective is no longer simply to assess the resources available at each ecclesiastical establishment. Perhaps for no other texts are the questions about purpose, context, date, provenance, and relationships to other manu­scripts as demanding as they are for the Pseudo-Isidorian decretals. Recent analysis by Eric Knibbs of the transmission of the Hispana Gallica Augustodunensis, a version of the Collectio Hispana that has long been identified as a fundamental resource for the compilers of the Pseudo-Isidorian texts, proposes a complex process of incremental use, revision, and incorporation of the text into the Pseudo-Isidorian forgeries.73 His description of the use of existing texts for new purposes in new contexts, which he bases upon extensive, detailed textual criticism and close study of the manu­scripts, provides a useful model for shaping descriptions of early medi­eval texts, collections, or even recensions as continuing narratives. Those narratives, in turn, remind us that ‘forgery’ is not a genre, per se. The Pseudo-Isidorian texts exemplify, in perhaps especially interesting ways, a larger context of frequent and widespread textual alterations in documents of all sorts. Part of their interest lies in their refraction of Carolingian understanding of a legal and historical past. Forgeries intrinsically refer to templates of legal forms, and mimic (however well or badly) authorities and argumentative patterns. From the alterations and new verba’ ( JK 381) cited in the predestination dossier, Zechiel-Eckes thought it possible that Florus used the Hadriana in BnF, MS lat. 1452: Florus von Lyon, pp. 208–09.  70 See, for example, ‘The “Additiones” to the Capitula of Isaac of Langres’: Kéry, Canonical Collections, pp. 174–75. The ‘additiones’ with the title ‘de nonis et decimis’ (on tithes) are now edited in Mordek, Biblioteca capitularium regum Francorum manu­scripta, pp. 1012–14.  71 Kéry, Canonical Collections, p. 180.  72 See, e.g., Paxton, ‘Bonus liber’; Firey, ‘The Canon Law Book of Jerome, Bishop of Belley’; cf. Pokorny, ‘Eine bischöfliche Promissio aus Belley’; Hen, ‘Educating the Clergy’; Hen, ‘Knowledge of Canon Law among Rural Priests’; Kéry, Canonical Collections, ‘Collectio of Verona LXIII (61)’: ‘sort of handbook for parish priests’ (p. 191).  73 Knibbs, ‘The Interpolated Hispana’. Knibbs usefully rechristens the Hispana Gallica Augustodunensis as the ‘Interpolated Hispana’.

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material falsifiers introduce, as well as in the models they elect not to use, there is much to be learned, not only about the pressures that legally literate clerics sought to mitigate with texts, but also about their expectations and perspectives on legal norms.74

Grander Expectations: From Knowledge to Application While the collections can reveal much about the canonistic resources and favoured texts used in learning and using canon law, it is the records of the councils and the extant capitularies that help to supply the context for the issues canon law could address and the institutional framework for implementing decisions framed with canon law. Just as canon law collections were not a Carolingian innovation, so too were councils and capitularies used in the Merovingian kingdoms; it was, again, the increase in their volume and scope that is notable in the Carolingian period.75 Both the councils and capitularies show the symbiotic relationship of the imperial court and the Carolingian episcopate: a relationship that can be described, in the view of some scholars, as theocratic government.76 The symbiosis was fostered by strategic

 74 For illuminating discussion of forgeries in the Carolingian period, see Koziol, The Politics of Memory and Identity, esp. ch. 7, ‘Forged Acts: Frankish Truth and its Consequences’ (pp. 315–99), although Koziol’s treatment of the Pseudo-Isidorian texts themselves is scant. Direct engagement with Carolingian forgeries, including Pseudo-Isidore, from a fresh vantage-point is in Bouchard, Rewriting Saints and Ancestors, ch. 5, ‘Age of Forgery’ (pp. 63–86; Pseudo-Isidore on pp. 77–84). See also Guyotjeannin, ‘“Antiqua et authentica praedecessorum nostrorum nos ammonent”’. For a survey of instances and types of alterations in canon law collections, see Landau, ‘Gefälschtes Recht’ and Schmitz, ‘Die Waffe der Fälschung zum Schutz der Bedrängten?’; Hartmann, ‘Fälschungsverdacht und Fälschungsnachweis im früheren Mittelalter’.  75 For Merovingian councils, see Concilia aevi Merovingici [511–695], ed. by Maassen, and also the Conciliae Galliae, A. 314–A. 506, ed. by Munier, and Concilae Galliae, A. 511–695, ed. by de Clercq. See also Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova Amplissima Collectio, ed. by Mansi. De Clercq, La législation religieuse Franque de Clovis à Charlemagne, is still one of the best studies of these materials. The Gallic councils are handily translated and very usefully annotated as Conciles gaulois du ive siècle, trans. by Gaudemet, and Les canons des conciles mérovingiens (vie–viie) siècles, trans. by Gaudement and Basdevant. Analysis of the composition and distribution of the councils, although the subject of some criticism, is in Pontal, Histoire des conciles mérovingiens. Aiming for more historical contextualization is Halfond, The Archaeo­logy of the Frankish Church Councils.  76 Willingness to use such termino­logy varies. Nelson, ‘Kingship and Empire in the Carolingian World’, p. 53, commented, ‘Theocracy thrived’. De Jong, ‘Sacrum palatium et ecclesia’, p. 1253, anxious to quash any distinction between a ‘théocratie royale’ and a ‘théocratie épiscopale’, seems careful to avoid the term altogether, opting for ‘une “structure synergique-binaire” selon laquelle roi et évêques partageaint la responsabilité du salut du populus christianus’. De Jong’s description of the sacred palace in many ways accords with the comments on Frankish use of the phrase ‘populus Christianus’ in Ullman, The Carolingian Renaissance and the Idea of Kingship, p. 17: ‘there was no conceptual distinction between a Carolingian State and a

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cultivation of prospective members of the clergy at the royal and imperial courts, and their placement in dioceses throughout the empire, where they would continue to operate as retainers loyal to the crown.77 The story of regal, episcopal, comital, and abbatial relationships is, of course, complex, especially because the Carolingian experiments in partitioning the empire for rule by siblings were exercises more often in warfare than in peace. Ecclesiastical and secular administrations did not fully coincide. Further complicating their relationships was the fact that the network of imperial bishops stretched over the boundaries of secular kingdoms, even as co-operation with reigning kings remained essential to episcopal ambitions. Among the most interesting episodes in Carolingian history are those in which loyalties were tested and sometimes changed, as when, most famously, some of the most prestigious bishops of the empire joined the rebellion against Louis the Pious.78 The very act of rebellion, and the religious discourse that swirled around it, however, attest to the firm belief that the affairs of the Crown were also the affairs of the Church. Conversely, Carolingian councils shaped their decisions with the expectation that the Crown was sponsor, guarantor, and Christian vanguard. An especially noteworthy feature of Carolingian conciliar activity is that in its earlier phases it was so frequently directed to theo­logical disputes. Whether it signalled a true imperial revival, recapitulating the days when emperors convened general councils of considerable heft to resolve arguments that reportedly convulsed the populace, or whether it was the result of reading codices of canon law that privileged the canons of those great councils and thereby conveyed that theo­logy was the business of an imperial Church and

Carolingian Church, nor anything approaching a pluralistic society and on these premisses none could come about’. Ullman’s more extensive discussion of theocratic governance, although neither always anchored temporally nor fully attentive to medi­eval controversy, is in his Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages, pp. 117–49. The literature on the integration of royal and episcopal power, and debates over their relative strengths, is vast and cannot be surveyed here. See de Jong, ‘Sacrum palatium et ecclesia’, for excellent biblio­ graphy, and Ullman, The Carolingian Renaissance and the Idea of Kingship, for older works of interest.  77 A summary roster is in Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church, p. 195, in the context of a readable narrative. For more specialized studies of the phenomenon, arguing for different degrees of imperial intervention in episcopal appointments at different times and in different regions, see Schieffer, ‘Karl der Große und die Einsetzung der Bischöfe im Frankenreich’, and also in the context of more abstract theories of state formation, Patzold, ‘Bischöfe als Träger der politischen Ordnung’; the entire antho­logy, Pohl and Wieser, eds, Der frühmittelalterliche Staat, comprises important essays relevant to the themes noted only cursorily here. For a superb study of the personnel of the court and their ecclesiastical status during the reign of Louis the Pious, see Depreux, Prosopo­graphie de l’entourage de Louis le Pieux. For the earlier period, culminating in the reign of Charlemagne, Heuclin, Hommes de Dieu et fonctionnaires du roi. For a study of a specific bishop in the context of administration and judicial authority, see Wolfram, ‘Arn von Salzburg und Karl der Große’.  78 For two important studies of this episode, see Booker, Past Convictions and de Jong, The Penitential State.

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the proper subject of canon law, or whether it was simply fortuitous, there was again engagement with theo­logical arguments at the conciliar level as there had not been since Late Antiquity. Recent scholarship proposes that such debates were not limited to a small circle of elite bishops, but were more widely known.79 The theo­logical disputes also display imperial muscle: the arguments over the theo­logical proposition known as Adoptionism that drew upon the intellectual skills of a number of clerics across the empire, working in concert under the patronage of Charlemagne, were directed against the archbishop of Toledo and the bishop of Urgel.80 In other words, the Adoptionist controversy was a consequence of imperial belligerence, in the guise of theo­logical righteousness. Carolingian participation in the debates over iconoclasm and the inclusion of filioque (‘and the Son’, referring to the procession of the Holy Spirit) in the Creed, both of which also produced voluminous written argument and empire-wide attention, were prompted by Carolingian interest in taking a place on the stage with the Byzantine Empire and the papacy.81 Although the debates over predestination and the Eucharist took place within the boundaries of the Carolingian domains, they were in many ways logical extensions of the theo­logical convulsions instigated by the effort to tackle the questions discussed outside Francia.82 Indeed, in the case of the filioque, it was integration of an ‘external’ practice that contributed to the Frankish stance: the filioque occurred in one of the canons of a Council of Toledo (589), a canon well known in Francia because of its transmission in the Collectio Hispana and its relatives.83 While it is difficult to discern clear periodization in the history of early medi­eval canon law, the theo­logical controversies do offer a starting point, perhaps. The dispute over Adoptionism (the notion that divine and eternal Christ was ‘adopted’ as the human Son of God in the man Jesus) flared in  79 Gillis, Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire; Pezé, ‘Doctrinal Debate and Social Control in the Carolingian Age’; Pezé, Le virus de l’erreur.  80 Chandler, ‘Heresy and Empire’, p. 511, argues that ‘Carolingian intervention in a doctrinal dispute among Spanish churchmen […] was triggered by the [Aquitainian] kingdom’s expansion south of the Pyrenees’, when Charlemagne’s son Louis ruled Aquitaine. Chandler suggests that the see of Urgel may have been subordinated to the Carolingian province of Narbonne when Felix, bishop of Urgel, was prosecuted for heresy in Carolingian councils, having been transferred from the see of Toledo, but the documentation appears scant. See also Ubierna, ‘Reflexions sobre el adopcionismo, la christianidad oriental y la escato­logia imperial carolingia’. The standard study of Adoptionism is Cavadini, The Last Christo­logy of the West. For discussion of how the Adoptionism controversy may relate to an anonymous canon law compilation, see Firey, ‘Carolingian Ecclesio­logy and Heresy’.  81 On iconoclasm, see Noble, Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians; on the ‘filioque’ dispute, see Siecienski, The Filioque; Gemeinhardt, Die Filioque-Kontroverse zwischen Ost- und Westkirche im Frühmittelalter; Kolbaba, Inventing Latin Heretics.  82 On the entwined problems of predestination and the Eucharist in Carolingian theo­logy, see Chazelle, The Crucified God in the Carolingian Era. A helpful brief survey of the theo­logical disputes of the Carolingian era is Matter, ‘Orthodoxy and Deviance’.  83 Siecienski, The Filioque, p. 9.

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the late eighth century and was formally addressed by Carolingian clergy, led by Alcuin under the aegis of Charlemagne, at the Council of Regensburg in ad 792 as a first foray, again at the Council of Frankfurt in 794 as a major effort to expose and quash the heresy, and again in 799 as an epilogue of continuing vigilance.84 In other words, thorough exploration of late antique canon law and related patristic works of theo­logy, as well as sustained eagerness to apply that knowledge to suppress a technically described heresy, was well underway before Charlemagne was crowned emperor at the end of 800. The Council of Frankfurt (794) also launched the Carolingian response to Byzantine iconoclasm and rejected the Second Council of Nicaea (787), at which iconoclasm had been sanctioned, as oecumenical.85 Not only the cultic validity of icons was thus under discussion, but also the classification and status of different councils as authoritative sources of law. The student of Carolingian canon law could do no better than to study the Council of Frankfurt, although it requires recourse to somewhat indirect witnesses to reconstruct what transpired there.86 A second wave of theo­logical disputes that elicited the use of canon law by the contesting parties rolled through the Carolingian realms at the end of the reign of Charlemagne’s successor, Louis the Pious (emp. 814–840), and during that of Charles the Bald (k. West Francia 840–877). In part, the spate of activity reflects the number of highly educated clerics at centres such as Corbie, Rheims, Fulda, Lyons, and other prominent monasteries and dioceses that had benefited from royal and imperial support. Paschasius Radbertus, Hincmar of Rheims, Agobard of Lyons, Amalarius of Metz, Gottschalk of Orbais, and Hrabanus Maurus are among the figures that command attention in the 840s, when, argued E. Ann Matter, theo­logical debates were ‘easy to find’ among the masters in Carolingian schools, although condemnations were few.87 The practice of using inherited knowledge to frame the position of an adversary as heretical, as had been honed and tested in the Adoptionist controversy, is evident in the works of these writers, as they engaged with the problems raised by the filioque, the Eucharist, and Predestination. The debates continued for decades, thus affecting both the impetus to produce more copies of late antique councils that defined points of orthodoxy and  84 Matter, ‘Orthodoxy and Deviance’, p. 512.  85 Matter, ‘Orthodoxy and Deviance’, p. 523.  86 Excellent studies of the issues debated at the Council of Frankfurt, their historical contextualization, and the implications of the council’s decisions are collected in the important antho­logy Berndt, ed., Das Frankfurter Konzil von 794. For a lucid description of the extant sources attesting to the council’s decisions, which found expression in a text known as the Capitulary of Frankfurt (the Capitulare Francofortense), see Hartmann, ‘Das Konzil von Frankfurt 794’, in this collection. For a demonstration that the boundaries between conciliar acta and capitularies should not be too firmly drawn, see van Rhijn, Shepherds of the Lord, pp. 13–31. A new study of the Frankfurt capitulary is promised by Patzold: see his ‘Capitularies in the Ottonian Realm’, p. 119, n. 40.  87 Matter, ‘Orthodoxy and Deviance’, p. 516.

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heresy, and also the perspectives readers brought to those texts. Among the glosses noted above are a number commenting on the ‘errors of the Greeks’, as a treatise written in 868 by Ratramnus of Corbie called them; marginalia in other canon law manu­scripts note ‘filioque’ alongside relevant texts.88 Not only did theo­logical discourse around the exceptionally difficult mysteries of the Trinity (as in both the Adoptionism and the filioque debates) and the real presence of the divine in tangible artefacts (as in the debates over both the Eucharist and icons) progress, but the theo­logical exercises also advanced the presumption that the Church had legal mechanisms that could be invoked. In the wake of theo­logical disputes, there was strengthened canonistic thinking about penitential punition, means of curtailing the spread of heterodoxy, the authority of late antique councils, and processes suited to examination and use of written documents, including use of written accusations.89 Especially noteworthy was a case that reverberated not only for its theo­ logical implications, but also for the ways in which it caused the participants to think about the legal boundaries around demands for obedience, the voluntary nature of religious professions, the rules for property and usufruct in the case of donations to ecclesiastical establishments, the options for punition, censorship, appellate processes, and assertions of hierarchical authority. This was the ongoing and dramatic saga of Gottschalk of Orbais, who was

 88 See Herbers, ‘Papst Nikolaus I. und Patriarch Photios’. For other glosses referring to the filioque, see Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, MS Hamilton 132, fol. 22v and Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS lat. 489. Others almost certainly can be found and have not yet been reported.  89 It may be that there was a shift during the Carolingian period from use of excommunication to use of penitential measures, including imprisonment in a monastery, as a response to grave ecclesiastical crimes. For discussion of the function of penance at the level of the sovereign, and its potential to supply both constraints on the abuse of power and protection for the apparatus of government, see de Jong, The Penitential State; on the use of monastic imprisonment, de Jong, ‘Monastic Prisoners or Opting Out?’. For the intersection of juridical and theo­logical discourse in the formation of Carolingian penitential practices, its impact on Carolingian legal culture, and the expansion of those practices through a concerted educational effort, see Firey, A Contrite Heart. For late antique and Merovingian approaches to excommunication: Mathisen, ‘Les pratiques de l’excommunication d’après la législation conciliaire’; Keygnaert, ‘Van medicijn tot wapen in de strijd om het kerkbezit’; Gaudemet, ‘Les formes anciennes de l’excommunication’; Vogel, ‘Pénitence et excommunication’. On late Merovingian and early Carolingian modes of defining and responding to religious transgression, see the important work by Glatthar, Bonifatius und das Sakrileg. For late antique antecedents: Hillner, Prison, Punishment and Penance. As a starting point on the importance of written documents in canonical processes, the Council of Soissons (a. 853) is especially noteworthy for its lengthy exposition of the necessity for a written libellus in accusatorial and testificatory processes: see Concilia aevi Karolini DCCCXLIII–DCCCLIX, ed. by Hartmann, pp. 266–68 and passim. Intense attention to judicial process is also well attested in the canon law collections of the Carolingian epoch. The second book of the Collectio Dacheriana is ‘on accusations, judges, witnesses, and procedure’. The Capitula Angilramni (see Kéry, Canonical Collections, pp. 114–17) is also rich in procedural canons; see Firey, ‘Codices and Contexts’.

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condemned at the Council of Mainz in 848 and the Councils of Quierzy in 849 and 853.90 A monk whose initiation in litigation started in 829 at the Council of Mainz, where he successfully protested his monastic status because he had been committed to the monastery of Fulda as a child oblate, and hence without his adult consent, Gottschalk was also a gifted and feisty theo­logian who, after his ordination as a priest, took to preaching the doctrine, implicit in Augustine’s works, of double predestination (gemina praedestinatio).91 The condemnation of Gottschalk at Quierzy in 849 in some ways exemplifies the merged forces of secular and ecclesiastical authority, to the extent that a prosecution for theo­logical heterodoxy also carried the charge that there was a violation of civil law, or at least of civic matters: the verdict read, ‘Because you have presumed to disturb both ecclesiastical and civil affairs’.92 The wording of the condemnation coincides with an increasing tendency to cite Roman law alongside the precedents of the late antique canons in conciliar deliberations. The citation of secular law, or of its precepts, within or alongside canon law was an important strategy in fortifying legal arguments. So, for example, Bishop Theodore of Cambrai noted in his discussion of the litigation between Hincmar of Rheims and his predecessor, Ebo, that due process required witnesses to support an accusation, as stated in the Theodosian Code, as relayed in the Sententiae Pauli: Moreover, concerning the process of conviction, it is clear how one ought to be accused and convicted, because one ought to be accused in writing or by witnesses, just as it is written concerning bishops and clerics in the Theodosian law, in the fifth book of the opinions of Paul: no one can be convicted in a judicial proceeding without witnesses or documents. Because indeed in this matter canonical authority confirms the Roman laws: it is written in the eleventh chapter of a Toledan council that, without a legitimate accuser, no one can be condemned: It is proper that the life

 90 An earlier council at Quierzy, held in 838, addressed a dispute between the monks of Saint Calais and their bishop, whom they claimed had expelled them; it also rejected some liturgical innovations instigated by Amalarius of Metz. For Quierzy a. 849: Concilia aevi Karolini DCCCXLIII–DCCCLIX, ed. by Hartmann, pp. 194–99; for Quierzy a. 853: Concilia aevi Karolini DCCCXLIII–DCCCLIX, ed. by Hartmann, pp. 294–97.  91 A fine discussion of the arguments over the legal dimensions of Gottschalk’s demand for his liberty and property, which pertained to precedents and principles in secular as well as canon law, and prompted discussion of divine law as well, is de Jong, In Samuel’s Image, pp. 77–91. On Gottschalk, see now Gillis, Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire, incl. pp. 24–51 regarding the 829 case.  92 Concilia aevi Karolini DCCCXLIII–DCCCLIX, ed. by Hartmann, pp. 198–99: ‘Quia et ecclesiastica et civilia negotia […] conturbare praesumpsisti’. The phrase appears in a very similar form in Florus of Lyons, Liber de III epistolis c. 24: ‘et quia contra canonicam institutionem civilia et ecclesiastica negotia perturbare studuit’ (Concilia aevi Karolini DCCCXLIII–DCCCLIX, ed. by Hartmann, p. 197). Useful commentary on the phrase and issues in translating it are in Gottschalk and a Medi­eval Predestination Controversy, ed. and trans. by Genke and Gumerlock, p. 25 and nn. 126, 127.

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of an innocent person not be stained by the destruction wrought by those accusing. Therefore whoever is accused, just as much the one accused as the accuser, should be brought forward and examined according to the decisions of the laws and the canons.93 From these citations, Theodore concludes, ‘and thus it is clear, because divine and human laws state that not unless someone has either openly been confessed or openly convicted may they be rewarded or condemned, and it is spelled out how the accused ought to be accused or convicted’, and applies the principles to the specific case of Ebo, bishop of Rheims.94 The legal precepts he elucidated were then applied again a decade later, by Hincmar of Rheims, in his analysis of the legal issues in the divorce of King Lothar II and his queen Theutberga.95 There is a stream, however narrow or wide it might have been, of continuing citation of regulae iuris developed in the ninth century, sometimes drawn from Roman law. The vexing question of the use of Roman law (or, more aptly, Roman laws) in early medi­eval canon law is one of the most unsettled and increasingly active areas of research. As for some of the other questions noted above for which methodo­logical changes produce different results, so is assessment of the knowledge and application of Roman legal precepts and principles. Whereas a census of complete manu­scripts of the Justinianic Corpus indicated that ‘Carolingian Europe was simply largely indifferent to Roman law’, scholarship that investigates manu­scripts containing more broadly defined citations of Roman law produces the opposite impression.96 It also appears to be the case

 93 Concilia aevi Karolini DCCCXLIII–DCCCLIX, ed. by Hartmann, p. 290: ‘Iam de convicendo qualiter accusari et convinci debeat, manifestum est, quia per scripturam vel testibus debeat accusari, sicut scriptum est de episcopis et clericis in lege Theodosiana, in libro quinto sententiarum Pauli: Conuinci nemo potest in iudicio sine testibus aut scriptura. Quia etiam leges Romanas in hoc negotio canonica probet auctoritas, scriptum est in concilio Toletano capite undecimo, ne sine accusatore legitimo quispiam condemnetur: Dignum est, ut uita innocentis non maculetur pernicie accusantium. Ideo quisquis a quolibet criminatur tam accusatus quam accusator praesententur atque legum et canonum sententiae exquirantur’.  94 Concilia aevi Karolini DCCCXLIII–DCCCLIX, ed. by Hartmann, p. 290: ‘ecce manifestum est, quia leges divinae et humanae non nisi aut aperte confessum aut aperte convictum adiu­ dicent vel condemnent, et qualiter accusatus accusari vel convinci debeat designatum est’.  95 Firey, A Contrite Heart, pp. 40, 45 and n. 85.  96 Quotation from Radding and Ciaralli, The Corpus Iuris Civilis in the Middle Ages, p. 52. Rich and widespread transmission of Roman law is, however, compellingly demonstrated by Kaiser, Die Epitome Iuliani, and Kaiser, Authentizität und Geltung spätantiker Kaisergesetze. See also Tate, ‘Roman and Visigothic Procedural Law’. For continuing use of Roman practices, especially with respect to written records, see Brown, ‘On the Gesta municipalia and the Public Validation of Documents in Frankish Europe’. See also Esders, ‘Die römischen Wurzeln der fiskalischen inquisitio der Karolingerzeit’; Siems, ‘Zum Weiterwirken römischen Rechts in der kulturellen Vielfalt des Frühmittelalters’; Day, ‘The iudex aequus’. Of the essays in Noble, ed., From Roman Provinces to Medi­eval Kingdoms, particularly relevant is Murray, ‘Pax et disciplina’. In Cahiers du Centre d’histoire médiévale, 3 (2005): Bournazel, ‘Du droit romain aux lois barbares’; Jeannin, ‘La persistance du droit

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that excerpts of Roman law copied into canon law manu­scripts have not been adequately reported or catalogued, and that it is still not possible to supply a census of surviving texts.97 As scholarly consensus builds for the view that the secular laws hitherto called ‘the Barbarian Codes’ represent or incorporate traditions of Roman law as applied in the western provinces, using the criterion of purity of Justinianic expression as the litmus test for use of Roman law is another methodo­logical problem.98 Following from that is the question of whether continuing use of Roman law was largely habitual, unremarkable, and hence unremarked, or whether there were moments and conditions under which Roman law was consciously invoked as authoritative, as, for example, in the early seventh-century edict of Clothar.99 The two phenomena are not mutually exclusive, and there is evidence for both. Another methodo­logical strategy is to examine the termino­logy in early medi­eval canon law texts, to determine whether they preserve technical vocabulary from Roman law, such as ‘relatio’, ‘sententiae’, ‘allegationes’, etc.100 Certainly there are references to the thirty-year rule and exceptio spolii that are given as if needing no explanation.101 In any number of ways, Carolingian canon law conserves, transmits, and continues to develop legacies from Roman laws.102 While ecclesiastical recourse to secular law further narrowed the distance

romain dans le centre de la Gaule’; Juillet, ‘“Secundum legem romanam …”’; LauransonRosaz, ‘“Theodosyanus nos instruit codex …”’; Magnou-Nortier, ‘Autour des Constitutions Sirmondiennes’; Salrach, ‘L’esprit de la res publica dans la législation du Charlemagne’. Although often superseded by more recent work, Conrat, Geschichte der Quellen und Literatur des Römischen Rechts im früheren Mittelalter remains essential. The work of the Projet Volterra is a very important resource for exploring imperial and post-imperial Roman law.  97 See Kaiser, Authentizität und Geltung spätantiker Kaisergesetze; Kaiser, Die Epitome Iuliani; and Firey, ‘Continuing Recourse to Roman Law in the Carolingian Period’.  98 See, inter alia, Wood, ‘Disputes in Late Fifth- and Sixth-Century Gaul’; Heather, ‘Law and Society in the Burgundian Kingdom’. For a historio­graphic analysis and proposal for new analytical approaches, see Lupoi, The Origins of the European Legal Order, pp. 36–46. See also Cortese, Il Diritto nella Storia Medi­evale.  99 See Esders, Römische Rechstradition und merowingisches Königtum. For the question of conscious invocation of written law in the Carolingian period, see Innes, ‘Charlemagne, Justice, and Written Law’.   100 Moore, A Sacred Kingdom, p. 63.   101 On use of the thirty-year rule, see Esders, ‘Procopius of Caesarea, the “lex tricennalis”, and “the time of the Vandals”’; Esders, ‘The Church as Governance Actor in a Period of PostImperial Transition’.   102 E.g., the ‘Excerpta Bobiensia’ (‘Systematically arranged collection of Roman Law (86 texts) concerning ecclesiastical matters’): Kéry, Canonical Collections, p. 162; the ‘Collectio of Paris lat. 12445 and Berlin, Phill, 1741’ (‘A mixture of constitutions from the Codex Theodosianus and canon law texts; important because it contains a great number of constitutions from the Codex Theodosianus which are not found in the Breviarium of Alaric’): Kéry, Canonical Collections, pp. 170–71; Abbo of Fleury, ‘Epistola XIV’ (‘Dossier of canonical, patristic, and Roman law texts’) and Odoramnus of Sens, ‘Opusculum III’ (‘Collection of conciliar canons and decretals, Fathers of the Church and Roman law’): Kéry, Canonical Collections, p. 201.

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between secular and ecclesiastical government, just as did integration of canon law into secular law, those who invoked various laws were cognizant that they were appealing to a set of distinct legacies of ecclesiastical and secular laws. Balancing the inclination to cite Roman law was one of the most interesting developments in canon law during the Carolingian period: an effort to use scriptural referents to supply a fully Christian rationale for legal rules and precedents. Like other trends in Carolingian canon law, the practice was not wholly innovative: interest in using scriptural texts as legal sources produced the late antique Collatio legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum (‘Collation of Mosaic and Roman laws’, known to medi­eval readers as the Lex Dei quam praecipit Dominus ad Moysen — ‘the Law of God which the Lord taught to Moses’), which was used by Hincmar of Rheims, the early medi­eval Liber ex lege Moysi (Book from the law of Moses), the Collectio canonum Hibernensis, and other canonistic texts comprising a notable quantity of Scripture.103 Among the most striking of such compilations are the Pseudo-Isidorian decretals, in which biblical verses are often pressed to serve as unexpected, and sometimes convoluted, bases for juridical reasoning.104 The prowess of Carolingian exegetes who had been generating a considerable quantity of scriptural commentaries may have instilled intellectual habits that were then transferred to often deft associations of legal principles and biblical ethics. The final form of publication of the surviving acta of the Carolingian councils was larded with scriptural citations.105 In the same vein, patristic or other extra-canonical sources entered canon law texts as authoritative citations. Although these paracanonical sources never gained recognition by modern scholars as ‘law’, they were an important substrate in post-Carolingian canon law.106 The very exercise of relating scriptural, patristic, and extra-canonical texts to conciliar decisions, judicial opinions, and precepts from Roman laws not   103 Frakes, Compiling the ‘Collatio Legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum’; Meeder, ‘The Liber ex lege Moysi: Notes and Text’; Wasserschleben, Die irische Kanonensammlung. For an insightful analysis of Merovingian use of Scripture as an argumentative device but not a juridical norm, see Basdevant-Gaudemet, ‘La Bible dans les canons des conciles mérovingiens’. See also Mor, ‘La bibbia e il diritto canonico’; Gaudemet, ‘La Bible dans les Collections canoniques’.   104 Zechiel-Eckes, ‘Politische Exegese und falsches Recht’; Chatillon, ‘Le verset biblique le plus souvent cité par les Fausses Décrétales’; Firey, ‘Lawyers and Wisdom’.   105 For an excellent study of the biblical frameworks in Carolingian canon law, see Heydemann, ‘The People of God and the Law’.   106 Collections that have been registered as incorporating patristic excerpts are, e.g., ‘Epistola XIV of Abbo of Fleury’, a ‘dossier of canonical, patristic, and Roman law texts’ (Kéry, Canonical Collections, p. 201); the ‘Collection of Laon 201 and St Petersburg Q.v.II.5’, described as ‘excerpts from the works of the Fathers of the Church, conciliar canons, papal decrees, penitential books, other canon law collections, didactic writings about the sacraments and liturgical formularies’ (Kéry, Canonical Collections, p. 166); the ‘Collectio 2 librorum’, of which the first book comprises patristic texts and the second Gallican councils (Kéry, Canonical Collections, p. 164); and the ‘Collection “pro causa iniustae excommunicationis”’, a collection of ‘fourteen patristic and biblical excerpts’ (Kéry, Canonical Collections, p. 86).

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only wove a tighter web of theocracy, but also created a level of abstraction and doctrinal reflection on the political and theo­logical order that canon law implicitly delineated. In numerous treatises, and refracted in art, artefacts, liturgy, architecture, and literature, a complex relation between imperial and ecclesiastical power was traced. The hierarchical schemes that mirrored celestial hierarchies and seemed embedded in the natural world had to accommodate this dualism.107 Growing out of the Gelasian formula, ‘Duo quippe sunt …’, Carolingian formulations identified the imperial sovereign as a minister of the Church, subject to priests, obliged to deliver justice, charged with advancing the welfare of the Church and all its members, but not a priest himself. Although admonished not to slip into tyranny, the sovereign’s liability to be judged by others was not stated: except in instances of ‘voluntary’ self-abasement in penance, the adage ‘nemo principem iudicat’, famously applied to popes, held.108 The question of papal status as a counterpoint to the political theories shaped in negotiation between Carolingian rulers and the Carolingian episcopate is thus an important one that merits further investigation.109 Although Carolingian clergy and royalty communicated with popes and treated the papacy as the appellate court for ecclesiastical cases, they were seemingly not inclined to treat the decisions of living or recently deceased popes as having the legal value of more ancient decretals, with the letters of Nicholas excepted.110 The great expositor of the biblical framework for medi­eval law and political theory, Walter Ullman, argued that ‘“the finis”’, the “telos”, the raison d’être of the Roman [Carolingian] emperor was […] interlocked with papal ideo­logy’.111 A rather different depiction of Carolingian political theory and ecclesio­logy, however, was offered by Karl Morrison, who emphasized instead the plenitude of royal power and the conciliarist ecclesio­logy of Frankish bishops, not entirely in accord with papal monism.112   107 On the intellectual referent of celestial hierarchies applied in Carolingian understandings of worldly order, see Iogna-Prat, ‘Penser l’Église, penser la société après le Pseudo-Denys l’Aréopagite’. For a superb study of the infusion in the Carolingian Empire of the celestial hierarchies through the defining text of Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, see Lapidge, Hilduin of Saint-Denis, pp. 64–80.   108 ‘et cavendum summopere est principibus, ut, qui a nemine nunc inde iudicantur, ne in futuro iuditio ab omnipotente deo gravius iudicentur’, Concilia aevi Karolini DCCCXLIII– DCCCLIX, ed. by Hartmann (Conc. Pavia, a. 850, c. XVI) p. 227. (And it is especially to be warned to princes, as they can now be judged by no one, lest they be judged gravely by omnipotent God at the judgement to come.)   109 Very stimulating direction is in Harder, Pseudoisidor und das Papsttum.   110 Jasper and Fuhrmann, Papal Letters in the Early Middle Ages, p. 111. On the ambiguous status of the pope in Carolingian conceptions of ecclesiastical power, see Gravel, Distances, rencontres, communications, pp. 205–06.   111 Ullman, The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages, p. 121. Half of this book is dedicated to Carolingian developments. Although out of fashion, overly schematic, and dogmatic, Ullman’s work remains valuable for his identification and readings of key sources, and set the terms of debate for much subsequent research.   112 Morrison, The Two Kingdoms. See also Thier, Hierarchie und Autonomie.

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What is clear is that the standard precepts protecting clergy from summons to secular courts were elaborated in Carolingian canon law, as were prescriptions for appellate processes, whether they were assigned to Crown, council, or papal Curia. The inevitable tensions in a dualistic system, however much the two powers were entangled, that would dominate the politics of subsequent centuries were well anticipated in the doctrinal foundations developed during the Carolingian period.113

Conclusions As part of the expansion of imperial sovereignty at both the theoretical level and also the level of territorial conquest, canon law accommodated the interests of Carolingian authorities in matters that straddled the boundaries of secular and canon law. The texts are replete with propositions and decisions relating to property and its transmission, tithes and taxes, and marriage and cloistering of women. Regulations intended to fortify the identity of the Carolingian kingdoms as ‘Christian’ detail the conditions, privileges, and immunities attached to clerical status, clarify the jurisdictional structure of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and also treat Jewish–Christian relations. Frequently, canons and commentaries addressed judicial procedure and the use and meaning of penance in any number of circumstances.114 The discourse of canon law was not, therefore, oriented around purely theoretical questions of ecclesio­logy. Those working with it were also pragmatists, who had found a large and extensible corpus that archbishops and bishops could use as the primary authority for governing their provinces and dioceses.115 While the success of dissemination and enforcement of the prescriptions and prohibitions may have been tenuous at times, the intensity of the idealism is striking. It is clear that an entire educational apparatus was imagined that, by efforts at the parochial level, would reach every Christian in the Carolingian domains.116 The canon law in the collections often ranges over matters pertaining to liturgy, teaching and preaching, credal formulations, examination   113 For a concise summation of Carolingian political theory and ecclesio­logy, see Gaudemet, Église et Cité, ‘II. Les Doctrines’, pp. 169–74.   114 For a convenient review of some of the topics treated in the canon law, see Hartmann, Kirche und Kirchenrecht um 900, pp. 191–283. Still enormously useful is Gaudemet, L’Église dans l’Empire Romain (iv–v siècles) as a wide-ranging study of many topics, their history, and implications in canon law. On women, marriage, and family in canon law, see especially Wemple, Women in Frankish Society, Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church, and Lynch, Christianizing Kinship.   115 For a comprehensive analysis of episcopal power and its limits during the period under discussion here, see Patzold, Episcopus. For varying assessment of the application of written regulations at the diocesan level, see Buck, Admonitio und Praedicatio and van Rhijn, Shepherds of the Lord. See also Austin, ‘Bishops and Religious Law, 900–1050’.   116 See Brown, ‘Introduction: The Carolingian Renaissance’.

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and approval of clergy, the problem of lay abbots, and prescriptions for generalized, Christian obedience. If not systematic, the canon law often has at least the quality of being programmatic. Whether or not clerical aspirations for both the spiritual and physical welfare — for care of the indigent was also a frequent topic in canonistic debates — of the Christians (nominal or otherwise) in the Carolingian kingdoms were effectively implemented is, not surprisingly, a difficult and unresolved question. The statutory prescriptions for Christian education in faith and mores certainly reveal consistent, thorough, and widespread attention to the effort to extend the norms of canon law to every locale, and the plethora of surviving manu­scripts suggests that perhaps the intention was at least partially realized. A number of manu­scripts appear to have been designed to serve local priests as well as suffragan bishops as general, practical handbooks. At every level at which canon law operated, however, from the village church to the imperially convoked assembly, the processes are obscured by practices that relied heavily upon oral, rather than written, participation.117 As for so many questions in the study of Carolingian canon law, it is necessary to exercise much caution, lest one slip into making an argument from silence. Just as philo­logists and students of medi­eval literature grow accustomed to the deviations from the standards of classical Latin — as represented in the protocols of modern, critical editions — and the variable medi­eval Latin in manu­scripts, fondly known as ‘wild Latin’, so should legal historians perhaps accept a degree of wildness in the nature, content, structure, and use of Carolingian canon law. The conservation and application of canonistic knowledge was not concentrated in a formally organized bureaucracy answering to or directed by a central authority; its academic study was not concentrated in a limited number of universities; its mastery was not exemplified by a handful of prominent teachers or glossators; its texts were many and multiplying. It would seem fruitful to set aside the modern approbation of systematization, codification, and regularized citation practices, and to explore instead the canon law of the Carolingian Empire on its own terms. The order of law for Carolingians lay not in a strict, codified canon of legislative and interpretative authorities, but in law’s relation to a Christian sense of equity, truth, and salvific discipline.118 The Carolingian proclivity for conserving older texts and the energy directed to generating new ones resulted in a vast accumulation of canons that reflected a wide range of circumstances, problems, solutions,

  117 For an important contribution on the relation of orality and legal practice, see Rio, Legal Practice and the Written Word in the Early Middle Ages.   118 Cf. Wagschal, Law and Legality in the Greek East, p. 7: ‘In effect […] Byzantine law may be understood as a grand literary enterprise, focused on justice, and with laws constituting one (and only one) potential pool of literary tools for constructing and effecting justice. Other tools can also be employed, including any type of reasoned argument, a moral precept, or a citation from classical authors. Ultimately, as [Dieter] Simon puts it, one never so much argues “from” the law as “with” the laws’.

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premises, and reasoning. The popularity of some canons exceeded that of others, and also waxed and waned, so the topo­graphy of canon law was in perpetual flux, but some constancy emerged in the use of common texts as reference and teaching compendia. The exasperation expressed by later medi­ eval compilers regarding the excessive number and apparent inconsistency in the corpus of early medi­eval canon law is a trope that reflects the range and complexity of the canon law available in the Carolingian period. As a trope, it also fails to reflect the interest of practitioners in litigation or legal argument, for whom a large corpus of existing law and inconsistencies in its interpretation are the very foundations of fine argument and legal strategy. Carolingian canon law was well enough developed and inscribed that educated clerics could pen documents setting forth their perspectives and defending their interests with the citation of written law, with the expectation that their readers would be equipped to read and respond in kind. We should not allow habits of cynicism about legal processes and the technicalities of law to cause us to forget that focused and extensive engagement with the promulgation, production, and study of law arises from a deep conviction, held somewhere by someone, that law is the instrument of justice.119 Carolingian rulers and their episcopal advisers repeatedly and frequently framed their hopes for the Carolingian polity as a desire that the Carolingian Empire be a place where justice was done, however undomesticated and experimental their array of legal resources might appear to modern eyes.

  119 See the very important articles by Oudart, ‘Le roi franc et l’idée de justice aux époques merovingienne et carolingienne’; Le Jan, ‘Justice royale et pratiques sociales dans le royaume franc au ixe siècle’; and Nelson, ‘Kings with Justice, Kings without Justice’.

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Biblio­graphy Manu­scripts and Archival Sources, and other unedited material Berlin, Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, MS Lat. qu. 931 Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, MS Hamilton 132 Freiburg i. Breisgau, Universitätsbibliothek, MS 7 Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, MS Aug. XVIII Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, MS Aug. CIII Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, MS Aug. CXLII London, British Library, MS Arundel 393 Merseburg, Bibliothek des Domstifts, MS 104 Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MS S 33 sup Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS Clm. 5508 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS Clm. 6242 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France [BnF], MS fonds latin 1452 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France [BnF], MS fonds latin 1536 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France [BnF], MS fonds latin 3851 Rome, Biblioteca Vallicelliana, MS T. XVIII St Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 243 St Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 614 St Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 670 St Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 676 St Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 679 St Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 728 Sankt Paul im Lavanttal, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 6/1 Sankt Paul im Lavanttal, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 7/1 Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, MS HB.VI.105 Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, MS HB.VII.62 Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana [BAV], MS Pal. lat. 485 Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana [BAV], MS Pal. lat. 574 Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana [BAV], MS Reg. lat. 421 Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana [BAV], MS Vat. lat. 5748 Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana [BAV], MS Vat. lat. 5751 Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana [BAV], MS Vat. lat. 5845 Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare, MS CXI Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS lat. 361 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS lat. 489 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS lat. 2141 Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Helmst. 1062

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Raddatz, Alfred, ‘Zur Vorgeschichte der Epistula seu Liber contra Judaeos Amulos von Lyon’, in Ecclesia peregrinans: Josef Lenzenweger zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. by Karl Amon and others (Vienna: Verband der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaften Österreichs, 1986), pp. 53–57 Radding, Charles M., and Antonio Ciaralli, The Corpus Iuris Civilis in the Middle Ages: Manu­scripts and Transmission from the Sixth Century to the Juristic Revival, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 147 (Leiden: Brill, 2007) Reynolds, Philip Lyndon, Marriage in the Western Church: The Christianization of Marriage during the Patristic and Early Medi­eval Periods, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, 24 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994) Reynolds, Roger E., ‘Canon Law Collections in Early Ninth-Century Salzburg’, in Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress of Medi­eval Canon Law, Salamanca 21–25 September 1976, ed. by Stephan Kuttner and Kenneth Pennington, Monumenta Iuris Canonica, ser. C, 6 (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1980), pp. 15–34 Rhijn, Carine van, Shepherds of the Lord: Priests and Episcopal Statutes in the Carolingian Period, Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, 6 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007) Rio, Alice, Legal Practice and the Written Word in the Early Middle Ages: Frankish Formulae, c. 500–1000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) Rolker, Christof, ed., New Discourses in Medi­eval Canon Law Research: Challenging the Master Narrative, Medi­eval Law and its Practice, 28 (Leiden: Brill, 2019) Roumy, Franck, ‘Remarques sur l’œuvre canonique d’Abbon de Fleury’, in Abbon, un abbé de l’an mil, ed. by Annie Dufour and Gillette Labory, Bibliothèque d’histoire culturelle du Moyen Age, 6 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 311–41 Ryan, Joseph J., ‘Observations on the Pre-Gratian Canonical Collections: Some Recent Work and Present Problems’, in Congres de droit canonique medi­eval, Louvain et Bruxelles 22–26 Juillet 1958, Bibliothèque de la RHE, 33 (Louvain: Bibliothèque de l’Université, Bureaux de la Revue, 1959), pp. 88–103 Salrach, Josep Maria, ‘L’esprit de la res publica dans la législation du Charlemagne’, Cahiers du Centre d’histoire médiévale, 3 (2005), 255–69 Schäfer, Irmhild, ‘Freising und Lyon: Bucheinbände des 9. Jahrhunderts in Wickeltechnik aus Peripherie und Zentrum des Karolingerreichs’, in Régionalisme et Internationalisme: Problèmes de Paléo­graphie et de Codico­ logie du Moyen Age. Actes du xve Colloque du Comité International de Paléo­ graphie Latine (Vienne, 13–17 septembre 2005), ed. by Otto Kresten and Franz Lackner, Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Schrift- und Buchwesen des Mittelalters, IV/5; Denkschriften der Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, philo­logisch-historische Klasse, 364 (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2009), pp. 353–64 Schaff, Philip, and David Schley Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. iv (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908) Schellhass, Karl, ‘Wissenschaftliche Forschungen unter Gregor XIII; für di Neuausgabe des Gratianisches Dekrets’, in Papsttum und Kaisertum: Forschungen zur politischen geschichte und geisteskultur des mittelalters Paul Kehr

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zum 65. Geburtstag dargebracht, ed. by A. Brackmann (Munich: Verlag der Münchner drucke, 1926), pp. 674–90 Schieffer, Rudolph, ‘Karl der Große und die Einsetzung der Bischöfe im Franken­ reich’, Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters, 63 (2007), 451–67 Schmitz, Gerhard, Die Kapitulariensammlung des Ansegis: Collectio capitularium Ansegisi, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Capitularia regum francorum, 1 (Hannover: Hahn, 1996) —— , ‘Die Waffe der Fälschung zum Schutz der Bedrängten? Bemerkungen zu gefälschten Konzils- und Kapitularientexten’, in Fälschungen im Mittelalter: Internationaler Kongreß der Monumenta Germaniae Historica. München, 16.–19. September 1986, vol. ii: Gefälschte Rechtstexte: Der bestrafte Fälscher, Schriften der Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 33.2 (Hannover: Hahn, 1988), pp. 79–110 Siecienski, A. Edward, The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy, Oxford Studies in Historical Theo­logy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) Siems, Harald, ‘Zum Weiterwirken römischen Rechts in der kulturellen Vielfalt des Frühmittelalters’, in Leges – Gentes – Regna: Zur Rolle von germanischen Rechtsgewohnheiten und lateinischer Schrifttradition bei der Ausbildung der frühmittelalterlichen Rechtskultur, ed. by Gerhard Dilcher and Eva-Marie Distler (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2006), pp. 231–55 Sommar, Mary E., The Correctores Romani: Gratian’s Decretum and the Counter-Reformation Humanists, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Sonderforschungsbereich 573 ‘Pluralisierung und Autorität in der Frühen Neuzeit’, 19 (Munich: Lit, 2009) —— , ‘Hincmar of Reims and the Canon Law of Episcopal Translation’, Catholic Historical Review, 88 (2002), 429–45 Spilling, Herrad, ‘Das Fuldaer Skriptorium zur Zeit des Hrabanaus Maurus’, in Hrabanus Maurus, Lehrer, Abt und Bischof, ed. by Raymund Kottje and Harald Zimmermann, Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz, Abhandlungen der geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse, Einzelveröffentlichungen, 4 (Mainz: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur; Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1982), pp. 165–81 Tafel, S., ‘The Lyons Scriptorium’, in Paleo­graphia Latina, ed. by W. M. Lindsay, vol. ii, St Andrews University Publications, 16 (London: Humphrey Milford, 1923), pp. 66–73, and vol. iv, St Andrews University Publications, 20 (London: Humphrey Milford, 1925), pp. 40–70 Tate, Joshua C., ‘Roman and Visigothic Procedural Law in the False Decretals of Pseudo-Isidore’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Kanonistische Abteilung, 90 (2004), 510–19 Theiner, August, Disquisitiones criticae in praecipuis canonum et decretalium collectiones seu Sylloges Gallandianae dissertationum de vetustis canonum collectionibus continuation, in Appendix prima: Documenta quae Gratianei Decreti emendationem respiciunt (Rome: Collegio Urbano, 1836) Thier, Andreas, Hierarchie und Autonomie: Regelungstradition der Bischofbestellung in der Geschichte des kirchlichen Wahlrechts bis 1140, Recht im ersten Jahrtausend, 1 /

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Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte, 257 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Kloster­mann, 2011) Ubierna, Pablo, ‘Reflexions sobre el adopcionismo, la christianidad oriental y la escato­logia imperial carolingia’, Temas medi­evales, 10 (2001, for 2000–2001), 95–116 Ubl, Karl, and Daniel Ziemann, eds, Fälschung als Mittel der Politik? Pseudoisidor im Licht der neuen Forschung. Gedenkschrift für Klaus Zechiel-Eckes, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Studien und Texte, 57 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2015) Ullman, Walter, The Carolingian Renaissance and the Idea of Kingship: The Birkbeck Lectures, 1968–9 (London: Methuen, 1969) —— , The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages: A Study in the Ideo­logical Relation of Clerical to Lay Power, 2nd edn (London: Methuen, 1962) —— , Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages, 4th edn (London: Methuen, 1978) Vezin, Jean, ‘Dix reliures carolingiennes provenant de Freising’, Bulletin de la Société nationale des antiquaires de France, 1987 (1985), 264–74 —— , ‘Le scriptorium d’Auxerre’, in L’École carolingienne d’Auxerre de Murethach à Remi, 830–908, ed. by Dominique Iogna-Prat, Colette Jeudy, and Guy Lobrichon (Paris: Beauchesne, 1991), pp. 57–58 Vogel, Cyrille, Les ‘Libri Paenitentiales’, Typo­logie des Sources du Moyen Âge Occidental, 27 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1978; rev. by Alan Frantzen, 1985) —— , ‘Pénitence et excommunication dans l’Eglise ancienne et durant le haut Moyen Age’, Concilium, 107 (1975), 11–22 Wagschal, David, Law and Legality in the Greek East: The Byzantine Canonical Tradition, 381–883 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) Wallace-Hadrill, J. M., The Frankish Church, Oxford History of the Christian Church (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) Wemple, Suzanne Fonay, Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister, 500 to 900 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981) Wirbelauer, Eckhard, ‘Zum Umgang mit kanonistischer Tradition im frühen Mittelalter: Drei Wirkungen der Symmachianischen Documenta’, in Schriftlichkeit frühen Mittelalter, ed. by Ursula Schaefer, ScriptOralia, 53 (Tübingen: Narr, 1993), pp. 207–28 Wolfram, Herwig, ‘Arn von Salzburg und Karl der Große’, in 1200 Jahre Erzbistum Salzburg: Die älteste Metropole im deutschen Sprachraum. Beiträge des Internationalen Kongresses in Salzburg vom 11. bis 13. Juni 1998, ed. by Heinz Dopsch, Peter F. Kramml, and Alfred Stephan Weiß, Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Salzburger Landeskunde, 18 (Salzburg: Gesellschaft für Salzburger Landeskunde, 1999), pp. 21–32 Wood, Ian, ‘Disputes in Late Fifth- and Sixth-Century Gaul: Some Problems’, in The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medi­eval Europe, ed. by Wendy Davies and Paul Fouracre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 7–22 Zechiel-Eckes, Klaus, ‘Auf Pseudoisidors Spur. Oder: Versuch, einen dichten Schleier zu lüften’, in Fortschritt durch Fälschungen? Ursprung, Gestalt und Wirkungen der pseudoisidorischen Fälschungen. Beiträge zum gleichnamigen

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Symposium an der Universität Tübingen vom 27. und 28. Juli 2001, ed. by Wilfried Hartmann and Gerhard Schmitz, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Studien und Texte, 31 (Hannover: Hahn, 2002), pp. 1–28 —— , ‘Ein Blick in Pseudoisidors Werkstatt: Studien zum Entstehungsprozeß der falschen Dekretalen. Mit einem exemplarischen editorischen Anhang (Pseudo-Julius an die orientalischen Bischöfe, JK +196)’, Francia, 28 (2001), 37–90 —— , Die Concordia canonum des Cresconius: Studien und edition, 2 vols, Freiburger Beiträge zur mittelalterlichen Geschichte, 5 (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 1992) —— , Fälschung als Mittel politischer Auseinandersetzung: Ludwig der Fromme (814–40) und die Genese der pseudoisidorischen Dekretalen, NordrheinWestfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste, Vorträge G 428 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2011) —— , Florus von Lyon als Kirchenpolitiker und Publiziste, Quellen und Forschungen zum Recht im Mittelalter, 8 (Stuttgart: Thorbecke, 1999) —— , ‘Politische Exegese und falsches Recht: Zu Rezeption und persuasiver Verwendung des Bibeltextes in den pseudoisidorischen Dekretalen’, in Präsenz und Verwendung der Heiligen Schrift im christlichen Frühmittelalter, ed. by Patrizia Carmassi (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2008), pp. 117–37

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Carolingian Imperial Bio­graphy and the Memory of Spain While the royal annalists served, in the words of Paul Dutton, as the ‘watchers of the empire’, Carolingian bio­graphers contributed a different set of written sources for the period.1 The imperial reign of Louis the Pious, who succeeded his father Charlemagne in 814, provided the backdrop for an unparalleled flowering of bio­graphical writing that proved fundamental to the writing of history in the medi­eval West for centuries to come.2 Over a relatively short period in the first half of the ninth century, perhaps as short as twelve years, a spate of works of Carolingian imperial bio­graphy appeared: Einhard, Vita Karoli (817–829?),3 Ermoldus Nigellus (hereafter Ermold), In honorem Hludowici (827), Thegan, Gesta Hludowici Imperatoris (836), and the anonymous Astronomer, Vita Hludowici Imperatoris (840–841) which was completed after Louis’s death in 840.4 In addition to inspiring ongoing discussions about their content, these bio­graphies have also left scholars to ponder both the reasons for this remarkable turn towards bio­graphy and then the seemingly precipitous turn away.5 Whatever the explanations might be,

 1 Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming, p. 88.  2 Innes and McKitterick, ‘The Writing of History’, pp. 203, 204; Hageneier, Jenseits der Topik; Depreux, ‘Poètes et historiens’, p. 313.  3 The dating of the Vita Karoli is disputed, with estimates ranging from around 817 to late in the 820s. See Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, ed. and trans. by Noble, pp. 10–11; McKitterick, Charlemagne, p. 11. A date closer to 829 seems to be favoured of late, but Iogna-Prat suggests a date not long after 817: Iogna-Prat, ‘La construction bio­graphique du souverain carolingien’, p. 200.  4 Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, ed. by Holder-Egger; Ermold the Black, In honorem Hludowici Pii, ed. and trans. by Faral; Thegan, Gesta Hludowici imperatoris, ed. and trans. by Tremp; Astronomer, Vita Hludowici, ed. and trans. by Tremp. See generally Berschin, Bio­graphie und Epochenstil im lateinischen Mittelalter; Tremp, ‘Thegan und Astronomus’, p. 695. I have not included Notker the Stammerer and the Poeta Saxo, whose works Noble refers to as ‘commemorations of Charlemagne’, Noble, ‘Greatness Contested and Confirmed’, p. 13.  5 Ganz, ‘The Astronomer’s Life of Louis the Pious’, p. 131; Iogna-Prat, ‘La construction Anne Latowsky ([email protected]) is Associate Professor of French at the University of South Florida. She is the author of Emperor of the World: Charlemagne and the Construction of Imperial Authority, 800–1229 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013) and is currently writing a book on the historio­ graphical legacy of Roncesvalles. Carolingian Experiments, ed. by Matthew Bryan Gillis, ISMAR 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022) pp. 123–148 10.1484/M.ISMAR-EB.5.127248

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the bio­graphies of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious that emerged during this burst of literary production laid the groundwork for some of medi­eval Europe’s most enduring narratives. One such narrative is the disaster at Roncesvalles.6 Charlemagne’s misfortune in the Pyrenees went from obscurity to relative prominence in the ninth century, and therefore provides an ideal opportunity to observe the evolution of a single event, featured both implicitly and explicitly in the bio­graphies of both emperors. The defeat was a setback in the military career of the then-king Charles that had not been mentioned during his lifetime in the royal annals yet went on to become one of the most widely repeated stories of the European Middle Ages. An examination of how bio­graphers manipulated the memory of 778 reveals an unappreciated link between the rise of imperial bio­graphy and the resuscitation in Carolingian circles of the story of the ambush of Frankish troops in the Pyrenees. Einhard’s decision to highlight Charles’s failure in Spain in a catalogue of military successes occurred well after the emperor’s death, at a time when its emergence would have been read against the backdrop of the reign of his son. For poets and bio­graphers engaging in the rhetoric of praise for Louis the Pious, which in some cases included requisite attention to military successes, there was far less to say about expansion of the realm than there had been for Charles. This helps to explain why Carolingian encomiasts showed particular interest in the siege and capture of Barcelona in 801 when Louis was still a young sub-king of Aquitaine, a title that he had held since the age of three.7 When the Carolingian encounters with rebellious Muslim-held cities in the Spanish March in 778 and 801 are taken together, it becomes clear that the revival of Charles’s one infamous defeat had provided a striking point of comparison between the fortunes of father and son. Louis had enjoyed success at Barcelona, while Charles’s campaign in Spain had been a rare instance when things had gone terribly wrong. The narrative of Roncesvalles, long seen as the fruit of seeds planted by Einhard and the royal annals, is better understood, therefore, as a complex product of the entirety, however short-lived, of the Carolingian experiment in imperial bio­graphy. Carolingian bio­graphy began with Einhard, the court scholar who created a secular, classicizing vita et conversatio of Charlemagne and his way of life. Rosamond McKitterick even goes so far as to say that through his bio­graphy, Einhard ‘could be said to have created Charlemagne’.8 The Vita Karoli proved unlike anything seen before in the post-Roman Latin West and introduced a

bio­graphique du souverain carolingien’, pp. 197–98; Berschin, Bio­graphie und Epochenstil im lateinischen Mittelalter, p. 337; Löwe, ‘Geschichtsschreibung der ausgehenden Karolingerzeit’, p. 11.  6 Gravel, Distances, rencontres, communications, pp. 275–76.  7 Godman, Poets and Emperors, pp. 112–18; Ottewill-Soulsby, ‘“Those Same Cursed Saracens”’, p. 417.  8 McKitterick, Charlemagne, p. 20.

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new kind of writing about contemporary Christian leaders.9 Although there existed models for bio­graphies of both pagan and Christian emperors from Suetonius to Eusebius, as well as other major literary models such as Sulpicius Severus’s fifth-century Vita Martini, the writing of specifically Carolingian imperial bio­graphy was indeed a new art and thus has been rightly deemed an experiment. Mayke de Jong, for instance, refers to Einhard’s Vita Karoli as a ‘daring experiment’ while McKitterick and Matthew Innes describe it as ‘one of the most novel works of the Carolingian renaissance’ and as a ‘new kind of historical writing’.10 With the exception of Einhard’s work, Carolingian imperial bio­graphies were of Louis the Pious, and apart from the portion of the Astronomer’s work completed after the emperor’s death, Louis’s bio­graphers wrote while their subject was still alive. Despite Einhard’s innovation in writing a secular bio­graphy, producers of Lives of Louis returned, to varying degrees, to more hagio­graphical models, presenting their subject as a pious exemplar of Christian rule. Yet as they shaped the image of the son of Charlemagne, the not-too-distant memory of his father loomed over these writers, as did the shadow of Einhard’s groundbreaking bio­graphy. The socio-political situation for would-be encomiasts was therefore far from simple to navigate, even during the less politically tumultuous years of Louis’s troubled reign. The modern study of the Carolingian past continues to be influenced by entrenched categorizations of sources as either secular or clerical, with secular examples including works such as the Annales regni Francorum and Einhard’s Vita Karoli, and Christian sources such as the Astronomer’s bio­graphy of Louis. De Jong examines the long-term reception of the short remark by Einhard in Chapter 19 of the Vita Karoli in which he states that Charlemagne had been unable to be without the company contubernium of his daughters, a statement that has led to conjecture about incest in the royal household. Refuting this suggestion, she calls for an end to the influence of the outdated secular/clerical binary as part of her larger call for more nuanced assessments of material gleaned from Carolingian bio­graphies.11 Similarly, Samuel Ottewill-Soulsby has noted stark differences in the presentations of Carolingian wars in Spain between those of Charlemagne and Louis. He points to the nature of the sources for both reigns as an explanation for why Charles’s military encounters in Spain have long been misconstrued as less religiously motivated than they actually were.12 In both cases, historians demonstrate how misinterpretation of the heavily bio­graphical Carolingian

 9 Ganz, ‘Einhard’s Charlemagne’, pp. 38–42; Tischler, Einharts ‘Vita Karoli’; Iogna-Prat, ‘La construction bio­graphique du souverain carolingien’, p. 199; Dutton, Charlemagne’s Courtier; Ganshof, The Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy, pp. 1–11; Innes, ‘The Classical Tradition in the Carolingian Renaissance’.  10 Innes and McKitterick, ‘The Writing of History’, p. 204; de Jong, The Penitential State, p. 67. See also Sot, ‘Au fondement du souvenir de Charlemagne’.  11 De Jong, ‘Einhard, the Astronomer, and Charlemagne’s Daughters’, pp. 555, 565.  12 Ottewill-Soulsby, ‘“Those Same Cursed Saracens”’, pp. 407–08, 426–27.

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sources can lead to flawed interpretations of the events and protagonists of the Carolingian world. Modern readings of the violent encounters between Charlemagne and Louis the Pious and Muslim-held cities in the Spanish March are also the result of centuries of layers of reception of the bio­graphical texts of the ninth century. These events, and especially Roncesvalles 778, come into far clearer focus when evaluated in context as products of the self-conscious practice of the new art of Carolingian imperial bio­graphy.

Roncesvalles, 778 Despite conflicting accounts, modern historians have been able to piece together the events of 778 in the mountain pass at Roncesvalles in the northern Pyrenees, near what is now Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in France.13 In 777 Charles had been sole king of the Franks for six years, since the death of his brother Carloman. Having secured control in Italy, he was fighting a bitter war with Widukind and the Saxons. Envoys from Muslim-held northern Spain arrived at Paderborn to propose an alliance with the increasingly imposing Frankish king against the emirate of Cordoba that controlled much of Spain. The envoys represented rebel leaders who governed northern cities including Barcelona and Zaragoza and were seeking help to control the region around the Ebro River. They proposed to the Franks some sort of protectorate over their cities and promised open gates and military alliance with Charles’s army when they arrived. The Frankish king had shown no interest in this area prior to the visit, and most likely hoped to merely create a buffer zone at the southern end of his kingdom and perhaps an area for missionizing.14 Charles agreed to help despite the extreme distance and mustered troops from all over his kingdom. For unclear reasons, the promise of alliance fell through, and the Franks were unable to enter the cities, including Zaragoza, as promised.15 With their siege unsuccessful and without allies, they returned north, destroying and pillaging the heavily Christian Basque city of Pamplona along the way. The subsequent ambush of his rearguard and baggage train in a narrow mountain pass by local Basques resulted in the deaths of his closest officers, whom Einhard famously names, including Hruodlandus. The event was, by most modern interpretations, a disaster, but contemporary sources from the reviser of the annals to Einhard to the Astronomer all engage in what Janet Nelson describes as rationalizing about what had gone wrong for Charlemagne.16

 13 See Irujo, Charlemagne’s Defeat in the Pyrenees, pp. 71–107; Nelson, King and Emperor, p. 170.  14 Chandler, Carolingian Catalonia, p. 58; See also Collins, Charlemagne, p. 67; Fried, Karl der Grosse, pp. 166–69.  15 Collins, Charlemagne, p. 67.  16 Nelson, King and Emperor, pp. 170–71; Goldberg, Struggle for Empire, p. 142.

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Barcelona, 801 After Charles’s coronation at Rome in 800, Louis developed a plan to make Barcelona the Carolingian seat of power of the Spanish March in his father’s new empire. When the Frankish army made inroads into Spain, the emir of Cordoba sent reinforcements north, but forces led by Duke William of Toulouse successfully besieged the city until the starving residents surrendered. Louis was then summoned to enter the city in triumph on Easter in 801.17 The success at Barcelona proved to be not only a rare achievement for Louis but also a rare territorial addition for the Carolingians after Christmas 800. Cullen Chandler notes the importance for Charlemagne of creating a kingdom of Aquitaine within his realm after the coronation, a move likely born of the failure at Zaragoza in 778.18 Carolingian expansion had come to a halt after 801, but as Nelson affirms, Louis was pious but not a pacifist and continued to fight various battles throughout his reign.19 Moreover, the governance of the Spanish March remained a site of frequent conflict for the son of Charlemagne.20 Of course, Carolingian imperial authority was not just a matter of war, as Jonathan Conant has elucidated in his analysis of a rhetorically complex letter written on behalf of Louis the Pious by Einhard around 829. The missive contains Louis’s quest for recognition of his authority from the people of Mérida, who had rebelled against the Umayyad leadership in a scenario that echoed Charlemagne’s promise of protection in 777 to the rebellious citizens of Iberian cities under Muslim rule at the porous and contested frontier of the Carolingian Empire.21 Charles’s mission had famously failed in the wake of betrayal, and in the case of Einhard’s letter there is no evidence of any actual Carolingian engagement with the people of Mérida in the late 820s. Yet, as Conant demonstrates, the letter fits the larger pattern of Carolingian efforts to expand their imperium into Muslim Spain despite a record of repeated failure.22 Needless to say, however, imperial ambitions in Iberia were not a locus of success for Carolingian bio­graphers. By the time the Astronomer was writing his praise-filled version of Louis’s life in 840, the siege of Barcelona was arguably Louis’s only major personal military achievement, which helps to explain his seemingly disproportionate focus on the event, just as it does Ermold’s.23 Both encomiasts chose to meet the generic expectation of  17 Chandler, Carolingian Catalonia, pp. 66–67.  18 Chandler, Carolingian Catalonia, p. 63; Tremp, ‘Zwischen Paderborn und Barcelona’, pp. 283–99.  19 Reuter, ‘The End of Carolingian Military Expansion’, p. 391; Nelson, ‘The Last Years of Louis the Pious’, p. 157.  20 Costambeys, Innes, and MacLean, The Carolingian World, p. 214; Ganshof, The Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy, p. 23.  21 Conant, ‘Louis the Pious and the Contours of Empire’; Noble, ‘Louis the Pious and the Frontiers of the Frankish Realm’, p. 338; Gravel, Distances, rencontres, communications, p. 256.  22 Conant, ‘Louis the Pious and the Contours of Empire’, pp. 343–44.  23 Conant, ‘Louis the Pious and the Contours of Empire’, pp. 358–59; Collins, ‘Pippin I and the

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celebrating a ruler’s deeds in war in spite of the limited material provided by Louis.24 In doing so, they shaped the long-term reception of the events in the Spanish March of both 778 and 801 for centuries to come.

Out of the Darkness The first iteration of the Annales regni Francorum (ArF), the production of which likely spanned from 741 to 793, had recounted a brief, rather colourless, tale of success on the Spanish campaign of 778. The royal annals were the most influential narrative of the realm and tended to emphasize the theme of Carolingian success and triumph, which might explain the failure to mention the ambush.25 The entry for 778 states that Charles had united his two armies at Zaragoza, received hostages from the two leaders who had originally sought his help, destroyed Pamplona, subjected the Spanish Basques and Navarrese, and then gone home to Francia.26 By 806, the Annales Mettensis priores (AMp), which were produced to justify the Divisio Regnorum between Charles’s sons in that year, reveal an evolving narrative, but still no evidence of any misfortune.27 In the AMp version, Charles had led an army to address the pleas of Christians in Spain who were ‘sub iugo sevissimorum Sarracenorum’ (under the yoke of the extremely harsh Saracens) and ‘victor in patriam reversus est’ (had gone home victorious).28 Ramón Menéndez Pidal, renowned for his work on the oral tradition of the event, accuses the Frankish annalists of lying in the name of adulation, and describes the short mendacious account of success in Spain as brièveté mensongère.29 The first source to offer a fuller and less triumphal description of the disaster in the Pyrenees appears in what is now known as the ‘revised’ version of the ArF, a rewriting which was undertaken for the years 741–801.30 The revision represents a significant rewriting of the original narrative of the rise of the Franks under the Carolingians during the half-century leading up to the imperial coronation. The date of the revision is unknown, with Kingdom of Aquitaine’, p. 379.  24 See Latowsky, ‘Foreign Embassies and Roman Universality’, pp. 31–32. For conventions of panegyric, see XII Panegyrici Latini, pp. 11–12; Eusebius, Life of Constantine, ed. and trans. by Cameron and Hall, p. 191.  25 McKitterick, Charlemagne, pp. 31, 36; Reimitz, History, Frankish Identity and the Framing of Western Ethnicity, pp. 337–38; Ganz, ‘Einhard’s Charlemagne’, p. 42.  26 ArF, ed. by Kurze, p. 50; Collins, ‘The “Reviser” Revisited’, p. 197; McKitterick, ‘Constructing the Past in the Early Middle Ages’, p. 116; Collins, Charlemagne, p. 67; Davis, Charlemagne’s Practice of Empire, p. 415.  27 AMp, ed. by von Simson, p. 67; McKitterick, ‘Political Ideo­logy in Carolingian Historio­ graphy’, p. 166; Evans, ‘Instructing Readers’ Minds in Heavenly Matter’, pp. 64–66.  28 ArF, ed. by Kurze, p. 50; AMp, ed. by von Simson, pp. 66–67.  29 Menéndez Pidal, La Chanson de Roland, pp. 201–03.  30 McKitterick, Charlemagne, p. 27; Reimitz, History, Frankish Identity and the Framing of Western Ethnicity, p. 418.

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proposed periods of composition ranging from not long after 801, to between 814 and 817, or as late as 829. McKitterick’s best guess for the arrival of the new version is around 817, just after the Ordinatio imperii.31 Whether the revision appeared in 801 or 829, the deaths of members of Charles’s inner circle in 778 were distant, the details perhaps largely forgotten, but nonetheless in living memory. In seeking to understand the emergence of the story in official circles, Menéndez Pidal theorized that although the event was long in the past, vernacular songs recounting the story were still in the air. In his scenario, court scholars would not have been able to suppress the power of the vox populi and ignore the available details.32 A better explanation, one requiring less conjecture, is that during the reign of Louis the Pious, the moulding of the image of the emperor through historio­graphical practice was shifting, with changing approaches to the annals and the rise of Carolingian bio­graphy. During that same period, the Spanish March was an ongoing headache for Louis the Pious, but also the site of his most glorious moment. Shifts in historio­graphical practice and contemporary political struggles both offer credible explanations for the re-emergence of the events of 778. Charles’s disaster at Roncesvalles functions not as a difficult memory imposed on the elites by popular demand, but rather as a rhetorically useful disaster for writers experimenting with bio­graphical forms. The revised ArF provide the first glimpse of how the memory of the disaster of 778 was beginning to be introduced as part of the historio­graphical programme of the realm. In an addition to the existing brief account in the ArF, the reviser describes an ambush of the Frankish troops and is concerned to explain how the Franks had been overcome in the mountains. The author offers as excuses the enemy’s superior knowledge of the territory, the difficult terrain, and the ‘genere inparis pugnae’ (unequal manners of fighting). The reviser then alludes to major personal losses for the king: In hoc certamine plerique aulicorum, quos rex copiis praefererat, interfecti sunt, direpta impedimenta et hostis propter notitiam locorum statim in diversa dilapsus est. Cuius vulneris accepti dolor magnam partem rerum feliciter in Hispania gestarum in corde regis obnubilavit. (In this encounter many of the courtiers whom the king had put in charge of the troops were killed, the baggage was stolen, and the enemies, thanks to their knowledge of the area, immediately slipped away in various directions. The pain of this wound that was endured clouded a great part of the deeds successfully carried out in Spain in the heart of the king.)33

 31 McKitterick, Charlemagne, p. 55.  32 Sholod, Charlemagne in Spain, p. 34; Menéndez Pidal, La Chanson de Roland, pp. 274–77.  33 ArF, ed. by Kurze, pp. 51, 53. Translation mine.

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The mood and style here are far more bio­graphical than those of the original annalist as the author ties the event to both the sentiments and memories of the king. This more personal approach may have even contributed to the now-rejected theory that Einhard himself had written the revised annals.34 The above passage moved the nineteenth-century French scholar Gaston Paris so much that he imagined that Charles himself had dictated the words, because who but Charlemagne, he asked, could reveal in this way the emotions in his great heart?35 As much as a reader might crave such a glimpse at the emperor’s vita interior, Paris’s image of the emperor recounting his grief to the annalist for the official record is poignant, yet unlikely.36 McKitterick, in addressing the rarity of discussions of fallen heroes in the Carolingian sources, includes Einhard’s mention of the events of 778, and suggests the potential influence of ritual singing of planctus.37 Both scenarios take the addition as a commemoration of a deeply human moment, yet Charlemagne had lost his men as much as five decades earlier, so the timing is curious. The reasons for the foregrounding of this long-silenced military reversal must surely lie elsewhere and are more likely related to the project of moulding the memory of Charlemagne in relation to the image of the imperial figure in power, Louis the Pious. The reviser’s revelation of Charles’s misfortune suggests twin motivations: first, to officially commemorate Charlemagne’s personal losses in Spain, and second, to rationalize his having been bested militarily. Both urges draw attention to the larger question of the nature of the changes wrought by the reviser of the annals. For Helmut Reimitz, the reviser returned to the era before the imperial coronation and rewrote those decades according to a reimagined future that replaced the centrality of Frankishness that had characterized the original ArF with a vision of the various peoples of the realm coming together under a shared Christian emperor.38 If we take the pathos-infused revelation of the disaster in the Pyrenees as part of this historio­graphical project, it becomes easier to see why the story evolved over the centuries into one of the primary episodes in the later, far more Christianized legendary life of Charlemagne. Moreover, if indeed the reviser was working after 814, then he was reshaping the memory of Charles as realm-builder not for Charles, but for Louis, who had been critical of his father after his death.39 Roger Collins rejects the idea that the revision itself was critical of Charlemagne, however, noting that there is no blame laid at the emperor’s feet for what happened.40 If

 34 Collins, ‘The “Reviser” Revisited’, p. 197.  35 Paris, Légendes du Moyen Age, pp. 4–5.  36 For the limits of bio­graphy for knowing early medi­eval interior life, see Nelson, ‘Writing Early Medi­eval Bio­graphy’, p. 130.  37 McKitterick, Charlemagne, p. 226.  38 Reimitz, History, Frankish Identity and the Framing of Western Ethnicity, pp. 412–14.  39 Noble, ‘Greatness Contested and Confirmed’, p. 4.  40 Collins, ‘The “Reviser” Revisited’, p. 198.

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anything, the addition to 778 seems sympathetic to Charles, as does Einhard’s evocation of the event. Yet just because Charles is not portrayed as personally responsible for what happened in Spain does not mean that the decision to publicize his misfortune after his death was not calculated to shed positive light on Louis the Pious. Since it is impossible to look to previous articulations of the story of 778, the only alternative is to look forward to the subsequent iterations to better understand why the reviser might have added such personal and humanizing details alongside the excuses for Charles’s military reversal. By extending the entry of 778, the annalist had provided new material from the official record for Einhard as the bio­grapher of Charles, whose version then influenced the bio­graphers of Louis. With the disaster now out in the open, those who sought to openly praise Charlemagne’s son, namely Ermold and the Astronomer, were able to juxtapose Charles’s misfortune with a rare moment of military success in Louis’s far less extraordinary military career.

Failure According to Einhard Although the reviser had seemingly reopened a long-silenced episode, Einhard’s version of what happened to the baggage train in the Pyrenees inaugurated the use of the disaster of 778 as a tool of Carolingian bio­graphy. The bio­grapher reports that while still at war with the Saxons, Charles had taken a large force to Spain and received the submissions of every town and fortification. This is not true, but it echoes the original ArF in their claims of success. He then tells a version of the story of the ambush that had been introduced by the reviser. On the way home, the Frankish baggage train was ambushed by treacherous Basques who killed the Franks who were present, including Eggihardus, Anshelmus, and Hruodlandus, and then made off with their possessions. Charles was unable to exact revenge because they dispersed, leaving no trace.41 Unlike the revised entry in the annals, Einhard gives the names of the dead and laments Charles’s inability to take revenge. Despite its inglorious outcome, the Spanish campaign appears in the Vita Karoli in the section that constitutes Einhard’s version of a catalogue of deeds in war according to the norms of Roman imperial bio­graphy. The campaign had added nothing to the realm of the betrayed king of the Franks, and yet Einhard chose to highlight it. This decision was likely influenced by his desire to emulate Suetonius. As an imitator of the Roman bio­grapher, the court scholar would have found in Suetonius’s life of Augustus a model for the discussion of defeat and personal loss, including a campaign gone wrong. In Chapter 23 of the Life of Augustus, he describes two disastrous events that occurred in Germany and led to the loss of men close to him.  41 Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, ed. by Holder-Egger, p. 12.

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After these ‘Graves ignominias cladesque duas’ (two shameful calamities), the emperor was so upset that he refused to cut his hair or beard and was prone to banging his head on the door and crying for his lost legions.42 Suetonius thus offered a classical model within imperial bio­graphy for a rare military defeat of a great emperor at the outer reaches of the empire that involved the death of officers. The revised annals had furnished Einhard with an official version of a tragedy for the Frankish leader that could be reframed as Charles’s Teutoburg, his own calamity in the wilderness. Yet Einhard, whose reliance on Suetonius shows deliberate independence, does not depict a distraught emperor, opting instead for excuses about how it had happened. Ironically, it is the reviser of the annals who had suggested strong emotions surrounding his personal losses. Cast as a literary choice, the disaster in the Pyrenees appears not as a matter of shame for Charles, but as a complex allusion to Augustus and to the Suetonian model of deeds in war, which include one humanizing failure. The Roman bio­grapher had not engaged in unbridled praise of his illustrious subject as a military leader, instead tempering the enumeration of victories with a moment of personal suffering. Einhard likewise depicts his subject in a moment of defeat, thereby showing him to be worthy of a parallel literary treatment to what was offered to Augustus. By the time Ermold, Thegan, and later, the Astronomer, wrote their Lives of Louis, the memory of the disaster of 778 had been inscribed belatedly into the official record and then reframed as implied praise in Einhard’s widely read bio­graphy. It fell to his followers, Louis’s bio­graphers, to decide how to mould the event for their own literary endeavours.

Ermold’s Poem in Honour of Emperor Louis The exiled poet Ermold came first in the series of bio­graphers of Louis and stands out as his most ardent encomiast, despite his lack of access to the emperor.43 Written from Strasbourg, the panegyric In honorem Hludowici is a plea to be allowed to return from exile to Aquitaine and the court of the emperor’s son, Pippin I.44 Ermold produced his verse bio­graphy of the emperor, the first Latin epic of the period on a secular theme, and delivered it to court in 827 or 828.45 The reason for his exile is not known, but despite his forced absence, the poet likely enjoyed an audience at the Aquitanian court of Pippin I. The work itself does not seem to have circulated widely,

 42 Suetonius, De vita Caesarum, ed. and trans. by Rolfe and Hurley, p. 181.  43 Bobrycki, ‘Nigellus, Ausulus’.  44 De Jong, The Penitential State, p. 90.  45 Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, ed. and trans. by Noble, p. 120; Innes and McKitterick, ‘The Writing of History’, p. 207.

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however, and certainly not to the degree of the other bio­graphies of Louis the Pious.46 Ermold’s fulsome praise begins with his address to Louis, whom he deems the greatest in wealth and military glory, and even greater in piety. A classicizing panegyrist, he commits fully, if playfully, to the image of Louis as bearer of arms and epic-style warrior.47 His poem celebrates two military events in detail, the siege of Barcelona in 801 and the defeat of the Breton warrior Murman in 818, turning both into glorious conquests worthy of hundreds of verses. Ermold uses most of Book i to celebrate Louis’s capture of Barcelona, including a description of Louis’s triumphal entrance into the Muslim-held city.48 By 828, the victory was well in the past, but certainly within living memory for many. The siege figures only briefly in the ArF; the annalist notes only that Barcelona was taken after two years of siege and does not mention Louis at all.49 This may be due in part to the fact that the events in Barcelona coincided with the more momentous news of Charles’s imperial coronation at Rome and its aftermath. Under those circumstances, occurrences at the edge of the empire would not necessarily have been a royal chronicler’s priority. Ermold, by contrast, chose to create a glorious chapter for Louis around this early military success. The In honorem had the obvious purpose of praising the emperor, yet the decision to recall past success in Spain must be considered alongside Louis’s struggles in the Spanish March at the time. There had been another ambush of Frankish troops as they returned from Pamplona in 824 that resulted in the imprisonment of two Frankish counts, an event that the ArF attribute to the treachery of the mountain people. Menéndez Pidal called this occurrence the other disaster of Roncesvalles.50 The ArF for 826 describe Louis’s fury at further treachery by the Saracens although he undertook no military action at the time. In 827 the annals show that Louis had dispatched his son Pippin, the king of Aquitaine, and the Frankish army to confront a rebellion in Barcelona. The Frankish troops failed and were chased out by Saracens, who burned and destroyed villages around Girona and Barcelona.51 The event led to major internal political strife, including the deposition of two counts whom the emperor blamed for the failed expedition.52 Describing it as the ‘Spanish debacle’, de Jong writes, ‘The fact that Louis’s former kingdom was

 46 Collins, ‘Pippin I and the Kingdom of Aquitaine’, p. 365; Godman, Poets and Emperors, p. 106.  47 Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming, p. 86; Depreux, ‘La pietas comme principe de gouvernement’; Falque, ‘Ermoldus Nigellus y el asedio’.  48 See Ottewill-Soulsby, ‘“Those Same Cursed Saracens”’, pp. 425–26.  49 ArF, ed. by Kurze, p. 116.  50 Menéndez Pidal, La Chanson de Roland, p. 207.  51 Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming, p. 86; ArF, ed. by Kurze, pp. 170–73; Collins, ‘Pippin I and the Kingdom of Aquitaine’, p. 379.  52 De Jong, The Penitential State, p. 148; Collins, ‘Pippin I and the Kingdom of Aquitaine’, pp. 378–79; Costambeys, Innes, and MacLean, The Carolingian World, p. 213.

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involved, and the territory where he himself had been victorious in the early 800s, can only have made matters worse’.53 Rachel Stone even characterizes Ermold’s emphasis on the Barcelona episode as tactless, given the increasing Saracen attacks in the area.54 Yet unlike Einhard, Ermold was not looking for a reason to bring to light instances of misfortune on the battlefield in the life of his subject. Rather than seeing Ermold’s extended commemoration of Barcelona as poorly timed, we should see it as a matter of limited options. Moreover, Louis had been physically absent from the conflict in 827, which while perhaps an indication of lack of leadership for some, could also serve to spare him an accusation of personal military failure.55 Barcelona 827 may have been a grim moment for his reign, but Barcelona 801, where he had been present, was nonetheless a memorable moment of particular glory for Louis and for the new empire, one that served the needs of a would-be epicist and panegyrist in need of a memorable feat of arms for his poem. Ermold begins his narrative of the siege of 801 by describing Barcelona as a rebel city, inhospitable to Frankish troops and ‘Maurorum votis adsociata magis’ (more inclined towards the desires of the Moors), and as a refuge for thieves from Spain.56 The poet then presents a speech by Duke William of Toulouse. William kneels before the young king: O lux Francorum, rex et pater, arma decusque, Qui meritis patres vincis et arte tuos, Virtus celsa tibi et, rector, sapientia, magne, Concordi voto patris ab amne meant. (O light of the Franks, king and father, distinguished in arms, you best your ancestors in merit and skill. Great ruler, the highest virtue and wisdom flow in harmony to you from the source, your father.)57 In 801, when the drama depicted in the poem takes place, Charlemagne is very much alive. In the late 820s, for the audience of the poem, he had joined the ranks of the ancestors whom Louis was meant to outperform. William’s declaration that Louis is superior to all who came before him is central to the rhetorical dynamic of the poem, which compares the son to the father both implicitly and explicitly. Throughout the poem, Ermold refers to Louis as the ‘son of ’ or the ‘offspring of ’ Charles in what seems like worshipful respect for the father, yet he frequently engages in one-upmanship on behalf of Louis.

 53 De Jong, The Penitential State, p. 39.  54 Stone, Morality and Masculinity in the Carolingian Empire, p. 55.  55 See Gravel, Distances, rencontres, communications, p. 327 and ch. 5 in general.  56 Ermold the Black, In honorem Hludowici Pii, ed. and trans. by Faral, i. 101–02 (p. 12); Ottewill-Soulsby, ‘“Those Same Cursed Saracens”’, pp. 425–26.  57 Ermold the Black, In honorem Hludowici Pii, ed. and trans. by Faral, i. 174–77 (p. 18); translation mine.

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For the exiled poet, winning in Spain is a primary example of how the son outshines the father. Ermold does not directly refer to 778, but rather uses verbal echoes and allusions to recall the disaster in the context of Louis’s victory. At verse 90, Ermold makes his first allusion to Charles’s defeat by praising the young Louis for having beaten the Basques. Louis did not just best them, though, ‘Wascones rabidos domuit pius arte magistra | Deque lupis torvis progeneravit oves’ (The pious ruler tamed the rabid Basques with a teacher’s skill, and he brought forth sheep from fierce wolves).58 Given the focus in both the revised ArF and the Vita Karoli on how the Franks under Charles had been bested, robbed, and massacred by the treacherous Basques, his assertion that Louis had outsmarted them should be read with the subtext that the son had achieved what the father could not. William’s speech had primed the reader to catch such a reference with his praise-filled claim about Louis surpassing all his ancestors. Godman sees the repeated references to Louis as offspring of Charles as part of a portrait of obedience that affirms the fitting nature of the succession.59 While this is certainly true, the poet nonetheless uses the parallel father/son fortunes in Spain as a mechanism of praise for the young emperor, who is meant not only to take up the imperial title, but to surpass its previous holder. Ermold creates an entire dramatic scene around the delivery of plunder from Barcelona to Charles after the successful siege. The Basques had stolen everything from the Frankish baggage train in 778, the reviser had revealed. It is significant, therefore, that the poet depicts in detail the objects that the Franks deliver to him, including weapons, breastplates, clothing, and helmets as gifts to the emperor, a visual manifestation of the son’s accomplishment. The reviser of the annals had revealed that Charles’s baggage train (stuffed with the spoils of his pillaging of the Basque city of Pamplona, we may presume) had not made it back to Frankish territory on the return to the north. For the delivery of plunder to Charles, Ermold uses direct speech to announce a success for Louis that recalls the misfortune of his father. When Bigo, another Toulousain count, tells the emperor about his son’s victory, he announces that Louis sends ‘Munera, quae gladio, scuto propioque lacerto | Extulit a Mauris victor habenda sibi’ (These gifts that he [Louis] as the victor won for himself from the Moors with his sword and shield and blows. He also sends you the king of the city that he took by force of arms).60 Despite what the ArF and Einhard had claimed, aside from pillaging Pamplona, Charles had no military success in Spain and had been prevented from pursuing victory  58 Ermold the Black, In honorem Hludowici Pii, ed. and trans. by Faral, i. 92–93 (p. 10); Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, ed. and trans. by Noble, p. 130.  59 Godman, Poets and Emperors, p. 113; Costambeys, Innes, and MacLean, The Carolingian World, p. 211.  60 Ermold the Black, In honorem Hludowici Pii, ed. and trans. by Faral, i. 586–87 (p. 46); Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, ed. and trans. by Noble, pp. 140–41.

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by the closing of the gates. In stark terms, Bigo praises Louis for his military accomplishment and personal victory. The poem shows Louis achieving everything that Charles had not been able to in Spain: taking a Moorish city, being received as a victor through open gates, panduntur portae, and coming home with plundered treasure, and with his inner circle still alive.61 Ermold continues his comparisons between father and son in Book ii in his presentation of the passage of the realm from Charles to Louis with the arrival of the pope for his coronation at Rheims in 816. The poet depicts Louis as a sort of priest-king, who in contrast to his warring father, belliger ipse pater, presides over a pious realm.62 Although he celebrates Louis without reservation as a bearer of arms in Book i, Ermold shifts panegyric themes from deeds in war to deeds in peace in Book ii.63 He allows that Charles had built up his kingdom through arms and was eager for war at a time when vices had multiplied everywhere like dense weeds in his realm. But Louis had come along and cut them down.64 Not only is Charles depicted as too keen for battle, but it takes his son Louis to bring peace and morality to the realm. This underlying message of the success of the son where the father failed runs through the work, culminating in the fourth book in which the implication of superiority becomes an assertion. Ermold speaks directly to Louis after recounting the conversion and submission of Harald and the Danes in 826.65 In his address to the emperor, the poet celebrates peaceful additions to Louis’s realm, while recalling what his father had not been able to accomplish: Haec, Hludowice, Deo das tu quoque lucra potenti, Et socias regnis inclita regna tuis; Arma patrum nullo quae non valuere duello, Sponte sua, capere, te modo regna petunt; Quod nec Roma potens tenuit nec Francica jura, Tu retines Christi nomine cuncta, pater. (Louis, you gave this gain to almighty God and also joined distinguished realms to your own. Kingdoms that your father’s arms were unable to take by any contest offer themselves to you willingly. You, father, take in hand in the name of Christ everything that neither Roman power nor Frankish law had held.)66 There is no mention of Spain here, to be sure, and Louis had never truly added Spain to the Frankish realm either. The victory at Barcelona had  61 Ermold the Black, In honorem Hludowici Pii, ed. and trans. by Faral, i. 560 (p. 44).  62 Ermold the Black, In honorem Hludowici Pii, ed. and trans. by Faral, ii. 838 (p. 66).  63 Latowsky, Emperor of the World, p. 24.  64 Ermold the Black, In honorem Hludowici Pii, ed. and trans. by Faral, ii. 839–41 (p. 66); Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, ed. and trans. by Noble, p. 183.  65 For this scene in Ermold, see Hoofnagle, The Continuity of the Conquest, pp. 26–27.  66 Ermold the Black, In honorem Hludowici Pii, ed. and trans. by Faral, iv. 2514–19 (p. 190); Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, ed. and trans. by Noble, p. 183 (slightly altered).

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been temporary, and the Spanish March was a continuing problem for the Carolingians, but the passage nonetheless reaffirms the underlying theme in the poem of Louis’s superiority over his ancestors including his illustrious father. Charles’s failures, when presented in light of his son’s successes, now constituted a uniquely Carolingian practice of encomium.

Thegan’s Deeds of Emperor Louis Thegan’s Gesta Hludowici, while favourable to the emperor, is not nearly as overtly encomiastic as Ermold’s poem.67 Walahfrid Strabo, in his pro­logue to the work written after 840, describes it in deprecatory terms as an opusculum, and uses a commonplace of Roman historio­graphy when he writes that it was composed more with truth than with elegant style.68 The second known work devoted to the reign of Louis the Pious, the Gesta is the least bio­graphical in form of the three major works devoted to the heir to Charlemagne’s imperial title. Although it does not contain entries by year, the Gesta was written in a far more annalistic style than Einhard’s Vita Karoli, a text with which Thegan was clearly deeply familiar.69 Thegan completed the work in 836 and was therefore the first to write a bio­graphy of the emperor after the revolt of Louis’s sons that started in 833.70 In contrast to Ermold, we do not know why or for whom Thegan, an auxiliary bishop of Trier, undertook his project.71 The work was certainly widely read and probably sanctioned by the court since it existed in compilations with the royal annals and Einhard’s bio­graphy.72 Without the expectation of praise for the emperor’s deeds in war that came with the practice of certain forms of bio­graphy, there was no reason for Thegan to focus on Louis’s military endeavours in the Spanish March, whether successes or failures. And indeed, Thegan has little to say about war beyond basic reporting. A probable explanation is that he was writing a different style of bio­graphy and creating a different, more Christian portrait, of a less warlike emperor. It would be inaccurate to see him simply as a chronicler of few words, however, since there were, in fact, topics on which he elaborated at length. In Chapter 6, for instance, he writes a relatively long narrative describing the ceremonial passage of the realm to

 67 Hummer, Politics and Power in Early Medi­eval Europe, p. 160, deems him ‘highly partisan’.  68 Thegan, Gesta Hludowici imperatoris, ed. and trans. by Tremp, p. 182; Tremp, Studien zu den Gesta Hludowici, p. 167. For Strabo’s pro­logues, see Booker, ‘A New Pro­logue of Walafrid Strabo’, p. 85.  69 Tremp, Studien zu den Gesta Hludowici, pp. 23–24; Innes, ‘The Classical Tradition in the Carolingian Renaissance’, p. 279.  70 For Thegan and the Field of Lies, see Booker, Past Convictions, pp. 15–67.  71 Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, ed. and trans. by Noble, p. 188.  72 Innes and McKitterick, ‘The Writing of History’, p. 210; Collins, ‘The “Reviser” Revisited’, pp. 200–201.

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the young Louis, and then describes his coronation in 813, a few months before the death of Charlemagne.73 Ermold had written his epic in four books with clear themes, while Thegan progresses chrono­logically in presenting Louis’s deeds, moving quickly to the era when Louis becomes emperor. He leaves unmentioned much of his young adulthood, including the events at Barcelona in 801, when Louis was a mere twenty-three years old. Thegan is also not interested in the failed campaign in Spain of nine years earlier in 827. By contrast, the ArF for that year are loquacious on the subject of the debacle, which the annalist blames on those whom Louis had placed in command of the army that had arrived too late. Dutton nonetheless sees this as a signal by the annalist of Louis’s failure of leadership.74 Thegan’s spare treatment is limited to a brief mention of the campaign in Chapter 34 in which he says only that Louis had sent his army against the Saracens.75 Just as the original royal annalists writing about 778 had kept quiet about Roncesvalles during Charles’s lifetime, so too did Thegan suppress Louis’s fiascos in the Spanish March. When Louis did achieve some measure of military victory, Thegan was equally uninterested in discussing his deeds in war, which is key to understanding the evolving role of Roncesvalles for his bio­graphers. For example, he writes in Chapter 15 in the briefest of terms that in the next year he sent his army against the Slavs, who lived to the east, beat them badly, and paraded his victories as God’s gift, and then went home.76 The description of his victory over the Briton leader Murman in 818, which receives an extended panegyric treatment from Ermold, is similarly brief, stating simply that Louis went to Brittany, where Murman was killed, and then Louis subjected the whole land to his authority.77 Critics have noted that Louis’s campaigns in the Gesta in the early part of his reign mirror, to the extent possible, the summary of the campaigns in Book ii of the Vita Karoli.78 Yet while Einhard’s classicizing portrait celebrated Charles as a warrior and kingdom-builder, despite his claim in Chapter 6 that he did not intend to talk about his wars, Thegan reduced Louis’s deeds in war to the most basic information. He chose instead to depict a Christian emperor through emphasis on the inner workings of the realm, on his virtues, practices, customs, tastes, generosity, and almsgiving. The evolving discourses of Carolingian imperial praise allowed for such variations in styles of portraiture. Roman literary models for praise within a bio­graphy that had inspired Einhard and Ermold would not have conformed to Thegan’s style

 73 Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, ed. and trans. by Noble, p. 197.  74 ArF, ed. by Kurze, pp. 172–74. Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming, p. 86, notes an increasingly unhappy annalist who provided the entries for the period of 820–829; Gravel, Distances, rencontres, communications, p. 321.  75 Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, ed. and trans. by Noble, p. 208.  76 Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, ed. and trans. by Noble, p. 201.  77 Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, ed. and trans. by Noble, pp. 206, 208.  78 Innes and McKitterick, ‘The Writing of History’, p. 207.

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and project, and therefore there is virtually no mention of military pursuits in the Spanish March, positive or negative, in his Gesta.

The Astronomer’s Life of Emperor Louis The experiment that was Carolingian imperial bio­graphy continued as Louis’s life and troubled reign came to an end in 840. The anonymous Astronomer, a member of the emperor’s inner circle, wrote his praise-filled and highly sympathetic Vita Hludowici Imperatoris in 840 and 841, in the year of the deaths of both Louis and Einhard.79 Up to the year 829, the ArF provided a major source of information for his bio­graphy, which he supplemented with first-hand knowledge.80 As the author of an encomiastic Christian bio­graphy inspired by Sulpicius’s Vita Martini, the Astronomer highlighted and suppressed events and details to conform to his literary project. In his case, this meant a dramatic presentation of the victory at Barcelona in 801 with far more overt comparisons to the failure of 778 than even Ermold had dared to suggest. The Astronomer provides rich details of the ceremonial and liturgical aspects of Louis’s victory directly after evoking Charles’s disaster in the Pyrenees. Far more so even than Ermold, who tends to be allusive rather than overt in his comparisons, the Astronomer uses the story of the misfortune of the father to construct his praise of the son. Unlike Louis’s other bio­graphers, the Astronomer is a conscious producer of a vita and is therefore more concerned with the stages of the life of his imperial subject, beginning with Louis’s birth in 778.81 The coincidence of Louis’s birth and the end of the Spanish campaign allowed the Astronomer to tie his arrival in the world to the disaster that befell his father, a connection that had not been made outright in other works. This time the story of the disaster occurs not in a catalogue of Charles’s deeds in war, but in the introduction to the life of Louis. The bio­graphy begins with the acquisition of Aquitaine, Louis’s future kingdom, from Hunald but moves quickly to Charles’s failed Spanish campaign. By creating this juxtaposition, the Astronomer marks the narrative of Louis’s life from the beginning with the memory of his father’s misfortune. In Chapter 2 of his bio­graphy, the Astronomer weaves Louis’s arrival in the world into a recollection of Charles’s journey to Spain in 778, which involved him leaving his wife Hildegard, pregnant with twins, behind in Cassinogilum, modern-day Chasseneuil, in Aquitaine. Karl Ferdinand Werner suggests that Charles may well have brought his heavily pregnant wife as far as Chasseneuil  79 McKitterick notes the lack of independent existence of the work separate from Einhard’s Vita Karoli, in History and Memory, p. 58; Romig, ‘In Praise of the Too-Clement Emperor’.  80 Depreux, ‘Poètes et historiens’, p. 319.  81 Depreux, ‘Poètes et historiens’, p. 321. Einhard chose not to speak of Charles’s childhood, Ganz, ‘Einhard’s Charlemagne’, p. 46.

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on his way to Spain to ensure that Aquitaine would be the birthplace of its future Carolingian king.82 The Astronomer writes that Charles decided to cross the Pyrenees to Spain, ‘laborantique ecclesiae sub Sarracenorum acerbissimo iugo Christo fautore suffragari’. (and with Christ’s aid bring help to the church, which was labouring under the extremely harsh yoke of the Saracens).83 In language reminiscent of the story as it is told in the AMp written around 806, this version represents the first known instance in Carolingian bio­graphy in which Charlemagne’s campaign in Spain is cloaked in language suggestive of a religious conflict with the Muslim leaders who governed the region.84 The Astronomer presents Charles’s difficult march through the mountains to Spain in poetic language, describing the high mountains, dense forest, and narrow passages, before presenting the bad news: ‘Sed hanc felicitatem transitus, si dici fas est, foedavit infidus incertusque fortune ac vertibilis successus’ (But if it is permitted to be said, the happy outcome of this successful crossing was spoiled by faithless, uncertain, and changeable fortune).85 As if working from the revised ArF and trying to explain what the reviser had found to be ‘feliciter’ about the event prior to the ambush, the Astronomer allows that the king made it home safely. No longer keeping up the pretence of success in Spain that even Einhard had maintained, the Astronomer places particular emphasis on Charlemagne’s misfortune. For the learned Astronomer, Charles’s return over the Pyrenees is akin to the difficult passages made by two famously defeated Roman-era generals, Hannibal and Pompey, both of whom made successful crossings, but ultimately at great loss to themselves and their men. The bio­grapher passes quickly over the actual campaign in Spain and announces the deaths of the Frankish soldiers: Dum enim que agi potuerunt in Hispania peracta essent et prospero itinere reditum esset, infortunio obviante extremi quidam in eodem monte regii caesi sunt agminis. Quorum, quia vulgate sunt, nomina dicere supersedi. (For although they accomplished what they could in Spain, and made a successful return journey, misfortune met them when some soldiers at the very end of the line of march were slaughtered on that same mountain. Because who they were is widely known, I refrain from naming them.)86

 82 Werner, ‘Hludovicus Augustus’, p. 24.  83 Astronomer, Vita Hludowici, ed. and trans. by Tremp, p. 286; Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, ed. and trans. by Noble, p. 229.  84 AMp, ed. by von Simson, p. 67. See also Tremp, ‘Zwischen Paderborn und Barcelona’, pp. 286–87, 298; Stone, Morality and Masculinity in the Carolingian Empire, p. 75.  85 Astronomer, Vita Hludowici, ed. and trans. by Tremp, p. 288; Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, ed. and trans. by Noble, p. 229.  86 Astronomer, Vita Hludowici, ed. and trans. by Tremp, p. 288; Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, ed. and trans. by Noble, p. 229. Emphasis mine.

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Rhetorically speaking, the idea that the Franks ‘accomplished what they could’ in Spain is deployed here to allow the Astronomer to say nothing of substance about the campaign itself while still emphasizing the disastrous outcome for Charles. He is not trying to depict Charles as a military failure so that he can then celebrate Louis as a successful military leader and extender of the realm, however. Rather, Charles’s misfortune of a bygone age, described in secular terms with classical references, sets up the reception of the bio­grapher’s heavily Christianized version of the successful Spanish campaign of 801, with Louis’s triumphal entrance into the conquered city functioning as evidence of divine favour.87

The Astronomer’s Barcelona, 801 As Thegan had demonstrated, it was not necessary to talk about Louis’s victory at Barcelona, or about his military prowess more generally, to write an account of his reign. Ermold, by contrast, had seen the event as ideal epic material for depicting him as a Christian warrior who entered the conquered city in triumph and purified the temples where souls were being sacrificed to demons.88 The Astronomer also uses the events of 801, the success and the ceremonial aftermath, as a locus of Carolingian imperial panegyric, but in a more solemn tone that serves to foreshadow his future demeanour as a pious Christian emperor. Andy Romig notes that the Astronomer emphasizes Louis’s reputation for military toughness in his youth, deeming him the ‘chief enforcer’ of his father’s will in Catalonia.89 In Chapter 13 of the sixty-four chapters, the Astronomer describes how Louis and his advisors determine that they should lay siege to Barcelona. The Franks succeed in starving out the people of the city, who betray their prince and surrender. Louis is then summoned so that he may be present when the city is taken. Although still technically the sub-king of Aquitaine, Louis arrives in triumph as a Christian ruler representing the newly declared Christian empire under Charlemagne. No longer the spear-hurling king that Ermold had portrayed, the Astronomer’s Louis proceeds with humility in a parade led by clergy. He refrains, at first, from entering the city until he is able to determine how to consecrate his victory to God’s name with a suitable demonstration of thanksgiving: Antecedentis ergo eum in crastinum et exercitum eius sacerdotis et clero, cum sollempni appartu et laudibus hymnidicis portam civitatis ingressus et ad ecclesiam sanctae et victoriosissime crucis pro victoria sibi divinitus conlata actiones Deo acturus est progressus.  87 See Evans, ‘God’s Judgement in Carolingian Law and History Writing’, p. 71.  88 Ermold the Black, In honorem Hludowici Pii, ed. and trans. by Faral, i. 566–67 (p. 46). For Ermold’s depiction of Louis’s liturgical practices surrounding Barcelona, see Hen, ‘When Liturgy Gets Out of Hand’, p. 211.  89 Romig, ‘In Praise of the Too-Clement Emperor’, p. 395; Gravel, Distances, rencontres, communications, p. 320.

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(On the next day his priests and clergy preceded him and his army through the gate of the city. In majestic solemnity and singing psalms, they processed right to the church of the holy and most victorious Cross, where they gave thanks to God for the victory divinely bestowed upon them.)90 The Astronomer adheres here to an ideal of piety and humility and attributes military success to God as a gift from above. The raw material, which had allowed for Ermold’s celebration of Louis as a successful military leader, becomes in the hands of the Astronomer a presentation of Louis as a pious ruler and receiver of the gift of divine grace in battle. As had Ermold, the Astronomer engages implicitly with the memory of Charlemagne’s defeat at the hands of the Basques, celebrating Louis’s success against them on the return march from Pamplona: Sed cum per eiusdem montis remeandum foret angustias, Vascones nativum assuetumque fallendi morem exerere conati, mox sunt prudenti astutia deprehensi, consilio cauti atque cautela vitati. (But when it was time for him to return through those same narrow mountain passes, the Basques tried to use their native and customary manner of deception, but they were detected by cleverness and avoided by a plan of caution and watchfulness.)91 Any mention of treacherous Basques must be taken as a deliberate allusion to the words from the widely circulating Vita Karoli. Yet whereas Einhard’s Charlemagne had been in an unfair fight and deprived of revenge, Louis was able to exact swift and harsh punishment, hanging the rebels and taking the women and children so that their deception could not damage the king and his army. Once again, a bio­grapher of Louis alludes to the details of 778 to enhance the celebration of Louis’s victory in Spain, creating this linguistic echo in part by emphasizing the language of falseness and deception. Charlemagne had been bested by Basque treachery, and so had Louis in 827 according to the ArF. The Louis of 801, in the context of imperial praise, returns home from Spain a victor, with God’s favour, something his father could never claim. These implied comparisons between the outcomes in 778 and 801 reveal a conscious commentary by the Astronomer and offer insight into his self-conscious production of another in a growing list of Carolingian bio­graphies. Einhard made excuses for Charlemagne, while the Astronomer highlights Louis’s enjoyment of divine favour, and this invidious comparison was not an accident.

 90 Astronomer, Vita Hludowici, ed. and trans. by Tremp, pp. 318, 320; Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, ed. and trans. by Noble, p. 238.  91 Astronomer, Vita Hludowici, ed. and trans. by Tremp, p. 334; Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, ed. and trans. by Noble, p. 242.

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Conclusion The mystery behind the decades-long silence surrounding the deadly ambush of 778 has long fascinated scholars of the period from various disciplines. Due to the enormous influence of the Roland tradition, the subject has been dominated by scholars of the vernacular epic tradition, yet with the ninth-century Latin sources we have the ability to examine the emergence and repetition of the story during the heyday of Carolingian imperial bio­graphy. We have the works themselves but also compilations that contained the annals, original and revised, and the gesta and vitae of Charles and then Louis.92 A reader leafing through such a gathering of narratives could therefore have observed, all in one place, the various treatments of a given event or theme. In the case of Carolingian struggles in the Spanish March, there is a discernible pattern. Only authors of certain kinds of works chose to highlight Carolingian military victories and defeats in the Spanish March. The existing evidence reveals that once the story of Roncesvalles came to light in the annals, it proved useful only to bio­graphers who were seeking to praise their Carolingian imperial subjects as military leaders. The need to account for deeds in war burdened any bio­grapher adhering to existing Roman imperial models, whether pagan or Christian. Yet Carolingian bio­graphers possessed in the person of Louis a subject who styled himself as a pious Christian emperor who ruled over a realm that had ceased to extend its boundaries in the manner of his father. At the same time, Frankish fortunes in the Spanish March would have naturally figured in a written Life of Louis the Pious. He spent much of the first thirty-six years of his life in Aquitaine, at the southern edge of his father’s empire.93 But the events on which bio­graphers elect to focus are not always related to the actual life of the subject. Thegan, for his part, had shown essentially no interest in any of the events in Spain that his colleagues had chosen to emphasize. There is, however, a shared project that ties together those who discuss the Spanish campaigns, and that is encomiastic bio­graphy. Einhard had used the defeat of 778 as part of Charlemagne’s catalogue of deeds in war to style Charles as an Augustus figure. Louis’s encomiasts, in shaping the image of the future inheritor of the imperial title, took advantage of the emergence from obscurity of Charles’s great misfortune in Spain to juxtapose it with their stylized celebrations of his victory at Barcelona. One wonders how the afterlife of the story of Roncesvalles might have been different had the memory not proved so useful as a device of praise for the most widely read creators of Carolingian bio­graphy.

 92 Ganz, ‘Einhard’s Charlemagne’, p. 41.  93 Costambeys, Innes, and MacLean, The Carolingian World, p. 196.

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Biblio­graphy Primary Sources XII Panegyrici Latini, in In Praise of Later Roman Emperors: The ‘Panegyrici Latini’, ed. and trans. by C. E. V. Nixon and Barbara Saylor Rodgers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) Annales Mettensis priores, ed. by Bernhard von Simson, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi, 10 (Hanover: Hahn, 1905) Annales regni Francorum inde ab a. 741 usque ad a. 829, qui dicuntur Annales Laurissenses maiores et Einhardi, ed. by Friedrich Kurze, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi, 6 (Hanover: Hahn, 1895) Astronomer, Vita Hludowici imperatoris, ed. and trans. by Ernst Tremp, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi, 64 (Hannover: Hahn, 1995), pp. 279–555 Charlemagne and Louis the Pious: Lives by Einhard, Notker, Ermoldus, Thegan, and the Astronomer, ed. and trans. by Thomas F. X. Noble (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2009) Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, 6th edn, ed. by O. Holder-Egger after G. H. Pertz and G. Waitz, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi, 25 (Hanover: Hahn, 1911) Ermold the Black, In honorem Hludowici Pii, in Poème sur Louis le Pieux et épitres au roi Pépin, ed. and trans. by Edmond Faral (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1964) Eusebius, Life of Constantine, ed. and trans. by Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999) Suetonius, De vita Caesarum, ed. and trans. by J. C. Rolfe and Donna Hurley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) Thegan, Gesta Hludowici imperatoris, ed. and trans. by Ernst Tremp, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi, 64 (Hanover: Hahn, 1995), pp. 167–277 Secondary Works Berschin, Walter, Bio­graphie und Epochenstil im lateinischen Mittelalter III: Karolingische Bio­graphie, 750–920 (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1991) Bobrycki, Shane, ‘Nigellus, Ausulus: Self-promotion, Self-suppression and Carolingian Ideo­logy in the Poetry of Ermold’, in Ego Trouble: Authors and their Identities in the Early Middle Ages, ed. by Richard Corradini and others (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2010), pp. 161–74 Booker, Courtney M., ‘A New Pro­logue of Walafrid Strabo’, Viator, 36 (2005), 83–105 —— , Past Convictions: The Penance of Louis the Pious and the Decline of the Carolingians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009)

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Chandler, Cullen J., Carolingian Catalonia: Politics, Culture, and Identity in an Imperial Province, 778–987 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) Collins, Roger, Charlemagne (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998) —— , ‘Pippin I and the Kingdom of Aquitaine’, in Charlemagne’s Heir: New Perspectives on the Reign of Louis the Pious (814–40), ed. by Peter Godman and Roger Collins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 363–90 —— , ‘The “Reviser” Revisited: Another Look at the Alternative Version of the Annales Regni Francorum’, in After Rome’s Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medi­eval History. Essays Presented to Walter Goffart, ed. by Alexander C. Murray (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 191–213 Conant, Jonathan P., ‘Louis the Pious and the Contours of Empire’, Early Medi­eval Europe, 22 (2014), 336–60 Costambeys, Marios, Matthew Innes, and Simon MacLean, The Carolingian World, Cam­bridge Medi­eval Textbooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) Davis, Jennifer R., Charlemagne’s Practice of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) Depreux, Philippe, ‘La pietas comme principe de gouvernement d’après le Poème sur Louis le Pieux d’Ermold le Noir’, in The Community, the Family and the Saint: Patterns of Power in Early Medi­eval Europe, ed. by Joyce M. Hill and Mary Swan (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 201–24 —— , ‘Poètes et historiens au temps de l’empereur Louis le Pieux’, Le Moyen Âge, 99 (1993), 311–32 Dutton, Paul Edward, Charlemagne’s Courtier: The Complete Einhard (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1998) —— , The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994) Evans, Robert A. H., ‘God’s Judgement in Carolingian Law and History Writing’, Studies in Church History, 56 (2020), 60–77 —— , ‘Instructing Readers’ Minds in Heavenly Matter: Carolingian History Writing and Christian Education’, Studies in Church History, 55 (2019), 56–71 Falque, Emma, ‘Ermoldus Nigellus y el asedio y toma de Barcelona por los francos en el año 801’, Conventus Classicorum, 1 (2017), 55–82 Fried, Johannes, Karl der Grosse: Gewalt und Glaube (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2018) Ganshof, F. L., The Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy: Studies in Carolingian History, trans. by Janet Sondheimer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971) Ganz, David, ‘The Astronomer’s Life of Louis the Pious’, in Rome and Religion in the Medi­eval World: Studies in Honor of Thomas F. X. Noble, ed. by Valerie Garver and Owen Phelan (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 129–48 —— , ‘Einhard’s Charlemagne: The Characterization of Greatness’, in Charlemagne: Empire and Society, ed. by Joanna Story (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 38–51 Godman, Peter, Poets and Emperors: Frankish Politics and Carolingian Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) Goldberg, Eric J., Struggle for Empire: Kingship and Conflict under Louis the German, 817–76 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006)

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Kaiserkrönung das Epos ‘Karolus Magnus et Leo papa’ und der Papstbesuch in Paderborn 799, ed. by Peter Godman and others (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), pp. 283–300 Werner, Karl Ferdinand, ‘Hludovicus Augustus: Gouverner l’empire chrétien – Idées et réalités’, in Charlemagne’s Heir: New Perspectives on the Reign of Louis the Pious (814–40), ed. by Peter Godman and Roger Collins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 3–123

Matthew Ga b ri ele

The Historian Hrabanus Maurus and the Prophet Haimo of Auxerre Experiments, Exegesis, and Expectations Emerging from the Ninth Century It may seem odd to begin an essay about the European Middle Ages, more specifically about experimentation in the ninth century, with a reference to the American Civil War. Yet, we live in interesting times.1 Antebellum America thought it existed on the cusp of something, its people living in a version of Reinhart Koselleck’s Sattelzeit (saddle time), a space in transition between old and new ways of thinking about their relationship with past, present, and future. As delineated by Jason Phillips, ‘expectation’ was something older, a conceptualization that man stood along the timeline as history approached them. They reacted to a foreclosed future. ‘Anticipation’, on the other hand, was about surging forwards, the future a blank canvas upon which to create. Although these relationships to the future tended to belong to certain groups exclusively in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Civil War in the United States between 1861 and 1865 scrambled things. Those who had ‘expected’ began to ‘anticipate’ and vice-versa.2 The ninth century was similarly punctured by civil war, similarly concerned about the future, similarly oftentimes focused on the horizon. Medi­evalists,



* My great thanks to all the participants in the 2017 Marco Symposium on ‘Carolingian Experiments’ at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where this essay first took shape. Particular thanks go to the organizer, Matthew Gillis, for bringing a phenomenal group of scholars together, who were all willing to experiment themselves, but also to Paul Edward Dutton as the keynote to the event and one who has changed the way so many of us think about the European Middle Ages.  1 For more on this specific connection, see Gabriele, ‘After Charlottesville’.  2 Dissected brilliantly in Phillips, Looming Civil War, especially pp. 4–7, 14–15. Koselleck first elaborated his idea of Sattelzeit in Koselleck, Critique and Crisis. Matthew Gabriele ([email protected]) is Professor of Medi­eval Studies and Chair of the Department of Religion & Culture at Virginia Tech. He is the author of An Empire of Memory: The Legend of Charlemagne, the Franks, and Jerusalem before the First Crusade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), co-author (with David M. Perry) of The Bright Ages: A New History of Medi­eval Europe (New York: Harper Books, 2021), and co-editor (with James Palmer) of Apocalypse and Reform from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 2019). Carolingian Experiments, ed. by Matthew Bryan Gillis, ISMAR 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022) pp. 149–164 10.1484/M.ISMAR-EB.5.127249

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however, tend to use different terms, in this case specifically using ‘apocalypticism’ to conflate (in perhaps a rather misleading way) how medi­eval Latin Christians thought about the movement of time with how they thought about the End. The thinking goes that whether or not they found themselves hurtling towards the apocalypse or patiently waiting for it, most European medi­evals believed that time moved more-or-less on a line.3 There would always be a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. But how modern scholars tend to think about history and the movement of time is, at least in part, no more than a trick of modernity. Recent work by Hayden White and François Hartog (among others) has demonstrated how the ideo­logical programmes of our scholarly predecessors served their nation’s ‘practical past’. As such, they trapped themselves in the telos of the present, thus giving past actors knowledge of the modern historian’s present that they never could have possessed.4 In this modernist model, history served only to explain how the world necessarily arrived at where it was in the present.5 Think, for example, of the mid-eighteenth-century invention of the ‘timeline’ that came into vogue at the beginning of the nineteenth.6 This way of ‘mapping’ time created a visual representation of the ideo­logy illuminated by White and Hertog by creating a sense of fixity — linearity — we teleo­logically ascribe to the past; this moved to that, then on to the next thing.7 But, the ninth-century Franks were not nineteenth-century Frenchmen, nor were they antebellum Americans. Moderns may have thought in lines, movement based on progress towards, but Franks thought of sacred time (loosely) in cycles, movement based on recursion.8 This framework came from Augustine, from what might loosely be called an ‘Augustinian Atemporality’, a distinction made by Augustine between secular and sacred history — how secular time moved, while sacred history remained in a type of stasis and would only be ‘restarted’ by the unleashing of the devil as foretold in Revelation. Ultimately, Augustine’s view of history (meant here as understanding past events, not the events themselves)9 was about the role of divine inspiration in the last age of the world. Divine inspiration had effectively ceased after the coming of Jesus. And with its disappearance, so too went the ability to effectively discern which events were critically important to the fulfilment of God’s plan for the  3 Although not directly comparable to Phillips’s categories, these two attitudes seem to find analogues in the ‘predictive’ vs. ‘psycho­logical’ apocalypses denoted in McGinn, ‘The End of the World and the Beginning of Christendom’.  4 White, The Practical Past, pp. 8–10; also Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, pp. 105–30.  5 Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, p. 105.  6 See Rosenberg and Grafton, Carto­graphies of Time.  7 A point explored in greater depth recently in Gabriele, ‘The “Terrors of the Year 1900”’.  8 What follows is complementary to the framework suggested in the brilliant Czock, ‘Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft’. Czock too saw the tension between sacred time — past, present, and future — that was always knowable via revelation and the unknowability of time because of causation and the limits of human experience.  9 A crucial distinction. See Markus, Saeculum, p. 14.

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world and which were not. R. A. Markus explains that ‘since the coming of Christ, until the end of the world, all history is homogeneous, […] cannot be mapped out in terms of a pattern drawn from sacred history, […] [and] can no longer contain decisive turning-points endowed with a significance in sacred history’. The meaning of this final age, the present, was therefore radically ambiguous. There could be no sacred history — only a gap within sacred history.10 Of course, Augustine would concede that things still changed over time. They just changed in specifics, not in substance. Although perhaps intended to tamp down the desire of his fellow Christians to make prophetic claims, Augustine’s injunctions paradoxically could have the opposite effect. I have argued elsewhere that Robert the Monk’s early twelfth-century narrative of the taking of Jerusalem owed a heavy debt to the work of the ninth-century biblical commentator Haimo of Auxerre (d. c. 878).11 Robert took from Haimo a sense of both ‘prophecy’ and ‘apocalypse’. Functionally, apocalypse preceded prophecy (and not the other way around) because the difference between the two concepts was fundamentally one of perspective. Apocalypse was revelation, was certainty, was history. Something had happened and could be interpreted so as to see God’s hand at work in the world. Prophecy was the other side of that. It was looking forward, forecasting what might come. Phillips’s categories of ‘anticipation’ and ‘expectation’ dwell here within prophecy; they are its varietals. Prophecy was contingent, and only possible after some apocalyptic moment, only after God’s will had been revealed to man through a sequence of events. In other words, prophecy was dependent upon how well one understood history — how well one understood the pattern that had been laid out in the Bible and elucidated by the Fathers.12 This looping cycle of sacred history allowed prophecy, legitimized it, because if one could figure out where on the cycle they stood, they could ‘know’ what came next. In this way ‘expectation’ and ‘anticipation’ were two sides of the same coin; the future was foreclosed, set by God, but history could be ‘pushed’ forwards towards the next stage by sensitive readers of God’s plan. In the Frankish ninth century, amongst a people who thought themselves chosen by God, the past led them forward towards the future.13 Hrabanus Maurus (d. 856) and Haimo of Auxerre, two prolific biblical exegetes, both experimented on how to resolve this tension, how to see the movement (if at all) of sacred history in their own time. They both agreed that the new

 10 Markus, Saeculum, pp. 17–23, quotation at pp. 20–21. See also the discussion in Malegam, ‘Against the Silence’.  11 Gabriele, ‘From Prophecy to Apocalypse’.  12 My thoughts here owe much to Southern, ‘Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing’.  13 The essential works are Garrison, ‘The Franks as the New Israel?’; and Garrison, ‘Divine Election for Nations’. Now also see Heydemann, ‘The People of God and the Law’; and O’Brien, ‘Chosen Peoples and New Israels’.

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kingdom of Israel seemed to be falling, but where they differed was whether it could be remade (Hrabanus) or if the new Babylonian captivity had already begun (Haimo). That subtle difference, owing most likely to their slightly different political and cultural circumstances, would have huge implications for how their work was understood not just in their own time, but also in subsequent centuries. *    *    * Historians who have studied Christian biblical exegesis tend to think of commentary in terms of traditions, genealogies. This is particularly true for those who study the ninth century. Beryl Smalley’s infamous quip that ‘to study Carolingian commentary is to study their sources’ still weighs heavily on anyone who approaches this material.14 The work done by Origen, Jerome, and Augustine (as well as Isidore and Bede), seems to have set the acceptable parameters within which nearly seven hundred years of commentary could operate in Latin Europe. Although that remains an important observation, we should note that it oversimplifies a complex body of work. Ninth-century authors could — and did — go beyond the Fathers. Hrabanus, for instance, was the first ever Latin Christian commentator on the books of Deuteronomy, Judith, Esther, Wisdom, and Chronicles. Even when creating their own texts by ostensibly ‘copying’ patristic commentaries, ninth-century exegetes were dynamic compilers and subtle interpreters of that tradition in ways that could subtly, if dramatically, alter the understanding of a verse for future generations.15 A shift in verb tense in Isaiah 11. 10, from future to future perfect, for example, allowed Haimo of Auxerre to reconcile disparate readings between Jerome and Augustine, and thereby situate a prophetic, forward-looking moment from Jerome’s translation of Isaiah into Augustine’s atemporality.16 This was still within ‘tradition’, yet there was no precedent for Haimo’s decision. They made choices, and those choices conveyed meaning. And we must remember that such decisions were never mere intellectual exercises. Frankish exegetes often engaged with (or were themselves members of) the highest intellectual circles of the Frankish world.17 One need only look to the networks within which men like Hrabanus operated, responding to requests directly from the emperor Lothar and Louis the German for biblical commentaries for their own edification. Indeed, Mayke de Jong has written that ‘exegesis was a duty taken care of by busy administrators of abbeys and bishoprics, who were intimately involved in the affairs of the court and the  14 Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, pp. 37–38.  15 For example, the brief summary in van Liere, An Introduction to the Medi­eval Bible, p. 148; also Kottje, ‘Hrabanus Maurus – “Praeceptor Germaniae”?’; and Zechiel-Eckes, ‘Ein Dummkopf und Plagiator?’.  16 Gabriele, ‘From Prophecy to Apocalypse’, pp. 309–13.  17 De Jong, ‘The Emperor Lothar and his Bibliotheca Historiarum’, p. 229.

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realm’.18 And what were they learning? They were learning about history, about the past — but also about themselves — because if Garrison is right that the Franks, particularly after 800 ce, created an image of themselves as a new Israel, then it meant that God was still working in the world for them, ‘so that the present [was not] merely a re-enactment, but also in some sense a fulfilment of words and events of the Bible’.19 Thus, what happened in the past guided their actions in the present and towards the future. Recursion and movement, a cycle, again. Consider briefly the use of bynames at the Frankish court. De Jong reminds us that we should take them seriously, that the ‘relationship between a person and his by-name most resembled the connection created by biblical typo­logy’. These names were supposed to connect their bearers to both the biblical past and a ‘higher spiritual meaning’.20 Charlemagne, of course, was called ‘David’, and Louis the Pious came to be compared (and compare himself) to Solomon, particularly after 833.21 Calling Charlemagne ‘David’ meant that others thought of him as a great king ruling over a new Israel. But it also perhaps meant something for how he was later remembered, even just after his death. As Paul Dutton has reminded us, Charlemagne’s ‘sin’ was from very early on primarily thought to have been sexual in nature — an alter David paralleling the original one in more ways than one.22 And did that comparison have implications for the son as well? Was Louis the Pious, at least in part, considered a new Solomon because his attention to his wife led him into trouble — had he, like Solomon, allowed impiety into the realm but became one who, after his restoration to the throne, can rule as a chastened, wise monarch? Was that name as much critique as it was panegyric? And now we have a pattern; we have a progression of kings, moving inevitably towards a splintering of the kingdom of Israel — a civil war, once more, between Jeroboam and Rehoboam23 — and then a scourging of the chosen people and captivity at the hands of external enemies. As we know, the Frankish Empire did indeed fragment and descend into civil war, then followed by invasions by foreign enemies. Ascent, descent, fragmentation. Panegyrics, warnings, lamentations. The pattern of sacred history, written on the Israelites, rewritten on the Franks.

 18 Quotation from de Jong, ‘The Emperor Lothar and his Bibliotheca Historiarum’, p. 229. See also on Hrabanus and his world, de Jong, ‘Becoming Jeremiah’; de Jong, ‘Old Law and NewFound Power’; de Jong, ‘The Empire as Ecclesia’; and Coon, Dark Age Bodies, especially ch. 1.  19 Garrison, ‘The Franks as the New Israel?’, p. 117.  20 De Jong, ‘Becoming Jeremiah’, pp. 186–87.  21 Booker, Past Convictions, p. 158; also Kershaw, Peaceful Kings, pp. 174–240.  22 Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming, pp. 50–80. See also Dutton’s essay in this collection.  23 John Contreni notes that in his Commentary on Ezekiel Haimo may have himself been comparing Charles the Bald to Jeroboam. Prudentius of Troyes evoked the wars between Rehoboam and his brothers, in a barely veiled allusion to contemporary events. See Contreni, ‘“By Lions, Bishops Are Meant; by Wolves, Priests”’, p. 49.

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Here, I do not mean to suggest that the ninth-century Franks were literally mapping their own time back onto the past, that they believed events of their own time were repeating precisely as they had before. At times it seemed much more cacophonous. Even as Louis the Pious was a new Solomon, his adversaries were justifying their actions in 830 by evoking Ezekiel. Wala of Corbie, active at the same time, was a new Jeremiah. Then, Paschasius would (in a way) take on that same mantle.24 But those names meant something to those who wore them. Gottschalk of Orbais (d. c. 867) related behaviour to the theatre, that men (particularly powerful ones) took on different roles and enacted them in the world. The name imbued them but simultaneously framed the range of their available actions.25 Thus, the above ‘cacophony’ of names from different moments in Israelite history could instead be seen as a contest about the parameters of acceptable political, social, cultural, and religious action. Were the Franks being ruled by alter Solomon or by alter Nebuchadnezzar? Was the ruler surrounded by Jezebels or Ezekiels? The answer to those questions determined whether the ruler needed gentle correction by loyal advisors or chastisement by divine visions of impending doom. Consider for a moment Hrabanus’s corpus.26 He was, as noted above, the first to comment on the books of Deuteronomy, Judith, Esther, Wisdom, and Chronicles. But in addition, he also compiled/edited commentaries on the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Kings, Ecclesiastes, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Maccabees, Matthew, as well as the Letters of Paul. The vast majority of these works, of course, come from the Christian Old Testament. Perhaps more importantly though, taken together they narrate the movement of the Divine Law, the formal relationship between God and his chosen people, with a focus on the kingdom of Israel but all together from Creation until the coming of Jesus. As such, considering who he was (abbot of Fulda and archbishop of Mainz), writing when he was (mostly during/after the 820s), Hrabanus was offering models applicable to whom he wrote — kings. To quote de Jong again, ‘Historia — in the sense of biblical commentary and historio­graphy — was a matter for kings […], for it guided their actions in the present’.27 Consider now Haimo of Auxerre’s commentaries.28 He wrote on the books of Genesis, Deuteronomy, the Song of Songs, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Daniel, and almost all of the Minor Prophets. He was the first ever since Jerome to

 24 De Jong, The Penitential State, pp. 107, 114–15; de Jong, Epitaph for an Era, pp. 125–29; and de Jong and Lake, trans., Confronting Crisis in the Carolingian Empire, pp. 41–43.  25 See Gillis, Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire, pp. 72–73. This corresponds with what other scholars have suggested about Christian behaviour in other periods, such as the frameworks of Reformation violence and the missionizing of Jesuits in the New World. See Davis, ‘The Rites of Violence’; and Reff, Plagues, Priests, and Demons, pp. 207–36.  26 For what follows, see Edwards, ‘List of Manu­scripts’.  27 De Jong, ‘Old Law and New-Found Power’, pp. 166–67.  28 I am here dependent on the wonderful Shimahara, Haymon d’Auxerre.

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comment on Daniel, Joel, Amos, and Abidas.29 From the New Testament, Haimo composed commentaries on the books of Matthew, Mark (though the attribution here is debated), John, Revelation, and the Letters of Paul. This tells us a different story than Hrabanus. Everything here is messianic, but (rather) anti-monarchical — or at least pre- and post-monarchical. Haimo’s commentaries centre on the relationship between God and his chosen people, but only at acute moments of crisis — the Creation, the giving of the Law, the breakdown of Israel and captivity, the coming of Jesus, the ministry, and the End. And this made particular sense during the 840s, 850s, 860s, when Haimo wrote. The new chosen people had fallen into the same trap as their predecessors and needed new prophets — exegetes — to call them back to repentance and God’s favour. For Haimo, ‘if the prophets of the Old Testament directly received the word of God, the exegetes of [his] present time received the spirit which allowed them to interpret that word and save their people’.30 The difference between the outlook of these two exegetes is perhaps subtle but nonetheless critical. They were near, though not exact, contemporaries but were products of quite different schools.31 Both of these facts seem to have impacted their outlook, impacted where they thought they lived on the arc of sacred history. Hrabanus came of age during the reign of Louis the Pious, at a moment when the burden of keeping God’s favour increasingly fell on the shoulders of the emperor himself.32 As such, Hrabanus wrote his commentaries to inspire a new Josiah, for a leader who would lead the Franks back to the Lord. Haimo wrote during the reign of Charles the Bald (840–877) but was reliant on an older model, one of collective responsibility before God, a new chosen people both before and after the monarchy, during the captivity. Haimo wrote not for kings but for the new chosen people, suffering, in exile. Let us consider an example. Daniel 2. 21: et ipse mutat tempora et aetates transfert regna atque constituit dat sapientiam sapientibus et scientiam intellegentibus disciplinam. ([God] changes times and ages, transforms and establishes kingdoms; he gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to those who have understanding.) This passage comes in the midst of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the statue, when the prophet demonstrates his connection to God and the meaning of the terrible vision that so troubles the Babylonian king. The Latin for the verse is a warning to the king, a summative statement about God’s power over

 29 Shimahara, Haymon d’Auxerre, p. 215.  30 Shimahara, Haymon d’Auxerre, p. 379.  31 On the nuance of difference between the schools, see for example Matter, ‘Haimo’s Commentary on the Song of Songs’, pp. 91–92.  32 Romig, Be a Perfect Man, pp. 67–75; also Booker, Past Convictions; de Jong, The Penitential State.

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earthly kingdoms and how he moves sacred history.33 Hrabanus, writing his commentary on Daniel in the 840s, copied Jerome’s rather straightforward exegesis of the verse verbatim. For Hrabanus, as for Jerome, the verse complemented Daniel’s explication of Nebuchadnezzar’s vision of the gold-topped statue that is ultimately destroyed by the stone from heaven. Kingdoms decline through the generations, as rulers are succeeded by those who enact more and more evil until the time of the End. The wise know that the righteous must endure as this is done to punish the wicked. For Hrabanus, as it was for Jerome, the verse is a warning about kings and kingdoms. It’s up to them to stop the cycle, to them correctio must be directed. It makes sense then that Hrabanus’s commentary on Daniel was written for, dedicated to, and sent to (in c. 844 ce) Louis the German.34 Hrabanus was playing the good courtier, acting himself like a good Huldah or Daniel, as counsellor to the king. Haimo of Auxerre did something different. His exegesis of Daniel 2. 21 also connects this verse to the king’s vision of the perilous statue but shifts the focus away from kings and to their subjects. He wrote: Ipse mutat tempora, id est sua prouidentia et dispositione facit reges regibus succedere, et regnis regna. Et interdum permittat malos regnare ut et mali malos puniant, et boni per eos probatiores fiant. Quarum rerum ideo meminit quia mutationem futuram in uisione cognouit.35 ([God] changes the times, that is by his foreknowledge and orderly planning he makes kings succeed kings, and kingdoms follow kingdoms. And sometimes he allows evil men to rule so that evil men would be punished by evil, and through those rulers good men will become worthy (probatiores). Therefore [Daniel] remembered those things because he recognized in the vision [of the statue] a future change.) The analysis is similar to Hrabanus but not the same. Kings are still here but they are, in a sense, passive. They enact God’s plan but without will of their own. Indeed, the only rulers here discussed are aligned with evil. In his commentary on Ezekiel, Haimo similarly blamed the disorder of his time on  33 For more on the afterlife of this pericope, see Gabriele, ‘The Last Carolingian Exegete’; also more generally Rubenstein, Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream.  34 ‘Ipse mutat tempora et aetates, transfert regna atque constituit. Non ergo miremur siquando cernimus regibus reges et regnis regna succedere, quae dei gubernantur et mutantur arbitrio. Causasque singulorum nouit ille qui conditor est omnium, et saepe malos reges patitur suscitari ut mali malos puniant; simulque subostendit, et generali disputatione preparat auditorem, et somnium quod uidit esse de mutationem et succisionem regnorum’. Hrabanus Maurus, Commentariorum in Danielem. The commentary itself has not yet been edited, but the text was provided by Prof. William Schipper, in a personal correspondence 7 October 2009. The dedication survives in Hrabanus Maurus, Epistolae, no. 34. On this text, see also Palmer, The Apocalypse in the Early Middle Ages, pp. 166–67.  35 My translation. Haimo of Auxerre, In Danielem. Text courtesy of Dr Sumi Shimahara, personal correspondence, 3 October 2009. Dr Shimahara is currently preparing an edition of this commentary for the Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis.

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the sinfulness of both priests and princes.36 Elsewhere, in his commentary on ii Thessalonians, he said that all emperors were types of Nero, the impious ruler.37 In other words, rulers were something to be endured — a corrupt class sent to punish the chosen people. As such, they were not the intended audience of his work. Instead, the focus of Haimo’s attention was the people who suffered under those rulers. In explaining Romans 5. 3–4, Haimo seemed to be expanding on what he started in his exegesis of Daniel 2. 21. Here, Haimo offered a further meditation on tribulation, patience, and being tested (probatio).38 He connected Paul’s injunction to patience in the face of tribulation to the examples of Job and the martyrs. In that testing situation, Haimo assured the reader that good habits and praiseworthy actions would win good men praise. That testing, in turn, led to hope — to the expectation of eternal life.39 Haimo was shifting registers, shifting the audience to which men like Hrabanus spoke. Haimo was not speaking to royalty, not to the princes, but to those who suffered under them — the mass of the aristocracy, the new chosen people as a whole. Haimo was schoolmaster at the episcopal abbey of Saint-Germain of Auxerre and ended his career as abbot of the small house of Cessy-les-Bois. He lived under Charles the Bald, who was the only Carolingian not to request a biblical commentary for his own edification.40 He came of age in a time of troubles, most likely only knowing the end of Louis’s reign, the depositions and restorations, the machinations of the sons, the civil war. Bishops and princes had failed. Hope rested elsewhere, with the aristocracy and monks.41 His audience were the ones who felt they suffered when the monarchy broke down and society followed. His audience were those who felt adrift after Fontenoy — those who called out for the monarchy to amend its ways and return the chosen people to God’s favour. As John Contreni has observed, Haimo was a ‘Carolingian Ezekiel’ who, throughout his works, lamented the ways in which the powerful — lay and clerical alike — had corrupted human governance and presaged the end times.42 Hrabanus, on the other hand, had been trained by Alcuin, made his monastic home at Fulda at the centre of Frankish intellectual life, wrote  36 Palmer, The Apocalypse in the Early Middle Ages, p. 167.  37 Haimo of Auxerre, In divi Pauli Epistolas Expositio, col. 781.  38 Romans 5. 3–4: ‘non solum autem sed et gloriamur in tribulationibus scientes quod tribulatio patientiam operator patientia autem probationem probatio vero spem’.  39 Haimo of Auxerre, In divi Pauli Epistolas Expositio, cols 402–03: ‘Patientia autem probationem, meritorum et fidei, sicut probati sunt sancti martyres et sicut probatu est Job, non deficiens in tribulatione. Est etiam probatio, honestas morum et laudabilitas actionum, unde probus dicitur laude dignus: probatio vero operatur spem, vitae aeternae. Spes est exspectatio futurorum bonorum. Qui ergo inter tribulationes et adversa per patientiam probabiles existunt in fide, illi securi de praemiis, futuram beatitudinem exspectant’.  40 Shimahara, Haymon d’Auxerre, p. 121.  41 Rodriguez, ‘Auctoritas y potestas’, p. 19.  42 Contreni, ‘“By Lions, Bishops Are Meant; by Wolves, Priests”’, p. 53.

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directly for kings, travelled in the highest circles of power, ended his career as the powerful archbishop of Mainz. He was active throughout the reign of Louis the Pious and died in a time when the reunification of the empire still seemed a real (and desirable) possibility. Hrabanus wrote for kings, and so told a story about how the original chosen people held lessons for the new via the monarchy, via Jerusalem. Put bluntly, ninth-century exegesis may have primarily been aimed at the top levels of Frankish society, but the specific stratum within that hierarchy differed, and those differences mattered, particularly after we leave the ninth century. If Hrabanus was the exegete par excellence for Carolingian kings, it might be said that Haimo was the exegete of the Franks. *    *    * Although manu­script transmission is never a perfect indicator of popularity (or importance), it stands out to us that almost every one of Haimo’s commentaries survive in thirty to forty copies each, and that some are much more popular than that. Haimo’s commentary on the Song of Songs survives in 147 manu­script copies from the ninth–twelfth centuries, his commentary on Revelation in 161, and on Paul’s letters in 208.43 All told, before his death around 878, Haimo wrote twelve distinct commentaries that survive in some 715 total manu­script witnesses from the Middle Ages. Compare that intellectual transmission and survival for a moment with the works of Hrabanus. His distinct commentaries total twenty-one, and they were indeed copied. Yet his manu­script survival still lags well behind Haimo’s. There are now about 519 extant manu­scripts of Hrabanus’s exegesis, with the single most popular text being his commentary on Kings, which has fifty-seven copies.44 This is a long way from the 208 extant copies of Haimo’s commentary on Paul. Certainly, part of Haimo’s incredible popularity in the tenth through twelfth centuries had to do with the output of the school he established at Saint-Germain. Haimo was, first, a schoolmaster, and his commentaries were schoolbooks. One of the reasons Smalley so famously concluded that ‘to study Carolingian commentary is to study their sources’ was that Frankish commentators were explicitly trying to explicate the Fathers. Haimo’s method, hinted in the pericope I briefly discussed above, was straightforward — a rehearsing of the biblical verse, followed by elucidation — usually literal, then typo­logical. Altogether just a few sentences, so clear and concise, and theo­logically safe for novices who might be learning Latin. Indeed, at least in the early Middle Ages monks rarely encountered the Bible directly but read

 43 Edwards, ‘From Script to Print’; also Edwards, ‘List of Manu­scripts’. With the help of Madeira Denison, an undergraduate assistant, I have mapped Haimo’s manu­scripts for which both date and provenance are secure — 280/715 (39%). See .  44 See Edwards, ‘List of Manu­scripts’.

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through exegetes.45 Those hundreds upon hundreds of Haimo’s manu­scripts that survive likely did so because they were unrelentingly used; many of them are decidedly not luxury copies, but rather on solid, worn vellum that seems to have borne repeated handling.46 And then through his teaching, Haimo trained students. Although there were many, Heiric and Remigius were the stars, who themselves directly trained generations of monks well into the tenth century. In turn, their students would become abbots and bishops throughout the Frankish heartland. Remigius was called to Paris from Auxerre, and from there eventually to Reims, where he helped set up the cathedral school, beginning a tradition that would count Odo of Cluny, Gerbert of Aurillac, Bruno of Chartreuse, and Pope Urban II among that school’s students and masters.47 They carried the Auxerrois intellectual tradition with them across Europe, mostly (particularly through the connection to Cluny) via monasteries. This is part of the story. The other part of the story about the afterlife of Haimo’s work has to do, I think, with the message that Haimo and his students were promoting. The Auxerrois focus on the Frankish people as the agents of sacred history complemented the way the Franks themselves wrote about their past. Frankish history was about the collective as a populus christianus, with kings as avatars of that collective.48 But then things began to change after the middle of the ninth century. As political power devolved, as kings grew distant, as civil war continued and peoples from the north invaded to punish the Franks for their sins, Haimo’s work took on a new resonance. Bishops remained by and large the consorts of kings, so the aristocracy connected to monasteries. Holding tightly still to their Frankish identity, they found allies and spiritual justification in the monastic houses emerging across the old Frankish Empire.49 And in the ‘absence’ of kings, the monks and aristocracy — oftentimes, we  45 Berarducci, ‘L’esegesi della Rinascita Carolingia’, p. 198; Courtray, ‘La réception du Commentaire sur Daniel de Jérôme’, pp. 127–28. On Haimo’s life and career as schoolmaster, Contreni, ‘Haimo of Auxerre, Abbot of Sasceium (Cessy-Les-Bois)’; and now Shimahara, Haymon d’Auxerre, pp. 59–81.  46 For example, a tenth-century florilegia from Saint-Maximin of Trier (BnF, MS n.a.l. 762) or an eleventh-century one from Saint-Martial of Limoges (BnF, MS lat. 3454).  47 On the school at Auxerre, see Avril and others, eds, Saint-Germain d’Auxerre. For Reims, see Demouy, ‘Bruno et la réforme de l’Église de Reims’; Glenn, Politics and History in the Tenth Century, pp. 54–64; Sot, Un historien et son église au xe siècle, pp. 72–74.  48 Gabriele, An Empire of Memory, especially pp. 130–38.  49 King Robert II the Pious (996–1031) was ‘innovative’ in his attentiveness to monasteries, and we ought to remember that even Saint-Denis — a royal necropolis and just outside Paris! — was outside the royal orbit for much of the tenth and eleventh centuries, only returning to King Philip I in 1077. On Robert the Pious, see Koziol, ‘The Conquest of Burgundy’; and on Saint-Denis and Philip I, Gabriele, ‘The Provenance of the Descriptio Qualiter Karolus Magnus’, pp. 101–02. Also still useful on the connection between the aristocracy and monasteries in the eleventh century is Bull, Knightly Piety and the Lay Response to the First Crusade; but also and perhaps more importantly now Smith, War and the Making of Medi­eval Monastic Culture.

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remember, from one and the same family — took on the mantle of the new Israel. Haimo’s Auxerrois tradition spoke directly to these new constituents, to those who would now be the new prophets and to those who would work collectively to answer their calls to repentance and ‘reform’. They had endured — were enduring! — the sins of their princes and so were the new probatiores, who together patronized holy spaces and pushed spiritual reform. Haimo’s authored expectation became in the tenth and eleventh centuries the aristocracy’s anticipation. In the end, we might say that both Hrabanus and Haimo lived too in a Sattelzeit, with one on either side of the saddle. Hrabanus was a historian for an era of kings. He excavated the biblical past in the service of the ninth-century present, in anticipating the future. The kingdom could be rebuilt if kings acted. Haimo’s narrative only began with the fall of the new Israel’s monarchy, with the new Israel fragmented, looking forward to repentance and restoration. As such, we might call Haimo a prophet, and one who expected. We do so not because he thought he foretold the future but because he called out warnings about a future that inexorably approached. These warnings were then taken up in the centuries following, as the new chosen people felt they suffered because of the sins of their rulers. In the end, if I’m correct in my reading of these thinkers, particularly as they moved out of their own time and into the next, then it leads us towards a radical rethinking of the legacy of the Franks. It leads us towards thinking of the ‘Carolingian Age’ as extending into the eleventh century, and it leads us to hopefully once and for all casting off the ‘darkness’ of the tenth century — a place too often characterized ‘like a dingy, gritty bus stop on a cross-country trip between the horizonless aspirations of the ninth century and the bustling purpose of the twelfth’.50 Instead, the survival of Haimo of Auxerre’s work, how it informed an intellectual world long after his death, suggests that it makes more sense to say it was a period that thought itself squarely within the arc of sacred history, expectant of the return of God’s favour, waiting for delivery from its (new) captivity. Perhaps the most radical outcome of understanding the subtleties of Haimo of Auxerre’s and Hrabanus Maurus’s experiments in the tenth and eleventh centuries is realizing that this was a period suffused with hope.

 50 Koziol, ‘Is Robert I in Hell?’, p. 233.

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Biblio­graphy Manu­scripts and Unedited Sources Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France [BnF], MS fonds latin 3454 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France [BnF], MS nouvelles acquisitions latines 762 Primary Sources Haimo of Auxerre, In divi Pauli Epistolas Expositio, ed. by Jacques-Paul Migne, Patro­ logiae cursus completus: series latina, 117 (Paris: Garnier, 1881), cols. 359–938 Hrabanus Maurus, Epistolae, ed. by Ernst Dümmler, Monumenta Germaniae Histo­ rica: Epistolae, 5 (Berlin: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 1899), pp. 379–516 Secondary Works Avril, François, and others, eds, Saint-Germain d’Auxerre: Intellectuels et artistes dans l’Europe carolingienne ixe–xie siècles (Auxerre: Musée d’art et d’histoire, 1990) Berarducci, Silvia Cantelli, ‘L’esegesi della Rinascita Carolingia’, in La Bibbia nel Medioevo, ed. by G. Cremascoli and C. Leonardi (Bo­logna: Edizioni dehoniane, 1996), pp. 167–98 Booker, Courtney, Past Convictions: The Penance of Louis the Pious and the Decline of the Carolingians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) Bull, Marcus, Knightly Piety and the Lay Response to the First Crusade: The Limousin and Gascony, c. 970–c. 1130 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) Contreni, John J., ‘“By Lions, Bishops Are Meant; by Wolves, Priests”: History, Exegesis, and the Carolingian Church in Haimo of Auxerre’s Commentary on Ezechiel’, Francia, 29 (2002), 29–56 —— , ‘Haimo of Auxerre, Abbot of Sasceium (Cessy-Les-Bois), and a New Sermon on 1 John V, 4–10’, Révue bénédictine, 85 (1975), 303–20 Coon, Lynda L., Dark Age Bodies: Gender and Monastic Practice in the Early Medi­ eval West (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) Courtray, Régis, ‘La réception du Commentaire sur Daniel de Jérôme dans l’Occi­ dent médiéval chrétien (viie–xiie siècle)’, Sacris Erudiri, 44 (2005), 117–87 Czock, Miriam, ‘Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft – Konstruktionen von Zeit zwischen Heilsgeschichte und Offenbarung: Liturgieexegese um 800 bei Hrabanus Maurus, Amalarius von Metz und Walahfrid Strabo’, in ZeitenWelten: Zur Verschränkung von Weltdeutung und Zeitwahrnehmung, 750–1350, ed. by Miriam Czock and Anja Rathmann-Lutz (Co­logne: Böhlau Verlag, 2016), pp. 113–33 Davis, Natalie Zemon, ‘The Rites of Violence’, in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 152–87 Demouy, Patrik, ‘Bruno et la réforme de l’Église de Reims’, in Saint Bruno et sa posterité spirituelle: Actes du colloque international de 8 et 9 octobre 2001 a l’Institut catholique de Paris, ed. by Alain Girard, Daniel le Blévec, and Nathalie Nabert (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2003), pp. 13–20

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Dutton, Paul Edward, The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994) Edwards, Burton Van Name, ‘From Script to Print: Manu­scripts and Printed Editions of Haimo’s Commentary on the Song of Songs’, in Études d’exégèse Carolingienne: Autour d’Haymon d’Auxerre, ed. by Sumi Shimahara (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 59–85 —— , ‘List of Manu­scripts’, [accessed 20 October 2020] Gabriele, Matthew, ‘After Charlottesville: Historians Tackle White Supremacist Nostalgia for an Imagined Past’, Perspectives Daily, 2 January 2019, [accessed 20 October 2020] —— , An Empire of Memory: The Legend of Charlemagne, the Franks, and Jerusalem before the First Crusade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) —— , ‘From Prophecy to Apocalypse: The Verb Tenses of Jerusalem in Robert the Monk’s Historia of the First Crusade’, Journal of Medi­eval History, 42 (2016), 304–16 —— , ‘The Last Carolingian Exegete: Pope Urban II, the Weight of Tradition, and Christian Reconquest’, Church History, 81 (2012), 796–814 —— , ‘The Provenance of the Descriptio Qualiter Karolus Magnus: Remembering the Carolingians at the Court of King Philip I (1060–1108) before the First Crusade’, Viator, 39.2 (2008), 93–117 —— , ‘The “Terrors of the Year 1900”: The Eleventh Century and a Debate about Modernity’, postmedi­eval, 10 (2019), 194–205 Garrison, Mary, ‘Divine Election for Nations – a Difficult Rhetoric for Medi­ eval Scholars?’, in The Making of Christian Myths in the Periphery of Latin Christendom (c. 1000–1300), ed. by Lars Boje Mortensen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006), pp. 275–314 —— , ‘The Franks as the New Israel? Education for an Identity from Pippin to Charlemagne’, in The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages, ed. by Yitzhak Hen and Matthew Innes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 114–61 Gillis, Matthew Bryan, Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire: The Case of Gottschalk of Orbais (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) Glenn, Jason, Politics and History in the Tenth Century: The Work and World of Richer of Reims (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) Hartog, François, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and the Experiences of Time, trans. by Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015) Heydemann, Gerda, ‘The People of God and the Law: Biblical Models in Carolingian Legislation’, Speculum, 95 (2020), 89–131 Jong, Mayke de, ‘Becoming Jeremiah: Paschasius Radbertus on Wala, Himself and Others’, in Ego Trouble: Authors and their Identities in the Early Middle Ages, ed. by Richard Corradini, Matthew Bryan Gillis, Rosamond McKitterick, and

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Irene van Renswoude (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2010), pp. 185–96 —— , ‘The Emperor Lothar and his Bibliotheca Historiarum’, in Media Latinitas: A Collection of Essays to Mark the Retirement of L. J. Engels, ed. by R. I. A. Nip, H. van Dijk, E. M. C. van Houts, C. H. Kneepkens, and G. A. A. Kortekaas (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), pp. 229–35 —— , ‘The Empire as Ecclesia: Hrabanus Maurus and Biblical Historia for Rulers’, in The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages, ed. by Yitzhak Hen and Matthew Innes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 191–226 —— , Epitaph for an Era: Politics and Rhetoric in the Carolingian World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) —— , ‘Old Law and New-Found Power: Hrabanus Maurus and the Old Testament’, in Centres of Learning: Learning and Location in Pre-Modern Europe and the Near East, ed. by Jan Willem Drijvers and Alisdair A. MacDonald (Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. 161–76 —— , The Penitential State: Authority and Atonement in the Age of Louis the Pious, 814–840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) Jong, Mayke de, and Justin Lake, trans and annot., Confronting Crisis in the Carolingian Empire: Paschasius Radbertus’ Funeral Oration for Wala of Corbie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020) Kershaw, Paul J. E., Peaceful Kings: Peace, Power, and the Early Medi­eval Political Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) Koselleck, Reinhart, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Boston: MIT Press, 1988) Kottje, Raymund, ‘Hrabanus Maurus – “Praeceptor Germaniae”?’, Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters, 31 (1975), 534–45 Koziol, Geoffrey, ‘The Conquest of Burgundy, the Peace of God, and the Diplomas of Robert the Pious’, French Historical Studies, 37 (2014), 173–214 —— , ‘Is Robert I in Hell? The Diploma for Saint-Denis and the Mind of a Rebel King ( Jan. 25, 923)’, Early Medi­eval Europe, 14 (2006), 233–67 Liere, Frans van, An Introduction to the Medi­eval Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) Malegam, Jehangir Yezdi, ‘Against the Silence: Twelfth-Century Augustinian Reformers Confront Apocalypse’, in Apocalypse and Reform from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages, ed. by James T. Palmer and Matthew Gabriele (New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 205–20 Markus, R. A., Saeculum: History and Society in the Theo­logy of St Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) Matter, E. Ann, ‘Haimo’s Commentary on the Song of Songs and the Traditions of the Carolingian Schools’, in Études d’exégèse Carolingienne: Autour d’Haymon d’Auxerre, ed. by Sumi Shimahara (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 89–101 McGinn, Bernard, ‘The End of the World and the Beginning of Christendom’, in Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World, ed. by Marcus Bull (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 58–89

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O’Brien, Conor, ‘Chosen Peoples and New Israels in the Early Medi­eval West’, Speculum, 95 (2020), 987–1009 Palmer, James T., The Apocalypse in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) Phillips, Jason, Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) Reff, Daniel T., Plagues, Priests, and Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) Rodriguez, Alfonso Hernández, ‘Auctoritas y potestas en la exégesis bíblica carolingia’, Bulletin du centre d’études médiévales d’Auxerre, hors-série, 7 (2013), [accessed 20 October 2020] Romig, Andrew J., Be a Perfect Man: Christian Masculinity and the Carolingian Aristocracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) Rosenberg, Daniel, and Anthony Grafton, Carto­graphies of Time: A History of the Timeline (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010) Rubenstein, Jay, Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream: The Crusades, Apocalyptic Prophecy, and the End of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) Shimahara, Sumi, Haymon d’Auxerre, exégète Carolingien (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013) Smalley, Beryl, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964) Smith, Katherine Allen, War and the Making of Medi­eval Monastic Culture (Rochester, NY: Boydell, 2011) Sot, Michel, Un historien et son église au xe siècle: Flodoard de Reims (Paris: Fayard, 1993) Southern, R. W., ‘Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing: 3. History as Prophecy’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 22 (1972), 159–80 White, Hayden, The Practical Past (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014) Zechiel-Eckes, Klaus, ‘Ein Dummkopf und Plagiator? Hrabanus Maurus aus der Sicht des Diakons Florus von Lyons’, in Raban Maur et son Temps, ed. by Philippe Depreux and Stéphane Lebecq (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 119–35

A ndrew Romig

Strange Natures Theodulf’s Letter to Moduin in Context Around the year 820, a world-weary Theodulf, formerly bishop of Orléans but now stripped of both office and influence, wrote from lonely exile to his old friend and imperial court colleague, Moduin, bishop of Autun. The missive was a 232-line verse poem in elegiac couplets, the ancient mode and metre of epistolary communication among the intelligentsia of the old Roman Empire. In the letter, Theodulf complained of his boredom, his incapacity to serve, and the unjust circumstances of his solitary life in the countryside of Le Mans. He also included three curious accounts of recent strange occurrences in the natural world: one describing a river suddenly stopping its flow, and two describing cataclysmic battles between armies of birds.1 The question that I wish to explore in this essay is what Theodulf’s accounts of strange nature might help us see, not just about Theodulf ’s final years, but also more broadly about Carolingian culture and cultural change during the decade of the 810s. Following the volume’s theme, I will take the opportunity to experiment with an array of contextual interpretations, puzzling out some of the ways in which the Carolingians saw themselves and their society in relation to the natural world. The dried-up river and bird battles clearly signified something to Theodulf, but precisely what they signified and to what end are questions that demand our further speculation and analysis. We must consider further the role that the natural world played in shaping the character of Carolingian aristocratic life. My hope, in the end, is to suggest some new ways of viewing the Carolingian past and perhaps even to offer some new perspectives for future research. When Louis the Pious ascended the throne in 814 after the death of Charlemagne, almost immediately, according to the narratives that the  1 For text and manu­scripts, see Theodulf of Orléans, Carmen 72, ed. by Dümmler, pp. 440–43 (manu­scripts), pp. 563–69 (text). All translations herein are my own, though see also the recent English translation of Theodulf ’s verse works, Theodulf of Orléans, The Verse, trans. by Andersson. Andrew Romig ([email protected]) is Professor of European medi­eval studies at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University. He is the author of Be a Perfect Man: Christian Masculinity and the Carolingian Aristocracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). Carolingian Experiments, ed. by Matthew Bryan Gillis, ISMAR 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022) pp. 165–182 10.1484/M.ISMAR-EB.5.127250

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Carolingians themselves created to make meaning of events, he made efforts to consolidate his power. On the heels of his coronation, he sought to expel and to extinguish as many perceived threats to his authority as he could. Famously this included banishing prominent figures from the old regime — men such as his father’s cousins, Adelard and Wala. But it also included the summary exile of his closest peers — his many sisters and men such as Drogo of Metz, the illegitimate brother with whom Louis would later reconcile and whom Louis would count among his closest friends at the end of his life. There was furthermore a detailed inquiry into the moral character of the palace. Sexual deviancies were defined, or redefined and criminalized, with prosecution affirmed through public flogging and public shaming. Louis purged the hangers-on and concubines of his father’s former entourage, who fled en masse from the court that they had once called home, now labelled unseemly at best, prostitutes at worst.2 Theodulf, a long-time member of Charlemagne’s court, survived this first palace purge and even rose in favour for a short time. He did not survive a second round of purges in 817. In that year, perhaps prompted by an accident at the palace that killed several and injured Louis himself, Louis and his councillors decreed a new Ordinatio imperii, modelled after the partitioning of the empire that Charlemagne had proclaimed for his own sons just over a decade earlier.3 The 817 document named Louis’s eldest son, Lothar, as co-emperor and sole heir to the imperial title. To his other sons, Pippin and Louis, it bestowed the title of king along with large territories of dominion: Pippin received the Mediterranean South, Louis the Germanic and Slavic East. The Ordinatio decreed that the two younger brothers were effectively to co-rule along with Lothar, with the eldest brother having final say over all matters that involved the empire as a whole. The brothers were furthermore to exchange regular tribute gifts as a means of solidifying their loyalties and publicly proclaiming their brotherly love.4 By all indications, the 817 Ordinatio was mostly just an affirmation and reassertion of power structures already in place, with relationships and hierarchies clarified and codified concretely. Yet soon there were rumours of upset and unrest: Bernard of Italy, the illegitimate son of Pippin and thus nephew to the emperor, plotted insurrection, motivated perhaps by the fact that his sovereignty over the southern reaches of the empire had been left unmentioned in the Ordinatio document. Louis responded swiftly and summarily, sending

 2 Annales regni Francorum, ed. by Kurze, p. 141; Thegan, Gesta Hludowici imperatoris, ed. and trans. by Tremp, pp. 188–90; Astronomer, Vita Hludowici, ed. and trans. by Tremp, pp. 346–54. Cf. also Nelson, ‘Women at the Court of Charlemagne’. See also Dutton’s essay in this collection.  3 Ordinatio imperii (817), ed. by Boretius, pp. 270–73. For the palace accident, see Annales regni Francorum, ed. by Kurze, p. 102.  4 For the manu­script tradition and historical context, see especially Ganshof, ‘Some Observations on the Ordinatio Imperii of 817’; Nelson, ‘The Frankish Kingdoms, 814–98’.

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an army southward to crush his opposition. Bernard voluntarily surrendered and publicly begged for mercy, but was judged guilty and sentenced to death along with key figures who were thought to have advised and supported him. Theodulf was counted among these co-conspirators. At the end of the affair, Louis made efforts to perform royal clementia and commuted all sentences of death to lesser punishments: blinding for Bernard (the trauma of which resulted in his death nevertheless), exile and monastic imprisonment for rest.5 We do not know exactly why Theodulf was implicated as a supporter of Bernard or whether that implication was even deserved.6 All we know is that Theodulf, who had served Charlemagne for some twenty-five years and remained in the service of Louis for three years after Charlemagne’s death, was abruptly cast out of Carolingian politics and sentenced to spend the remaining years of his life in the solitude of monastic confinement, first at Angers and finally at Le Mans, where he died, succumbing to the stresses of political disfavour and the ravages of age, in December 821.7 Theodulf wrote his poetic epistle to Moduin from Le Mans in hopes that Moduin might assist him in attesting his innocence and reversing the emperor’s decision. The contents of the letter reveal an artful strategy of combined rhetorical styles.8 It begins with an extended and ornate profession of love for his old friend. Theodulf then proceeds to narrate his predicament. Theodulf reports that he is effectively trapped, unable to perform his offices on behalf of the people, unable to read, unable to write. A good death, he says dramatically, might be worth more than the life he leads now.9 Theodulf then proceeds to plead his cause. The crux of his complaint is not just that he is innocent, but that he has been stripped of his rights and now exists in a permanent limbo of legal exception, completely subject to the will of the emperor without the power of appeal. Even the lowest members of society have legal rights, he says: slaves have recourse to the law, as do shepherds and swineherds, bakers and ploughmen and sailors. But the order that is actually supposed to be promoting the law, he protests, teaching it to others and adjudicating it on behalf of the community, has no legal rights.10 Moduin should care about this, Theodulf argues, because he is a bishop, too, and the episcopal order as a whole shares in the predicament:

 5 Annales regni Francorum, ed. by Kurze, pp. 147–48. For analysis of Bernard’s revolt and its relationship to the Ordinatio Imperii of 817, see especially McKitterick, History and Memory, pp. 268–70; Noble, ‘The Revolt of King Bernard of Italy in 817’.  6 Many modern accounts have suspected his innocence: e.g. Noble, ‘Some Observations of the Deposition of Archbishop Theodulf ’.  7 For the location of Theodulf ’s exile, see Schaller, ‘Theodulfs Exil in Le Mans’.  8 For a recent, brief taxonomy of Theodulf ’s epistolary corpus and varying styles, see Rouquette, ‘Les lettres en vers de Théodulf d’Orléans’.  9 Theodulf of Orléans, Carmen 72, ed. by Dümmler, pp. 563–64, lines 1–24.  10 Theodulf of Orléans, Carmen 72, ed. by Dümmler, p. 564, lines 49–54.

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Unus ego quamvis sim, non est unius haec res: Quod factum est mihimet, esse potest alii. Est commune malum, communis cura petenda est: Quod nostrum est hodie, cras erit alterius. Haec non quis frater timeat contagia demens, Ne illi, quae nobis, inrepat ista lues.11 (Although I’m just one man, this matter is not limited to one man. What has been done to me can be done to another. It is a communal harm and a communal cure must be sought. What is ours today will be someone else’s tomorrow. Any brother would be mad not to fear these contagions, Lest that plague which afflicts me might steal into him.) Theodulf presents his claim and petition as a simple matter of law, a pressing matter of common interest. Yet he drives his argument home with a metaphor borrowed from the uncontrollable natural world — the injustice he suffers is a rampant contagion. Without concerted intervention, outbreak is only a matter of time. In a flourish of rhetorical urgency, Theodulf concedes that guilt rightly condemns the thief, but he is not guilty. He has never confessed. There have been no witnesses against him nor even a suitable judge. And indeed, he argues, because the secular world (mundana negotia) knows no mechanism for such a trial, his case lacks any weight of just reason. The only measure in determining his justice, he says, is savagery.12 ‘So be it’, he rants — Esto: forem fassus, cuius censura valeret Dedere iudicii congrua frena mihi? Solius illius opus Romani praesulis extat, Cuius ego accepi pallia sancta manu.13 (So be it — let’s say I did confess. Would proper checks And balances be given to the judgment of my case? That is the work of the bishop of Rome alone, From whose hand I accepted the holy pallium.) This last line has been read as an appeal to have his case actually tried by the pope, though what Theodulf is saying could equally be more hypothetical — simply that Louis cannot possibly be a fair judge. Either meaning amounts to a rather remarkable statement.14 The letter then stops abruptly at this point and changes back to the airy tone and ornate style with which it begins. In two couplets, Theodulf states that he is attaching some ‘jocund’ verses about ‘miracula visa’ — attested  11  12  13  14

Theodulf of Orléans, Carmen 72, ed. by Dümmler, p. 564, lines 37–42. Theodulf of Orléans, Carmen 72, ed. by Dümmler, p. 564, lines 55–60. Theodulf of Orléans, Carmen 72, ed. by Dümmler, p. 565, lines 63–66. Cf. Greeley, ‘Raptors and Rebellion’, pp. 64–66, especially n. 89.

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marvels or miracles — but he includes no further explanation of why or to what purpose.15 Three stories follow, all elaborately told and all involving unexplainable phenomena from the natural world. The first tale reports that the river Sarthe had recently dried up in places, such that for a matter of hours peasants could cross on foot where previously they had always needed boats. It was the third time it had happened to the Sarthe in recent memory, Theodulf claims, and it happened once to the Huisne as well, the tributary that meets the Sarthe at Le Mans.16 The second and third stories tell of vicious battles among birds. In one tale, flocks of birds from different regions and species amass together in a field near Toulouse. They face off for a length of days, tensions high, sending emissaries back and forth, before diplomacy ultimately fails and the bird armies tear at each other in savage combat. In the aftermath of the slaughter, the ground is strewn with blood and bodies. The townsfolk hesitantly journey to the field to see what has happened. Upon surveying the carnage, they ask their local bishop (named Mancio in the poem, a figure otherwise unknown in Carolingian sources) whether the birds might be edible, to which the bishop replies cryptically, ‘Inlicitis spretis, licitas adsumit’ (Take what is allowed and leave what is not) perhaps an unexplained reference to penitential laws involving carrion.17 In the other bird battle story, Theodulf recounts another instance of avian warfare but this time frames the battle as interspecies Brüderkrieg. He claims to have heard the story third-hand, from a bishop friend who himself had heard it from a member of his flock, an unnamed woman who had travelled on pilgrimage from Tours to the Holy Land and back. The verses dwell on the horrors of civil war and specifically recall the historical tragedies of Caesar’s battles against Pompey on the Emathian plain. ‘Youths’ on both sides line up eager for war. Two large birds withdraw from the battle and do not fight. The rest tear each other to pieces in fury. There are no victors.18 The question that I wish to pose at this juncture is a simple one: What, exactly, are we to do with these stories? Modern interpreters have puzzled over their specific meanings. Do they relate to Theodulf ’s petition for justice? And if they do, what could Theodulf have possibly hoped Moduin might learn from them? Assessments have ranged from positing that the stories are little more than virtuosic confections, designed to lighten the mood of the petition and showcase Theodulf ’s facility with the Latin language, to theories that the  15 Theodulf of Orléans, Carmen 72, ed. by Dümmler, p. 565, lines 67–70: ‘Mittere, care, mihi libuit tibi carmina quaedam, | Nostra quibus lusit Musa iocosa parum. | Tempore praeterea hoc quaedam miracula visa | Dicuntur, breviter haec quibus ista canam’.  16 Theodulf of Orléans, Carmen 72, ed. by Dümmler, pp. 565–66, lines 71–130.  17 Theodulf of Orléans, Carmen 72, ed. by Dümmler, pp. 567–68, lines 131–90. Lines 187–90: ‘Ipse Tolosana praesul quoque venit ab urbe | Mancio, plebs rogat, haec ales an esca fiat. | “Inlicitis spretis, licitas adsumit”, dixit: | Plaustra onerant avibus, in sua quisque redit’.  18 Theodulf of Orléans, Carmen 72, ed. by Dümmler, pp. 568–69, lines 191–224.

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stories are in fact complex allegorical prognostications of a dark future, eerily foreshadowing the devastating civil wars that would plague Louis’s reign and the years following his death.19 Theodulf ’s pregnant images certainly feel deliberate. The poems teem with tantalizingly specific details that beg for allegorical interpretation: the bishop’s solemn response to his flock; lines in the second battle that tease cryptic numero­logy: four hawks assembling on one side of the battlefield, four on the other, then four falcons; the two great birds who escape the battle, choosing not to fight.20 And the verses make explicit claims that natural wonders do in fact signify important information. Human beings ought to pay attention. Theodulf compares his stories with wonders from both biblical stories and classical pagan histories: the Book of Joshua where God parts the Jordan for the crossing of the Ark of the Covenant; the epic battles of the Roman civil war as described by Lucan and Livy.21 At one point in his storytelling, Theodulf writes that ‘Monstrata haec crebro tempore signa patent’ (Oftentimes, such tell-tale signs are clear).22 At another, he writes, ‘Rebus et exemplis quaedam bene nosse valemus | Cum non divinem, haec scio res quid agat’. (We can know certain things well from signs and wonders. | Although I do not guess their meaning, I know what causes these signs.)23 Suspiciously, however, Theodulf ’s gestures towards the promise of revelation never fully materialize, at least not explicitly. His vague indications towards hidden meaning ultimately remain without gloss, and he is reluctant to speculate. Of the dried-up rivers, Theodulf writes that he chooses not to investigate the stories further for fear of being asked to divine the future. The future, he says, will reveal itself in time: Non grandi studio perquirimus ista, quod illi Qui narrant per me nosse futura volunt Non id aperta canit, nec erit vox semper operta, Tempore namque manent ista canenda suo.24  19 Greeley, ‘Raptors and Rebellion’, pp. 66–70.  20 Theodulf of Orléans, Carmen 72, ed. by Dümmler, p. 569, lines 207–08: ‘Quattuor accipitres veniunt hinc, quattuor illinc | Quattuor et totidem parte ab utraque capi’; lines 217–18: ‘Nempe duae volucres magnae avolasse feruntur, | Quae non pugnarunt: cetera turba iacet’.  21 Theodulf of Orléans, Carmen 72, ed. by Dümmler, p. 566, lines 105–06: ‘Quis neget antiqui dominum meminisse tropaei, | Quo fluvium scindit et Hiericunta quatit?’; p. 567, lines 157–60: ‘Utque diu Poenos inter populumque Quiritum | Currunt legati, donec in arma ruant: | Haud secus inter eas, postquam sat utrimque volatum est | Vi, qua quaeque valet, in fera bella ruunt’; p. 568, lines 175–76: ‘Hinc Rutilos, illinc videas consurgere Teucros, | Saevire et Martem parte ab utraque ferum’; p. 569, lines 213–16: ‘Egit id Emathiis populus Romanus in arvis, | Cum fera bella gerunt, hinc socer, inde gener. | Cum fratrem frater perimit, vel amicus amicum, | Quando pares aquilas et paria arma vehunt’; lines 221–22: ‘Ut furor Annibalis complevit funere Cannas, | Funere sic avium haec rura repleta manent’.  22 Theodulf of Orléans, Carmen 72, ed. by Dümmler, p. 569, line 224.  23 Theodulf of Orléans, Carmen 72, ed. by Dümmler, p. 567, lines 131–32.  24 Theodulf of Orléans, Carmen 72, ed. by Dümmler, p. 566, lines 127–30.

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(I am not inquiring further into those matters with great fervour, because the ones | Who recount them want to know from me what will become of things. | My full voice does not sing out, but neither will my voice always be silenced, | For indeed what comes to pass remains to be sung in its own time.) Theodulf certainly does not provide enough information in the letter to explain how, or even whether, the three stories relate to his initial argument and petition about his exile. June Ann Greeley, who has given the poem its most recent extended scholarly treatment in 2006, barely addressed the marvels sections at all in her reading. I cite this not as a deficiency of her analysis, but rather as a demonstration of just how little direction the poem gives to its reader for contemplating these vignettes — for gleaning whether they may or may not complement and inform either each other or the exchange between Theodulf and Moduin. Moduin’s response to Theodulf, which we also have, does not appear to refer to the marvel stories at all; so it, too, gives little hint of deeper meaning.25 While Theodulf’s specific intent is ultimately unknowable, what we can say with certainty is that the stories invited Moduin to consider, if nothing else, the anomalous wonder of the natural world. And here we can share in that invitation to consider not only our own tenuously complex relationship with the environment, but also how the Carolingians more broadly understood the capacity of nature to reveal information relevant and useful to human affairs.26 In the contemporary world, such questions have become the domain of what has been called the ‘new materialism’. New materialist perspectives are useful for exposing the ideo­logical foundations and fantasies upon which human beings construct their anthropocentric realities. Which is to say, new materialism takes as its grounding principle the notion that human beings are never in complete control over anything, even though we trick ourselves into believing that we are. As a general philosophy, new materialism posits that no single actant can ever determine a particular outcome. There are always, inevitably, multiple actants in any system, each working independently from one another, sometimes in assemblage but also sometimes in opposition, thus undermining the capacity for any single acting force to exert complete control over any other. In recent decades, for example, such lines of thought have been helpful for theorizing land rights. As global climate change melts our polar ice caps, it also exposes enormous amounts of previously ice-locked territory to potential resource exploitation. The United States, Canada, Russia, Denmark, and Norway — nation states whose abutting sovereignties compel them to make claims to these lands — have sought legal recourse and agreement over  25 Moduin of Autun, Carmen 73, ed. by Dümmler, pp. 569–73.  26 For a recent examination of the Carolingians and the environment, see Devroey, La Nature et le roi.

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ownership. Yet the unpredictability and independent outcomes of ice flows and melting permafrosts and rising sea levels, of the displacement of Inuit settlements and wildlife migrations, all set forth by the multiple actants of climate change — the list goes on and on — render the traditional human-centric frames that define sovereignty inapplicable at best, utterly laughable at worst. Where, exactly, does one plant a flag when the ground itself is shifting? New materialism demands and gives language to new conceptions of sovereignty in which the environment, in this example, would be respected as an active player in the geopolitical game, rather than an object only to be acted upon by human and animal forces. It recognizes the ways in which material can hold the same autonomous power that humans assume to be their sole domain, acting independently and in ways with which humans must humbly contend and reconcile their incapacity to control. In the most optimistic views of theorists such as Jane Bennett, new materialist perspectives encourage humans towards more cooperative notions of stewardship and collaboration as opposed to traditional conceptions of ownership and dominance.27 More pessimistic applications warn that humanity ignores material sovereignties at its own peril, that our refusal to respect the material world’s awesome power as an uncontrollable actant in world affairs will prove our eventual downfall.28 Might Theodulf ’s observations and descriptions of the natural world have served a similar function? Might they have invoked natural sovereignty as a kind of check to the sovereign power of the emperor that he was trying to contest? Indeed, the interplay between Carolingian politics and their experience of natural phenomena can perhaps illuminate an aspect of Theodulf ’s poems that we have overlooked, due in no small part to our very different concepts of the relationship between human beings and the natural world in which we live. It is well attested, of course, that natural phenomena had a profound impact on Carolingian political sensibilities. By all accounts, Charlemagne was particularly curious about nature’s role in human affairs. Subsequent generations remembered his personal interest in the natural world as a vigilant observer of the nighttime sky, an avid hunter, and an enthusiastic collector of exotic animal species for his palace menagerie.29 And crucially, he made regular observation of and reverence for the natural world a fundamental part of his governance. I myself have argued elsewhere that the experience of environmental crises played a crucial role in determining the character of the last decade of  27 Bennett, Vibrant Matter.  28 As a still-developing field of inquiry, definitions and applications of ‘new materialism’ continue to evolve and be contested. See especially Gamble, Hanan, and Nail, ‘What Is New Materialism?’. Edited collections that have shaped the conversation include Bennett and Joyce, eds, Material Powers; Coole and Frost, eds, New Materialism; and Grusin, ed., The Nonhuman Turn.  29 See especially Dutton, Charlemagne’s Mustache, pp. 43–68 (‘Charlemagne, King of Beasts’), 93–127 (‘Of Carolingian Kings and their Stars’).

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Charlemagne’s reign.30 The Carolingians could read and did read natural disaster as God’s displeasure, requiring penance and moral correction as the only means by which humans could attempt to exert or re-exert control over their lives. Recent work by Timothy Newfield has shown, for example, that 805–814 was one of the three worst decades for famine and food shortage in the entirety of the Carolingian era.31 During these years the continent experienced at least one major food shortage from 805–807 and probably a second from 811–813, both due to unusual weather patterns.32 Carolingian settlements across the empire also suffered a major livestock pandemic in 809–810.33 Charlemagne ordered three separate empire-wide, three-day penitential fasts during the winter of 805, professing hope that God might grant mercy and end the crop failure for the coming season. Surely, Charlemagne suggested in his decree for the fasts of that year, the Frankish people suffered because of their lapses and sins.34 In 810, he called for another trio of three-day fasts, ordering magnates to pray that God might reveal to them more clearly how Carolingian morals and ways of living ought to be improved.35 At the council that he subsequently called in 811 to address moral improvement, he railed that he and his people needed to assess unabashedly whether they were truly living as Christians.36 The questions that the 811 council debated were about the very nature of Christian physics: not just the substance and qualities of the divine realm, but the proper relationships between religious domains and secular spheres, professional adherents of the Church and the lay flocks they supposedly shepherded.37 I have argued that we must learn to see these questions as not only genuine, but also learned.38 They do not show, in other words, an unschooled warlord asking for basic tutelage in Christian doctrine. They reveal a ruler of a Christian people, well versed in scriptural and doctrinal study, revisiting and examining the very foundations of his thinking. The Carolingians had the capacity to admit to themselves that they had not yet

 30 Romig, Be a Perfect Man, pp. 70–72.  31 Newfield, ‘The Contours, Frequency and Causation of Subsistence Crises in Carolingian Europe’, p. 169.  32 Newfield, ‘The Contours, Frequency and Causation of Subsistence Crises in Carolingian Europe’, p. 163.  33 Newfield, ‘A Great Carolingian Panzootic’.  34 Karoli ad Ghaerbaldum, ed. by Boretius, pp. 244–46.  35 Capitula de causis, ed. by Boretius, p. 162: ‘Primo commemorandum est, quod anno praeterito tria triduana ieiunia fecimus, Deum orando ut ille nobis dignaretur ostendere, in quibus conversatio nostra coram illo emendari debuisse: quod nunc facere desideramus’. On the interrelation and historical context for this and the document cited in note 36 below, see Nelson, ‘The Voice of Charlemagne’.  36 Capitula tractanda, ed. by Boretius, p. 161: ‘Quod nobis despiciendum est, utrum vere christiani sumus’. Cf. Nelson, ‘The Voice of Charlemagne’, p. 86.  37 See also Stone, ‘“In What Way Can Those Who Have Left the World Be Distinguished?”’.  38 For further discussion with regard to a somewhat different historical context, see Romig, Be a Perfect Man, pp. 72–74.

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mastered the knowable. Charlemagne demanded a fuller understanding of the whole universal picture — an understanding that, because of the misfortunes that had fallen upon his world, he and his people had clearly not yet grasped. Environmental disasters that directly affected human affairs — droughts and livestock plagues — provided one forum for the Carolingians to contemplate and to negotiate their relationship with the environment, but they were not the only forum. Sometimes, indeed most of the time, the natural environment served simply as a strange and confounding text that begged, but ultimately thwarted, satisfying interpretation. Think of all the unfixed, uninterpreted signs that the Carolingians recorded in their annals and in their literature: comets, meteors, eclipses, configurations and confluences of the stars.39 These signs were sometimes considered as allegories, but most of the time their specific messages were incomprehensible to humanity.40 Instead they served as an ever-present reminder that other forces existed and exerted agency on the course of events — non-human forces and non-human ways of knowing that existed alongside, but always independent of, the worlds of human habitation and cognition. When we look again at the source materials, we find all sorts of evidence for the Carolingians thinking about the strangeness of nature in precisely this way — attempting to understand what they could of the patterns and mechanisms that created the natural wonders that they so regularly experienced. From around the year 800, for example, we have evidence of a debate within the imperial court about the material physics of Creation. Fredigisus, a former student of Alcuin who succeeded his master as abbot of Marmoutier at Tours, wrote an epistolary treatise in apparent response to a query from Charlemagne asking him to weigh in on a matter of urgent debate among the court intelligentsia.41 The matter involved trying to determine the precise natures of nihil (nothingness) and tenebrae (darkness), the substances out of which God created the heavens and the earth. Fredigisus takes a thickly argued grammatical tack in his answer, concluding after about a thousand words of logical play that nothingness is, indeed, something. What it exactly was, however, he could not claim to know.42 To date, historians have understood Fredigisus’s ‘Treatise on Nihil and Tenebrae’, as it has come to be known, as a particularly intriguing but

 39 It is a modern commonplace to suppose that premodern cultures believed such signs to be causal and thus explanations of sorts for the natural misfortunes suffered by humanity. But the Carolingians never believed these signs to be causal. See, in addition to Dutton, ‘Of Carolingian Kings and their Stars’, Palmer, ‘Climates of Crisis’.  40 As an exception, see the discussion of Florus of Lyons’s tendentious and retrospective reading of such signs as warnings of imminent disaster and divine wrath in Gillis’s essay in this volume.  41 Fredigisus of Tours, ‘De substantia nihili et tenebrarum’, ed. by Gennaro.  42 For the most robust examination of this text, particularly with respect to Fredegisus’s grammaticism, see Colish, ‘Carolingian Debates over Nihil and Tenebrae’.

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ultimately only bemusing artefact of the exuberant exegetical energy of Charlemagne’s scholarly renovatio. Perhaps this is all it was, but there is considerable reason to believe that its import was more than just academic. Indeed, the matter seems to have been of some specific pressing concern. We have another letter in evidence, this one written in the voice of Charlemagne, requesting that a certain Dungal, an Irish monk, also contribute to the court’s discussion of nihil and tenebrae.43 Charlemagne says in this letter that he is attaching a treatise on the subject, which modern scholars presume to be that of Fredigisus. But Charlemagne urges Dungal to pay close attention to what the attached document fails to address, namely the literal meaning of these terms in particular: ‘Nihil tamen allegorice aut figurate ibi adtendas, sed nudum sermonem nudamque litteram rem nudam significatem’ (Direct your particular attention to the bare speech and bare letter of the bare thing signified, nothing allegorically or figuratively).44 Sadly, if Dungal sent any response, it is no longer extant. Yet we have to ask why Charlemagne would be so interested in the literal meaning of these terms. If it were simply a scholarly debate about exegesis, allegorical meanings should have been the goal. Charlemagne wanted to know what these mystical substances actually were. At the very least, we have to consider this evidence as an attempt to learn more about the mysterious natural world to which humans belonged, but which humans could only barely understand. But what if beyond the advancement of knowledge, Charlemagne and his advisors were also thinking about nihil and tenebrae more pragmatically? What if their questions somehow applied to pressing matters of governance? Might Charlemagne actually have been organizing a Manhattan Project–style research endeavour with an eye towards cracking the science of Creation itself? A preposterous question, perhaps. Yet we have further evidence of similar court-directed researches into the unknown workings of the natural world that equally seem more urgently pressing than, presumably, purely academic interests would demand. In 810, a double eclipse prompted Charlemagne to seek out further expert knowledge about the movement of the heavens from Dungal of Saint-Denis, perhaps the same Dungal whose expertise he had consulted in 801.45 This is especially interesting considering that from only a few months earlier, in 809, we have a capitulary document that seems to record the questions and responses asked at a conference convened to discuss computus — or as we sometimes call it, ‘computistics’ — the art of using the study of the stars and mathematics to devise an accurate calendar for the determination of the date of Easter and other feast days within the

 43 Bischoff, Contreni, Riché, and others have debated whether this was Dungal of Saint-Denis or Dungal of Pavia. It may also have been a third, otherwise unknown Dungal. See Colish, ‘Carolingian Debates over Nihil and Tenebrae’, p. 767, n. 38.  44 Carolus imperator Dungalem interrogat, ed. by Dümmler, p. 552.  45 Dungalus Carolo exponit, ed. by Dümmler, pp. 570–78.

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liturgical year.46 The capitulary document strongly suggests that Adalhard of Corbie presided over this council of scholars. And the assembly seems to have produced an encyclopaedic compendium that became generally titled, within about a decade of its first redactions, the Liber calculationis — the Book of Calculation.47 The Synod of 809, as it is now usually called, was very much about the math. And it was about the math not because there was a particular dispute over, say, the date of Easter, as with the Synod of Whitby in the late seventh century. It was about the math more in the sense of a collective striving for exactitude — an effort to make sure that all Carolingian students of the stars were working according to the same algorithms and numbers, that they were all on the same page, so to speak. Questions posed at the Synod ranged from the very specific, such as the number of years between the Incarnation and the present day (answer: 809), to the mildly debatable, such as how many years passed while the Lord lived among human beings (answer: 33.5, on good authority).48 The Synod considered which scholarly traditions were best for answering doctrinal matters of time, such as the number of years since Creation (answer: in light of the diversity of answers among traditions, they would follow the Hebrew solution).49 And those in attendance worried over the legalistic basis of their work, such as whether the common practice of not making Easter sacrifices before the spring equinox was an actual precept or just a custom (answer: the injunction is nowhere to be found in the letter of the law).50 A significant number of the questions asked participants to discuss and to debate the most technical aspects of computistical mathematics. These questions are perhaps the most illuminating of the Synod’s character, for they reveal what those present felt they still needed to know. They seemed to have grasped, for example, why some lunar years are standard (i.e. twelve months) and others embolismic (i.e. thirteen months) (answer: due to observations of the full moon).51 But other questions, such as why there was always a

 46 Capitula de quibus, ed. by Dümmler, pp. 565–67.  47 For the most recent scholarship on the Capitulary of 809, see Ramírez-Weaver, ‘Carolingian Innovation and Observation’, pp. 1–122; cf. Ramírez-Weaver, A Saving Science, pp. 1–2, 74–75, 81, 85–86.  48 Capitula de quibus, ed. by Dümmler, p. 565, article 1: ‘Quot annos ab incarnatione Domini usque in presentem tenere velint. Responderunt DCCCVIIII’; article 3: ‘Cum interrogarentur, quot annis velint Dominum inter hominess fuisse conversatum a nativitate usque ad passionem? Responderunt XXXIII semis annos ex auctoritate’.  49 Capitula de quibus, ed. by Dümmler, p. 566, article 4: ‘Interrogate quot annos a mundi initio usque ad Christi incarnationem dicerent. Qui cum propter diversorum auctoritates primum diversa protulissent, postremo in Ebraice veritatis numero fidem facere censuerunt’.  50 Capitula de quibus, ed. by Dümmler, p. 566, article 6: ‘De eo, quod quidam preceptum dicunt, ut ante vernale equinoctium pascha non liceat immolari, percunctati sunt, ubi scriptum in lege abeat. Responderunt hoc palam in legis littera non manifestari’.  51 Capitula de quibus, ed. by Dümmler, p. 566, article 11: ‘Cur anni communes et embolismi

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one-day discrepancy in calculating the sun’s course for the final year of the nineteen-year calendrical cycle, or why there are leap years and whether leap years are related to moon cycles, appear to have left them baffled.52 (Concerning the question of whether it would do harm simply to skip the leap year, they satisfied themselves with the obvious affirmative.)53 The most extensive and recent study of the Synod by Eric Ramírez-Weaver suggests that we ought to see the 809 gathering as part of the educational and social renovatio commonly attributed to Charlemagne’s era — a ‘Christianization’ of pagan and Judaic knowledge, conducted in the service of revivifying classical learning for a new age of Christian ascendance.54 Probably so, but I think there is more to see in the evidence. I also wonder whether the notion of ‘Christianization’ itself leads us astray, creating an unnatural binary opposition between Christian conceptions of the universe and all others, effectively framing the Carolingian moment as a minor stepping stone in the broader progression of the history of science from Ptolemy to Galileo, rather than a moment of scientific innovation and contribution in and of itself.55 Admittedly, it is easy to dismiss the Carolingians as primitive thinkers when we see them stubbornly trying to fit the square peg of geocentrism into the round hole of observable heavenly movements. They fully admit to not knowing elementary physical principles such as why calendars require leap years. But I think we need to focus instead on the fact that their questions provide clear evidence for Charlemagne being very much concerned, at the end of his reign, about the natural world and the fact that he and his scholars did not fully understand it. While their science may have been ‘primitive’ when compared to the contemporary, their minds were every bit our match. They were as sceptical as we are about the prognostic capacities of the stars. What they most wanted to know was how the stars worked, because the answer to that question could help them further understand themselves. Hrabanus Maurus, in his 819 treatise De institutione clericorum, echoed the well-known warnings that Augustine had written four and a half centuries earlier, in De doctrina Christiana, about the reasons for priests to learn and

constituti sint et non omnes equales. Responderunt: Propter observationem XIIII. lunae’.  52 Capitula de quibus, ed. by Dümmler, p. 566, article 12: ‘De eo requisiti, quod in ultimo cycli decennovenalis anni non XI, ut in superioribus, sed XII ad cursum solis remaneant, contra hoc nihil responderunt’; article 14: ‘De bissexti ratione, utrum ad lunam pertineat, inquisitum est. Unde nihil prius audisse se responderunt’; article 17: ‘De eo, quod in anno solari, qui ebdomadibus LII, id est diebus CCCLXIIII, continetur, addita sit una dies, vel unde ipsa quinta dies adcrescat (in quattuor annis solaribus), quaesitum est, sed ex eo reddita ab ipsis ratio non est’.  53 Capitula de quibus, ed. by Dümmler, p. 566, article 18: ‘Interrogatum est, unde quadrans, ex quo bissextus conficitur, adcrescat in quattuor annis solaribus, vel quid obesset, nisi bissextus adderetur. Hinc autem plana responsione satisfecerunt’.  54 Ramírez-Weaver, A Saving Science, pp. 121–22, 208–13.  55 Cf. my comments in Romig, Be a Perfect Man, p. 159.

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to practice the study of the stars.56 The stars contained truths, but not of the kind that could be used to dictate future behaviours or future events in the lives of human beings; nor could one use the study of the stars to determine characteristics of the soul and mind from the position of the constellations on one’s date of birth. This was superstition. The reason to discern the motions of the stars accurately was because these were part of the knowable truths of the universe — a universe created by a divine intelligence that far surpassed the intellectual capacities of its created children, but also a universe that contained certain kinds of fixed, ascertainable truths from which humans could gain understanding. The scholars of the 809 Synod were not praying for mystical powers to solve their problems for them. They were working to find answers to the knowable mysteries of their universe. Even though human beings could never reach the sapientia of their superintelligent creator, there remained hard facts about the natural world that were still within reach. Here, in the end, I find myself riffing on an argument that I often like to discuss with my undergraduate students, namely that early medi­eval ‘religion’ might not be what we call religion in the modern world, but rather something much closer to what we call cosmo­logy and evolutionary bio­logy. The Carolingians were asking the exact same questions as these modern disciplines — who are we? what is our place in the universe? what is possible to know? how much can we deduce from what we observe? how does it all fit together? And they were devising remarkably similar philosophical conclusions: we are beings of fundamentally limited intellectual capacity, living in a fundamentally artificial world of illusion and confusion the exact physics of which we cannot fully fathom. Through theo­logy, computus, and astronomy, the Carolingians believed that they might see the ‘truth’ of the saeculum more clearly through all the muck. They understood that humans could never achieve the wisdom of God, but they also kept experimenting with the limits of the human capacity to know, trying to figure out how to get as close to divine wisdom as possible. From their thought experiments we might be inspired to experiment more ourselves with reconceptualizing early medi­eval religion and the questions that we should be asking as historians. The natural marvels described in Theodulf ’s letter to Moduin, whether he meant them to be read allegorically or not, overflow with potential, unfixed meaning. And this, in the end, may be their ultimate function. They elicit wonder precisely because, though inscrutable, they seem to show the exact opposite of randomness. The natural world knew something that most humans did not. It teemed with sovereignties over which no emperor could hold domain. And this would have been a comfort for the pains and tribulations that

 56 Hrabanus Maurus, De institutione clericorum, ed. by Zimpel; Augustine, De disciplina Christiana, ed. by Vander Plaetse, pp. 207–24. For Hrabanus’s use of Augustine’s De disciplina Christiana, see especially Phelan, ‘New Insights, Old Texts’, pp. 71–78.

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Theodulf believed he suffered. The natural world served him and his society as a mirror, not just more information to be understood and manipulated by men at the centre of creation, but a measure of existence that was ultimately independent of and indifferent to human aspirations and fears. In a moment where supreme sovereignty had effectively rendered Theodulf powerless, the natural world may have represented to him a place where non-human sovereignties acted in accordance with their own plans and ends. He could not precisely know the future from nature’s strange signs, but they could at least confirm his suspicions that the world was sick and in need of care. Carolingian histories emplotted Bernard’s alleged insurrection as the defining moment of Louis’s early reign. The trauma of the blinding ended up killing Bernard in spite of Louis’s purported intentions to the contrary, which swayed aristocratic opinion unfavourably. The future remembered the extent to which Louis experienced widespread criticism for Bernard’s death, and writers circulated prophetic texts and vision stories questioning the certainty of his salvation. These acts of resistance culminated in Louis’s first voluntary vow of public penance at Attigny in 822, where the emperor repented the fate of his nephew, forgave the crimes of the conspirators, and restored them from exile. Theodulf unfortunately did not live to see the pardons of Attigny. He died while still in exile, but not without leaving us his solemn petition to Moduin. Historians have read Theodulf’s tales of strange nature as representations of the world that he feared, but they may ultimately have been more a representation of the world he hoped to heal and of the humility that he hoped human sovereignties would embody. As a consciousness all its own, an assemblage of autonomous beings and things that existed alongside humanity, but not of it, nature could be seen to have its own ways of knowing the universe, its own interests, and its own ends. These ways of knowing were parallel to, but not always congruent with, human ways of knowing, and thus the natural world could serve as an ever-present reminder that no human, not even the emperor, was ever in complete control of anything.

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Biblio­graphy Primary Sources Annales regni Francorum inde ab a. 741 usque ad a. 829, qui dicuntur Annales Laurissenses maiores et Einhardi, ed. by Friedrich Kurze, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi, 6 (Hanover: Hahn, 1895) Astronomer, Vita Hludowici imperatoris, ed. and trans. by Ernst Tremp, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi, 64 (Hanover: Hahn, 1995), pp. 279–555 Augustine of Hippo, De disciplina Christiana, ed. by Roel Vander Plaetse, in Aurelii Augustini Opera, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, 46 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1969) Capitula de causis cum episcopis et abbatibus tractandis, ed. by Alfred Boretius, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Capitularia regum Francorum, 1 (Hanover: Hahn, 1883), no. 72, pp. 162–64 Capitula de quibus convocati compotiste interrogati fuerint, ed. by Ernst Dümmler, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Epistolarum, 4 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1895), pp. 565–67 Capitula tractanda de causis cum episcopis et abbatibus, ed. by Alfred Boretius, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Capitularia regum Francorum, 1 (Hanover: Hahn, 1883), no. 71, pp. 161–62 Carolus imperator Dungalem fidelem de substantia tenebrarum et nihili interrogat, ed. by Ernst Dümmler, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Epistolarum, 4 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1895), p. 552 Dungalus reclusus S. Dionysii Parisiensis Carolo I. imperatori exponit secundum Macro­ bium de solis defectione anno 810. bis facta, ed. by Ernst Dümmler, Monu­menta Germaniae Historica: Epistolarum, 4 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1895), pp. 570–78 Fredigisus of Tours, ‘De substantia nihili et tenebrarum’, ed. by Concettina Gennaro, Fridugiso di Tours e il ‘De substantia nihili et tenebrarum’; edizione critica e studio introduttivo, vol. xlvi, Pubblicazioni dell’Istituto universario di magistero di Catania, serie filosofica, saggi e monografie (Padua: CEDAM, 1963) Hrabanus Maurus, De institutione clericorum, ed. by Detlev Zimpel, De institutione clericorum; Uber die Unterweisung der Geistlichen, Fontes Christiani, 61.1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006) Karoli ad Ghaerbaldum episcopum epistola, ed. by Alfred Boretius, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Capitularia regum Francorum, 1 (Hanover: Hahn, 1883), no. 124, pp. 244–46 Moduin of Autun, Carmen 73 (Incipit rescriptum Modoini Episcopi ad Theodulfum Episcopum), ed. by Ernst Dümmler, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Poetae Latini medii aevi, 1 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1881), pp. 569–73

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Ordinatio imperii, ed. by Alfred Boretius, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Capitularia regum Francorum, 1 (Hanover: Hahn, 1883), no. 136, pp. 270–73 Thegan, Gesta Hludowici imperatoris, ed. and trans. by Ernst Tremp, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi, 64 (Hanover: Hahn, 1995), pp. 167–277 Theodulf of Orléans, Carmen 72 (Incipit epistola Theodulfi episcopi ad Modoinum Episcopum scribens ei de exilio), ed. by Ernst Dümmler, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Poetae Latini medii aevi, 1 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1881), pp. 563–69 —— , The Verse, trans. by Theodore M. Andersson with Åslaug Ommundsen and Leslie S. B. MacCoull (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medi­eval and Renaissance Studies, 2014) Secondary Works Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Eco­logy of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010) Bennett, Tony, and Patrick Joyce, eds, Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn (New York: Routledge, 2010) Colish, Marcia L., ‘Carolingian Debates over Nihil and Tenebrae: A Study in Theo­ logical Method’, Speculum, 59 (1984), 757–95 Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds, New Materialism: Onto­logy, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010) Devroey, Jean-Pierre, La Nature et le roi: Environnement, pouvoir et société à l’âge de Charlemagne (740–820) (Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 2019) Dutton, Paul Edward, Charlemagne’s Mustache and Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) Gamble, Christopher N., Joshua S. Hanan, and Thomas Nail, ‘What Is New Materialism?’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 24 (2019), 111–34 Ganshof, François Louis, ‘Some Observations on the Ordinatio Imperii of 817’, in The Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy: Studies in Carolingian History, trans. by Janet Sondheimer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), pp. 273–88 Greeley, June-Ann, ‘Raptors and Rebellion: The Self-Defence of Theodulf of Orleans’, Journal of Medi­eval Latin, 16 (2006), 28–75 Grusin, Richard, ed., The Nonhuman Turn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015) McKitterick, Rosamond, History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) Nelson, Janet L., ‘The Frankish Kingdoms, 814–98: The West’, in The New Cambridge Medi­eval History, ed. by Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 110–41 —— , ‘The Voice of Charlemagne’, in Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages: Studies Presented to Henry Mayr-Harting, ed. by Richard Gameson and Henrietta Leyser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 77–88

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—— , ‘Women at the Court of Charlemagne: A Case of Monstrous Regiment?’, in Medi­eval Queenship, ed. by John Carmi Parsons (New York: St Martin’s, 1998), pp. 43–61 Newfield, Timothy P., ‘The Contours, Frequency and Causation of Subsistence Crises in Carolingian Europe (750–950 ce)’, in Crisis alimentarias en la Edad Media: Modelos, explicaciones y representaciones, ed. by Pere Benito I Monclús (Lleida: Editorial Milenio, 2013), pp. 117–72 —— , ‘A Great Carolingian Panzootic: The Probable Extent, Diagnosis and Impact of an Early Ninth-Century Cattle Pestilence’, Argos, no. 46 (2012), 200–210 Noble, Thomas F. X., ‘The Revolt of King Bernard of Italy in 817: Its Causes and Consequences’, Studi medi­evali, 15 (1974), 315–26 —— , ‘Some Observations of the Deposition of Archbishop Theodulf of Orleans in 817’, Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medi­eval and Renaissance Association, 2 (1981), 29–40 Palmer, James T., ‘Climates of Crisis: Apocalypse, Nature, and Rhetoric in the Early Medi­eval World’, Viator, 48.2 (2017), 1–20 Phelan, Owen M., ‘New Insights, Old Texts: Clerical Formation and the Carolingian Renewal in Hrabanus Maurus’, Traditio, 71 (2016), 63–89 Ramírez-Weaver, Eric M., ‘Carolingian Innovation and Observation in the Paintings and Star Catalogs of Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, Ms. 3307’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, New York University, 2008) —— , A Saving Science: Capturing the Heavens in Carolingian Manu­scripts (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017) Romig, Andrew J., Be a Perfect Man: Christian Masculinity and the Carolingian Aristocracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) Rouquette, Enimie, ‘Les lettres en vers de Théodulf d’Orléans’, in Epistola 1. Écriture et genre épistolaires: ive–xie siècle, ed. by Thomas Deswarte, Klaus Herbers, and Hélène Sirantoine (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2018), pp. 259–71 Schaller, Dieter, ‘Theodulfs Exil in Le Mans’, Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch, 27 (1992), 91–101 Stone, Rachel, ‘“In What Way Can Those Who Have Left the World Be Distinguished?”: Masculinity and the Difference between Carolingian Men’, in Intersections of Gender, Religion and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages, ed. by Cordelia Beattie and Kirsten A. Fenton (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 12–33

Part Two

The Struggle against Sin

Lynda Coon

The Call of the Siren Sex, Water, and Salt in the Sacramentary of Gellone

In Book xii of The Odyssey, the wanderer from Ithaca and his fellow mariners encounter seductive sirens, bird-women with talons. In one of the most famous scenes in the epic, the companions of Odysseus escape destruction by having their ears sealed with beeswax while their commander is lashed to the mast and writhes in agony (or ecstasy) at the call of the sirens, who apparently flutter above his storm-tossed galley. Similar Graeco-Roman sirens infiltrated the writings of Hebrew prophets translated into the Greek of the Septuagint in the third century bce. In that text, sirens join other wild beasts in the ruins of cities destroyed by God’s wrath; they threaten the Israelites in the wilderness, and they haunt biblical wastelands with their bewitching chant. Almost six hundred years later, Jerome praises the Children of Israel who stop their ears, Odysseus-like, when attacked by noontime demons. Oblivious to the enchanted voices, God’s Chosen shut out the sirens’ song, using their most precious treasure, their faith, to guard their hearts.1 In eighth-century manu­scripts, however, the Homeric bird-women have been transformed into faith-threatening mermaids. Their realm is the sea, not the sky or sandy ruins. The Sacramentary of Gellone (c. 790) includes some of the most famous such figures in the history of illuminated texts.2



* The author dedicates ‘The Call of the Siren’ to long-term mentor and scholarly inspiration, Professor Robert G. Finlay.  1 Jerome, Ep. 78.38, ed. by Hilberg, pp. 79–80.  2 BnF, MS lat. 12048, fol. 1v, gives the title of the sacramentary: ‘incipit liber sacramentorum’. For the manu­script, see Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses. Deshusses details the history of the manu­script, pp. vii–xxxvi, while Dumas edits the Latin text. Additional studies of the Gellone Sacramentary include Kitzinger, The Cross, the Gospels, and the Work of Art, pp. 69–81; Chazelle, The Crucified God in the Carolingian Era, pp. 81–99; Moreton, The Eighth-Century Gelasian Sacramentary, pp. 187–91; Teyssèdre, La sacramentaire de Gellone et la figure humaine dans les manuscrits francs du viiie siècle; Baldwin, Lynda Coon ([email protected]) is Dean of the Honors College and Professor of History at the University of Arkansas. Her research includes Sacred Fictions: Holy Women and Hagio­graphy in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997) and Dark Age Bodies: Gender and Monastic Practice in the Early Medi­ eval West (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Carolingian Experiments, ed. by Matthew Bryan Gillis, ISMAR 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022) pp. 185–220 10.1484/M.ISMAR-EB.5.127251

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Figure 1. ‘The Virgin Mary confronts a mermaid’, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 12048, fol. 1v. Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century. Unless otherwise indicated, all manuscript images in this chapter are reproduced with permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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The sacramentary launches the liturgical year with vigils held for Christ’s birth. The artist of the Gellone frames these Christmas Eve rites with two striking females (Figure 1). On the top left, the Blessed Virgin Mary initiates the vigil for Jesus’s momentous birth to come. Vertical and elongated, she dominates the page. Her identity is sealed by the inscription on both sides of her head: Sancta Maria. To the Virgin’s left, a fish-woman is swimming towards her against the tide of the Latin letters slanting across the page from left to right. In contrast to the Virgin, the mermaid is horizontal, her tail coiled. She draws the viewer’s eye towards her body because of its prominent position at the top centre of the page as well as because of her hybrid style, fusing fish with woman. The fish-woman is nameless, allowing the viewer of the manu­script to ponder her meaning within the theatre of the liturgy delineated by the Latin text of the sacramentary. These two female figures — the Virgin and the mermaid — confront one another visually in a way that is truly singular in Carolingian manu­scripts. In fact, the image of the Virgin itself is innovative in the icono­graphical history of the early medi­eval era.3 Mary’s gold, geometric-patterned tunic with red fringes links her to other ecclesiastical and biblical characters in the illuminated pages to follow, which has prompted some liturgical scholars to identify her as a kind of Hebrew priest.4 She wears a pectoral cross emblematic of her high ecclesiastical status. She swings a censer with her right hand, a priestly object drawn in the same gold with red outline as the Virgin herself. Mary’s left hand holds a red cross which appears to be in motion, as if about to hit the head of the fish-woman. The cross’s downward thrust is kinetic as shown by the tumbling chi-rho sitting atop the sacred abbreviation for Jesus Christ’s name inscribed on the third line of the Latin text (Figure 2). In anticipation of the incarnation, this Chi-Rho at the far left of the line points back towards the Virgin’s body. Its partner Chi-Rho on the opposite side

‘Studies in the Sacramentary of Gellone’; Deshusses, ‘Le sacramentaire de Gellone dans son context historique’; Puniet, Le Sacramentaire Romain de Gellone. On this opening vigil, see Sabak, ‘The Theo­logical Significance of “Keeping Vigil” in Rome from the Fourth to the Eighth Centuries’, pp. 415–20.  3 An eighth-century manu­script of the seventh-century Chronicle of Fredegar (BnF, MS lat. 10910, fol. A) has a similar rendition of a female figure but in no way replicates the liturgical and icono­graphical complexity of the Gellone Virgin. Discussed in Laffitte and Denoël, Trésors carolingiens, p. 78; and Porcher, ‘La peinture provinciale’, p. 59. On the image of Mary in the Gellone Sacramentary, see Kitzinger, The Cross, the Gospels, and the Work of Art, pp. 69–73; Chazelle, The Crucified God in the Carolingian Era, pp. 81–86; Rubin, Mother of God, p. 102; Hahn, ‘The Performative Letter in the Carolingian Sacramentary of Gellone’, p. 248; Lewis, ‘A Byzantine “Virgo Militans” at Charlemagne’s Court’.  4 Mary’s garb is reminiscent of the ephod of the High Priest of Israel in the Torah (Exodus 28) with its twelve tile-like patterns symbolizing the twelve tribes. She performs his sacrificial duty in the heavens. Her image also calls to mind the priest Zechariah in the Gospel of Luke, who brings the sacrifice of incense to the Temple (Luke 1. 9) in advance of the birth of John the Baptist. See Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, p. xii.

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Figure 2. ‘Kinetic Chi-Rho symbols with Alpha and Omega signifiers, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 12048, fol. 1v. Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

of the page tilts towards the right, bidding the reader to enter fully into the sacramentary to see how the story of the incarnation unfolds. Both Chi-Rhos display Alpha and Omega signifiers, pointing to the beginning (Alpha) of Christ’s ministry on earth and the end times of the apocalypse (Omega), a subject fully mined in the text. The Virgin, who holds the incarnate Christ in her womb, stands on tiptoes on a column-like initial I, which forms the first letter of the word Incipit. The image expresses various functions, testifying to the beginning of the book, to Christ as the Logos at Creation, and to Mary’s role as gestational vessel for the Word made flesh ( John 1. 1). At the bottom of the column, a serpentine creature with a horse-like head can be seen, devouring green vegetation. The green shade points the reader back to the aquatic woman, whose hair takes the form of grassy seaweed and whose tail is powered by wavy mossy material parallel to the fish forming the letter D of Domini below her.5 The mermaid sports egg-shaped scales in green, a feature indicative of her salty fecundity, for she is Venus’s spawn.6 Green also links the mermaid to other images on the page, save Mary, who lacks verdant hues. She raises her feet atop a gold column capital, thereby avoiding contact with the leafy material below. Unlike Mary, the mermaid lacks arms and hands — signifiers of priestly power and purity in the Carolingian world.7 At the point where the fish-woman’s pudenda should be placed there is instead a knot midway down her torso; therefore, the mermaid’s feminine form is every bit as mysterious and hidden as that of the tightly clad, rectilinear Virgin. Both women hold the promise of fertility out to the viewer: the mermaid in the form of egg-like scales; the Virgin in the guise of the censer, which signals to Carolingian

 5 Early medi­eval artists deployed green in a variety of capacities, including the colour of monsters, mermaids, and fertility. See Pastoureau, Green, p. 94.  6 On early medi­eval mermaids and their transition to the figure of the classical siren, see Austern and Naroditskaya, eds, Music of the Sirens, pp. 29–30.  7 On the purity of priestly hands, see Angenendt, ‘Mit reinen Händen’.

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Churchmen: ‘corpus Christi plenum odore bono’ (Christ’s body suffused with a pleasing odor).8 While Christ is not visualized in this opening folio, the censer stands in for his body. This confrontation between the Virgin and the mermaid is far from whimsical. The two female characters set the ritual stage for the entire sacramentary while enforcing the gendered hierarchies of the earthly society producing the codex. The Gellone Sacramentary stages a riveting struggle over terrestrial, oceanic, and cosmo­logical fertility. In the sacramentary, Mary and her virginal troops channel celestial fertility while the mermaid and her minions produce sterile seed. The prototype for the two styles of fecundity can be found in the Torah’s signifier of righteousness, the quality of being ‘upright’ (yashar), and its polar opposite, ‘crooked’ or ‘twisted’ (petaltol/​ patal).9 The Virgin is an upright column, an axis mundi, her womb a holy temple enshrining Christ.10 The mermaid wallows in sin horizontally with a twisted tail; armless, she slithers through the page.11 She is a gateway to destruction and temptation, luring readers away from the sacred script and into unfruitful sensuality. Her womb is fettered by sterility.12 The mermaid is Eve fallen from grace; the Virgin is a second Eve whose chastity conquers the labile state of her forebear. Mary’s strongest cohort within the Gellone Sacramentary are the male altar servants of the Carolingian world. The Virgin’s priestly activities visualized in the opening folio — thrusting a handheld cross downwards to expel evil and clasping a fragrant censer to purify — bring to life the ceremonies detailed in the manu­script and performed by bishops, priests, and deacons. Frankish priests are the Virgin’s successors within the theatre of the Mass, where they arbitrate the fertility of women’s wombs with Mary as a heavenly guide. At the same time, Churchmen usurp through ritual means the ability of women to reproduce. In rites of exorcism, baptism, and blessings, clerics miraculously open and close wombs in imitation of God.13 They also transfer the procreative power of the womb to the consecrated objects used in the Mass by ritually activating them. While Mary in priestly garb is evocative of Carolingian churchmen, her nemesis, the mermaid, encapsulates the negative forces of the universe that

 8 Amalarius of Metz, On the Liturgy 3.5, ed. and trans. by Knibbs, ii, pp. 36–37.  9 Deuteronomy 32. 4–6 (The Jewish Study Bible, ed. by Berlin and Brettler, pp. 440–41): ‘The Rock! — His deeds are perfect, | Yea, all His ways are just; | A faithful God, never false, | True and upright is He. | Children unworthy of Him — | That crooked, perverse generation — | Their baseness has played Him false’.  10 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, p. 289.  11 The association between sin and horizontality has been worked out by art historians specializing in the Romanesque. See Werckmeister, ‘The Lintel Fragment Representing Eve from Saint-Lazare, Autun’.  12 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, p. 417.  13 On God’s ability to open and close wombs, see Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 185–98.

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are hostile to ecclesiastical ritual. The mermaid’s presence in Christian manu­ scripts and medi­eval works of art signifies the dark side of human behaviour: sexual depravity, earthly temptation, and satanic compulsion. She and her demonic legion infect bodies, objects, and waters. The fish-woman causes earthly wombs to close, crops to fail, contaminants to pollute water, and weather to turn foul. Significantly, the mermaid’s ties to salt and water — two elements used in the Mass to exorcise, consecrate, and baptize — bring her perilously close to the world of the male altar servant, who rebirths Christians through the procreative waters of baptism purified and made productive by salt. This ritual of regeneration finds its biblical origins in the figure of the Prophet Elisha, who throws salt into noxious waters, transforming them into a life-giving, fertile spring (ii Kings 2. 21). Study of the appropriation of human reproduction by Carolingian clerics exposes a long-standing misogyny in the liturgy, which has had an exceptional resilience in the history of Christianity. Such an analysis also provides a new perspective on interpreting the cryptic opening page of the Gellone Sacramentary within the ritual and political structure of the text. At the same time, the investigation that follows reveals a liturgical history in which the mermaid and her Neptunian companions challenge priestly domination and Christian rites of passage.

The Gellone Sacramentary The Gellone Sacramentary has been the focus of multiple disciplines: liturgical history, palaeo­graphy, art history, theo­logy, political history, gender history, material culture studies, and even performance theory.14 Yet there has been no comprehensive reading of these fields regarding the cultural logic informing the codex. In the early Middle Ages, a sacramentary was a handbook for altar servants on how and when to conduct the Mass. These books were part of

 14 On the Gellone Sacramentary and performance theory, see Hahn, ‘The Performative Letter in the Carolingian Sacramentary of Gellone’. On material culture studies, see Weinryb, The Bronze Object in the Middle Ages, pp. 135–37, 205–06. For theo­logical readings of the Gellone, consult Chazelle, The Crucified God in the Carolingian Era, pp. 81–99. A gendered consideration of the Gellone Sacramentary can be found in Lifshitz, ‘A Cyborg Initiation?’, pp. 103–04. A gender analysis of the famous Te Igitur folio appears in Coon, ‘Gendering Dark Age Jesus’, pp. 18–22. Studies of the icono­graphy of the sacramentary include Kitzinger, The Cross, the Gospels, and the Work of Art, pp. 69–81; Nees, ‘Christ Crucified in the Gellone Sacramentary’. Garipzanov, The Symbolic Language of Authority in the Carolingian World, pp. 66–67, mines the political and imperial meaning of the Gellone, and Baldwin, ‘The Scriptorium of the Sacramentary of Gellone’, has examined the scribal hands. There is a great deal of work on the liturgical history of the Gellone, summarized in Moreton, The Eighth-Century Gelasian Sacramentary, pp. 187–91. See also Chupungco, ed., Introduction to the Liturgy, pp. 249–50.

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the political capital of the Carolingian Empire’s priests, marking them off as religious virtuosi. The sacramentary most likely was produced north of Paris somewhere in the diocese of Cambrai in Neustria around the year 790.15 In the early ninth century, the codex travelled some six hundred miles from Neustria to Septimania to take up residence in a church dedicated to the Holy Saviour in Gellone, part of the monastic complex founded by the Carolingian nobleman William, count of Toulouse.16 In the seventeenth century, the codex made its way north again to find another home in the abbey of Saint-Germain-desPrés only to be relocated to the Bibliothèque nationale de France during the French Revolution.17 In the early Middle Ages, the Gellone Sacramentary inhabited the space between Merovingian and Carolingian styles of manu­script production, between Roman and Frankish liturgical rites, and between the veneration of local saints in northern Europe and the emergence of a court piety calibrated by the purity of the Blessed Virgin.18 If the sacramentary did indeed originate in Cambrai, then its initial image of the Virgin may reference that city’s episcopal cathedral, which was dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary.19 The image of the Virgin’s elongated body with tile-like patterns on her tunic parallels the latest innovation in Carolingian sacred space: the extended nave of major basilicas.20 The preponderance of bishop’s blessings in the sacramentary also suggests an origin at the church of Notre Dame in Cambrai, a cathedral under Bishop Hildoard (d. 816). Hildoard was a renowned liturgical expert with close ties to the Carolingian court, which aspired to consolidate the celebration of the Mass throughout the empire.21 The Sacramentary of Gellone was the work of a handful of late eighth- and early ninth-century scribes. An artist-calli­grapher, perhaps ‘David’, dominated, for his name appears twice in the manu­script, artfully woven into geometric  15 Deshusses discusses the various theories about the sacramentary’s origins as well as its post-production history: Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, pp. xx–xxiii.  16 See fol. 276r: ‘Dedicatio baselice Sancti Salvatoris in Gellone’. Count William of Toulouse is named at the top margin of fol. 123v and fol. 124r: ‘Gellonis Vuillelmi Lib’.  17 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, pp. xxii–xxiii.  18 For the purification of Mary, see Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, p. 289. Mayke de Jong has clarified the relationship between the Purification of the Virgin and the resolution of major political upheavals in the Carolingian realm. See her The Penitential State, p. 19.  19 Hahn, ‘The Performative Letter in the Carolingian Sacramentary of Gellone’, p. 248, discusses this image of Mary as connected to the episcopal cathedral in Cambrai and Rome’s major basilica Santa Maria Maggiore, the site of Marian liturgies documented in the sacramentary.  20 On the extension of the nave as a signature style of the Carolingian T-shaped basilica, see Krautheimer, ‘The Carolingian Revival of Early Christian Architecture’.  21 Hildoard also wrote a sacramentary: Cambrai, Bibliothèque Municipale, Codex 164. Discussed by Hen, ‘When Liturgy Gets Out of Hand’, p. 208.

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lyn da co o n Figure 3a. ‘Name of the scribe David featured along the left, vertical bar forming the letter B’, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 12048, fol. 99r. Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

forms (Figure 3a/​3b).22 Palaeo­graphical study of the sacramentary demonstrates a connection with other manu­scripts produced at Cambrai.23 The scribes of the Gellone used over 270 folia to record vigils, Masses, saints’ feast days, episcopal blessings, orations, exorcisms, baptismal rites, a pontifical liturgy, and two martyro­ logies. Key liturgical sections of the codex direct the clergy on conducting ceremonies. Their contents are a bricolage of ancient and contemporary rites, the hallmark of the eighth-century liturgy prior to its reform in the early ninth century. The codex is in remarkable shape perhaps because several of its ancient rituals did not continue into the liturgical system envisioned by zealous Carolingian reformers; hence, the sacramentary did not modernize sufficiently and possibly fell out of use.24 Other rites, however, persisted throughout the Middle Ages, some until the present day, albeit in modified form.25 This Carolingian sacramentary takes its reader into aspects of the empire — social class, age, and gender — imposing the power of the clergy over buildings, human body parts, biblical history, animals, diseases, and nature itself. The text revolutionizes in several ways, as historians of the liturgy  22 At fol. 99r and fol. 254v.  23 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, p. xx; Moreton, The EighthCentury Gelasian Sacramentary, p. 188.  24 Moreton, The Eighth-Century Gelasian Sacramentary, p. 191.  25 Such as the baptismal rites and the rituals of the Exultet.

Figure 3b. ‘Name of the scribe David etched in the blank space below an ornamental F topped with an animal head’, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 12048, fol. 254v. Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

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Figure 4. ‘Christ Crucified on the letter T’, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 12048, fol. 143v. Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

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Figure 5. ‘Carolingian cavalryman’, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 12048, fol. 229v. Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

Figure 6. ‘Job pulls worms from his feet with his wife observing’, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 12048, fol. 143r. Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

Figure 7. ‘Mermaid swimming in between the lines of the Gospel of Luke’, Dublin, Trinity College, MS 58, fol. 213r. Book of Kells. Early ninth century. Reproduced with permission of the Board of Trinity College Dublin. Image(s) may not be further produced from software.

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have noted. The Gellone is the earliest evidence of the rite for exorcising demoniacs, consecrating abbesses and abbots, and reciting invocations over the dying.26 The manu­script’s icono­graphy is also novel. Folio 143v has the first extant Te Igitur segment in the canon of the Mass where the T of Te forms the cross of Christ’s Crucifixion (Figure 4). The Gellone also provides an early image of a Carolingian cavalryman (Figure 5), appropriate considering the importance of the count of Toulouse in the chronicle of the codex. In keeping with this martial theme, the manu­script includes prayers for success in battle, rites for the transfer of power from the Roman Empire to the Carolingians, and petitions for protection of the Church from barbarians.27 An unusual image of Job visualizes the Hebrew prophet’s sufferings ( Job 2. 7). A seated Job pulls worms from his ulcerated feet. His curious wife (perhaps) looks over his shoulder at the eruption of disease in her husband’s body, the result of demonic assault (Figure 6).28 Although startling to contemporary readers, the inclusion of mermaids in early medi­eval religious texts with visualizations of biblical figures like Job is not unknown. The Book of Kells (c. 800) displays an image of a mermaid looking to the viewer (Figure 7). She has a knotted mid-zone and unnaturally long, folded arms with elegant, flipper-like fingers. She fills the empty space at the end of a gospel verse (Luke 6. 31). Like the fish-woman on folio 1v of the Gellone Sacramentary, the Kells mermaid backstrokes against the surge formed by the left-to-right flow of the letters in the text. In the Carolingian Stuttgart Psalter (820s), Christ calms the storm at sea (Matthew 8. 23–27; Mark 4. 35–41; Luke 8. 22–25) as if an exorcism aimed at a merman blasting his horn amidst sea creatures presumably responsible for the demonic weather (Figure 8). The psalter includes more maritime monsters, underscoring God’s supremacy over creation: ‘His is the sea, He made it’ (Psalm 95. 5 (94. 5)); ‘Yonder is the sea, great and wide, creeping things innumerable are there, living things both small and great’ (Psalm 104. 25 (103. 25)); ‘There go the ships, and Leviathan that you formed to sport in it’ (Psalm 104. 26 (103. 26)). Carolingian fishermen tangle with the monstrous male draco (Figure 9), yet another nautical danger.29 In a Carolingian Psalter (c. 800), a seductive mermaid appears in the margin between the Latin text of two Psalms (Figure 10). Her body forms the

 26 On exorcism in the Gellone Sacramentary, see Young, A History of Exorcism in Catholic Christianity, pp. 45–58; on the consecration rites for abbesses and abbots, consult Bugyis, ‘The Development of the Consecration Rite for Abbesses and Abbots in Central Medi­eval England’, pp. 95–98; on death rituals, refer to Dunn, Belief and Religion in Barbarian Europe, pp. 160–61. Dunn builds on the earlier work of Paxton, Christianizing Death, pp. 107–14.  27 See Garipzanov, The Symbolic Language of Authority in the Carolingian World, pp. 66–67.  28 Fol. 143r. Discussed in Harkins and Canty, eds, A Companion to Job in the Middle Ages, pp. 294–95.  29 On sirens in the early Middle Ages, see Leclercq-Marx, La Sirène dans pensée et dans l’art de l’Antiquité et du Moyen Âge, pp. 60–91.

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Figure 8. ‘Christ calms the storm at sea accompanied by a mermaid blasting a horn’, Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Cod. bibl. Fol. 23, fol. 124r. Stuttgart Psalter. First quarter of the ninth century. Reproduced with permission of the Württembergische Landesbibliothek.

Figure 9. ‘Monstrous draco besieges a ship’, Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Cod. bibl. Fol. 23, fol. 117v. Stuttgart Psalter. First quarter of the ninth century. Reproduced with permission of the Württembergische Landesbibliothek.

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Figure 10. ‘Mermaid occupies the space between Psalm 13 (12) and Psalm 14 (13)’, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 13159, fol. 13v. Gallican Psalter. Early ninth century.

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D of the opening verb of Psalm 14 (13), Dixit. She has bare breasts, and she trails her hair through an elaborate headdress while gazing at the audience of the Psalter. Her exposed midriff elides into an elaborate tail decorated with geometric patterns, scales, and pincers at the end. In her right hand, she grasps a plait of hair along with the curved end of a banner reading: ‘Vox ecclesiae de populo Iudeorum negante Chr(istu)m esse Deum’ (The voice of the church against the Jewish people who deny that Christ is God). The mermaid’s body is sandwiched in between the prayer of a pious petitioner entreating God’s favour in Psalm 13 (12) and Psalm 14 (13), a castigation of evildoers who fail to invoke the Eternal. The Carolingian artist thus interprets the ‘insipiens’ (foolish) man of Psalm 14. 1 (13. 1), who believes ‘non est Deus’ (there is no God), as an allegory of the apostasy of the Jewish people and their rejection of the Christ. The mermaid’s grotesque body pushes up against the Latin words for ‘corrupt’ and ‘abomination’, accentuating her role in the story of salvation as a temptress seizing the impious with snapping claws. This fish-woman is the most dreadful hybrid, with a human torso arrayed with fins, scales, and pincers. The latter personify the perpetually unclean bottom-feeder, an antisemitic slur hurled at Jews by biblical exegetes in the Carolingian West.

Mary, Star of the Sea Despite early medi­eval anxieties about the maritime world, Carolingian poets and churchmen fondly connected the Blessed Virgin Mary with the sea. Alcuin of York (d. 804) had a strong devotion to the Virgin.30 He wrote poems to her, such as one dedicated to an altar he used for nighttime vigils: Virgo Maria, dei genetrix, castissima virgo, Lux et stella maris, nostrae regina salutis, Hanc aram meritis semper vivacibus ornet, Quae sacrata suo condigno constat honore. (Virgin Mary, Mother of God, most chaste Virgin, Light and Star of the Sea, Queen of our Salvation, Let her always adorn this altar by her long-lived rewards, Which stands firmly, consecrated by her own worthy honour.)31 Alcuin uses the phrase stella maris (star of the sea) frequently in his poetry, anticipating a Carolingian predilection for the salt-soaked Virgin. The image of Mary (see Figure 1 above) in the Gellone visualizes several verses of the Stella maris. The anonymous poem celebrates the Virgin as a ‘felix coeli porta’ (blessed gate of heaven), a ‘Dei mater alma’ (nurturing mother of God), and a ‘mutans Evae nomae’ (transformer of Eve’s name). The stella maris is chaste,  30 See Rubin, Mother of God, p. 102.  31 Alcuin, Ad aram Sancte Marie in choro eodem, ed. by Dümmler.

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always virginal, a conduit of grace, a mediator of purity, and an expeller of evil, who cures the sick and sets free those in bondage. Above all, she is a mater (mother) sustaining the hope of salvation in her womb. These verses are in dialogue with the priestly image of the Gellone Mary as well as with the rites described in the codex. The Virgin’s position atop a column with her feet barely touching its top points to her role as celestial mediator, gateway to heaven, and Second Eve, who overturns the fallen nature of her namesake (the mermaid) through militant chastity. The Virgin also is an exorcist or dispeller of evil (the fish-woman) in folio 1v, and she is a receptacle for the petitions to Christ made by the people described in the sacramentary. As a star, she enlightens and illuminates the righteous path for the Christians of the Carolingian Empire, a journey conducted through the rituals delineated in the sacramentary. The Virgin as stella maris is the polestar of the Gellone Sacramentary, guiding the Frankish Church to Christ with male altar servants as ferrymen. The sea and its connection to the Virgin and the mermaid appears in ritual and exegetical contexts in the Gellone Sacramentary. Salt and water are two elements used by the priests to activate objects, humans, and even demons. Some of these rites relate to fertility, and the most intense rituals centre on baptism.32 The ceremonies connected with the baptism of infants, catechumens, and pagans are examples of fructificatio, or the ways in which the Christian liturgy produces space for begetting and birthing. These baptismal rites also stage a drama where Carolingian altar servants assume the creative power of God in Genesis and the deity’s conquest of the deep. Baptismal scrutinies — or the tests of catechumens — begin during the third, fourth, and fifth Sundays of Lent and differ for males and females in the Gellone vision of the liturgy.33 Although the targets of these rituals are infants, their families function as surrogates during the verbal and gestural parts of the rites. In the first scrutiny, an acolyte inscribes the names of those to be baptized on a document held in the church; he then calls the electi (candidates) into the church, male infants on the right (auspicious) and females on the left (inauspicious) carried by family members. The deacon prays over them, and a priest performs the ancient exorcism of salt, an element used in baptismal rites.34 One by one, the priest states the names of the electi and places salt in their mouths. The acolyte then lays hands on the electi and exorcises them

 32 On baptism generally, see Cramer, Baptism and Change in the Early Middle Ages.  33 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, pp. 48–51, 312–17. For an analysis of scrutinies in the Carolingian world, see Phelan, The Formation of Christian Europe, pp. 122–25, 165–71, 181–87. On the ancient Christian scrutinies, see Ferguson, Baptism in the Early Church, p. 768.  34 ‘Exorcizo te creatura salis in nomine dei patris omnipotentis, et in caritate[m] domini nostri iesu Christi, et in virtute spiritus sancti’; Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, p. 49. For salt in the early rite of exorcism, see Kelly, The Devil at Baptism, pp. 122–25, 165–68.

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three times. In the first exorcism, the acolyte recites the names of Hebrew patriarchs and the children of Israel liberated from Egypt over the male electi. Female bodies receive a different sort of lineage: God of the heavens and earth, angels and archangels, prophets and martyrs, and virgins. The juxtaposition of male patriarchs — whose seed will be as numerous as the stars (Genesis 15. 5) — with a chain of genderless or inviolate beings points to separate baptismal ceremonies for males and females and their encoded messages about terrestrial (productive seed) and spiritual fecundity (militant chastity).35 Gender disparity continues in the remaining formulas.36 In a second exorcism, male electi undergo a lengthy theo­logical discussion of baptism; female electi hear the names of Hebrew patriarchs terminated in Susanna who, while bathing in a garden, becomes the object of the voyeurism of male elders (Daniel 13). They falsely accuse Susanna of a sexual dalliance with a younger lover after she spurns their lecherous advances. The prophet Daniel intercedes on Susanna’s behalf, and the two elders are executed. The addition here of a female figure, Susanna, to an otherwise patriarchal cast of biblical characters is striking for several reasons. First, the biblical narrative transforms the baptismal font of a nave into the private garden bath of a nubile Susanna. Second, the presence of an audience in the church signals the dangers of the illicit gaze, personified by the Hebrew elders, and the power of that gaze to penetrate the female body, always exposed during baptism. Third, the churchman stands in for the prophet Daniel, who himself is a spiritual replacement for the youthful lover invented by the elders. This second rite of exorcism actualizes a biblical passage as a mini drama within the theatre of a Carolingian nave. The third exorcism continues in this theatrical mode.37 Over male bodies, the acolyte narrates Christ’s powers of walking over water while rescuing Peter who was sinking to the deep because of his lack of faith (Matthew 14. 22–33). Over female bodies, the acolyte recites Christ’s opening of the eyes of a man born blind from birth and his resurrection of Lazarus from a tomb. The passage about Christ and Peter both walking on the water until Peter waivers in his belief is a message about the miraculous potential of male bodies if they cling to steadfast faith. For females, the biblical passages invoke feminine passivity and invisibility — be like the recipients of Christ’s healing, the blind and the dead, as well as the sisters of Lazarus, who beg Jesus to raise their brother from the dead ( John 11), underscoring the auxiliary role of women in the faith. While not mentioned in this passage of the sacramentary, Lazarus’s sisters, Mary and Martha, certainly would have been present in the minds of the audience because of their secondary role in this famous resurrection narrative.

 35 For the gendered rites of exorcism, see Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, pp. 50–51, 314–16.  36 For a discussion of these gendered exorcisms, see Lifshitz, ‘A Cyborg Initiation?’, pp. 103–04.  37 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, pp. 51, 316.

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Figure 11. ‘Coiled aquatic creatures biting one another’, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 12048, fol. 41v. Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

Another preparation for baptism involves a rite, the ‘apertio aurium’ (opening of the ears), a ritual occurring twice in the sacramentary in various forms.38 Folio 41v visualizes the rite with three coiled aquatic creatures biting one another, conceivably illustrating how existing in a non-baptized body constricts and inhibits sensory activity (Figure 11). The three serpents also point forward to the triple immersion of infant bodies in the baptismal font. Each of the two versions of the opening of the senses includes stage directions for the clergy, enhancing the spectacle of the baptismal process. What follows is a general overview based on Ordo 1 and Ordo 2. According to the liturgical script, once the electi arrive at the church, a deacon cries out: ‘Let the catechumens come forward’. He then recites the names of the males and females as they are written down in the church’s register followed by the antiphon, ‘Sicientes venite ad aquas’ (Those who thirst, come to the waters, Isaiah 55. 1).39 The priest prays over the catechumens, and the deacon asks the people to sign themselves. The congregation stands in silence, listening to two readings and a response. Altar servants then introduce the electi to the evangelists and their symbols. Deacons emerge from the sacristy carrying four manu­scripts of the gospels, candelabras, and a censer, illuminating and purging the path to the altar. Chanting again, ‘Those who thirst, come to the waters’, the deacons place the gospels on the corners of the altar: Matthew at the top left; Mark at the bottom left; Luke at the top right; John at the bottom right.  38 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, pp. 65–73, 321–37. See Palazzo, ‘La mise en action des images dans l’illustration du sacramentaire de Gellone’; and Besseyre, ‘Une icono­graphie sacerdotale du Christ et des évangélistes dans les manuscrits Bretons des ixe et xe siècles’.  39 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, p. 65.

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Figure 12a. ‘Opening of the ears ritual with evangelist symbols of Matthew (top left) and Mark (bottom left)’, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 12048, fol. 42r. Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

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Figure 12b. ‘Opening of the ears ritual with evangelist symbols of Luke (top left) and John (bottom left)’, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 12048, fol. 42v. Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

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The four codices positioned at the corners of the altar speak to the cosmo­ logical foundation of this rite. In Revelation (7. 1), seven angels stand at the corners of the world; they hold back the winds from blowing against earth, sea, and tree. The gospel books mimic the activities of apocalyptic angels: the manu­scripts activate the altar by channelling the four cardinal directions of the universe; they protect the sacrificial table from external forces; and they prepare it to serve as an axis mundi for the birthing rituals to come.40 After placing the gospels at the extremities of the altar, the priest teaches the symbols of the four evangelists to the audience, prefacing his remarks with the prophet Ezekiel’s visualization of the four gospel writers as man, lion, calf, and eagle (Ezekiel 1. 10; Revelation 4. 6). Thereafter, deacon and priest act as a textual tag-team: the deacon reads the opening of the gospel, starting with Matthew, and the priest clarifies the relationship between the evangelist’s symbol and his account of Jesus. The priest explains that Matthew is personified by a man because of the prominence of human genealogy in the opening of his gospel. Thematically, Mark’s lion signifies the solitude of the desert as well as Judah, the lion’s whelp (Genesis 49. 9). Luke’s beginning recounts the birth of John the Baptist to the aged and sterile Elizabeth, wife of Zechariah (Luke 1), a miraculous instance of God opening wombs, a subject dealt with elsewhere in the sacramentary. Luke’s symbol, the calf, has two horns for the two testaments and four hooves for the books of the evangelists. Finally, John’s symbol, the eagle, denotes the resurrection of Christ and the exalted nature of the Word, the controlling metaphor of the fourth gospel. The artist of the Gellone included illustrations of the four symbols of the evangelists in the text (Figure 12a/​12b): Matthew’s ‘man’ metamorphoses into a Carolingian prelate wearing a crossed stole, gripping a crosier, sporting a fringed cope, and holding open the codex of the gospel itself; his clerical garb echoes that of the Virgin in folio 1v with their shared colouring, fringed outer-garments, geometric patterns, and priestly stance. Mark’s fanciful lion, forming the first letter M of Marcus, also displays a gospel. Luke’s calf touches two of its hooves with two other disembodied hooves, popping directly out of the manu­script page to the right, a sign of the unity of the gospels. The artist accents the calf ’s horns — signifiers of the two testaments — in the same colour as Matthew’s crosier. John’s symbol is a hybrid eagle-churchman, clasping his codex to his chest but refusing to let the viewer see the mysteries inside. His luxurious feathers create another fringed cope, and his bare feet may reference the discalced clergy present during the baptism.41 Possibly the priests performing the opening of the senses showed these images to their audience, especially since the four evangelists themselves exhibit open and closed books. After all, the clerics conducting the opening of the senses lift the gospel books from the four corners of the altar one at a time to read aloud

 40 For Carolingian foursquare cosmo­logies, see Coon, Dark Age Bodies, pp. 216–46.  41 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, p. 100.

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from them. The resonance between the dress of the evangelical figures and contemporary Frankish altar servants in Neustria would have signalled to witnesses of the liturgy the celestial foundation of the Carolingian priesthood in conversation with the apostolic origins of the Church.42 After the priest discourses on the meaning of the evangelists, an acolyte holds a male baby in his left arm and places his right hand over the infant’s head. The priest then interrogates the electi in Greek; female babies (electae) experience the same physical gestures, but they hear the Word in Latin only, an intriguing example of how Greek trumps Latin as a sacred language even in the Carolingian world where access to the Greek language was virtually non-existent.43 Following this gendered induction, the priest recites prayers over the electi. The group then exits the sanctuary only to return later for more rites of passage. They re-enter the basilica according to the order established in the church register, males on the right, females on the left. The priest signs the babies’ foreheads and places his hands on their heads, rebuking Satan and conjuring the regenerative waters of the Temple.44 He translates Jesus’s Aramaic command of healing, Ephphatha, ‘be opened’ (Mark 7. 34), into Latin as Effeta.45 The Effeta involves the priest taking saliva from his own mouth and touching the nostrils and ears of the electi in imitation of Jesus’s healing of the deaf and blind man with his spittle (Mark 7. 33–35). This ritual completes the sequence launched by the opening of the ears, that is, the procedure for safeguarding orifices from demonic penetration and preparing them to receive the Word through the ear as well as incense, or ‘the pleasing odour of Christ’, through the nose. Moving away from these head-based rituals, the priest applies the oil of exorcism onto other bodily parts, making the sign of the cross with his thumb, an instance in which the cult of the crucified God draws on the ancient Roman understanding of the thumb as having special curative properties.46 The priest signs the chests of the electi with holy oil, commanding them to renounce Satan. He subsequently signs their shoulders too, males first and then females. The priest ambulates in a ritual circuit, touching one baby after another. Within the darkened backdrop of a Carolingian basilica (such as the

 42 On the visualization of Carolingian clerical dress, see Reynolds, ‘The Portrait of the Ecclesiastical Officers in Raganaldus Sacramentary and its Liturgico-Canonical Significance’.  43 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, pp. 68–69. Second baptismal rite is conducted in Latin for both sexes: Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, pp. 326–28.  44 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, p. 331.  45 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, p. 331: ‘Deinde tangit eos presbiter per singolos narres et aures de sputo ori(s) sui, dicit unumquemque (ad) aurem: “Effeta”, quod est adaperire, in hodorem suavitatis. Tu autem effugare, diabule, adpropinquavit enim iudicium dei’. This rite also appears as Effecta in other sacramentaries. The ritual of the Ephphatha continued in the Catholic Church until Vatican II. On the meaning of the Ephphatha in the Gospel of Mark, see Horsley, Jesus and Magic, p. 64.  46 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, pp. 100, 312, 314. On the classical Roman thumb and its supernatural powers, see Corbeill, Nature Embodied, p. 45.

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one at Cambrai), illuminated dimly by candlelight, the opening of the senses must have been mesmerizing theatre. The climax of the rites of passage described above centres on the baptismal font, the spiritual nexus of this early medi­eval cosmo­logy.47 The congregation goes inside the basilica again, but now the bishop accompanies them along with clerics elevating two candles and bearing both censers and bells. Bells themselves are subject to liturgical rites in the Gellone Sacramentary, including censing, rubbing with salt and oil, and washing with water, ritual actions parallel to those experienced by baptized bodies.48 For humans, the congregation witnessing baptism encircles the font with more lights, presumably candles. The bishop intones prayers, blessing the font and explicating the mysteries of its vivifying water and its role as a womb (uterus) rebirthing humans into a celestial state. Thereafter, he signs the water. In so doing, he both exorcises the water and conjures the four rivers of paradise (Genesis 2. 10–14), a cosmo­logical act parallel to the placement of the four gospels on the corners of the altar. The bishop emulates the power of God to separate out the dry land from the waters, a testimony to the Eternal’s subjugation of the chaotic forces of the sea (Genesis 1. 9), the conquest of Leviathan, the ‘twisting’ serpent (Isaiah 27. 1), and Jesus treading over vanquished waves (Mark 6. 45–53; Matthew 14. 22–34; John 6. 16–21). At this point in the ceremony, an acolyte thrusts two candles into the font, summoning the potency (virtus) of the Holy Spirit to make fecund the waters.49 The candles call to mind the two ‘great lights’ created by God to rule over the night and day (Genesis 1. 16) as well as the dual nature of Jesus Christ. Once they make the prodigious plunge, the tapers remain burning for the duration of the ceremony. The candles also represent the divine phallus impregnating the font through the agency of male altar servants, a fertility rite delineated in the Latin text of the sacramentary. The culmination of baptism thus is the spilling of priestly semen — the consecrated salt — into the church’s uterus, the font.50 Next, the priest blows three times over the water, his breath forming the Greek letter ψ (Psi) for ‘spirit’.51 Provocatively, this segment of the rite propels the participants into the biblical world after the flood, when God blew over the sea to drive back the Deluge thus enabling Noah to repopulate the earth  47 For the baptismal rituals centred on the font, see Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, pp. 98–101, 333–37.  48 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, pp. 367–69. Discussed in Weinryb, The Bronze Object in the Middle Ages, pp. 135–36; translation of the Latin benediction, pp. 205–06. Weinryb notes that the baptism of bells became a controversy during the period of Carolingian Church reform; therefore, the reference in the Gellone Sacramentary opens a window into certain liturgical practices that did not survive the age of Carolingian Church reform.  49 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, pp. 99, 335.  50 On Carolingian exegesis of semen, see Coon, ‘“What Is the Word if Not Semen”’.  51 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, p. 335. The ψ is not mentioned in the first version of this rite (pp. 99–100).

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(Genesis 8. 1).52 The priest subsequently uses the oil of chrism to make the sign of the cross over the font, mixing some of it with water and casting it over onlookers, thereby bringing them into the ritual process of rebirthing babies.53 In Latin, a priest interrogates the males and then the females, giving them basic lessons in the faith, starting with Jesus’s conception by the Holy Spirit — mirrored here by the priest who blows the spirit over the water — and ending with the Final Judgement. The altar servants immerse the babies in the water three times, a demonstration of the Carolingian commitment to the Trinity.54 The priest signs the cross using chrism on the top of their heads, and they dress the infants in white robes, symbolic of their changed state from offspring of terrestrial fertility to immaculate progeny of a spiritual uterus, the font.55 After bestowing the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit on the infants, the bishop then makes the sign of the cross on their foreheads using holy oil, thus sealing the rite of passage. Communion and an injunction to fast complete the ceremony.56

Siren, Seducer of Humanity The rites of passage detailed above elucidate the confrontation between Virgin and mermaid depicted in folio 1v of the Gellone Sacramentary. The scrutinies, opening of the senses, and baptismal ceremonies chronicle the priestly usurpation of female fertility, God’s victory over the primordial chaos of the sea, and the projection of the human senses into the celestial realm. Carolingian priests labour as the Virgin’s apprentices in the drama of exorcism, a pioneering subject in the Gellone Sacramentary. The Virgin’s adversary, the twisted mermaid, has her own seafaring regiment in the codex. For instance, folio 51v visualizes the VD, the abbreviation for the Vere Dignum prayer during Holy Thursday, as an extraordinary fish-woman (Figure 13).57 This mermaid stares at the viewers of the page, beckoning their eyes to move across her remarkable body. She has long, luxurious red and yellow hair enveloping her hybrid form; her lips part, and her teeth protrude like fangs. Unlike the mermaid on folio 1v (see Figure 1 above), this creature has breasts depicted as

 52 The sacramentary includes the late ancient rite of priests blowing in the faces of pagans to convert them; Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, p. 347. This ritual parallels God blowing his breath into Adam’s nostrils (Genesis 2. 7).  53 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, pp. 100, 335.  54 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, pp. 100, 336. Phelan, The Formation of Christian Europe, p. 126.  55 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, pp. 100, 336.  56 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, pp. 100–01, 336–37.  57 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, p. 83. Image analysed in Leclercq-Marx, La Sirène dans pensée et dans l’art de l’Antiquité et du Moyen Âge, and Laffitte and Denoël, Trésors carolingiens, p. 83.

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Figure 13. ‘Mermaid frames the VD of the Vere Dignum prayer of Holy Thursday’, Paris, Biblio­ thèque nationale de France, MS lat. 12048, fol. 51v. Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

two small circles amid her green, scaly body. She has no arms. Her torso is enormous, snaking up and down the page to form both the V and the D. A fantastical tail completes the design, and fins punctuate her serpentine figure. Provocatively, a small fish stands in where the abbreviation line of the VD should be; that same fish reads as the horizontal bar of the cross of Christ’s Crucifixion. More so than her sister on folio 1v, the folio 51v mermaid is a siren, the seductress feared by sailors, sojourners, and biblical exegetes alike. The early Middle Ages witnessed a shift from fishy female to seductive siren, the ancient bird-woman with Figure 14. ‘Bifid mermaid’, Cathédrale Notre-Dame- talons immortalized in Homeric de-l’Annonciation, Le Puy-en-Velay, France. Twelfth epic but increasingly depicted in century. Reproduced with permission of Professor Kim Sexton, Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, University of Arkansas, USA.

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eighth-century Christian manu­scripts as a mermaid. The Graeco-Roman siren had infiltrated the writings of Hebrew prophets translated into the Greek of the Septuagint in the third century bce. In the Septuagint, sirens join other wild beasts residing in the ruins of cities destroyed by God’s wrath; they threaten the Israelites along the stations in the wilderness; and they haunt biblical wastelands with their bewitching chant. They are the kindred spirits of howling jackals, shrieking owls, and roaring dragons (Isaiah 13. 21–22, 43. 20; Numbers 33).58 They journey from the Greek Septuagint to the Latin Vulgate, finding a home in the writings of the Church Fathers, where they embody lust, beguiling speech, apostate heresy, pagan theatricality, and human shipwreck in perdition. Between the early and central Middle Ages, the mermaid/​siren is propelled from the pages of illuminated manu­scripts to the heights of Romanesque architectural sculpture, where she still adorns column capitals in pilgrimage churches along the Camino de Santiago. The sculpted siren of the Camino often assumes the shape of a mermaid with two tails forming a ω, as if exposing her vagina to those entering sacred space.59 The siren’s body warns pilgrims of the perils of the journey and its myriad temptations, which threaten to suck the impious into the abyss, configured on the church as a gaping vulva (Figure 14).60 Although not as erotically charged as the double-tailed or bifid mermaid of the pilgrimage basilica of Le Puy-en-Velay, the Gellone siren epitomizes the spiritual dangers Carolingian altar servants aim to defeat. These threats to redemption take place both in spectacular combat with the Devil and in the mundane rhythms of life, such as making a journey. The sacramentary furnishes protection for travellers in the empire, whether on land or sea, the siren’s domain.61 On land, wayfarers pass through mountains, valleys, rivers, and dense forests. At night, they feel the Devil’s envy, driven off only by the seal of a bishop’s blessing at the commencement of the trip. Liturgical rites shelter voyagers from venomous serpents and feral animals. On the sea, sailors receive the Lord’s strong arm and the anchor of the Catholic faith during storms often believed to be summoned by sea monsters (see Figure 8 above). Holy water and the salt of exorcism, however, protect Christians from lightening blasts, while Masses performed at departure safeguard boatmen, much like Yahveh parting the Red Sea to lead the Israelites to safety (Exodus 14. 21–22). The figure of the siren, signifying as she does the elemental spirits of the water diverting sojourners from the righteous path, lurks behind the rituals designed to defend Christians on the road or seas.  58 On sirens in the Septuagint, see Heyman, ‘Sirens Chanting in Auvergne-Velay’, pp. 79–84. Carolingian churchmen also discuss biblical passages featuring sirens. See VieillardTroiekouroff, ‘Sirènes-poissons carolingiennes’, pp. 65–67.  59 On this type of image, see Kindl, Sirena bifida.  60 On the Romanesque bifid mermaids, see Heyman, ‘Sirens Chanting in Auvergne-Velay’, and Leclercq-Marx, La Sirène dans pensée et dans l’art de l’Antiquité et du Moyen Âge, pp. 93–228.  61 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, pp. 438–41.

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If the Virgin is the chief exorcist of the Gellone, then the siren is her satanic rival. In the Gellone Sacramentary, the siren and her demonic troops exercise dominion over humans, objects, and spaces. The first arena for cosmo­logical combat between exorcist and demon is the body.62 During the rite for curing a demoniac, the exorcist commands Satan to lie prostrate and be vanquished. He reminds the Devil to fear the human form because it is made in God’s image. The cleric taunts the Adversary as an ‘ancient enemy’, ‘demon of the noontide’, ‘roaring lion’, ‘most nefarious dragon’, ‘insidious serpent’, ‘figure of vices’, ‘seducer of men’, and ‘master of demons’. This satanic vocabulary squares with the multivalent meaning associated with the figure of the early medi­eval siren. The exorcist calls on angels, archangels, prophets, apostles, martyrs, and confessors to guard spiritual patients both day and night, at every minute of every hour. The exorcist hurls forceful imperatives at Satan — recede, exit, depart, tremble, fear. The dance between exorcist and demon manifests the Christlike powers of Carolingian altar servants with their ability to throw the Devil down prostrate in front of captivated audiences. In the rites of exorcism to follow, the demonic permeates human anatomy. Parallel to ninth-century medical treatises and their head-to-toe remedies for physicians, the sacramentary compels priestly doctors to negotiate — and purge — the body’s landscape.63 The exorcist demands that Satan ‘recede’ from the head, hair, tongue, mouth, arms, nostrils, chest, eyes. He delves deeper into the body, expelling evil from the large and small intestines in the same way God in Genesis separated the heavens from the earth, the light from the shadows, and truth from falsehood. The sacramentary likens demonic possession to physical blows, leaving their imprint on the body in the form of lesions. More exorcisms target different parts of the body, from eyelids, teeth, and palate to vocal cords, knees, and spine. The whole body becomes a battlefield. Priests purge liquid from the stomach, guts, and thighs. Unclean spirits afflict the flesh and the four humours as well as the genitalia and the five senses. This scrupulous purge of evil from human anatomy points to the parts churchmen expected to be most corrupt, or at least, were most likely to reveal signs of possession inscribed on the body. These passages also intimate anatomies of sin where corporeal zones associated with speech (tongue, vocal cords, lips), gluttony (stomach, throat, jaws), and sex acts (thighs and genitalia) receive special priestly care. Altar servants also target buildings and objects as being subject to demonic assault, the siren’s ultimate weapon. They do so in imitation of their Hebrew ancestors, the cohanim, who inspect anatomy, architecture, and material things, such as saddles and textiles (Leviticus 12–15). The expulsion

 62 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, pp. 353–59.  63 For the head-to-toe exorcisms, see Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, pp. 358–59. On parallels in medical texts, see Leja, ‘Dissecting the Inner Life’, pp. 306–13.

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of evil from Christian sacred space is every bit as precise as the anatomical exorcisms, illustrating the affiliation between bodies and church architecture in the Carolingian world. The Gellone Sacramentary layers every corner of a monastery with orations designed to put demons to flight in order to consecrate ascetic space.64 The sacramentary reconfigures the entryway to a monastery as the gate of Jerusalem through which the Saviour’s body passed. The memory of Jesus moving through the gate protects the monastic entrance from malevolent forces. The access point to the monastery’s basilica is sanctified by the blood of the martyrs, a liminal shield reminiscent of lamb’s blood smeared on the lintel and two doorposts during the biblical Passover (Exodus 12. 22). The basilica itself is the ‘hall of paradise’, underscoring its position as umbilicus of the entire complex. After framing monastic entry points with prophylactic prayers, the sacramentary then takes its reader on a virtual tour through the monastery: sacristy, dormitory, refectory, cell, pharmacy, kitchen, lard house, granary, furnace room, scriptorium, hospital, dormitory of the sick.65 Pilgrimage through these ascetic spaces highlights the most perilous locations: the dormitory, where the dangers of satanic illusions and phantasms oblige monks to be vigilant at night; and the refectory, where refreshing the body’s carnality may divert even the most pious from the salvific track.66 The seductive siren’s song permeated sites dedicated to the body and its physicality. The consecration of material objects extends priestly mastery over the visible world in response to the siren’s powers of possession. Amid the blessings of critical vessels deployed in the Mass — altar, patina, chalice, chrismal, font, crosses — lurk some unexpected wonders. Priests exorcise and bless soap, which is used both for purging human bodies and washing off pus from the rim of the baptismal font.67 Water again emerges as a central theme in these sections of the sacramentary. Priests expel the demonic from new cisterns, now cleansed of diabolical machinations; contagious water sources revivify in the manner of Jesus turning water into wine ( John 2. 9).68 Cauldrons contaminated by diabolical herbs undergo a purgation akin to the three youths emerging unscathed from the furnace of the idolatrous king Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 3. 26), and Susanna triumphs over the false accusation of the two elders (Daniel 13).69 Here, the sacramentary equates pagan king and Hebrew elder with demonic potions employed by priestly rivals and magicians, indeed, all the siren’s soldiers in the battle between churchmen and their satanic rivals. Throughout the sacramentary, water and salt combine to exert hegemony  64 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, pp. 452–58.  65 The spatial scenario resembles that visualized on the Plan of Saint Gall. See Coon, Dark Age Bodies, pp. 165–215.  66 Rob Meens, ‘Reconciling Disturbed Sacred Space’, explores these exorcisms of space.  67 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, p. 449.  68 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, pp. 451–52.  69 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, pp. 484–85.

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Figure 15. ‘Hebrew matriarch Sarah frames prayers recited over sterile women’, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 12048, fol. 223r. Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

Figures 16a. ‘Fish form the E of Ex with one biting a cross’, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 12048, fol. 22v. Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

Figure 16b. ‘Fish form the letter S’, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 12048, fol. 85v. Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

Figure 16c. ‘Twisty, serpentine figure licks the letter O’, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 12048, fol. 93v. Gellone Sacramentary. Late eighth century.

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over the devil and terrestrial creation. The sovereignty of salt-water can be felt in domestic space, sacred architecture, liturgical instruments, water sources, and diverse bodies — clerical, demoniac, sick, pagan, lay, and even animal. ‘This creature of salt and water’ seasons the pious with faith (Mark 9. 49–50), enforcing the deity’s role as ruler over the elements and destroyer of unclean spirits of place and matter. Exorcised salt masters the chaos of water, thereby redeeming its demonic, elemental nature. In like manner, God is a protective midwife, who ushers the newborn from the human uterus to the watery womb of the priestly font, where the reborn come out of the holy salt-water as the spiritual issue of the divine. The baptismal font, an integral player in this story of the Gellone Sacramentary, enables Carolingian priests to emulate the Torah’s depiction of God as an opener and closer of women’s wombs. In the Torah, a disembodied God uses the divine voice to impregnate sterile women (Genesis 17. 16; 20. 17–18; 25. 21). In the gospels, the Holy Spirit does the work of semen, filling the barren womb of Mary with God’s son (Matthew 1. 18; Luke 1. 35). The sacramentary plays off biblical passages centred on tensions between terrestrial sterility and celestial fecundity. Nowhere is this friction more perceptible than in the Mass held on behalf of sterile women, a rite juxtaposed with prayers given after successful birth.70 The first oration on the birth of a child resonates with the opening page of the sacramentary: the infant is taken from its mother’s viscera and birthed into the world just as Mary experiences the same process to yield the Word (see Figure 1 above). In the liturgy targeted at the empire’s infertile wombs, priests invoke the biblical example of Sarah, whose ‘dead vulva’ (mortua vulva) wondrously resurrects to receive fertile seed activated by the divine voice. The sacramentary then lists a chain of sterile matriarchs who give birth miraculously: Rebecca, Rachel, Elizabeth, and of course, Mary herself. Carolingian altar servants take on the power of God’s voice, making fertile a uterus tormented by fetters of sterility, the description of barren wombs in liturgical speech. An illustration of a woman frames these prayers directed at dead wombs. The image may possibly be Sarah of Genesis as she existed in the Carolingian imaginary, an exotic figure with large, dangling earrings and a bejewelled headdress (Figure 15). Along with a curved fish, this female figure forms the D of Deus. Her green-gloved hand gestures towards the beginning of the oration for sterile women. Green also points to the fertile future of the shackled uterus once it is freed by a priest. The gesture made by the woman’s green gloves also points to the next prayers in the sacramentary, which are designed to make barren terrain verdant through abundant rain, sunny weather, and ample crops.71 Clearly, the fertility of the female body relates directly to the abundance of agricultural produce. Sterility of bodies and infertility of plants are both the result of demonic incursions, the siren’s sphere of influence.

 70 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, pp. 414–17.  71 Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by Dumas and Deshusses, pp. 418–21.

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Green also recalls the opening folio with its showdown between mermaid and Virgin (see Figure 1 above). This siren exists as an index for the abundant evils portrayed in the sacramentary. The fish-woman and her demonic army insinuate themselves into every inch of the human body, the totality of sacred space, and even the objects of ordinary life. Her satanic voice threatens the human senses even after they have been spiritually reactivated to God’s purpose during the baptismal ‘opening’ ceremony. The mermaid’s legions blight the fruits of the earth just as they constrict the uterus rendering it barren. The mermaid extends her reach from the depths of the sea up into the water sources of the earth — wells and fonts. Her reign over the salty sea abuts the priestly zone in the theatre of the Mass, where salt and water, the mermaid’s elemental forces, come under the control of male altar servants. She is the ancient serpent, the wicked dragon, the ultimate Adversary in the sacramentary. She is the ‘great whore seated on many waters’ (Revelation 17. 1). The siren’s twisted, yet alluring, body warns Christians: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight’ (Matthew 3. 3; Mark 1. 3; Luke 3. 4). The Gellone Sacramentary and its priestly polestar, the Blessed Virgin, demonstrate that the straight path to the heavens must be accessed through rituals that conquer the satanic sway of the siren and her minions.

Neptunian Cohort But the Virgin’s victory over the mermaid may merely be a Pyrrhic one. Because the siren represents the forces of the universe in conflict with the Church, there is an alternative way of interpreting the sacramentary. The siren’s insouciant gaze at the viewer of the manu­script is an obvious challenge to the male priests and to those who obey their liturgical commands. The siren unleashes a maritime regiment marshalled strategically throughout the sacramentary. Her body frames the VD prayer, the Vere Dignum, of Holy Thursday (see Figure 13 above). Her scaly minions appear in multiple forms, the ultimate shape-changers of the codex. Most often, they comprise the D of the Latin word for God, Deus. They swim across the folia in myriad other forms: a Crucifixion-like E, a serpentine S, and a bizarre dragon-snake hybrid with darting tongue licking an O (Figure 16a, 16b, 16c). On the one hand, these aquatic beasts, biting and snapping, resonate with the early Christian symbol for Christ, Ichthys, ‘fish’. On the other hand, they point to the clash between the elements, especially salt and water, and the priests attempting to control them through rituals of baptism and exorcism. These seemingly ‘marginal’ images thus carry meaning rather than function as trifling, fancy-driven ornamentation, leavings of the illuminator nodding over his task.72 Specifically, the reptilian letters signify the siren’s foothold in the manu­script — as in  72 On the meaning of biting, masticating, chewing in medi­eval manu­scripts, see Camille, Images on the Edge, pp. 63–73.

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Figure 17. ‘Sea-woman blows horn while maritime monster swallows the prophet Jonah’, Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Cod. bibl. Fol. 23, fol. 79r. Stutt­gart Psalter. First quarter of the ninth century. Reproduced with permission of the Württem­ bergische Landesbibliothek.

the human heart. The siren herself is described in religious tracts from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages as seducer, demon of the noontide, enchantress, venomous serpent, and gateway to hell. The maritime features of the sacramentary evoke the shadowy world of rival, chthonic cults, fertility, magic, and even enterprising commerce with infernal spirits. The misogyny of the Gellone Sacramentary is imprinted in the siren’s Neptunian comrades and their associations with fertility and magic. While not as acrobatic or sensual as the fish-woman of Romanesque sculpture (Figure 14), the siren of the Gellone awakens that ancient, misogynistic trinity of fish, vulva, and salty fecundity. While lacking the exhibitionist vulva of the sculpted, bifid mermaid, the siren on a Carolingian psalter between Psalm 13 (12) and 14 (13) (see Figure 10 above) aims her pincers towards her mid-zone, a gesture reminding the viewer of the dangers of entering into the female because of her ambition to trawl men to the chasm of carnality. The association between vagina and monstrous mouth appears in the Stuttgart Psalter’s visualization of Jonah being swallowed by a maritime monster viewed by a sea-woman blowing a trumpet (Figure 17). The elements of Carolingian culture considered here have left a large footprint in the history of the West, especially regarding the negative priestly portrayal of women as practitioners of dark arts, employing their bodies as gateways to Satan. Vestiges of this battle over fecundity are still felt in the liturgy of today, where priests continue to perform their conquest of the waters through the plunge of candles into the baptismal font. The present

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is witnessing a transformation in religious practice and perspective more in line with the elemental powers of the siren and her maritime allies. Reading the headlines of major news venues brings home this point: ‘Millennials Reject Christianity’; ‘Black Millennials Leave Church for African Witchcraft’; ‘Witchcraft Is on the Rise’; ‘The Return of Paganism’; ‘Christianity on the Decline’.73 Esoteric beliefs ‘maintain their appeal even in the era of the smart phone — as is attested by numerous tarot, astro­logy, and ghost-hunting apps’ available to the public.74 Indeed, those consumers now exist in a world where a positive link between feminist and witch has made its way into mainstream culture; where Christianity is apparently losing its religious hegemony in the West; and where the mermaid of folio 1v of the Gellone Sacramentary may come to stand for the futility of established, male-centred religion to address fully human needs. Beyond the relevance of the topic to the contemporary scene, scholars must reconceptualize the study of liturgy and its priestly actors. Instead of dismissing images like the medi­eval siren as enchantingly quirky, or making them fit Christian patterns of worship (Ichthys), or ignoring them altogether, historians must recognize that early medi­eval mermaids memorialize the possibility of other spiritual routes taken by medi­eval pilgrims but whose presence in the historical narrative hitherto has been largely invisible.75

 73 News headlines taken from New York Times, Fox News, The Atlantic, Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Guardian.  74 Conversation with scholar of American esotericism, Dr John Treat.  75 For a convincing reading of the Gellone’s fish imagery as Christian, see Kendrick, Animating the Letter, pp. 72–183.

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Biblio­graphy Manu­scripts Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS 58 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France [BnF], MS fonds latin 10910 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France [BnF], MS fonds latin 12048 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France [BnF], MS fonds latin 13159 Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Cod. bibl. Fol. 23 Primary Sources Alcuin, Ad aram Sancte Marie in choro eodem, ed. by Ernest Dümmler, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Poetae Latini medii aevi, 1 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1881), p. 336 Amalarius of Metz, On the Liturgy, ed. and trans. by Eric Knibbs, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014) Jerome, Sancti Eusebii Hieronymi epistulae, vol. ii, Epistulae LXXI–CXX, ed. by Isidore Hilberg, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, 55 (Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1912) The Jewish Study Bible, ed. by Adele Berlin and Marc Ziv Brettler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, ed. by A. Dumas and J. Deshusses, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, 159, 159A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981) Secondary Works Angenendt, Arnold, ‘Mit reinen Händen: Das Motiv der kultischen Reinheit in der abendländischen Askese’, in Herrschaft, Kirche, Kultur: Beiträge zur Geschichte des Mittelalters; Festschrift für Friedrich Prinz zu seinem 65. Geburtstag, ed. by Georg Jenal, Mono­graphien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters, 37 (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1993), pp. 297–316 Austern, Linda, and Inna Naroditskaya, eds, Music of the Sirens (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006) Baldwin, Carl Raushenbush, ‘The Scriptorium of the Sacramentary of Gellone’, Scriptorium, 25.1 (1971), 3–17 —— , ‘Studies in the Sacramentary of Gellone’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 1968) Besseyre, Marianne, ‘Une icono­graphie sacerdotale du Christ et des évangélistes dans les manuscrits Bretons des ixe et xe siècles’, Pecia: Ressources en médiévistique, 12 (2007), 7–26 Bugyis, Katie Ann-Marie, ‘The Development of the Consecration Rite for Abbesses and Abbots in Central Medi­eval England’, Traditio, 71 (2016), 91–141 Camille, Michael, Images on the Edge: The Margins of Medi­eval Art (London: Reaktion, 1992)

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Chazelle, Celia, The Crucified God in the Carolingian Era: Theo­logy and Art of Christ’s Passion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Chupungco, Anscar J., ed., Introduction to the Liturgy, Pontifical Liturgical Institute (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1997) Coon, Lynda, Dark Age Bodies: Gender and Monastic Practice in the Early Medi­eval West (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) —— , ‘Gendering Dark Age Jesus’, Gender & History, 28.1 (2016), 8–33 —— , ‘“What Is the Word if Not Semen”: Priestly Bodies in Carolingian Exegesis’, in Gender in the Early Medi­eval World: East and West, 300–900, ed. by Leslie Brubaker and Julia M. H. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 278–300 Corbeill, Anthony, Nature Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004) Cramer, Peter, Baptism and Change in the Early Middle Ages, c. 200–1150 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) Deshusses, J., ‘Le sacramentaire de Gellone dans son context historique’, Ephemerides liturgicae, 75 (1961), 193–210 Dunn, Marilyn, Belief and Religion in Barbarian Europe, c. 350–700 (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) Ferguson, Everett, Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theo­logy, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009) Garipzanov, Ildar, The Symbolic Language of Authority in the Carolingian World (c. 751–877) (Leiden: Brill, 2008) Hahn, Cynthia, ‘The Performative Letter in the Carolingian Sacramentary of Gellone’, in Sign and Design: Script as Image in Cross-Cultural Perspective, 300–1600 ce, ed. by Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak and Jeffrey F. Hamburger (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Symposia and Colloquia, 2016), pp. 237–57 Harkins, Franklin T., and Aaron Canty, eds, A Companion to Job in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2017) Hen, Yizhak, ‘When Liturgy Gets Out of Hand’, in Writing the Early Medi­eval West: Studies in Honor of Rosamond McKitterick, ed. by Elina Screen and Charles West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2018), pp. 203–12 Heyman, Avital, ‘Sirens Chanting in Auvergne-Velay: A Story of Exegetical Pilgrimage on the Via Podiensis’, Ad Limina, 4.4 (2013), 69–115 Horsley, Richard A., Jesus and Magic: Freeing the Gospel Stories from Modern Misconceptions (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014) Jong, Mayke de, The Penitential State: Authority and Atonement in the Age of Louis the Pious, 814–840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) Kelly, Henry Ansgar, The Devil at Baptism: Ritual, Theo­logy, and Drama (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1985) Kendrick, Laura, Animating the Letter: The Figurative Embodiment of Writing from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999)

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Kindl, Ulrike, Sirena bifida: Bilderwelten als Denkräume (Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2008) Kitzinger, Beatrice E., The Cross, the Gospels, and the Work of Art in the Carolingian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) Krautheimer, Richard, ‘The Carolingian Revival of Early Christian Architecture’, Art Bulletin, 24.1 (1942), 1–38 Laffitte, Marie-Pierre, and Charlotte Denoël, Trésors carolingiens: Livres manuscrits de Charlemagne à Charles le Chauve (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2007) Leclercq-Marx, Jacqueline, La Sirène dans pensée et dans l’art de l’Antiquité et du Moyen Âge: Du mythe païen au symbole chrétien (Brussels: Académie royale de Belgique, 1983) Leja, Meg, ‘Dissecting the Inner Life: Body and Soul, Medicine and Metaphor in the Carolingian Era’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Princeton University, 2015) Lewis, Suzanne, ‘A Byzantine “Virgo Militans” at Charlemagne’s Court’, Viator, 11 (1980), 71–94 Lifshitz, Felice, ‘A Cyborg Initiation? Liturgy and Gender in Carolingian East Francia’, in Paradigms and Methods in Early Medi­eval Studies, ed. by Celia Chazelle and Felice Lifshitz (New York: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 101–17 Meens, Rob, ‘Reconciling Disturbed Sacred Space: The Ordo for “Reconciling an Altar Where a Murder Has Been Committed”, in the Sacramentary of Gellone in its Cultural Context’, in The Merovingian Kingdoms and the Mediterranean World: Revisiting the Sources, ed. by Stefan Esders, Yitzhak Hen, Pia Lucas, and Tamar Rotman (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 103–12 Moreton, Bernard, The Eighth-Century Gelasian Sacramentary: A Study in Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976) Nees, Laurence, ‘Christ Crucified in the Gellone Sacramentary’, Conversations: An On-Line Journal of the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion (2013), [accessed 14 November 2020] Palazzo, Eric, ‘La mise en action des images dans l’illustration du sacramentaire de Gellone: Le canon de la messe et le ritual baptismal’, Codex Aquilarensis, 29 (2013), 49–60 Pastoureau, Michel, Green: The History of a Color, trans. by Jody Gladding (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014) Paxton, Fredrick S., Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medi­eval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990) Phelan, Owen, The Formation of Christian Europe: The Carolingians, Baptism, and the Imperium Christianum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) Porcher, Jean, ‘La peinture provinciale’, in Karl der Grosse: Lebenswerk und Nachleben, vol. iii: Karolinigische Kunst, ed. by Wolfgang Braunfels and Hermann Schnitzler (Düsseldorf: L. Schwann, 1966), pp. 54–73 Puniet, Dom Pierre de, Le Sacramentaire Romain de Gellone (Rome: Ephemerides liturgicae, 1934)

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Reynolds, Roger E., ‘The Portrait of the Ecclesiastical Officers in Raganaldus Sacramentary and its Liturgico-Canonical Significance’, Speculum, 46 (1971), 432–42 Rubin, Miri, Mother of God (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) Sabak, James George, ‘The Theo­logical Significance of “Keeping Vigil” in Rome from the Fourth to the Eighth Centuries’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Catholic University of America, 2012) Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) Teyssèdre, Bernard, La sacramentaire de Gellone et la figure humaine dans les manuscrits francs du viiie siècle: De l’enluminure à l’illustration (Toulouse: Privat, 1959) Vieillard-Troiekouroff, May, ‘Sirènes-poissons carolingiennes’, Cahiers archéo­ logiques, 19 (1969), 61–83 Weinryb, Ittai, The Bronze Object in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) Werckmeister, O. K., ‘The Lintel Fragment Representing Eve from Saint-Lazare, Autun’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 35 (1972), 1–30 Young, Francis, A History of Exorcism in Catholic Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 2016)

Courtney M. Booker

By the Body Betrayed Blushing in the Penitential State Nihil veritas erubescit nisi solummodo abscondi. Tertullian, Adversus Valentinianos, 3. 2 Man is the only animal that blushes … or needs to. Mark Twain

In a characteristically grim letter, Jerome reminded a friend that although ‘we were created in God’s image and likeness, by reason of our own perversity we hide ourselves behind changing masks, and just as on the stage one and the same actor now figures as a brawny Hercules, now relaxes into the softness of a Venus or the quivering tone of a Cybele, so we […] have as many counterfeiting masks as we have sins (tot habemus personarum similitudines quot peccata)’.1 Yet the situation was not as bad as Jerome made it seem, for he neglected to mention that these same corporeal masks, guises, and façades — these self-fashioned, dissimulating personae — were imperfect;



* A preliminary version of this paper was presented at ‘The Material World of the Early Middle Ages’ conference, Pacific University, Forest Grove, Oregon, 8 October 2016. I wish to thank Mayke de Jong and Patrick Geary for their queries and suggestions.  1 Jerome, Ep. 43.2 (ad Marcellam), ed. by Hilberg, p. 320, ‘Cum enim ad imaginem et simili­ tudinem dei conditi sumus, ex uitio nostro personas nobis plurimas superinducimus. Et quomodo in theatralibus scaenis unus atque idem histrio nunc Herculem robustus ostentat, nunc mollis in Uenerem frangitur, nunc tremulus in Cybelem, ita et nos, qui, si mundi non essemus, odiremur a mundo, tot habemus personarum similitudines, quot peccata’. Trans. modified slightly from Jerome, Select Letters, trans. by Wright, p. 175. See also the even more striking passage by Jerome on the playing of personae in his commentary on Psalm 81, Jerome, Tractatus in Psalmos, 81, 2–4, ed. by Morin, pp. 84–85. On the reception of this latter passage in Carolingian Europe, see Gillis, Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire, pp. 72–73. On Jerome and self-fashioning, Vessey, ‘Jerome and the Jeromanesque’, pp. 226–27. Courtney M. Booker ([email protected]) is Associate Professor of medi­eval European history at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He is the author of Past Convictions: The Penance of Louis the Pious and the Decline of the Carolingians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). He is currently translating Henri-Xavier Arquillière’s L’Augustinisme politique, and writing a book on Carolingian conceptions of ‘conscientia’. Carolingian Experiments, ed. by Matthew Bryan Gillis, ISMAR 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022) pp. 221–244 10.1484/M.ISMAR-EB.5.127252

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as Jerome knew well, the body itself often betrayed its conscience through involuntary signs.2 In particular, the blush was long understood to be the body’s uncontrollable, irrepressible way of disclosing its possessor’s inner disposition, revealing hidden feelings of shame or modesty.3 As Seneca the Younger (d. 65) had already pointed out several centuries earlier, ‘the blush cannot be prevented or acquired. Wisdom will not assure us of a remedy, or give us help against it; it comes or goes unbidden, and is a law unto itself ’. Even those professional dissimulators, actors in the theatre, continued Seneca, ‘who imitate the emotions, who portray fear and nervousness, who depict sorrow, who imitate bashfulness by hanging their heads, lowering their voices, and keeping their eyes fixed and rooted upon the ground, cannot muster a blush’.4 Centuries later, Charlemagne himself would also aver the involuntary nature of the blush: ‘in the presence of another’, he explained to two bishops, ‘fear or blushing (timor uel erubescentia) often reveals outwardly on the face that which a man is unable to hold back inwardly in the heart’.5 While there has been some attention paid by modern scholars to the pallor of fear as a probative sign in medi­eval Europe — one thinks of Edward Peters’s and Patrick Geary’s work on the threat (and practice) of torture, or that of Robert Bartlett, Stephen White, and Thomas Head on the dread caused by the prospects of the Ordeal or the deployment of relics — there has been relatively little investigation of the blush in Carolingian culture.6

 2 See Jerome, Commentariorum in Hiezechielem, 2.7.18b, ed. by Glorie, p. 82, ‘In omni facie confusio, et in uniuersis capitibus caluitium. Rubor uultus pudoris indicium est et conscientia peccatorum lucet in facie, spes que salutis est quando delictum sequitur uerecundia; unde ad eam quae corde duro in suis peccatis gloriabatur, dictum est: facies meretricis facta est tibi, nescis erubescere’ ( Jeremias 3. 3). Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel, trans. by Scheck, p. 82, ‘And shame [shall be] upon every face, and baldness upon all their heads. Redness of face is a sign of embarrassment, and the awareness of sins lights up the face, and there is hope of salvation when shame follows transgression. This is why it is said to her who was boasting with a hardened heart in her own sins, You had a whore’s face, you have become shameless’ ( Jeremias 3. 3). See also Wilkinson, Women and Modesty in Late Antiquity, p. 44; and for related remarks by Pelagius, pp. 38–39, 133–34. On blushing as a signum conscientiae, see Cicero, Rhetorica ad Herennium, 2.5.8, ed. and trans. by Caplan, p. 72.  3 See Lateiner, ‘Blushes and Pallor in Ancient Fictions’; Barton, ‘The Roman Blush’; Miller, Humiliation, pp. 178–80; Peterson, Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh, p. 17.  4 Seneca, Ep. 11, ed. by Reynolds, p. 25, ‘Artifices scaenici, qui imitantur adfectus, qui metum et trepidationem exprimunt, qui tristitiam repraesentant, hoc indicio imitantur uerecundiam. Deiciunt enim uultum, uerba summittunt, figunt in terram oculos et deprimunt: ruborem sibi exprimere non possunt; nec prohibetur hic nec adducitur. Nihil aduersus haec sapientia promittit, nihil proficit: sui iuris sunt, iniussa ueniunt, iniussa discedunt’. Trans. modified slightly from Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, trans. by Gummere, p. 63.  5 Charlemagne, Ep. 85 (ad Athilhardum archiepiscopum et Ceovulfum coepiscopum, c. 793–96), ed. by Dümmler, p. 128, ‘Quia saepe in praesentia timor uel erubescentia in facie foris ostendit, quod homo intus in corde non retinet’. Cf. Alcuin, De dialectica, 6, ed. by Migne, col. 960C.  6 See Peters, Torture; Geary, ‘Judicial Violence and Torture’; Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water; White, ‘Proposing the Ordeal and Avoiding It’; and Head, ‘Saints, Heretics, and Fire’. On the

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This is unfortunate, for modern scholars of late medi­eval and early modern Europe, building on the foundational, physio­logical work of Charles Darwin, have analysed the semiotic functions of the blush within literary, religious, and scientific texts from their periods of interest, revealing much in the process. What follows is a modest, preliminary attempt to look at the Carolingian blush and see what it too can reveal. In a book published in 1872, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin devoted an entire chapter to blushing, which he described as ‘the most peculiar and most human of all expressions’.7 Deducing and classifying the causes of blushing into four emotional states — namely, self-attention, shame from broken moral laws and conventional rules, shyness, and modesty — he concluded with an evolutionary theory about ‘why […] the thought that others are thinking about us [should] affect our capillary circulation’.8 Such persons whom we believe are considering or censuring our actions or character, observed Darwin, have frequently and over countless past generations directed their attention specifically to the face, that part of our bodies about which we are most sensitive. This self-consciousness caused us to turn our own mental attention to our face as well, he cautiously posited, a self-scrutiny which somehow tended to interfere with and dilate the area’s capillary circulation, instantly flushing the face with arterial blood. This peculiar, unexplained tendency of the vaso-motor system to react to one’s thoughts became greatly strengthened over the long course of time, Darwin concluded, by the ‘nerve-force readily flowing along accustomed channels, and by the power of inheritance’, to eventually form an involuntary reflex, a gesture generated spontaneously by an indirect emotional stimulus.9 A century later, in the wake of the linguistic turn, modern historical studies have looked not to the past understanding of the physio­logy of blushing, but to the historical meaning and use of the metonymic relationship between the blush and shame.10 They have sought to identify what varieties of meaning were

Aristotelian distinction between the blush of shame and the pallor of fear, see Allen, ‘Waxing Red’, p. 196.  7 Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions, pp. 310–47 (= ch. 13), here p. 310. Darwin was responding, in part, to an earlier work by Burgess, The Physio­logy or Mechanism of Blushing, who analysed blushing as evidence of Divine Design. Before the rise of experimental physio­logy in the nineteenth century, the blush was not an object of systematic study but featured rather frequently in literature as a narrative device of disclosure, the ambiguities of which were often exploited for dramatic effect. See Lateiner, ‘Blushes and Pallor in Ancient Fictions’; Dunne, ‘Blushing on Cue’; O’Farrell, Telling Complexions; and Crozier, ‘The Blush’, pp. 503–05.  8 Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions, p. 337.  9 Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions, p. 339. On Darwin’s theory, see Browne, ‘Darwin and the Expression of the Emotions’.  10 To be sure, scientific studies on the blush as a psycho-physio­logical phenomenon have continued unabated since Darwin: e.g. Crozier and de Jong, eds, The Psycho­logical

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ascribed to that relationship, how and in what contexts it was articulated, and with what frequency. Works like that by Daniel Lord Smail on Old French epics in late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century France, for instance, attempt to determine the particular part played by blushing within a larger ensemble of involuntary somatic gestures, such as weeping, pallor, or sweating, that are frequently described in literary texts. Such analyses provide insight on the emotional self-fashioning of the aristocracy for whom such affective texts were written and by whom they were expected to be understood.11 Valerie Allen has looked at English literary texts from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and concludes that shame, given the ubiquity and variety of its applications in her sources, could be called the ‘primal medi­eval emotion’, that it always had nudity — especially female nudity — at its core, and that the blush, shame’s sign, was understood to befit a woman more than a man.12 Brian Cummings’s work compares how shame and blushing were treated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in ‘pseudo-medical’ analyses of the passions, as well as in early ethno­graphic reports of natives in the New World. While the scientific manuals observed that shame comes of the self-apprehension of the human body as a body, and that this self-knowledge distinguishes man from other animals (which consequently do not blush), contemporary ethno­graphic reports were detailing the deliberate, chosen nakedness of the New World natives who — astonishingly — felt no shame and displayed no blush. The natives’ various cultural practices and complex customs, on the one hand, clearly distinguished them from beasts, yet their cognizance and cultivation of nakedness, on the other hand, precluded them from any innocent, Edenic state. To Europeans, for whom genital shame was intrinsic to the fallen human condition, such shame-free, intentional nakedness posed a serious conundrum.13 One thing that is common to all these studies is their appeal to the theoretical observations of Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas on natural signs (smoke being a sign of fire, tracks a sign of a creature) as the conceptual bases on which the act of blushing as a sign of shame was later understood. As usual, the early Middle Ages are ignored altogether in this intellectual genealogy, presumably because the period was thought to have contributed little to the phenomeno­logy of the blush, or perhaps more charitably because so little work has been done on the topic by early medi­evalists themselves, leaving the period a forbidding terra incognita to scholars of later times.

Significance of the Blush; Crozier, Blushing and the Social Emotions; Leary and others, ‘Social Blushing’. On the development of, and tension between, the blush as a literary device and as an object of scientific study, see the excellent recent account of White, ‘Reading the Blush’.  11 Smail, ‘Emotions and Somatic Gestures in Medi­eval Narratives’. See also Nyffenegger, ‘Blushing, Paling, Turning Green’; Maddern, ‘Reading Faces’.  12 Allen, ‘Waxing Red’. See also Chang, ‘Blushing and Legibility in La Princesse de Clèves’.  13 Cummings, ‘Animal Passions and Human Sciences’.

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For instance, Cummings’s fascinating work on the early modern European encounter with blushless, naked peoples in the New World might have been nuanced in interesting ways had he known of an earlier, Carolingian effort to understand the monstrous ‘Cynocephali’ — dog-headed creatures alleged to exist beyond the frontiers of early medi­eval Europe. A contemporary report claimed that the Cynocephali were seen to cover their genitals with rudimentary clothing, a practice that, in the opinion of one Carolingian thinker (using interpretive categories of Aristotle and Boethius), was demonstrative of reason. Together with accounts of their practicing agriculture and animal husbandry and their living communally in accordance with law, the creatures’ fabrication and use of clothing established, in the opinion of Ratramnus of Corbie, that they possessed consciousness of themselves with respect to others, and thus were humans rather than animals.14 ‘It is a sign of modesty’, explained the monk Ratramnus, ‘for the private parts to be covered, which is [something] not sought after except by minds able to distinguish between the lewd and the decent. For no one can be ashamed (erubescere) by lewdness unless he has a certain awareness of decency’.15 In his understanding, shame — or its avoidance, modesty — was a primary indicator of discernment, awareness, rationality, and thus humanity. As Ratramnus concluded, ‘humans are distinguished from animals by reason alone’.16 Noteworthy is that he discusses the matter at a level of abstraction removed from the specific, terrestrial accident of the dog-people: ‘no one’, nemo, can erubescere unless they have cognitio. Presumably, Ratramnus here meant erubescere to connote the abstract emotion of shame rather than its corporeal sign of the blush, since he was speaking of a general principle that could be applied as a heuristic, but had the dog-people in mind as his immediate test case — modest creatures whose canine heads (likely) could not display a blush, but who nevertheless knew shame, and thus were rational.17 This subtle distinction of the verb’s metonymic connotation is significant, for it suggests that Ratramnus understood the Cynocephali to be bestial (i.e. blushless) in physio­logy, yet still human in cognition and behaviour. If we return to Brian Cummings’s study on the early encounters of Europeans with the Amerindians in the New World, we see that such nuances among feelings of shame, the (in)ability to blush, rationality, and humanity were lost  14 See Ratramnus of Corbie, Ep. ad Rimbertum, ed. by Dümmler, pp. 155–57; trans. in Dutton, ed., Carolingian Civilization, pp. 452–55. On this fascinating text, see Matter, ‘The Soul of the Dog-Man’; Bruce, ‘Hagio­graphy as Monstrous Ethno­graphy’; and Wood, ‘Categorising the cynocephali’.  15 Ratramnus of Corbie, Ep. ad Rimbertum, ed. by Dümmler, p. 156, ‘At pudenda uelari honestatis est signum, quod non quaeritur nisi ab animo inter turpe et honestum habenti distinctionis iudicium. Erubescere namque nemo potest de turpitudine, nisi cui contigit quaedam honestatis cognitio’; trans. in Dutton, ed., Carolingian Civilization, p. 453.  16 Ratramnus of Corbie, Ep. ad Rimbertum, ed. by Dümmler, p. 156, ‘Homo uero a bestiis ratione tantummodo discernitur’; trans. in Dutton, ed., Carolingian Civilization, p. 454.  17 Later medi­eval literature, such as Gower’s Confessio Amantis, would use the incapacity of animals to (visibly) blush as a plot device. See Flannery, ‘Gower’s Blushing Bird’.

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or ignored. Rather, the implications of the blush and its absence were used in a strict sense by the colonists to verify their self-perceived superiority in terms of both physio­logy and civilization; indeed, the two categories were thought to be closely, if mysteriously, linked. Europeans quickly came to believe the Indians incapable of blushing due to the pigmentation of their skin, and diagnosed them to be ‘shameless in physio­logy as if to match the bestiality of [their] behaviour’.18 In contrast, Europeans understood themselves to be more developed both physio­logically and in terms of civilization. When considering the Indians in 1799, for example, Alexander von Humboldt declaimed that the variety and mobility of [man’s] features […] increase by civilization, without being solely produced by it. In the great family of nations, no other race unites these advantages in so high a degree as the Caucasian or European. It is only in white men that the instantaneous penetration of the dermoidal system by the blood can produce that slight change of the colour of the skin which adds so powerful an expression to the emotions of the soul. ‘How can those be trusted who know not how to blush?’, says the European, in his dislike of the Negro and the Indian.19 As Cummings concludes strikingly, here we see the blush being used as an index of civilization itself.20 The Indians were blushless in physio­logy, and therefore their behaviour (no matter its apparent rationality) was read as bestial as well. Yet, centuries earlier, a European monk was more circumspect in his reasoning: the dog-people may have been blushless, but in Ratramnus’s view their behaviour was undeniably rational and thus human. ‘There seem to be such strong and so many things [reported about them]’, he conceded, ‘that it would seem to be stubbornness rather than prudence to deny them or to disbelieve’.21 As the statements by Ratramnus and Humboldt demonstrate, there is much to be learned by investigating the historical semiotics of the blush.

 18 Cummings, ‘Animal Passions and Human Sciences’, p. 39.  19 Humboldt, Personal Narrative of Travels, i, p. 305. Quoted in Cummings, ‘Animal Passions and Human Sciences’, p. 40. A dark or ruddy skin colour (which obscured the act of blushing) had long been equated with dishonesty and untrustworthiness; as an early medi­ eval text on physiognomy stated, ‘when a red color is obvious on the body, it reveals a man who is cunning and devoted to deceit’. See Anonymus Latinus, Traité de physiognomonie, 79, ed. by André, p. 113, ‘Cum color rubicundus est euidenter in omni corpore, dolis hominem studentem uersutumque declarat’; trans. by Repath, ‘Anonymus Latinus, Book of Physiognomy’, p. 607; also Leja, ‘The Sacred Art’, pp. 30–33. This attitude regarding skin colour and trust was not unrelated to an ancient ‘anti-cosmetics’ tradition, on which see note 33 below.  20 Cummings, ‘Animal Passions and Human Sciences’, p. 40.  21 Ratramnus of Corbie, Ep. ad Rimbertum, ed. by Dümmler, p. 157, ‘Nunc autem tanta tamque fortia uidentur esse, quae super his dicuntur, ut his uel fidem non adhibere uel contradicere uelle peruicatia potius uidetur esse quam prudentia’; trans. in Dutton, ed., Carolingian Civilization, p. 455.

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In a pathbreaking essay, Abigail Firey looked closely at blushing within Carolingian society, chiefly noting its prominence in texts concerned with the necessity and merits of confession, and linking it more generally to the moral reforms of the early ninth century. As Firey shows, the blush was regularly invoked by Alcuin in a negative sense, as a vivid symbol of shame within his harangues on the medicine of confession and penance.22 Again and again, Alcuin calls for the sinner not to blush before a judge (i.e. attempt unsuccessfully to hide one’s sin) but to confess, for if one is ashamed to reveal one’s sins in this world before men, he will have to face the piercing charges of the devil in the great Judgement of one’s life in the next world, where all is disclosed. Better to confess openly now, ignore the fear of losing others’ esteem, and show complete faith in the forgiveness of the Lord, than try to conceal one’s sin for the moment and suffer eternal damnation later.23 This metonymic equation of the blush with shame, and its function within Carolingian texts as a sign of hidden sin, is as far as Firey goes with the blush per se. But I think there is still more to be said on the matter. First, while the blush stands in these texts as a symbol of a sinner’s refusal to confess due to shame, it also connotes that such a refusal and attempt to hide the sin is never entirely successful, as the body itself reveals to others the general guilt of the sinner, thereby exacerbating the shame.24 Such feelings

 22 Firey, ‘Blushing before the Judge and Physician’. Firey chiefly examines Alcuin’s text Ad pueros sancti Martini; see Driscoll, ‘Ad pueros sancti Martini’. Cf. Quatorze homélies du ixe siècle, Sermo in Quadragesima, 7.1, ed. by Mercier, p. 186. I thank Josh Timmermann for this reference.  23 See Firey, ‘Blushing before the Judge and Physician’, pp. 176–80. Godden, ‘An Old English Penitential Motif ’, argued that this was a distinctively English idea, disseminated on the Continent by Boniface and Alcuin. In 875, as a reminder to his suffragan bishops, Hincmar of Reims, De fide Carolo regi seruanda, 25, ed. by Migne, col. 975C, quoted Ambrose’s praise of the contrite emperor Theodosius in similar terms (but without any reference to the goad of Final Judgement) — that Theodosius had done his penance publicly, without blushing: Ambrose, De obitu Theodosii, 34, ed. by Faller, p. 388, ‘Quod priuati erubescunt, non erubuit imperator, publice agere paenitentiam’. Yet, in 860, Hincmar had twice quoted Pope Leo I to reject such admittedly ‘praiseworthy’ public confession of sin, ‘lest many be kept away from the remedies of penance because they are ashamed (erubescunt), or because they fear to reveal their deeds to their enemies, by whom they could be struck with legal action’. See Hincmar, De divortio, Interrogatio/​Responsio 11, ed. by Böhringer, p. 176; Hincmar, Ep. 136, ed. by Perels, p. 92. On this tension, see Firey, A Contrite Heart, pp. 57–58.  24 Cummings, ‘Animal Passions and Human Sciences’, p. 30, ‘The blush announces at once a scandalous confession and yet also a balancing re-assertion of modesty, a self-defeating openness to fault which nonetheless triumphs by gaining simultaneous credit for moral honesty’. Also Langum, ‘Discerning Skin’. As Künzel, ‘Over schuld en schaamte’, p. 365, notes, a pseudo-Augustinian text, De uera et falsa poenitentia, 10, ed. by Migne, col. 1122 (dated to the eleventh century, but perhaps written earlier), makes the striking contention that the blush of shame that occurs at confession is in itself beneficial and has the same effect as penitence; that shame itself is a form of penance. I thank Mayke de Jong for this reference. See now Wei, Gratian the Theo­logian, pp. 84–89. This claim was anticipated by Isidore of Seville’s remark in his Sententiae, 2.12.5, ed. by Cazier, p. 119, that when one remembers

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of shame presuppose a shared assumption of moral values on the part of the sinner and his accuser, values held not just mentally but even bodily; while the sinner’s mind recognizes his transgression for what it is and tries to hide it to avoid punishment and loss of others’ esteem, his body also recognizes his transgression and irrepressibly signals it to the accuser, revealing that the blusher possesses a shared moral sense, a conscience, is capable of experiencing remorse, and thus might be remedied and brought back to the fold.25 In other words, as Charlemagne and Alcuin both knew, blushing reveals outwardly on the face that which a conscientious person — and thus a person worth engaging — is unable to hold back inwardly in their heart. Likewise, Smaragdus, in his commentary on the Rule of Benedict, took comfort in Saint Basil’s words about discerning the unknown intentions of a pilgrim monk: ‘si simulator est, erubescet’.26 Why the body acts in this way was the subject of numerous discussions by Carolingian exegetes, who all pointed to the passage in Genesis (2. 25) that describes the prelapsarian, innocent state of Adam and Eve — ‘and they were both naked: to wit, Adam and his wife: and did not blush/​were not ashamed (et non erubescebant)’. As Alcuin explained, both a blush and an erection only began to occur as the punishment for original sin: the body rebels against one’s will as a consequence of Adam and Eve’s rebellion against their Maker.27 Later Carolingian exegetes, such as Hrabanus Maurus, Angelomus of Luxeuil, and Ratramnus of Corbie, focused more on the fateful Edenic acquisition of knowledge and moral awareness, and thus on the ability to recognize sin, as the origin of the blush: after tasting the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve understood

past sins and is moved to tears, one blushes/​is ashamed within (interius erubescit) by their recollection and thus undergoes a kind of penitence by the suffering of one’s own judgement.  25 On blushing, shame, and the necessary condition of a shared assumption of values, see Barton, ‘The Roman Blush’, p. 215, ‘In the man or woman who blushed the very weakness revealed the strength of the blusher’s commitments to social bonds’; also Castelfranchi and Poggi, ‘Blushing as a Discourse’; and more generally Chadwick, ‘Conscience in Ancient Thought’. Cf. Hrabanus Maurus, De uniuerso, 6. 1, ed. by Migne, col. 148B, ‘Unde erubescere dicitur, qui compungitur pro delictis suis, et se meliorare studuerit’. Hrabanus Maurus, De universo, trans. by Throop, i, p. 154, ‘Whence a person, who is pricked by his sins and endeavors to better himself, is said to blush’.  26 Smaragdus, Expositio in regulam Sancti Benedicti, 61, ed. by Spannagel and Engelbert, p. 305.  27 Alcuin, Interrogationes et responsiones in Genesin, 59, ed. by Migne, col. 522D, ‘Quare non erubescebant Adam et Eva, dum nudi erant (Genesis 2. 25)? Resp. Quia nullam legem senserunt in membris suis repugnantem legi mentis suae: nihil enim putabant uelandum, quia nihil senserunt refrenandum. Nam in poenam peccati euenit homini, ut ipsa sua caro rebellis ei esset in motibus suis, quia ipse rebellis erat creatori suo in actibus suis’. (Why were Adam and Eve not ashamed while they were naked? Answer. Because they felt in their limbs no law contrary to the law of their minds: they did not think that anything needed veiling, because they did not feel that anything needed restraining. For it was as a punishment for sin that it befell man that his own flesh became rebellious against him in its passions, because he himself was rebellious against his Creator in his actions.) See Allen, ‘Waxing Red’, p. 195.

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they were naked, recognized their genitals as indecent, and blushed.28 Yet, while all these scholars attributed the blush’s creation to original sin, and were fascinated with its involuntary nature, they had little to say about why God had formulated the blush specifically as a reddening of the face, or why it should occur in the interest of revealing hidden sin.29 As an aside, it should be noted that in none of the three Carolingian illuminated manu­scripts that portray the Genesis story of the Fall in colour did the artist depict Adam and Eve as blushing.30 Perhaps this is because, with respect to the signification of the verb erubescere, the connotation of the figurative condition of shame had already largely overshadowed the word’s literal connotation of a blush, as we have already seen with Ratramnus’s comments on the Cynocephali.31

 28 Hrabanus Maurus, Commentariorum in Genesim, ed. by Migne, col. 499D; Angelomus of Luxeuil, Commentarius in Genesin, ed. by Migne, col. 135C–D; Ratramnus of Corbie, De eo quod christus ex uirgine natus est liber, ed. by Migne, col. 85C–D. See also the observations of Ratramnus on the modesty and shame of the Cynocephali, notes 14–16 above. As Barton, ‘The Roman Blush’, p. 216, notes, the notion of conscius rubor, of self-consciousness and the blush, had an ancient pedigree.  29 Cf. the striking pronouncement of Gregory of Nazianzus, Poemata Moralia, 29, ed. by Migne, cols 898–99, trans. by Barton, ‘The Roman Blush’, p. 226 n. 24, ‘In time gone by […] glory fell to the most dishonorable and dishonor to the noblest as these distinctions changed hands without justice. The Lord God […] slow to anger, spoke this word, “It is not right that good and bad should enjoy the same repute; this would but increase evil. Therefore I shall bestow a goodly token whereby you may tell who is evil and who is good”. So saying, he reddened the cheeks of those who were good, causing the blood to flow beneath their skin as shame arose in them; especially in the female kind did he implant a deeper blush, inasmuch as they are weak of nature and tender of heart. But as for the evil, he made them hard and insensitive within, and that is why they are not in the least affected by shame’. I am unaware of any knowledge of this Greek poem in the early medi­eval West. A near contemporary, Macrobius, Saturnalia, 7.11.1–6, ed. and trans. by Kaster, pp. 242–43, offered various explanations of the blush, including the following: ‘physical scientists (physici) also say that when one’s nature has been touched by shame, it holds the blood out before itself like a veil (pro uelamento), as we see someone who blushes often holding a hand up in front of his face’. Cf. Alcuin, De dialectica, 6, ed. by Migne, col. 960C. In the second century, Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, 19.6, ed. and trans. by Rolfe, pp. 364–67, noted a friend’s irritation that Aristotle had explained only how a blush occurred, but not why.  30 BnF MS lat. 1, fol. 10v (the ‘Vivian Bible’); BL, Add. MS 10546, fol. 5v (the ‘Moutier-Grandval Bible’); Rome, Biblioteca della Basilica di S. Paolo fuori le Mura, fol. 7v. On these manu­ scripts, see Kessler, ‘Hic Homo Formatur’. Note also the lost wall paintings of Genesis at the palace in Ingelheim; see Ermold the Black, In honorem Hludowici Pii, 4.2070–77, ed. and trans. by Faral, p. 158. Also, the tituli evidence of lost Genesis wall paintings at Saint-Riquier: Carmina Centulensia, ed. by Traube, pp. 347–48. See Ganz, ‘“Pando quod Ignoro”’, p. 27; and Noble, Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians, p. 345.  31 In numerous ancient Roman texts, the condition of shame — pudor — is invoked separately in conjunction with the phenomenon of the blush; the verb erubescere may not yet have fully assumed its metonymic function. See Barton, ‘The Roman Blush’, pp. 212–16; also, Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, cols 821–23, s.v. ‘erubesco’; cf. Mittellateinisches Wörterbuch, iii, cols 1374–75, s.v. ‘erubesco’. In Anglo-Saxon England, the metonymic relationship of blushing and shame was tenuous and rather rare within Old English texts; see Díaz-Vera, ‘From Cognitive Linguistics to Historical Sociolinguistics’, pp. 67–68.

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Then again, Scripture never explicitly states that Adam and Eve blushed; it only foreshadows the possibility by stating that in their naked innocence they did not blush/​become ashamed, thus implying that they would do so if they were ever to become cognizant of their nakedness. Another aspect of blushing upon which Carolingian exegetes focused repeatedly was the meaning of its absence. Taking as their point of departure a passage from Jeremias (3. 3), ‘thou hadst a harlot’s forehead, thou wouldst not blush’ (Frons enim meretricis facta est tibi, erubescere noluisti), commentators noted the existence of some whose mind and body were wholly lost and utterly corrupt; like a prostitute, they no longer shared Christian morals, disregarded others’ opinions of themselves, and thus were completely shameless.32 Even their bodies had somehow lost the innate moral compass exhibited by the blush.33 (Hrabanus Maurus would extend the allegorical meaning of the Jeremias passage: by a blushless woman, a meretrix, is meant a ‘sinning soul’; thus, a brothel, a locus meretriciosus, ‘is the conscience of a sinful person, or the body in which one has illicit union with demons’.34) The Jeremias passage was frequently used as a shorthand to express the effrontery, alienation, and  32 E.g. Hrabanus Maurus, De uniuerso, 6.1, ed. by Migne, col. 148B–C, ‘Iuxta allegoriam frons uerecundiam mentis aut impudentiam significat. Unde erubescere dicitur, qui compungitur pro delictis suis, et se meliorare studuerit. Aliter de impudentis fronte exprobratur Jerusalem per Prophetam redarguentem scelus suum, cum ei dicitur: Frons mulieris meretricis facta est tibi’; Hrabanus Maurus, De universo, trans. by Throop, i, p. 154, ‘According to allegory, the forehead signifies modesty of the mind, or impudence. Whence a person, who is pricked by his sins and endeavors to better himself, is said to blush. Otherwise, by the “forehead” of a shameless one, Jerusalem is reproached for its sin, when the Prophet says ( Jeremias 3. 3) “You had a prostitute’s forehead”’. Also, Hrabanus Maurus, Commentariorum in Ezechielem, 5.7, ed. by Migne, col. 615B, quoting the passage from Jerome in note 2 above; Haimo of Auxerre, Annotatio libri Iezechielis imperfecta, 2.4, 3.7, ed. by Gryson, pp. 71, 84; Haimo of Auxerre, Annotatio libri Isaiae prophetae, 48.4, ed. by Gryson, p. 575. Ambrosius Autpertus, Expositio in Apocalypsin, 2.2.20, ed. by Weber, p. 140, ll. 105–11, had Jezebel, the wife of Ahab, in mind when thinking of such a shameless, blushless woman. See Bührer-Thierry, ‘La reine adultère’, p. 304; Löfstedt, ‘Frons “Scham” und “Schamlosigkeit”’, pp. 169–70.  33 Consequently, the artificial means of imparting a blush through cosmetics were long the object of condemnation by moralists — indeed, one can speak of a continuous ‘anticosmetics’ tradition reaching from Antiquity to the modern era, in which the ‘feigning’ of innocence, modesty, and shame through the application of rouge and other embellishments led to mistrust, scorn, and vilification for being a ‘painted woman’ or a ‘painted sepulchre’ (the latter simile alluding to Matthew 23. 27), fair on the outside, but full of corruption within. See Totelin, ‘From techne to kakotechnia’; Olson, ‘Cosmetics in Roman Antiquity’, pp. 296–97; Wilkinson, Women and Modesty in Late Antiquity, pp. 38–39; Barton, ‘The Roman Blush’, p. 232 n. 94; Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, pp. 49–50; Polo de Beaulieu, ‘La condamnation des soins de beauté’; Iyengar, Shades of Difference, pp. 123–39; Festa, ‘Cosmetic Differences’; Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, pp. 88–89.  34 Hrabanus Maurus, De uniuerso, 7.1, ed. by Migne, col. 184A, ‘Meretrix, anima peccatrix, quae derelicto coelesti uiro, id est, Christo, adulterinos de diabolo iniquitatis fructus concipit: ut in Jeremia Frons meretricis facta est tibi ( Jeremias 3. 3). Lupanar, id est, locus meretriciosus, conscientia hominis peccatoris, uel corpus, in quo adulterinos cum daemonibus perpetrat concubitus’; Hrabanus Maurus, De universo, trans. by Throop, i, p. 194.

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scriptural condemnation of shameless persons, especially heretics. At the Council of Frankfurt in 794, for instance, Paulinus of Aquileia spoke of those who held the Adoptionist belief, and quoted the Jeremias verse both to express their shamelessness at ‘piercing the hearts of the simple folk with false assertions’, as well as to underscore and intensify the extent of their sin.35 More often, however, the notion of the blush’s absence was invoked without the quotation from Jeremias, functioning simply as a rhetorical trope of intensification by which to emphasize a person’s moral vacuity and callousness, depravity and arrogance.36 A typical example is found in Hildemar’s commentary on the Rule of Benedict, where he sought to distinguish, for purposes of proper monastic discipline and correction, the obstinate (duri) from the proud and disobedient (superbos inobedientes): ‘The obstinate’, explains Hildemar, ‘are those who, if admonished or excommunicated, neither amend nor even blush (neque etiam erubescunt), but without fear of disgrace or excommunication determinedly follow the impulse of their own heart’.37 Perhaps my favourite example of blushlessness used to signify the flagrantly, stubbornly deviant is found within Einhard’s report of the sententious harangue concerning the sinful state of the realm delivered by the demon Wiggo. A master of his craft, Einhard not only underscored the depravity of his times through inversion, having a gatekeeper of hell berate the people for their moral failings, but within Wiggo’s speech used the absence of the blush to intensify even further the degree of their immorality: among many other vices, explains Wiggo, the people trick one another with fraud, ‘and do not blush/​are not ashamed to bear false witness [against each other]’.38 Let me conclude with a few brief observations. First, none of what I have reviewed about the blush was new with the Carolingians. It was a phenomenon and a rhetorical trope already familiar to most late antique writers who gave thought to sin. Yet the frequency with which the blush was deployed within

 35 Concilium Francofurtense (794), ed. by Werminghoff, p. 135, ‘quibus simplicium corda iaculando falsis assertionibus perforare non erubescas. Frons enim meretricis facta est tibi, erubescere noluisti’ ( Jeremias 3. 3). For another example, Hincmar of Reims, Ep. 19 (ad Ludovicum III regem, balbi filium), 6, ed. by Migne, col. 114D, ‘et nunc contra regulas et leges sine uisitatore praesumpserunt electionem. Unde referendum est eidem plebi illud propheticum: Frons mulieris meretricis facta est tibi, nescis erubescere’.  36 The equation of shamelessness, lack of a blush, and deviancy would have a long history; see Barton, ‘The Roman Blush’, pp. 221–22; Horn, ‘Blood Will Tell’.  37 Hildemar of Corbie/​Civate, Expositio regulae S. Benedicti, 23, ed. by Mittermüller, p. 341, ‘Duri autem sunt, qui siue admoneantur siue excommunicentur, non emendantur neque etiam erubescunt, sed obstinata mente non timentes uerecundiam atque excommunicationem impetum sui cordis sequuntur’. See also, e.g., Pope Hadrian I, Ep. 83, ed. by Migne, col. 376B, ‘Eliphandus et Ascaricus, cum aliis eorum consentaneis, Filium Dei adoptiuum confiteri non erubescunt’; Annales Fuldenses, a. 882, ed. by Kurze, p. 99, ‘et quod maioris est criminis […] tributa soluere non erubuit’. Instances of this usage are legion.  38 Einhard, Translatio et miracula, 3.14, ed. by Waitz, p. 253, ‘falsa testimonia dicere non erubescunt’; trans. by Dutton, Charlemagne’s Courtier, p. 104.

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texts of the first half of the ninth century, as Abigail Firey has observed, is noteworthy, a trend she links to the intimate connections among confession, penance, and the moral reforms of the 810s and 820s.39 While Firey is surely right, I think it would also be worthwhile to examine the discourse of blushing in performative terms. Recall the remarks of Seneca and Jerome earlier on theatrical dissimulation and the implacable blush. By irrepressibly signalling the disparity between the inner disposition of people and their outer comportment, the blush provides an excellent heuristic by which to explore and rethink the sharp escalation of interest in and suspicion of performance during the Carolingian era (whether penitential, liturgical, theatrical, or otherwise), and the correlative concerns regarding the discrimination of the interior from the exterior, the sincere from the feigned, the true from the false.40 Second, it would also be interesting to gauge the relative frequency of the rhetorical figure of blushing’s absence. Mayke de Jong and I have noted an intensification in the language of admonition and criticism during the 820s and 830s, and I have recently tracked a parallel intensification in the textual representation of morally charged sound, such as murmurs and shouts, during the same period.41 Perhaps the intensification provided by the blush’s absence was yet another means by which Carolingian moralists of the time signalled their urgent concern over the flagrant depravity of the realm. Indeed, that urgent concern could even be signalled by the countenance of the moralists themselves. Recall Charlemagne’s assertion that ‘in the presence of another, fear or blushing (timor vel erubescentia) often reveals outwardly on the face that which a man is unable to hold back inwardly in the heart’.42 Hrabanus Maurus considered this same dynamic regarding the signs of pallor and the blush, but from the perspective of their appearance on preachers attempting to convey the truth of the Word to audiences ill-disposed to its reception. Discussing the blush within his encyclopaedic work De rerum naturis, and noting that its absence connotes impudence, Hrabanus cited the passage from Jeremias (3. 3), ‘thou hadst a harlot’s forehead, thou wouldst not blush’, and then recalled the verses from the Book of Ezekiel on God’s gift to that prophet of a blushless, stony visage as fortification against shameless opponents: ‘Behold I have made thy face stronger than their faces: and thy forehead harder than their foreheads. I have made thy face like an adamant and like flint’ (Ezekiel 3. 8–9).43 Hrabanus then quoted Jerome’s brief commentary on these verses for

 39 Firey, ‘Blushing before the Judge and Physician’.  40 See Booker, ‘Hypocrisy, Performativity, and the Carolingian Pursuit of Truth’; Booker, ‘By Any Other Name?’; Koziol, ‘Truth and its Consequences’. Mayke de Jong has recently referred to ‘a typically Carolingian discourse on the emptiness of solemn gestures and pronouncements informed by deception’; see de Jong, Epitaph for an Era, p. 215.  41 De Jong, The Penitential State, pp. 112–47; de Jong, ‘Admonitio and Criticism of the Ruler’, p. 337; Booker, ‘Iusta murmuratio’; Booker, ‘Murmurs and Shouts’; Booker, Past Convictions.  42 See note 5 above.  43 Hrabanus Maurus, De uniuerso, 6.1, ed. by Migne, col. 148C, ‘Et iterum Dominus ad

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their proper interpretation: ‘The house of Israel is of a hard forehead and an obstinate heart and it is compared to a scorpion’, explained Jerome. Therefore, God gave the Prophet ‘the hardest face, and a forehead which is overcome by no shame. From this, we learn that sometimes it is of the grace of God to resist impudence and, when the situation demands’, Jerome continued ominously, ‘to obliterate (conterere) one forehead by another. This is bestowed so that modesty and human shame might not fear the snares of envious people’.44 In a different work devoted strictly to the exegesis of Ezekiel, Hrabanus encountered these same verses and once again quoted the brief remarks of Jerome on the adoption of a blushless, hardened countenance to vanquish the impudent.45 But here he also appended a lengthy quotation from Gregory the Great’s commentary on Ezekiel, which presents a far more nuanced interpretation of the Prophet’s severe face and its meaning, relating it to preaching and the speaking of truth to power. ‘He should be a defender of truth who neither fears nor blushes to speak what he rightly feels’, asserted Gregory.46 Pallor and the blush are obstacles to preaching the truth of the Word, since they are bodily signs that undermine the authority of the preacher in the eyes of his audience, who, when they see such signs, do not take his message to heart. ‘It often happens’, explains Gregory, that we are ashamed to speak to those whom we perceive to hear too humbly their reproach. Sometimes indeed it turns out that we tremble to offer the word of preaching to those whom we see disregard and contemn their rebuke. But if we are truly wise, both as to those by whom we perceive we are honored, and those by whom we see we are despised, we assume the authority of either exhortation or rebuke so that we should neither blush at the humility of the former nor dread the pride of the latter.47

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Ezechielem ait: Ecce dedi faciem tuam ualentiorem faciebus eorum, et frontem tuam duriorem frontibus eorum. Ut adamantem et ut silicem, dedi faciem tuam’. Hrabanus Maurus, De uniuerso, 6.1, ed. by Migne, col. 148C, ‘Domus Israel attritae frontis est, et procacis audaciae, et duro sic corde, ut scorpionibus comparetur: ideo dedi tibi uultum durissimum, et frontem, quae nullo pudore superetur. Ex quo discimus interdum gratiae esse Dei, impudentiae resistere, et cum locus poposcerit, frontem fronte conterere. Hoc autem tribuitur, ne nostra uerecundia et humanus pudor pertimescat insidias aemulorum’; quoting Jerome, Commentariorum in Hiezechielem, 1.3.8–10a, ed. by Glorie, p. 34; Hrabanus Maurus, De universo, trans. by Throop, i, p. 154. For Hrabanus’s commentary on Ezekiel, see de Jong, ‘The Empire as Ecclesia’, pp. 207–08, 212; de Jong, ‘Old Law and New-Found Power’; Butzmann, ‘Der Ezechiel-Kommentar des Hrabanus Maurus’. Hrabanus Maurus, Commentariorum in Ezechielem, 3.3, ed. by Migne, col. 565D, ‘Ille enim esse debet ueritatis defensor, qui quod recte sentit loqui nec metuit, neque erubescit’; quoting Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Hiezechihelem Prophetam, 1.10.17, ed. by Adriaen, p. 152; Gregory the Great, The Homilies, trans. by Gray, p. 116. Haimo of Auxerre, Annotatio libri Iezechielis imperfecta, 3.7–9, ed. by Gryson, pp. 84–85, also relied on Gregory for his exegesis of these passages from Ezekiel. Hrabanus Maurus, Commentariorum in Ezechielem, 3.3, ed. by Migne, col. 566B, ‘Et

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This is what God meant when he said ‘I have made thy face like an adamant and like flint’ (Ezekiel 3. 9), concludes Gregory: not simply that a preacher should have a face harder and more callous than the insolent by which to defeat them, but that his pale, stony visage reflects the relative value ascribed by different audiences to his words. ‘Both adamant and flint are hard’, noted Gregory, ‘but one of them is [considered] precious and the other of little value’.48 The wise preacher is always aware of this variability in the reception of his words, and, by his awareness of how he may be perceived, possesses a grave(n) face — one displaying neither a blush nor pallor — and an ‘authority in speech’ to communicate and defend the truth, adjusting his message to suit his audience.49 In other words, Gregory believed that, with self-knowledge, the blush and pallor could indeed be forestalled and kept under control, and that such self-knowledge and authoritative comportment were necessary qualities of the effective truth-teller: the adamantine demeanour and delivery of an exhortatio were required for confronting the hypersensitive, the flinty carriage and conveyance of an increpatio for the insensitive.50 Far more nuanced than Jerome’s interpretation of the preacher’s stony forehead as a divine blessing by which to ‘obliterate’ the shameless, Gregory’s exegesis understood the vivid image in therapeutic terms similar to Saint Benedict’s recommendation that an abbot be a ‘man for all seasons’, ‘threatening at one time and coaxing at another as the occasion may require, showing now the stern countenance of a master, now the loving affection of a father’, in order that he might return the lost to the fold.51

saepe contingit ut hos quos correptionem suam conspicimus nimis humiliter audire, uerecundemur eis aliqua dicere. Nonnunquam uero euenit ut eos quos increpationem suam uidemus postponere, et despectui habere, trepidemus eis uerbum praedicationis inferre. Sed si recte sapimus et ad eos a quibus nos honorari conspicimus, et ad eos a quibus nos despici uidemus, auctoritatem exhortationis uel increpationis sumimus, ut nec illorum humilitatem debeamus erubescere, nec horum superbiam formidare’; quoting Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Hiezechihelem Prophetam, 1.10.18, ed. by Adriaen, pp. 152–53; trans. modified slightly from Gregory the Great, The Homilies, trans. by Gray, p. 116.  48 Hrabanus Maurus, Commentariorum in Ezechielem, 3.3, ed. by Migne, col. 566A, ‘Adamas et silex utraque dura, sed unum horum pretiosum est, alterum uile’; quoting Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Hiezechihelem Prophetam, 1.10.18, ed. by Adriaen, p. 152; Gregory the Great, The Homilies, trans. by Gray, p. 116.  49 Hrabanus Maurus, Commentariorum in Ezechielem, 3.3, ed. by Migne, col. 565D, ‘auctoritatem […] habent in locutione’; quoting Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Hiezechihelem Prophetam, 1.10.17, ed. by Adriaen, p. 152; Gregory the Great, The Homilies, trans. by Gray, p. 116. On the ‘constantia’ of an orator, see van Renswoude, The Rhetoric of Free Speech, p. 8.  50 Cf. Leyser, ‘Vulnerability and Power’, pp. 165–71; Leyser, ‘“Let Me Speak, Let Me Speak”’; Pollheimer, ‘Hrabanus Maurus’, pp. 214–15; de Jong, The Penitential State, pp. 118–47.  51 Benedict, Regula, 2.24, ed. by de Vogüé and Neufville, p. 446, ‘miscens temporibus tempora, terroribus blandimenta, dirum magistri, pium patris ostendat affectum’, following i Corinthians 9. 22, ‘To the weak I became weak, that I might gain the weak. I became all things to all men, that I might save all’.

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As Hrabanus’s assemblage of commentary on Ezekiel showed, when confronted with deviancy, a ‘hardened’ teacher’s options were Jeromian obliteration or Gregorian rehabilitation. Thus, perhaps it was not by chance but design that, when he elaborated on the ‘Frons meretricis’ verse in his De rerum naturis, Hrabanus included only the violent Jeromian interpretation;52 as Matthew Gillis has recently reminded us, Hrabanus’s tendency when dealing with that most insolent and pertinacious monk Gottschalk of Orbais was again and again obliteration.53 Verbally, sonically, bodily, the mid-ninth century was a time of extremes, which called for even more extreme measures. The callous and blushless would be met with an even stonier, severe countenance. But to what end? Where had caritas gone? What now was conscience? Whither the blush?54

 52 See note 44 above.  53 Gillis, Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire.  54 Recent works in pursuit of these questions from different angles include Heinzle, Flammen der Zwietracht; Romig, Be a Perfect Man; de Jong, Epitaph for an Era; Gillis, Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire; Firey, A Contrite Heart.

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Why the Carolingians Didn’t Need Demons Antony went out to the tombs [… and] remained alone within. […] When the enemy could stand it no longer — for he was apprehensive that Antony might before long fill the desert with the discipline — approaching one night with a multitude of demons he whipped him with such force that he lay on the earth, speechless from the tortures. […] Because of the blows he was not strong enough to stand, but he prayed while lying down. And after the prayer he yelled out: ‘Here I am — Antony! I do not run from your blows, for even if you give me more, nothing shall separate me from the love of Christ’. Then he also sang, Though an army should set itself in array against me, my heart shall not be afraid. These things, then, the ascetic thought and spoke, but the enemy who despises good, astonished that even after the blows he had received he dared to return, summoned his dogs and said, exploding with rage, ‘You see that we failed to stop this man with a spirit of fornication or with lashes’.1 So Martin [of Tours], pressing on [through the Alps …] had passed Milan when the devil, taking on human form, encountered him on the road, and asked him where he was going. Being informed by Martin that he was going where the Lord called him, the devil said to him, ‘Wherever you go and whatever you assay, the devil will oppose you’. Then Martin prophetically replied, ‘The Lord is my helper; I shall not fear what man can to do me’. Forthwith the devil vanished from his sight.2

Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria’s (d. c. 373) paradigmatic fourth-century vita of Saint Antony (d. 356) and Sulpicius Severus’s (d. c. 425) widely influential Life of Saint Martin open a window onto the role of the Christian demon, here playing foil to the virtuous hermit and the resolute saint.3 The demonic  1 Athanasius, ‘The Life and Affairs of our Holy Father Antony’ 8–9, trans. by Gregg, pp. 37–38.  2 Sulpicius Severus, Vita Martini 6, ed. by Burton, pp. 100–01.  3 Van Geest, ‘“… Seeing that for Monks the Life of Antony Is a Sufficient Pattern of Discipline”’, pp. 199–221: ‘Antony is a physician and a gift of God because, in an incessant, ever more intensive struggle against his own failings and against the devil, through ever stricter asceticism, he managed to restore the imperturbability and serenity of a man in his Martha Rampton ([email protected]) is Professor Emerita of History at Pacific University Oregon. Her work focuses on religion, magic, and gender in the early Middle Ages, and she is the author of Trafficking with Demons: Magic, Ritual, and Gender from Late Antiquity to 1000 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021). Carolingian Experiments, ed. by Matthew Bryan Gillis, ISMAR 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022) pp. 245–268 10.1484/M.ISMAR-EB.5.127253

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hounds test Antony’s mettle, and through them the ascetic validates his sanctity. Martin (d. 397) bests the devil, and in doing so successfully undergoes the right of passage necessary to prove himself worthy of his mission.4 Throughout the first millennium, demons were fundamental to theo­logy, and they played a vital and functional role in Christian cultures. Unlike most other ancient cults in which demons could be agents for good or ill, in the Christian scheme demons were by definition evil.5 In Justin Martyr’s (d. c. 165) Second Apo­logy to the Roman senate, he lays out the seminal explanation of the role of demons in Christian thought. The sons of God ‘succumbed to intercourse with women, and begot children — who are called demons. They then went on to enslave the human race to themselves, partly through magical exchanges […]. They sowed amongst human beings murders, wars, adulteries, licentiousness, and every kind of evil’.6 Augustine of Hippo’s (d. 430) interpretation of demonic origins built on that of Justin Martyr, but Augustine identified demons, not as children born of angels and human women, but as the rebel angels who fought alongside and suffered the same fate as Lucifer, once an archangel, who, due to overweening pride and envy of God, was cast out of heaven after a monumental war against righteous forces led by the Archangel Michael (Revelations 12. 7–9). From that time forward, Lucifer (now Satan) and the other fallen angels were condemned to exist in the lower air beneath the moon.7 At the most elementary level, demons were the embodiment of evil and linked to sin, but there were nuances as to how this connection played out. One way demons insinuated themselves into the human experience was to lure people to wrongdoing by playing on human frailty and facilitating transgression. To be sure, the demon as tempter was a bane when a sinner failed to pass the moral test the demon posed; however, the tempter could also be useful. In the vitae of Antony and Martin, the saints positively need the devils in order to prove they can prevail over their own innate propensity to sin. Ordinary people were rarely called upon to demonstrate the kind of virtuosity required of Antony and Martin, but in more modest ways, demons gave ordinary humans an opportunity to rise above mortal limitations. Demons could also act on their own accord, vindictively wreaking havoc to create a hell on earth. Because such fiendish undertakings were independent

original state of soul and so to become an intermediary of God’s grace’ (p. 219). Also, Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk, pp. 150–56.  4 The terms ‘devils’ and ‘demons’ were synonymous throughout the first millennium ce. Although Satan was the devil and the most noteworthy of the fallen angels, demons did not operate under any sort of organizational or hierarchical structure.  5 Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, pp. 9–15.  6 Justin Martyr, Second Apo­logy 4.3–4, ed. and trans. by Minns and Parvis, p. 283. For a discussion of the evolution of the Christian understanding of the devil and the fallen angels, see Almond, The Devil, pp. 1–15; Pagels, ‘The Social History of Satan’.  7 Wiebe, Fallen Angles in the Theo­logy of St Augustine, pp. 53–93.

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of human involvement, sin did not enter the equation. David Frankfurter observes that there is a mythic need to imagine malevolence on a universal scale and to see evil as a conspiracy that will emerge time and time again as a response to otherness. Virtually every culture imagines a being that is the embodiment of evil, a creature responsible for mysterious or inexplicable malice and misfortune.8 These creatures are intrinsically malevolent and antisocial; they desire blood, shape-shift, copulate promiscuously, control the weather, operate in the spirit world, sicken victims, fly, and are always to be feared.9 In the early medi­eval period, characteristics that many cultures attribute to witches were projected, not onto human agents, but onto demons. In his Differentiae, Isidore of Seville (d. 636) provides a catalogue of demons’ sinister misdeeds: Daemones sunt […] superbia tumidi, fallacia callidi, semper in fraude noui. Commouent sensus, fingunt affectus, uitam turbant, somnos inquietant, morbos inferunt, mentes terrent, membra distorquent, sortes regunt, praestigiis oracula fingunt, cupidinem amoris inliciunt, ardorem cupiditatis infundunt, in consecratis imaginibus delitescunt; inuocati adsunt, uerisimilia mentiuntur, mutantur in diuersis figuris, interdum in angelorum imaginibus transformantur.10 (Demons are […] swollen with pride, ingenious in deceit, always devising new frauds. They agitate the senses, feign emotion, upset life, disturb sleep, bring disease, terrify the mind, distort limbs, oversee the drawing of lots, and fake oracles by creating illusions. They induce passion and pour heat on desire. They hide in sacred images. When called, they come, lying with the appearance of truth. They change into various shapes; sometimes they transform themselves into the image of angels.) A third way demons sought to upend the world of men was by contractual collaborations between themselves and humans — that is to say, magic. In the early fifth century, Augustine laid out an explanation of the relationship between human beings and the miraculous that both incorporated earlier thinking and formed the basis for the Christian understanding of magic for much of the Middle Ages.11 Miracles are allowed by God and wrought by faith,  8 Frankfurter, Evil Incarnate, introduction.  9 See Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, pp. 13–16, for a collection of motifs dealing with such creatures.  10 Isidore of Seville, Liber differentiarum II 2.14, ed. by Sanz, pp. 29–30.  11 Augustine, De civitate Dei 10.8–12, ed. by Dombart and Kalb, i, pp. 280–87; 10.16, i, pp. 289–91; 10.19, i, pp. 293–94; 10.26–27, i, pp. 300–330; Augustine, De doctrina Christiana 2.23, ed. by Martin, pp. 57–59. Throughout Augustine’s works, although he often refers to the pursuits of demons as magia, he does employ mira or miracula when describing the pursuits of both demons and agents of God, but he is clear that the two are different. For example: ‘Facere quaedam mira permissi sunt, ut mirabilius unicerentur!’ (Augustine, De civitate Dei

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not incantations and spells, in order to encourage faith. Marvels not performed for the honour of God are illicit sorcery accomplished by the deceitful tricks of malignant demons. The stunts of demons are easily discernible from true miracles of the godly because demons demand sacrificial homage be made to themselves whereas saints credit their miraculous powers to their maker and contend that all worship is owed to God alone. Augustine made clear that magic encompassed all exceptional phenomena that had no reference to God and was beyond the limits of human power.12 Magic amounted to collusion with demons, which could be either intentional — realized by the use of words, poisons, ointments, powders, and rites — or inadvertent, as when people wore amulets of herbs, grasses, or bones to protect themselves on a journey or drew lots to determine on which day to be married. The latter two were magical because they drew on the potency of demons, even if trafficking was not the intent.13 Following Augustine’s lead, intellectuals from Late Antiquity to the early eleventh century and beyond held that magic involved traffic with demons and proscribed it on that basis.14 The boundary between trafficking and sinful transgression was inexact. People knowingly and willingly submitted to devils when they succumbed to temptation, but that was not magic because sinners (simply by virtue of being sinners) were not in a position to exploit demons’ capabilities. For example, the Iberian theo­logian Paschasius of Dumium (fl. mid-sixth century) told of an abbot’s encounter with a demon who was pleased because he had successfully coaxed one of the monks into overeating. The demon boasted, ‘I have one friend; he is on my side; whenever he sees me anywhere he comes

10.8, ed. by Dombart and Kalb, i, p. 280) and ‘Quod vero non solum quaedam daemones futura praedicunt, verum etiam quaedam mira faciunt, pro ipsa utique sui corporis excellentia’ (Augustine, De divinatione daemonum 4.8, ed. by Zycha, p. 606).  12 Augustine, De civitate Dei 10.12, ed. by Dombart and Kalb, i, p. 286: ‘Verum quia tanta et talia geruntur his artibus, ut universum modum humanae facultatis excedant’. Augustine distinguished two types of ‘miracles’ (Augustine, De utilitate credendi 16.34, ed. by Zycha, p. 43): ‘Quaedam enim sunt, quae solam faciunt admirationem, quaedam vero magnam etiam gratiam benevolentiamque conciliant’.  13 My approach to early medi­eval magic has a different emphasis than that of Hen (‘The Early Medi­eval West’, pp. 183–206) and Filotas (Pagan Survivals, Superstitions, and Popular Culture, p. 11), both of whom grapple with the opaque and protean nature of the nomenclature for magic and magical practitioners in the early medi­eval West. Filotas’s meticulous research (that Hen references) demonstrates the complexity of tying down the meanings of words such as ‘pagan’, ‘heathen’, ‘magic’, and ‘superstition’ as they morph from one text, from one writer, and from one genre to another. However, as important as it is to unravel the etymo­ logy, regardless of nuances in meaning, magic always involved traffic with demons in one way or another. Traffic with demons was the common thread. See Rampton, Trafficking with Demons, introduction.  14 For example, Isidore of Seville, Etymo­logiarum sive originum libri XX 8.9.3, ed. by Lindsay, vol. i; Hrabanus Maurus, De magicis artibus, cols 1095–1110; Regino of Prüm, De synodalibus causis et disciplinis ecclesiasticis 2.371, ed. by Wasserschleben p. 355; and Burchard of Worms, Decretum 10.40–45, cols 839–44.

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to me as quick as the wind’.15 The ravenous monk in this story is in voluntary connivence with the demon, but even so, Paschasius is not implying that any magic has transpired. It is more a matter of the errant monk succumbing to temptation rather than his drawing on the power of the demon. Devils tempted people, who all too often capitulated, and although the opportunity to capitalize on human vulnerability pleased demons, wayward offenders did not actually engage in trafficking. Furthermore, whereas ‘sin’ could be intellective or behavioural, magic always involved action of some sort on the part of the human being. In other words, magic was never solely cerebral. In the wake of the Carolingian reform movement, a shift occurred in the positioning of humans, sin, and demons. The crisis of sin was front and centre, but the issues sin brought up were fixed on the fragility of the human will and a general susceptibility to wickedness more than on people being drawn in by demons’ trickery. The state of sinfulness became more relevant than individual acts of wrongdoing. Carolingian intellectuals did not depend on demons in order to talk about sin, because the concept had taken on a different tinge than it had in the Christian past when sin was, to a large extent, an act committed, expiated, and put to rest. Although many Carolingian writers used the word peccatum to describe distortion of religious rules and norms, the term carried a connotation of ongoing, weighty guilt, coming not from external agents such as demons, but from internal weakness and irresolution, and it was grounded in a profound anxiety about imperfection and pollution.16 Sin was a condition of the soul against which the Carolingians had to be ever vigilant; they had to allow themselves to be guided through the treacherous earthly terrain by priestly experts. Reformers cultivated a chronic apprehensiveness focused on the imperative to fashion and maintain the moral sanitation of the state, which, if contaminated by the depravity of its people, would falter. The challenge sin or guilt posed was cultural, political, and existential. In the Carolingian era, demons and the magic they facilitated lost their urgency. Carolingian reformers inculcated a deep sense of communal guilt as a bulwark against impurity and God’s wrath, and in that pursuit, demons played a minor, even a trivial role. In early medi­eval Europe, magic was thought to occupy a natural position in the functioning of the universe and existed within a rational cosmos hierarchically arranged according to a ‘great chain of being’.17 Magic amounted to traffic with demons of the lower air that were part of the physical order. Interactions with those demons occurred in highly formalistic, ritual settings and on a routine and casual basis. One of the reasons magic was so insidious  15 Paschasius of Dumium, ‘Questions and Answers’ 8, trans. by Barlow, p. 121.  16 On pollution, see Gillis, Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire, pp. 233–38.  17 Struck, ‘The Poet as Conjurer’; Janowitz, Icons of Power, pp. 120–21, 126; Lovejoy, Great Chain of Being, pp. 24–66. In general, only the intelligentsia would have articulated the concept of the ‘chain of being’ per se; nevertheless, for all segments of the medi­eval population, magic was integral to the normal workings of the universe.

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in the eyes of the Church was that it relentlessly entrenched itself both in the sacral and the quotidian behaviours even of well-intentioned Christians.18 The competition between Christian practice and magic was fierce in the first century, and it continued throughout the eighth century as atavistic forms of magic mutated and found sanctuary in the daily habits of the converted peoples and new paganisms entered Europe with their own forms of magic. By and large, the types of magic common in the Merovingian era were similar to those practised throughout the centuries before it. In the private domain of hearth and field, Christianity was diverse and old superstitions endured. Vows were made at trees, rocks, and streams, and celebrations on the Kalends of January persisted. Spells, weird nocturnal rituals, fortune-telling, and potions continued to be enacted or used to gain advantage in battle or love or to ensure the health of the body. Not only rank-and-file Christians, but clergy and lay religious could come dangerously near (or cross the line into) traffic with demons by misuse of signs, sacred objects, spaces, and observances. In Merovingian Europe, the essential risks of magic were thought to lie in the personal sin of trafficking with demons and the crime of malevolent sorcery. Magic was primarily a legal issue or a matter of misconduct resulting in disruption of the peace, injury, domestic conflict, and individual transgression. Prohibitions of traffic with demons appear primarily in proscriptive sources such as legal documents, conciliar records, and penitentials. For example, Lex Salica (late fifth century) legislates against the activities of striae, who were women thought to meet at crossroads for cannibalistic cooking rituals.19 The striae used magic potions and herbs to kill humans and eat their flesh. ‘If a stria eats a person and it can be proven’, she is liable to a two-hundred-solidi fine’.20 Pactus legis Alamannorum (c. 615) exacts a penalty of twelve solidi from a woman who calls another woman ‘a stria or a [h]erbaria’. The term denotes magically treated herbs. The rate of reparation differs with the social standing of the inculpated woman.21 Edictus Rothari of Leges Langobardorum (c. 643) is similar to Lex Salica in that to accuse a woman of being a stria or a sorceress (masca) is very grave. A man who makes such an allegation against a woman over whom he has legal guardianship stands to lose her full mundium. If a man indicts a woman who is not under his guardianship of being a stria or a harlot (fornicaria) and cannot prove the

 18 When I use the word ‘Church’ I am referring to the institution (ever mutating) and its collective personnel (secular and regular clergy and missionaries) but am not assuming that they had a unified voice or a tightly coordinated organization, particularly before the ninth century. On this subject, see de Jong, ‘Ecclesia and the Early Medi­eval Polity’, pp. 115–22.  19 Ubl, Sinnstiftungen eines Rechtsbuchs, pp. 55–59.  20 Pactus legis Salicae 64.3, ed. by Eckhardt, p. 231: ‘Si stria hominem comederit et conuicta fuerit’.  21 Pactus legis Alamannorum 13.1, ed. by Lehmann and Eckhardt, p. 24: ‘Si femina aliam stria aut erbaria clamaverit’; Pactus legis Alamannorum 14.1, ed. by Lehmann and Eckhardt, p. 24: ‘Si quis alterius ingenuam de crimina seu stria aut herbaria’.

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charge in combat, he must pay the woman’s wergeld.22 The charge is severe, as it incurs the loss of the full wergeld of a free person. These examples from Merovingian and Lombard legislation demonstrate the fact that preceding the Carolingian era, societal concerns about magic centred on public safety, protecting family honour, and individual wrongdoing. In the Carolingian era, the concept of ‘the magical’ and the acts that constituted traffic with demons were in many ways the same as they had been for centuries. However, in the late eighth century, from the point of view of the Carolingian mandarinate, there was a sizable shift in the factors that motivated condemnations of the magic arts. The suppression of magic, along with other types of sin, became an imperative of public authority and cultural policy. Unlike secular and ecclesiastical authorities before them, the Carolingian elite were relatively uninterested in maleficium or simple sorcery. Most intellectuals were sceptical of the supposed abilities of both demons and magicians and tended to be more troubled about errors of belief than the commission of what they considered futile and fraudulent magical acts. When magic was addressed, the emphasis was not on the harm such actions might cause, but rather on the disruption to the Christian community incurred by sins of intention, and the need to bring irregular behaviours in line with the design of the increasingly centralized Church and Carolingian rule. The efforts to subdue paganism and superstition were indexed on two interrelated factors: the escalating power of the state, and the drive to shape proper Christian worship upon which the well-being of governing structures was contingent.23 The interest in spiteful, cunning demons such as those that tormented Saints Antony and Martin of Tours no longer figured into the cognitive calculus of the Carolingian intelligentsia. The educated did not believe that most of the putative abilities of demons’ fantastic feats such as forecasting the future, raising the dead, or transmogrifying were real. Most of the wonders devils credited to themselves were fraudulent. Demons’ most impressive ability was creating illusions of their prowess to draw in the unwary. The archetype for this sort of demonic mirage is from the biblical account of the revivification of Samuel, the prophet of ancient Israel. King Saul, whom Samuel had anointed, sought out a local medium called the pythoness of Endor whom he instructed to draw the dead prophet from the grave to predict the Israelites’ chances against the armies of the Philistines. The ghost of Samuel appeared and correctly prophesied Saul’s defeat (i Samuel 28. 7–20). By the

 22 Lex Langobardorum 197–98, ed. by Beyerle, p. 76.  23 See Alberi, ‘The Evolution of Alcuin’s Concept of the Imperium christianum’, for a discussion of Alcuin’s conception of ‘the Carolingian imperium [that] united many Christian populi under a single lord dedicated to the conversion of the nations before the Last Judgement’ (p. 8) and how the struggle against pagan idolatry was necessary in order to maintain that imperium. On Alcuin, see also Garrison, ‘The Franks as the New Israel?’.

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ninth century, the consensus was absolute that the spectre was not actually the ghost of Samuel, but a demon that assumed his shape. Despite the fact that demons were largely ineffectual, the Carolingian clergy were genuinely troubled about people who tried to work magic because that endeavour involved a readiness to traffic with devils. Even attempting to effect abortion, cast an astro­logical chart, cure the sick, or bring rain constituted an affront to God and a willingness to appropriate his prerogatives. Clerics felt compelled to warn their generation of the perils in trafficking with demons — partially because of the hazard it posed to individual salvation, but even more importantly, magic was a grave threat to the proper ordering of the Christian oecumene. As was suggested earlier, Carolingian reform culture, which Mayke de Jong has dubbed ‘the penitential state’, was defined by a dread of sin and a sense of guilt hovering near the surface.24 The ethos of the ruling class held that in order to ensure the health and safety of the state and the persons in it, sin must be shunned at every turn. By this reckoning, every human being lived in the shadow of elemental guilt, and continuous vigilance was necessary so that guilt not erupt into sin. Louis the Pious (d. 840) put this notion into bold relief with his 822 public penance at Attigny, which aimed to set a tilting universe straight.25 By acknowledging and atoning for his own sins and those of his father, Charlemagne (d. 814), the king set an example for others. Offenders of the moral system could be corrected by penance, but penance did not erase the dreadful surety that temptation was ambient, nor could it change individuals’ underlying sickness and relentless guilt.26 Demons were rarely cast as the catalyst for mortal transgression, although they were perfectly willing to get involved. Five texts from Louis the Pious’s reign demonstrate that the Carolingian reform movement fostered a world view in which the understanding of sin was re-envisioned in such a way that the role of demons was diminished. It is fitting to focus on Louis’s reign because it was during this period that the notion of communal purity was most formative and most virulent. In 829 Louis the Pious and his son Lothar (d. 855) called four major reform assemblies, of which the Council of Paris was one. Canon 2 of the

 24 De Jong, The Penitential State. See also Gillis, Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire, pp. 1–24. Gillis identifies heresy as a particular type of sin: ‘While the Carolingian regime and its theo­logians generally saw sin as a contaminating and corrupting force, Gottschalk’s heresy and disobedience constituted a pollution of the most dangerous and loathsome kind’ (pp. 5–6); Costambeys, Innes, and MacLean, The Carolingian World, pp. 110–30; Firey, A Contrite Heart, pp. 61–110; Allman, ‘Sin and the Construction of Carolingian Kingship’, pp. 22–40; de Jong, ‘Pollution, Penance and Sanctity’, pp. 145–58.  25 De Jong, The Penitential State, pp. 34–38.  26 For a similar analysis of guilt, see Firey, A Contrite Heart, p. 64: ‘Guilt is rarely located in a single act and innocence is hard to come by and easily lost’.

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council record, compiled by Jonas of Orléans (d. c. 843), lays out a blanket condemnation of sorcery and magical practices. Extant et alia pernitiosissima mala, quae ex ritu gentilium remansisse non dubium est, ut sunt magi, arioli, sortilegi, venefici, divini, incantatores, somniatorum coniectores, quos divina lex inretractabiliter puniri iubet, de quibus in lege dicitur: ‘Anima, quae declinaverit ad magos et ariolos et fornicata fuerit cum eis, ponam faciem meam contra eam in interficiam illam de medio populi sui. Sanctificamini et estote sancti, quia ego sanctus sum dominus Deus vester. Custodite praecepta mea et facite ea, quia ego Dominus, qui sanctifico vos’ (Leviticus. 20. 8). Dubium etenim non est, sicut multis est notum, quod a quibusdam praestigiis atque diabolicis inlusionibus ita mentes quorundam inficiantur poculis amatoriis, cibis vel filacteriis, ut in insaniam versi a plerisque iudicentur, dum proprias non sentiunt contumelias. Ferunt enim suis maleficiis aera posse conturbare et grandines inmittere, futura praedicere, fructu et lac auferre aliisque dare et innumera a talibus fieri dicuntur. Qui ut fuerint huiusmodi conperti, viri seu femine, in tantum disciplina et vigore principis acrius corrigendi sunt, in quantum manifestius ausu nefando et temerario servire diabolo non metuunt.27 (There exist most insidious evils, which, no doubt, remain with us from heathen rites, such as sorcery, soothsaying, drawing lots, poisonings, divination, incantations, and interpreting dreams, for which divine law unhesitatingly stipulates punishment, about which it is said in the scriptures, ‘The person who will turn to magicians and soothsayers and prostitute himself to them, I will set my face against that person, and I will [cut him off] from among his people. Sanctify yourselves and be holy, because I your Lord God am holy. Keep my commandments and carry them out, because I am the Lord who sanctifies you’. Doubtless, as many have noted, there are those who, by the same deceptions and diabolical illusions, infect the minds of others by love potions, drugged food, or charms, so that they become insane and are not aware of the abuses they suffer. It is said that they can, by their sorcery, disturb the air, send hailstorms, predict the future, move fruit and milk from one person to another, and innumerable other such things. If someone of this sort should be found, whether men or women, they should be very sternly corrected, because in their crimes and temerity, they do not fear to serve the devil, nor do they renounce him publicly.)

 27 Council of Paris 2, ed. by Werminghoff, p. 669.

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The text reads like a catalogue of the varieties of traffic with demons that had accumulated over the centuries.28 The document evinces a relative disinterest in the specifics of contemporary superstitions and local practices. For example, drawing lots was a type of magic in the Merovingian era, but it virtually disappeared from the record in the ninth century. We know that information about common magical rituals was available because descriptions of them are meticulously detailed in penitentials of the period. Further, in 815 or 816 Agobard of Lyons (d. 840) wrote with some specificity about a widespread belief among the peasants that mortals were able to manage the weather and that specialists existed called tempestarii who exercised that control. Bishop Agobard came upon a crowd about to stone four captives they had bound in chains. The villagers explained they had seized sailors from skyborne ships coming from the mystical land of Magonia who had produced ruinous storms.29 Canon 2 of the Council of Paris mentions hailstorms but lacks any suggestion that the canon is a response to the sort of superstition Agobard describes in his treatise. What then is the purpose of the generalized execration against magic? The canon includes an admonition to bishops to amend peasant fantasies and remediate quotidian sorcery, but there is a more immediate reason than pastoral supervision that the section on magic is included in the comprehensive conciliar decree.30 Since we know that the Carolingian Church and secular rulers did not credit the efficacy of most of the magic outlined in the canon, it follows that its significance is less about the specific nature and ills of traffic with demons and more about the people’s intent to sin and the dangers of blasphemy. The Lord vows that he will turn against magicians and separate them from his people. The sin of trafficking with demons on the part of some pollutes the entire body politic. People who commit these sins serve the devil, and the renunciation of this masterly demon is a matter of public concern; devils must be denounced publicly so that the salvific healing of confession is shared. This point is made even more clearly in the preface to the canon. ‘Sunt sane diversorum malorum patratores, quos et lex divina improbat et condempnat, pro quorum etiam diversis sceleribus et flagitiis populus fame et pestilentia flagellator et ecclesiae status infirmatur et regnum pericliatur’ (There are without doubt those guilty of various evils whom divine law both rejects and

 28 This adumbration is similar to that found in the Admonitio generalis promulgated under Charlemagne in 789. Die Admonitio generalis Karls des Großen, ed. by Mordek, Zechiel-Eckes, and Glatthaar; see for example capitulae 18, p. 192, and 64, p. 216.  29 Agobard of Lyons, De grandine et tonitruis, ed. by van Acker, pp. 1–15. See Dutton, Charlemagne’s Mustache, pp. 169–88; Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medi­eval Europe, pp. 111–16; Boshof, Erzbischof Agobard von Lyon, pp. 170–76.  30 Granted the council was called by and large to address the reform of the Church and the clergy’s morals and not as a guide to pastoral care: Gillis, Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire, p. 27.

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condemns, and through their many evils and scandals, the people are beaten down by famine and pestilence, the condition of the Church weakened, and the kingdom put in jeopardy).31 This condemnation of magic does not centre on sorcerous practices because they cause injury to the victims of malevolent evil deeds, nor is it focused on the salvation of the sinner’s soul; rather traffic with demons results in famine and pestilence and puts the health of the Church and the viability of the kingdom at risk. The blame for this state of affairs lies not in the active initiative and engagement of demons but is the shortcoming of the people. The most convincing evidence that the Carolingians did not need demons in order to sin comes in a strange twist from a demon itself. In his account of the miracles that attended the translation of the relics of Saints Marcellinus and Peter from Seligenstadt to Strasbourg (c. 830), Einhard (d. 840) recorded an incident in which a young girl is possessed of a demon called Wiggo. When the local exorcist asks Wiggo why he had so harried the Frankish realms for the last several years, the demon responds that he and his eleven companions had been commanded to leave the inferos (infernal regions) and wreak havoc in the land because of the wickedness of the people and the iniquities of their rulers. Wiggo responds to the exorcising priest’s question: I am an assistant (satelles) and disciple of Satan, and I was for a long time a gate-keeper in the infernal regions, but for the last few years I and eleven of my companions have wreaked havoc upon the kingdom of the Franks. We have destroyed and utterly ruined grain, wine, and all the other crops that come from the earth for human use, just as we had been ordered to; we killed off herds [of cattle] with disease; [and] we let plague and pestilence loose among those people of yours. Indeed, all the misfortunes and evils, that people have been suffering from for a long time now, as they so deserved, fell upon them because of our actions and our assault.32 Wiggo’s scolding underlines a point that emerges from the Council of Paris: it is because of the ‘many evils and scandals, [that] the people are beaten down by famine and pestilence’. In this estimation of the world, calamity was not brought on by humans summoning demons to commit specific sorcerous acts of wrongdoing. Rather Wiggo and his companions find the ambiance on earth so agreeable because of the Franks’ pervasive impurity. Humans did not need demons as partners in sin; their very turpitude invited demons to unleash mayhem.33 Einhard lamented that in his time it was not necessary for demons to lure the people to vice; they zealously sought it out themselves.

 31 Council of Paris 2, ed. by Werminghoff, p. 669.  32 Einhard, Translatio et miracula 14, ed. by Waitz, pp. 253–54. Translation: Booker, Past Convictions, p. 232.  33 Booker, ‘Hypocrisy, Performativity, and the Carolingian Pursuit of Truth’.

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I argue that the Carolingians did not need demons because the notion of sin was more finely shaded and nuanced than a simple reduction to trafficking with demons or even temptation by demons. As Wiggo informs his astounded listeners, it is their own sinfulness that draws demons out, not vice versa. The unending burden of guilt under which the clergy and, more and more, the laity laboured meant that the straight and narrow path was a slippery one, and demons were not the most serious hazards.34 Wiggo outlines ‘an almost endless number of sins committed every day both by the people themselves and by their rulers […]. Friends do not trust friends, brothers hate brothers, and fathers do not love their sons. They do not fear to use crooked measures and false weights. They trick one another with fraud and do not blush to bear false witness’.35 The Carolingian pastors and their charges became ever more certain that sin was rampant across the Frankish realms. Ironically, it was a devil itself who made it clear that the populace did not need demons to sin. In Charlemagne’s Mustache, Paul Dutton writes of an anonymous bishop who compiled a list of biblical warnings of doom which echoes Wiggo’s harangue. Among the iniquities enumerated are cursing, lying, killing, adultery, and sorrow. Most of the sins are acts, but sorrow, a state of mind, is an interesting addition. Along with the biblical quotations is Jeremiah’s warning, ‘Let every man take heed now of his neighbour, and let him not trust in any brother of his: for every brother will utterly supplant, and every friend walks deceitfully’ ( Jeremiah 9. 4).36 In other words, in the bishop’s assessment, everyone is susceptible all the time. Sinfulness is the natural state of humanity. Demons are not the cause nor are they necessary to sustain that condition. Two texts that were written about the civil war of 830 suggest that references to magic were code for pollution and have less to do with demons than with the contaminating culpability of those who seek them out. In the year 830, a dynastic dispute over rulership of the Carolingian Empire erupted into open warfare between Emperor Louis the Pious and his sons. Among the rebels’ goals was to separate Louis from his wife, Judith (d. 843), and to end or limit the emperor’s authority. Judith was veiled and sent to a convent, and Louis was taken into custody. There is a long-held historio­graphy that puts Judith at the centre of the rebellion of the emperor’s sons which argues that by manipulating her aging husband, Judith destabilized the status quo to her stepsons’ disadvantage in

 34 Nelson, ‘Organic Intellectuals in the Dark Ages?’, argues (although not in reference to guilt specifically) that the Carolingian mission as articulated by Alcuin ‘soaked downward to reach quite low-level landlords’ (p. 10). See also Costambeys, Innes, and MacLean, The Carolingian World, p. 15: ‘By the time of Charlemagne’s grandsons, the court’s cultural and reform agendas had been internalized by provincial bishops and monks. Such ways of thinking could filter down to ordinary lay people in a variety of ways’.  35 Translation of selections from Translatio et miracula in Booker, ‘Hypocrisy, Performativity, and the Carolingian Pursuit of Truth’, p. 199.  36 Dutton, Charlemagne’s Mustache, pp. 148–49 and 191–93.

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order to ensure a patrimony for her own child, Charles (d. 877). However, that portrait of events has now dimmed. Most agree that on her marriage the queen was integrated smoothly into the royal family, and the emperor and empress worked together to accomplish mutual aims. Neither the Royal Frankish Annals nor the Astronomer give any indication that Judith was the broker behind the reallocation of lands in 829, and both affirm that Louis’s sons’ resentment was centred on Louis himself, not on Judith or Charles.37 This having been said, a discourse did develop among Louis’s enemies that cast Judith’s influence as excessive and untoward, not in the domain of lands and armies, but within the imperial family — the realm in miniature. In the charged atmosphere of civil strife in 830, Judith was brought to trial for adultery, and underlying that charge was the accusation that she employed the magic arts to manipulate her husband. The chamberlain, Bernard of Septimania (d. 844), was implicated along with Judith for adultery and sorcery. In 826 and 827 Bernard was charged with the defence of southern Aquitaine against Arab attacks, and he proved his ability while Hugh of Tours (d. 837) and Matfrid of Orléans (d. 836), two long-standing notables of the Carolingian court, bungled military defences in the same area. They were stripped of office and, but for the intercession of Wala, abbot of Corbie (d. 836), might have been executed for their incompetence. Meanwhile, Bernard received accolades. Nithard (d. 844) said Louis entrusted young Charles to Bernard and ‘eidem commendavit ac secundum a se in imperio praefecit’ (made [the duke] second only to himself in the empire).38 In 830 Hugh, Matfrid, and Wala launched a campaign of inner-palace slander against Bernard and the empress. The principal texts for the defamation of Judith are the Libri apo­logetici by Agobard of Lyons and the Epitaphium Arsenii of Paschasius Radbertus (d. 865). Each author accuses Judith and Bernard of adultery, Bernard of perfidious disloyalty and ambition, and Judith of exerting an overweening and altogether inappropriate feminine influence over Louis. The emperor himself is not spared in the calumny. Although his detractors hold him innocent of overt crimes, he is said to have failed as a king because he does not keep his wife in check. Sorcery is among this complex of denunciations. Agobard of Lyons expresses the expectation that the home (even the very politicized royal household) be loyal and harmonious, and he reveals a sense of frustration that this is not the case within Louis’s familia. He blames Judith in the harshest terms and lays at her feet the responsibility for the discord  37 Nelson, ‘Gendering Courts in the Early Medi­eval West’; Nelson, Charles the Bald, p. 87; Stau­ bach, ‘“Des grossen Kaisers kleiner Sohn”’. However, the Prior Metz Annals (ed. by Simson, a. 830, p. 96) and Nithard, (Historiarum 1.3, ed. by Müller, pp. 3–5) accuse the empress of inappropriate influence at court. The following (now dated) studies portray Judith as domineering: Riché, The Carolingians, pp. 149–53; Fichtenau, The Carolingian Empire, p. 40.  38 Nithard, Historiarum 1.3, ed. by Müller, p. 3. On Wala’s history, see de Jong, Epitaph for an Era, pp. 17–68.

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in the palace. He indicates that she is frivolous in the extreme, expecting to rule an empire when she cannot run a palace.39 The bishop is circumspect in accusing the empress of magic. He describes her actions as facini, which means crimes or villainies but also connotes magic. Agobard stops short of accusing Judith of maleficium, but he implies it; he calls her ‘auctrice vero malorum’ (the author of evils). The juxtaposition of Judith’s facini with her salacious seductions points to love magic. In this period most types of magic were not taken very seriously, but amatory magic was an exception, especially when it worked to impact political events. Agobard writes that Judith got her way with Louis ‘per carnalium blandimenta et cupidorum scelestos favores atque indecoras adulationes’ (through flattery and granting carnal favours).40 Sex and concealment, the traditional elements of women’s magic, come together in Agobard’s condemnations. Further, and significantly, he portrays Judith through the hermeneutic of powerful and malign Old Testament queens and compares her reign to periods of backsliding in the Old Testament when people worshiped ‘idola et simulacra’ (idols and images). In the second book of the Libri apo­logetici, Agobard continues the allusion linking Judith and Jezebel, who introduced false gods and ‘sorceries’ into the palace of Ahab, the Hebrew king.41 We read of Jezebel in Revelations when the angel of the Lord castigates the church in Thyatira saying, ‘I have this against you: you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet and is teaching and beguiling my servants to practice fornication and to eat food sacrificed to idols’ (2. 20). In i Kings it is written, ‘Indeed, there was no one like Ahab, who sold himself to do what was evil in the sight of the Lord, urged on by his wife Jezebel’ (21. 25). Jezebel destroyed the prophets of the Lord and worshiped Baal and incited Ahab to do the same. Agobard, in his implied accusation, is not occupied with the mechanics of how Judith cuckolded an aging king and seduced a courtier, but by equating Judith and Jezebel, the bishop implies that just as Jezebel brought foreign cults and false gods into the household of Ahab, the Hebrew king, Judith had polluted the palace by trafficking with demons, and he feared the results for the Frankish kingdom would be the same as they had been for Israel. In his treatise, the allegations of magic are muted and serve more to bolster and intensify other charges — specifically, infidelity (the king’s marriage bed had been infiltrated) — and he describes no rituals, spells, or accoutrements of magic in the case of Judith or Bernard.42 It is not the work of demons per  39 Agobard of Lyons, Liber apo­logeticus 1.5, ed. by van Acker, pp. 311–12.  40 Agobard of Lyons, Liber apo­logeticus 1.1–2, ed. by van Acker, pp. 309–10. Agobard also suggests that Louis’s downfall was precipitated by his failure to satisfy Judith in bed.  41 Agobard of Lyons, Liber apo­logeticus 2.9–11, ed. by van Acker, pp. 316–18. On Jezebel’s sorceries, see ii Kings 9. 22. For a comparison of similar treatments of earlier queens, see Nelson, ‘Queens as Jezebels’.  42 Charges of lasciviousness in Carolingian courts were ‘code for political opposition’: Nelson,

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se that the text confronts, but the impurity of those who would attempt to traffic with them. Another text in which magic is an element in understanding the civil war of 830 is the second book of Paschasius Radbertus’s Epitaphium Arsenii, which survives in a single ninth-century manu­script from the monastery of Corbie.43 Like Agobard, Radbertus was a partisan of Louis’s sons and held Judith and Bernard in contempt. In a somewhat stylized, classicizing assault,44 Radbertus says of Louis’s palace, From all quarters [Arsenius] began to hear about things infamous and obscene, immoral and dishonourable — not just of any sort, but such as have never been heard of in this age of ours. […] The palace, which had once been a seat of honour, had become a theatre in which so many recurring impostures of soothsayers were bubbling up as one would never believe to have existed in the entire world. Then, when [Arsenius’s messengers] understood what was going on, they reported to Arsenius evils in this world that had scarcely ever been heard of, that in such a glorious empire everything had suddenly been transformed. The palace had become a brothel where fornication held sway and an adulterer ruled, where crimes piled upon one another, where every type of evil deed and sorcery of magicians could be found, so much as I never could have believed still existed in the world. There is neither mind, tongue nor voice that can relate the schemes that this madman [Naso] undertook, enveloped as he was in the filth of every sort of crime. For he intended to take control of everything through diabolical sorcery and prevail not through counsel, but to usurp power through omens and divination, because he had so deluded the most sacred emperor through his impostures. […] The emperor was going like an innocent lamb to the slaughter. The great and merciful emperor, deceived by the one (qua) whom Solomon had warned him about.45 Radbertus sees magic as a palpable and menacing agent in the events of the realm. His accusations are more than slurs;46 they are warnings that just as ‘Women at the Court of Charlemagne’, p. 58.  43 Epitaphium Arsenii was written in the mid- to late 850s. There is no evidence that the text was intended for or reached an audience outside of Corbie: de Jong, Epitaph for an Era, p. 4. On the text of Epitaphium Arsenii, see de Jong and Lake, trans., Confronting Crisis in the Carolingian Empire, pp. 5–9, 12–15, 43–46; de Jong, Epitaph for an Era, pp. 1–11.  44 De Jong, Epitaph for an Era, pp. 69–101. As de Jong writes, Book ii of Radbertus’s Epitaphium ‘evokes a world of the late antique Christian empire [… which] elevated himself and his readers above the confusion of the present’ (de Jong and Lake, trans., Confronting Crisis in the Carolingian Empire, p. 43). On the theatrical elements of the Epitaphium, see Booker, ‘Hypocrisy, Performativity, and the Carolingian Pursuit of Truth’.  45 Paschasius Radbertus, Epitaphium Arsenii 2.8, trans. by de Jong and Lake p. 164; 2.8, p. 167; 9.2, p. 169. Arsenius is a pseudonym for Wala, and Naso is an alias for Bernard.  46 David Ganz argues that Paschasius Radbertus’s disappointment with Louis was due to the

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traffic with demons brought down kings, so had it struck a blow at the heart of the Carolingian imperium. He speaks in the vaguest terms of ‘evil deed[s] and sorcery of magicians’, ‘omens and divination’, ‘diabolical sorcery’. Radbertus does not appear to understand or care very much about the machinations of sorcery; rather as in Agobard’s Libri apo­logetici, magic carries a connotation of impurity that is more damning than the fact that demons are behind the efficacy of sorcery. The revolt of 830 was short lived. At an assembly in Nijmegen in October 831, Judith was to answer to ‘cunctis se obicientibus’ (those who would charge her), but nobody came forth. The emperor recovered his authority and the empress her throne.47 Louis exiled Wala to Corbie, and Radbertus painted his political eclipse as a moral triumph, framing it in the context of the banishment of the prophet Elijah, exiled by a powerful queen whose religious proclivities tended to the demonic; or, like Jeremiah, Wala is the prophet who warned Israel against ‘false prophets, diviners, idolaters, and those who dream’ ( Jeremiah 27. 8–9) in the court of Nebuchadnezzar.48 For both Agobard and Radbertus, the danger of magic lies not in its efficacy, but rather in the harm wrought by the intention of people who traffic with demons and its contaminating effect. There is no explanation of what was foretold by the soothsaying or the mechanism by which Bernard learned of the future. For example, was it astro­logical magic? Nor is there any sense as to exactly what is meant by ‘diabolical sorcery’.49 The accusations of magic were imputations of spiritual decline. Magic seldom emerged as a central issue in and of itself in the Carolingian reform movement. The magic arts were peripheral to the larger scheme of comprehensive emendation, never central to it. Discussions of magic were embedded in writings about other subjects, such as marriage and political upheaval. As he retired from the abbacy of Fulda and went to the neighbouring monastery of St Petersberg to live a contemplative life of study and prayer, Hrabanus Maurus (d. 856), an archbishop of Mainz and abbot of the Benedictine Abbey of Fulda,50 composed a letter to Abbot Hatto of Fulda (d. 856) in response to Hatto’s inquiries on consanguinity and magical divination (842). The portion of the letter regarding magic is known as De magicis artibus.51 Little is original in the text, which is heavily reliant on biblical passages and works of the Church Fathers. Whole sections of it are taken verbatim from

king’s perceived disregard of the imperial ideal in favour of vulgar partisan politics: ‘The Epi­ taphium Arsenii and Opposition to Louis the Pious’, pp. 548–50.  47 Annales Bertiniani 831, ed. by Waitz, p. 3.  48 On Judith, see Ward, ‘Caesar’s Wife’.  49 De Jong, ‘Emotions and Rhetoric in the Epitaphium Arsenii’.  50 Haarländer, Rabanus Maurus zum Kennenlernen.  51 I would like to thank James Palmer for bringing to my attention the fact that De magicis artibus was not a stand-alone treatise as is generally thought, but a segment of a letter. I cite the PL edition because the MGH edition (see biblio­graphy) is abridged.

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Augustine’s On the Divination of Demons. Hrabanus rehearses admonitions against magic that had become standard by the ninth century, including motifs from scriptural and patristic writings. For instance, he speaks of the competition in feats of magic between Aaron and the priests of Pharaoh (Exodus 7. 8–25; 8. 1–19), and he refers to the Witch of Endor and her putative revivification of Samuel. Yet the formulaic nature of Hrabanus’s comments is the key to its significance. The bishop condemns magic in his own era by pulling passages from the Hebrew Bible that demonstrate how sorcery played a role in the history of the Israelites. De magicis autem artibus atque incantationibus, et de superstitionibus diversis, quos gentiles et falsi Christiani in divinationibus suis et observationibus perversis sequi videntur, quid lex divina sanciat, in auctoritate Veteris Testamenti ac Novi, facile est invenire. […] ‘Non declinabitis, [Leviticus 19:31] ait, ad magos, nec ab hariolis aliquid sciscitemini, ut polluamini per eos’.52 (It is clearly established by the authority of the Old and New Testaments what divine law enacts concerning the magic arts, both incantations and various superstitions that pagans and false Christians, in their divinations and perverse observations, follow. [… Leviticus 19. 31 says,] ‘You must not turn to magicians or seek to know anything from mediums, or you will be polluted by them’.) Hrabanus makes it clear that magicians are carriers of an impurity that is contagious. The wrongness in trafficking with demons is not simple misconduct but the more dire offence of polluting the self. In Deuteronomio quoque sic dicit, ‘Quando ingressus fueris terram quam Dominus Deus tuus dabit tibi, cave ne imitari velis abominationes illarum gentium: nec inveniatur in te qui lustret filium suum, aut filiam suam ducens per ignem, aut qui hariolos sciscitetur, et observet somnia atque auguria. Non sit maleficus neque incantator, neque qui pythones consulat, neque divinos: et quaerat a mortuis veritatem. Omnia autem haec abominatur Dominus, et propter istiusmodi scelera, delebit eos in introitu tuo’.53 (In Deuteronomy it also states, ‘When you enter the land that your God will give to you, take care not to imitate the detestable abominations of the gentiles. There shall not be found among you those who sacrifice his son or his daughter by passing them through the fire, one who inquires of fortune tellers, or observes auguries and dreams. You shall not be a sorcerer or enchanter or consult spirit mediums or diviners who seek information from the dead. Anyone who does these evil  52 Hrabanus Maurus, De magicis artibus, col. 1095.  53 Hrabanus Maurus, De magicis artibus, col. 1095.

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things is abominable to the Lord; because of these same evil practices the Lord annihilated those who came before you’.) The warning is stern, and those who ignored it in the past were obliterated. The implication is that just as the magic arts threatened the perfection of ancient Zion, it puts at risk the new Zion of Hrabanus’s day. As in the transcript of the Council of Paris, in his letter to Hatto, Hrabanus employs biblical examples to speak about his own world. It seems clear that the aim of the treatise was not to unearth and correct folk superstitions in his backyard. For instance, he refers to the superstitious practice of passing children through the fire or putting them on the roof in order to cure a fever. The language is borrowed from the Penitential of Theodore (c. 700), and its meaning in that penitential text — and in the myriad penitentials for which Theodore’s was a model — is not at all clear.54 Nor does the archbishop evince distress over the harm maleficium can cause; rather he exhorts his readers to abjure ‘the detestable abominations of the gentiles’ because they are anathema to the Lord. People addicted to magic are the ‘other’; they are the accursed gentiles, both in ancient Israel and in ninth-century Francia. Nec ab alio quam a se requiri veritatem aut sanitatem vult, quia ipse cum Patre et Spiritu sancto, unus verus atque omnipotens est Deus, faciens mirabilia magna solus. […] Quae ratio est, scientiam aut sapientiam ab alio quolibet discere velle, quam ab omni sapientiae et scientiae fonte? […] Qui perceptos homines alios decipere quotidie gestiunt, ut perditionis suae faciant eos esse participes.55 (Not from anyone other than from [God] should you want to look for truth or health which comes from the father and the holy spirit who is the one true and omnipotent God, who alone makes great miracles. […] Why seek knowledge or wisdom anywhere than from the font of all knowledge and wisdom? […] Those people who hold these beliefs are happy to be deceived daily, and thus they bring about their own ruin.) Hrabanus voices a theme that was common in early Church literature to the effect that humans aided by demons cannot bring about miracles, which are God’s prerogative. And again he stresses that the results of turning to magic are not personal; they are epic and led to the ruination of a people. Returning to David Frankfurter’s observation that ‘virtually every culture imagines a being that is the embodiment of evil, a creature responsible for mysterious or inexplicable malice and misfortune’, it is striking that in the

 54 Poenitentiale Theodori 1.15.2, ed. by Haddan and Stubbs, p. 190: ‘Mulier si qua ponit filiam suam supra tectum vel in fornacem pro sanitate febris VII. annos peniteat’. See Meens, Penance in Medi­eval Europe, pp. 159–62.  55 Hrabanus Maurus, De magicis artibus, cols 1096–97.

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ninth century the beings most guilty of malice and causing disaster were not witches or demons, but human beings staggering under the weight of guilt and enmeshed in sin. At the beginning of this paper we saw that in the fourth century Saint Antony of the Egyptian desert and Saint Martin of Roman Gaul were defined by their encounters with demons, but in Carolingian Europe, demons did not occupy the same pride of place as an explanatory force in hagio­graphy or in intellectual culture at large. Writings from the authors who designed the Carolingian reform movement display little evidence of minds pondering what acts were magical, outside, perhaps, of the penitentials. The charge of magic was a charge of impurity; demons were incidental. Nevertheless, traffic with demons was a menace because of the bald defiance those who would turn to them flaunted. It was the intent to work magic, more than demons themselves, that stood to disrupt the Christian imperium — the new Zion. Magicians’ perfidious waywardness was an impediment to creating a thoroughly Christian perception of the world, which depended on the ‘proper’ orientation of the whole person, and of the whole nation.

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Biblio­graphy Primary Sources Die Admonitio generalis Karls des Großen, ed. by Hubert Mordek, Klaus ZechielEckes, and Michael Glatthaar, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Fontes iuris Germanici antiqui in usum scholarum separatim editi, 16 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013) Agobard of Lyons, De grandine et tonitruis, in Agobardi Lugdunensis opera omnia, ed. by L. van Acker, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, 52 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981), pp. 1–15 —— , Libri apo­logetici, in Agobardi Lugdunensis opera omnia, ed. by L. van Acker, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, 52 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981), pp. 307–19 Annales Bertiniani, ed. by G. Waitz, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi, 5 (Hanover: Hahn, 1883) Athanasius, ‘The Life and Affairs of our Holy Father Antony’, in The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus, trans. by Robert C. Gregg, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), pp. 29–99 Augustine, De civitate Dei, ed. by Bernard Dombart and Alphonso Kalb, 2 vols, Aurelii Augustini Opera, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, 47–48 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1954–1955) —— , De divinatione daemonum, ed. by Joseph Zycha, in Sancti Aurelii Augustini opera, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, 41 (Vienna: Tempsky, 1800), pp. 597–618 —— , De doctrina Christiana, ed. by Joseph Martin, in Aurelii Augustini Opera, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, 32 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1962) —— , De utilitate credendi, ed. by Joseph Zycha, in Sancti Aurelii Augustini opera, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, 25 (Vienna: Tempsky, 1891), pp. 1–48 Burchard of Worms, Decretum, ed. by Jacques-Paul Migne, Patro­logiae cursus completus: series latina, 140 (Paris: Garnier, 1853), cols 537–1058 Council of Paris, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Concilia aevi Karolini, 2.2, ed. by Albert Werminghoff (Hanover: Hahn, 1979), pp. 605–80 Einhard, Translatio et miracula sanctorum Marcellini et Petri, ed. by G. Waitz, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores, 15.1 (Hanover: Hahn, 1887) pp. 238–64 Hrabanus Maurus, De magicis artibus, ed. by Jacques-Paul Migne, Patro­logiae cursus completus: series latina, 110 (Paris: Garnier, 1864), cols 1095–1110 —— , Epistolae 31 (De magicis artibus), ed. by E. Dümmler, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Epistolae Karolini aevi, 5 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1899) pp. 458–61

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Isidore of Seville, Etymo­logiarum sive originum libri XX, ed. by W. M. Lindsay, Scriptorum Classicorum Biblioteca Oxoniensis, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911; repr., 1957) —— , Liber differentiarum [II], ed. by María Adelaida Andrés Sanz, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, 111a (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006) Justin Martyr, Second Apo­logy, in Justin, Philosopher and Martyr: Apo­logies, ed. and trans. by Denis Minns and Paul Parvis, Oxford Early Christian Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 270–323 Lex Langobardorum, in Die Gesetze der Langobarden, ed. by Franz Beyerle, Germanenrecht (Weimar: H. Böhlaus Nachf, 1947) Nithard, Historiarum libri IIII, ed. by E. Müller, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi, 44 (Hanover: Hahn, 1907) Pactus legis Alamannorum, in Leges Alamannorum, ed. by Karl Lehmann and Karl A. Eckhardt, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Leges nationum Germanicarum, 5.1 (Hanover: Hahn, 1966), pp. 21–34 Pactus legis Salicae, ed. by K. A. Eckhardt, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Leges nationum Germanicarum, 4.1 (Hanover: Hahn, 1962) Paschasius of Dumium, ‘Questions and Answers’, in The Writings of Martin of Braga, Paschasius of Dumium, and Leander of Seville, vol. i of Iberian Fathers, trans. by Claude W. Barlow, Fathers of the Church, 62 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1969), pp. 117–71 Paschasius Radbertus, Epitaphium Arsenii, trans. by Mayke de Jong and Justin Lake, in Confronting Crisis in the Carolingian Empire: Paschasius Radbertus’ Funeral Oration for Wala of Corbie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020) Poenitentiale Theodori, in Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents Relating to Great Britain and Ireland, ed. by Arthur West Haddan and William Stubbs, vol. iii (Oxford: Clarendon, Press 1871; repr., 1964), pp. 173–204 Prior Metz Annals (Annales Mettenses priores), ed. by B. von Simson, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi, 10 (Hanover: Hahn 1905) Regino of Prüm, De synodalibus causis et disciplinis ecclesiasticis, ed. by F. G. A. Wasserschleben (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1840; repr., Graz: Akademische Drucku. Verlagsanstalt, 1964) Sulpicius Severus, Sulpicius Severus’ Vita Martini, ed. by Philip Burton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) Secondary Works Alberi, Mary, ‘The Evolution of Alcuin’s Concept of the Imperium christianum’, in The Community, the Family and the Saint: Patterns of Power in Early Medi­eval Europe, ed. by Joyce M. Hill and Mary Swan, International Medi­eval Research, 4 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 3–17

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Allman, Dwight D., ‘Sin and the Construction of Carolingian Kingship’, in The Seven Deadly Sins: From Communities to Individuals, ed. by Richard Newhauser, Studies in Medi­eval and Reformation Traditions: History, Culture, Religion, Ideas, 123 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 21–40 Almond, Philip C., The Devil: A New Bio­graphy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014) Booker, Courtney M., ‘Hypocrisy, Performativity, and the Carolingian Pursuit of Truth’, Early Medi­eval Europe, 26 (2018), 174–202 —— , Past Convictions: The Penance of Louis the Pious and the Decline of the Carolingians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) Boshof, Egon, Erzbischof Agobard von Lyon: Leben und Werk, Kölner historische Abhandlungen, 17 (Co­logne: Böhlau, 1969) Brakke, David, Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006) Costambeys, Marios, Matthew Innes, and Simon Maclean, The Carolingian World, Cambridge Medi­eval Textbooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) Dutton, Paul Edward, Charlemagne’s Mustache and Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) Fichtenau, Heinrich, The Carolingian Empire, trans. by Peter Munz, Studies in Mediaeval History, 9 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978) Filotas, Bernadette, Pagan Survivals, Superstitions, and Popular Culture in Early Medi­eval Pastoral Literature, Studies and Texts, 151 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2005) Firey, Abigail, A Contrite Heart: Prosecution and Redemption in the Carolingian Empire, Studies in Medi­eval and Reformation Traditions, 145 (Leiden: Brill 2009) Flint, Valerie I. J., The Rise of Magic in Early Medi­eval Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991) Frankfurter, David, Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Ritual Abuse in History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006) Ganz, David, ‘The Epitaphium Arsenii and Opposition to Louis the Pious’, in Charlemagne’s Heir: New Perspectives on the Reign of Louis the Pious (814–40), ed. by Peter Godman and Roger Collins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 537–50 Garrison, Mary, ‘The Franks as the New Israel? Education for an Identity from Pippin to Charlemagne’, in The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages, ed. by Yitzhak Hen and Matthew Innes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 114–61 Geest, Paul van, ‘“… Seeing that for Monks the Life of Antony Is a Sufficient Pattern of Discipline”: Athanasius as Mystagogue in his Vita Antonii’, Church History and Religious Culture, 90 (2010), 199–221 Gillis, Matthew Bryan, Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire: The Case of Gottschalk of Orbais (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) Haarländer, Stephanie, Rabanus Maurus zum Kennenlernen: Ein Lesebuch mit einer Einführung in sein Leben und Werk (Mainz: Bistum, 2006)

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Hen, Yitzhak, ‘The Early Medi­eval West’, in The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West: From Antiquity to the Present, ed. by David J. Collins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 183–206 Janowitz, Naomi, Icons of Power: Ritual Practices in Late Antiquity, Magic in History (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002) Jong, Mayke de, ‘Ecclesia and the Early Medi­eval Polity’, in Staat im frühen Mittelalter, ed. by Stuart Airlie, Walter Pohl, and Helmut Reimitz, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters, 2 (Vienna: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2006), pp. 113–32 —— , ‘Emotions and Rhetoric in the Epitaphium Arsenii’, paper presented at American Historical Association, Boston, 8 January 2011 —— , Epitaph for an Era: Politics and Rhetoric in the Carolingian World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) —— , The Penitential State: Authority and Atonement in the Age of Louis the Pious, 814–840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) —— , ‘Pollution, Penance and Sanctity: Ekkehard’s Life of Iso of St Gall’, in The Community, the Family and the Saint: Patterns of Power in Early Medi­eval Europe, ed. by Joyce M. Hill and Mary Swan, International Medi­eval Research, 4 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 145–58 Jong, Mayke de, and Justin Lake, trans. and annot., Confronting Crisis in the Carolingian Empire: Paschasius Radbertus’ Funeral Oration for Wala of Corbie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020) Lovejoy, Arthur O., Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964) Meens, Rob, Penance in Medi­eval Europe, 600–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) Nelson, Janet L., Charles the Bald, The Medi­eval World (London: Longman, 1992) —— , ‘Gendering Courts in the Early Medi­eval West’, in Gender in the Early Medi­ eval World: East and West, 300–900, ed. by Leslie Brubaker and Julia M. H. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 190–97 —— , ‘Organic Intellectuals in the Dark Ages?’, History Workshop Journal, 66 (2008), 1–17 —— , ‘Queens as Jezebels: Brunhild and Balthild in Merovingian History’, in Poli­ tics and Ritual in Early Medi­eval Europe (London: Hambledon, 1986), pp. 1–48 —— , ‘Women at the Court of Charlemagne: A Case of Monstrous Regiment?’, in Medi­eval Queenship, ed. by John Carmi Parsons (New York: St Martin’s, 1993), pp. 43–61 Pagels, Elaine H., ‘The Social History of Satan, Part Three. John of Patmos and Ignatius of Antioch: Contrasting Visions of “God’s People”’, Harvard Theo­ logical Review, 99 (2006), 487–505 Rampton, Martha, Trafficking with Demons: Magic, Ritual, and Gender from Late Antiquity to 1000 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021) Riché, Pierre, The Carolingians: A Family Who Forged Europe, trans. by Michael Idomir Allen, The Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993)

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Russell, Jeffrey Burton, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972) Shaw, Gregory, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus, Hermeneutics: Studies in the History of Religions (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995) Staubach, Nikolaus, ‘“Des grossen Kaisers kleiner Sohn”: Zum Bild Ludwigs des Frommen in der älteren deutschen Geschichtsforschung’, in Charlemagne’s Heir: New Perspectives on the Reign of Louis the Pious (814–40), ed. by Peter Godman and Roger Collins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 701–21 Struck, Peter T., ‘The Poet as Conjurer: Magic and Literary Theory in Late Antiquity’, in Magic and Divination in the Ancient World, ed. by Leda Ciraolo and Jonathan Seidel, Ancient Magic and Divination, 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 119–31 Ubl, Karl, Sinnstiftungen eines Rechtsbuchs: ‘Die Lex Salica’ im Frankenreich, Quellen und Forschungen zum Recht im Mittelalter, 9 (Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke, 2017) Ward, Elizabeth, ‘Caesar’s Wife: The Career of the Empress Judith, 819–829’, in Charlemagne’s Heir: New Perspectives on the Reign of Louis the Pious (814–40), ed. by Peter Godman and Roger Collins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 205–27 Wiebe, Gregory D., Fallen Angels in the Theo­logy of St Augustine, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021)

Matthew Bryan Gi ll i s

Pleasures of Horror Florus of Lyons’s Querela de divisione imperii Montes et colles, silvaeque et flumina, fontes, Praeruptae rupes pariter vallesque profundae, Francorum lugete genus, quod munere Christi Imperio celsum iacet ecce in pulvere mersum. Hunc elementa sibi sumant conpuncta dolorem Terrarum tractus, maris aequora, sidera caeli, Ventorum flatus, pluviarum denique guttae, Et doleant homines, hominum quia corda rigescunt.1 Mountains and highlands, woodlands and rivers, springs, Plummeting crags and sunken valleys, Mourn you all the Frankish race, noble in empire By Christ’s offering, that now lies buried in the dust. Let the troubled elements embrace this grief — Expanses of the earth, surfaces of the sea, celestial stars, Whirling winds and falling drops of rain — Let them lament humankind, for human hearts grow hard. Thus did the deacon Florus of Lyons call upon the cosmos to lament for the Franks in the early 840s, a time when they tore themselves and their empire to pieces.2 Notice how the fullness of the universe was summoned here: the

* The author would like to thank the participants of the University of Tennessee’s 2017 Marco Symposium, ‘Carolingian Experiments’, the anonymous reader, Celia Chazelle, and the late Miriam Czock for their generous and helpful comments about this essay.  1 Florus of Lyons, Querela, ll. 1–8, ed. by Dümmler, pp. 559–60. All translations are mine.  2 On Florus, see Zechiel-Eckes, Florus von Lyon, including pp. 11–18 for a bio­graphical sketch; Charlier, ‘Les manuscrits personnels de Florus de Lyon’; and Charlier, ‘Florus de Lyon’. On Florus’s lament, see especially Dümmler, ‘Flori Lugdunensis Carmina’, pp. 507–09, including a discussion of the two surviving manu­scripts containing Florus’s poetry; Godman, Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, pp. 50–51 and 264–73 (which includes an English translation Matthew Bryan Gillis ([email protected]) is Associate Professor in the History Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the author of Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire: The Case of Gottschalk of Orbais (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), and Religious Horror and Holy War in Viking Age Francia (Budapest: Trivent Publishing, 2021). Gillis is also the series editor for Renovatio – Studies in the Carolingian World (Trivent Publishing). Carolingian Experiments, ed. by Matthew Bryan Gillis, ISMAR 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022) pp. 269–289 10.1484/M.ISMAR-EB.5.127254

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earth’s vast geo­graphies and waters, heavenly stars, even the winds and rain. All were called to mourn and grieve that the once noble, imperial Franks were now fallen, ‘buried in the dust’, dead or spiritually dead — which was far worse. In using the term genus Francorum, Florus could signify both the members of the Carolingian dynasty who were violently competing for control of the realm, and their array of aristocratic supporters slaughtering one another on the battlefield and laying waste the empire.3 The ambiguity of this term rendered it poetically potent, capacious enough to condemn royals and elites alike, showing that Florus like so many other authors transformed the meaning of this ethnic identifier to his own ends.4 Furthermore, such rhetorical powers enabled Florus to convey the immensity of the disaster. For this collapse was all the more troubling because it was ‘Christ’s offering’, meaning the gift of grace as much as his death on the cross, that had raised and ennobled the Franks in the first place.5 With the poem’s opening, the audience’s gaze was made cosmic, deepened and broadened like the universe’s vast depths which the poet has summoned, opening readers’ eyes to the spiritual reality of the Franks’ catastrophe.6 Seeing cosmically and no longer as humans, readers witnessed the Franks’ appalling fate and grieved for humankind, which did not grieve for itself. Florus of Lyons’s other surviving writings consist chiefly of studies of patristic works, theo­logical texts directed at doctrinal controversies, and a small body of verse.7 His lament survives among a unique collection of Latin texts by different authors bemoaning the Frankish sins that spawned so much mayhem in the 830s and 840s, when rebellion gave way to civil war, devastation, heresy, and Viking attacks.8 These writers framed the age’s horrors

and commentary); Godman, Poets and Emperors, pp. 149–51; Szövérffy, Weltliche Dichtungen, pp. 609–11; Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming, pp. 121–23; Zechiel-Eckes, Florus von Lyon, pp. 15–16, 158, 173, and 176; Kershaw, Peaceful Kings, pp. 197–201; Romig, Be a Perfect Man, pp. 210–14; and Heinzle, Flammen der Zwietracht, pp. 248–62.  3 Heinzle, Flammen der Zwietracht, pp. 249–55, likewise argues that the poem condemns the dynasty and aristocracy. See also Reimitz, History, Frankish Identity and the Framing of Western Ethnicity, esp. pp. 369–83 and 440–43 on Frankish identity before Florus’s writing. On early medi­eval campaign practices, see Bachrach, Early Carolingian Warfare, pp. 202–42; and Halsall, Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West, pp. 134–62.  4 Reimitz, History, Frankish Identity and the Framing of Western Ethnicity, esp. pp. 444–55 where he encapsulates the complex and varied uses of Frankish identity.  5 Heydemann and Pohl, ‘The Rhetoric of Election’; and Garrison, ‘The Franks as the New Israel?’. See also Chazelle, The Crucified God in the Carolingian Era, pp. 1–74; and Phelan, The Formation of Christian Europe, pp. 48–146.  6 Authors who regard horror as a historical way of seeing include Tudor, ‘Why Horror?’; and Straub, ed., American Fantastic Tales, p. xi. See also Jauß, ‘Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory’; Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’; and Meister, ‘“It’s Not What You See”’.  7 Critical editions of Florus’s writings include Carmina, ed. by Dümmler, pp. 507–66; Collectio ex dictis XII Patrum, ed. by Fransen and others; Expositio in epistolas, ed. by Fransen and others; and Opera polemica, ed. by Zechiel-Eckes and Frauenknecht.  8 On early and mid-century Carolingian authors responding to times of crisis, see Dutton,

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chiefly within biblical traditions: the Franks’ trespasses led repeatedly to destruction and humiliation, all of which had to be lamented lest things get worse.9 Biblical citations and allusions joined the Frankish cataclysm with those of ancient Israel, punished so often for its scandals and crimes against the deity.10 Like Old Testament psalmists and prophets, these ninth-century authors loathed these evils and grieved for their times, terrifying their readers into repentance and reform. Only such fear and trembling could purge sinners of their crimes against Christ. Peter Godman lauded Florus’s lament in his book on Carolingian political poetry as ‘an experimental form of admonitory verse’ grown out of the poet’s ‘sombre meditation on the troubles’ of his times.11 Godman especially emphasizes the work’s anxious religious tone, arguing that the politically unpartisan Florus offered a prophetic and apocalyptic perspective on these troubles; he pleaded emotionally for understanding ‘with an eagerness that approache[d] desperation’ in a world where ‘the endurance of suffering [w]as a trial imposed by divine justice’.12 Paul Edward Dutton likewise offers an artfully dark assessment of Florus’s horrors, concluding that he wrote nothing short of a ‘funeral eulogy for a fallen empire’. In particular, Dutton identifies the lament’s ending as ‘paradoxical’, where ‘a homiletic call for reform’ was nonetheless ‘suffused with the finality of damnation, for punishment was already at hand’.13 Andrew Romig identifies the power of Florus’s poem to transform readers, stressing how they first witnessed emotionally the horrific experiences of civil war, but then found their grief exorcised and replaced with hope as they ultimately understood how such hardships would beget a better future as well as salvation.14 In the spirit of experimentation, I would like to draw on these scholars’ insights to present Florus’s dark lines as something radically transformative. Having sombrely meditated on this poem for some time, I argue it was an

The Politics of Dreaming, esp. pp. 81–156; de Jong, The Penitential State, pp. 112–47; Booker, Past Convictions, pp. 15–67; Romig, Be a Perfect Man, pp. 98–131; de Jong, Epitaph for an Era, pp. 76–95 and 206–27; Coupland, ‘The Rod of God’s Wrath or the People of God’s Wrath?’; Gillis, Religious Horror and Holy War, pp. 14–16 and 19–23; Gillis, ‘Dreaming of Saint Germain’; and Heinzle, Flammen der Zwietracht, pp. 247–369.  9 On the biblical tradition of horror and lamentation, see Kalmanofsky, Terror All Around; Mandolfo, ‘Language of Lament in the Psalms’; Brown, Seeing the Psalms, pp. 1–14; and Westermann, Praise and Lament in the Psalms, pp. 165–280.  10 Kershaw, Peaceful Kings, pp. 198–99.  11 Godman, Poets and Emperors, p. 149. For a recent collection of essays highlighting the innovative qualities of Carolingian poetry, see Stella, The Carolingian Revolution.  12 Godman, Poets and Emperors, pp. 149–51.  13 Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming, pp. 121–23 with the quotations on p. 123. See also Szövérffy, Weltliche Dichtungen, pp. 609–11, on Florus as an elegist; and Zechiel-Eckes, Florus von Lyon, p. 16, who describes the lament as ‘ein letzer Abgesang auf eine unwiederbringlich verlorene Epoche, ja geradezu als Anachronismus zu werten’.  14 Romig, Be a Perfect Man, pp. 210–14.

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uncanny experiment in verse, which offered spiritually sensitive readers a unique cluster of sensations that we might call the ‘pleasures of horror’. This concept derives its name from Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, which studies literature’s power to relieve humanity’s inescapable sense of existential desolation.15 My method also stems from George Bataille’s notion that disturbing spiritual experiences could nurture as much as terrify.16 Such an approach accords with the findings of biblical and late antique scholars, who have identified how scriptural horror served as a form of chastisement and spiritual correction, and how late antique Christian literature offered readers a new subjectivity based on positive notions of suffering.17 To witness as reader the rotting corpse, to behold imaginatively the open and oozing wound, is to confront the living mortality within ourselves; yet the text’s literary powers simultaneously engender catharsis so that one’s dread becomes a source of pleasure and relief.18 I argue that such readerly experiences in their Carolingian setting granted audiences an aesthetic way of confronting their own sinfulness.19 Furthermore, the pleasure of such an aesthetic vision held theo­logical ramifications. Carolingian literary horror was terrifying because it disclosed the eerie dynamics of human sin and divine punishment, which unleashed wretchedness and suffering. Yet such horror weirdly spawned pleasure because that same pain and misery might also engender spiritual transformation and purity. Our interest here will be the experience of Florus’s pious and sensitive ninth-century audience. I put forward that reading his lament, that is, actively and perceptively experiencing its pleasures of horror, radically transformed readers. No longer spiritually Franks, this pious audience was now part of the deity’s ‘tiny flock’ (pusillus grex) — Christ’s pious and faithful friends, the elect.20 Accordingly, Florus’s poem offered knowing readers a phenomeno­ logical encounter with the strangeness of predestination as it unfolded and revealed itself to the elect in the world rather than according to a theoretical understanding of God’s unchanging will. In this way, rather than seeing Florus’s lament as a piece of propaganda for Emperor Lothar or a seemingly anachronistic call for a united realm and Church, I will read Florus’s lament with a sensitivity to his teachings on grace and predestination.21 Such an  15 Kristeva, Powers of Horror.  16 Bataille, Inner Experience, pp. 9–11, 39–66, and 120–22, where he discusses how Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s Exercises served as an important inspiration; Bataille, Erotism, pp. 34–37; and Kripal, ‘The Traumatic Secret’, esp. p. 153, where the author notes that Bernard McGinn recom­mended Bataille’s work to his students as useful for understanding Christian mysticism.  17 Kalmanofsky, Terror All Around, pp. 9–14; and Perkins, The Suffering Self, pp. 4–14.  18 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, pp. 1–31.  19 See also Gillis, Religious Horror and Holy War, for a related discussion of Carolingian horror texts. On horror’s historical nature, see Tudor, ‘Why Horror?’.  20 Luke 12. 32.  21 For these alternate readings of the text, see Nelson, ‘The Search for Peace in a Time of War’,

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approach accords with Georg Friedrich Heinzle’s recent assessment that the poem disclosed how God’s grace alone offered salvation to individuals in a realm now divided by evil rulers.22 Indeed, Florus appears to have written his poem during his intense investigation of Augustine’s thought, a project that occupied him through the 840s.23 Likewise, Florus wrote in Lyons, where both a sense of isolation from the centres of power during Louis the Pious’s reign and feelings of resentment over the controversial deposition of Florus’s beloved Archbishop Agobard seem to have remained even after the removal of his replacement, Amalarius, and Agobard’s death.24 Florus’s poem reveals the theo­logical fecundity of such an environment. And since this venture was as theo­logically driven as it was spiritually, calling Florus’s audience an ‘emotional community’ would fail to capture its full significance.25 For the experience that the text offered its audience was radical, because it involved abandoning the Frankish empire’s and Church’s now seemingly lost claims to divine favour. Instead, the Lord’s tiny flock recognized that divine favour was in itself uncanny: it painfully and terrifyingly purified pious individuals in ways they embraced and relished, mystically converting them from sinners to willing victims of the Franks’ wickedness. The alternative — that is, to remain so to speak spiritually Frankish — was unthinkable, since the Franks were now evil. *    *    * Florus’s poem quickly laid bare the disturbing nature of the Frankish cataclysm. I quote now the lines following the cosmic invocation with which the essay began. Notice here the strange revelation that the Franks’ crimes were indistinguishable from divine punishment: Omnia concrepitant divinis cincta flagellis,      Omnia vastantur horrendae cladis erumnis,      Omne bonum pacis odiis laniatur acerbis,      Omne decus regni furiis fuscatur iniquis.26 (All resounds, surrounded by divine scourges,      All is laid waste by dread calamity’s afflictions,      All of peace’s prosperity is butchered by bitter hatreds,      All of the realm’s splendour is darkened by hostile fiends.)

pp. 101–02; and Zechiel-Eckes, Florus von Lyon, pp. 15–16 respectively. On Florus’s theo­logy of predestination and grace, see Zechiel-Eckes, Florus von Lyon, pp. 115–77.  22 Heinzle, Flammen der Zwietracht, pp. 259–62. See also Kershaw, Peaceful Kings, pp. 201–03, who identified Florus’s view of heavenly peace in the lament as an Augustinian one.  23 Zechiel-Eckes, Florus von Lyon, p. 16, citing Charlier, ‘La compilation augustinienne de Flore sur l’Apôtre’, p. 166.  24 Zechiel-Eckes, Florus von Lyon, pp. 27–71.  25 Rosenwein, Emotional Communities; and Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, esp. pp. 3–10 where she reiterates her earlier approach.  26 Florus of Lyons, Querela, ll. 9–12, ed. by Dümmler, p. 560.

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In this stanza, the language and metaphors of violence, suffering, and outrage — key features of the lament genre — fill each line. Yet the text deepens the terror of the catastrophe by interpreting it spiritually: the divine scourges and dread calamity’s afflictions, the bitter and butchering hatreds, the hostile fiends darkening the realm’s splendour — all seem weirdly indistinguishable, as if Frankish violence and divinely ordained devastation were one and the same. The Franks’ seemingly inexplicable hatred has transformed them into ‘fiends’ (furiae), monstrous and murderous beings that violate peace and cast the empire into gloomy darkness. These metaphors prepare the readers’ imagination for the poem’s details of horror yet to come. But they also suggest the larger significance of Frankish sin, leaving the audience with the impression that the Franks themselves somehow generated the punishment for their sins through the very crimes they committed. For the audience — with its spiritualized, cosmic gaze — would see how in their frenzied hatred the Franks not only murdered themselves, but also metaphorically murdered their empire as a kind of self-inflicted, divinely ordained punishment. Readers then discovered the cause of the current catastrophe: the Franks had abandoned their sense of religious dread. Florus’s concern for pious fear echoed that of Archbishop Agobard of Lyons, who had some years before composed a treatise on that very subject.27 The consequences of losing their sensibility of religious dread were tremendous, because doing so set in motion the strange forces of sin and divine punishment. Notice especially in the following passage how metaphors of violence and murder are extended here even to holy things: Ecclesiae deiectus honor iacet ecce sepultus,      Iura sacerdotum penitus eversa ruerunt,      Divinae iam legis amor terrorque recessit,      Et scita iam canonum cunctorum calce teruntur. Vexantur clarae assiduis conflictibus urbes,      Basilicae Christi prisco spoliantur honore;      Martyribus iam nullus honos; altaribus ipsis      Nemo metum defert, sacris reverentia nulla est.28 (Behold! The honour of the Church now lies slain and buried,      The rights of priests are utterly destroyed and fallen into ruins,      Now the love and terror of divine law have departed,      And the decrees of all canons are crushed under the boot. Famous cities are shaken by constant conflicts,      Christ’s basilicas are stripped of their ancient beauty;

 27 Agobard of Lyons, De spe et timor, ed. by van Acker, pp. 429–54; and Firey, A Contrite Heart, p. 190.  28 Florus of Lyons, Querela, ll. 13–20, ed. by Dümmler, p. 560.

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     Now there is no regard for the martyrs; no one comes in dread      Before their altars; there is no fear for sacred things.) The violent imagery here conveys the spiritual nature of the Franks’ crimes against their deity, its closest servants, its holy places. Some offences are described metaphorically: the Church’s honour has been slain and buried, clerical rights are destroyed and ruined, all ordained by the canons is crushed under the boot. Yet others call to mind the physical spaces of Christian devotions: Christ’s basilicas are robbed of their treasures, his martyrs are disrespected and no one comes reverently to their altars, there is no fear for sacred things. Florus tells us the cause of these crimes: the Franks’ love and terror of divine law have departed — no longer fearful of punishment for their transgressions, they have unleashed sin’s destructive forces. Florus described the traditional Frankish antidote to sin in appropriately uncanny terms — the love and terror of divine law, the dread of the martyrs, the fear of sacred things. In each case, something terrifying was also desirable. Divine law was terrible yet lovable. Holy martyrs — the Church’s ancient heroes and miraculous intercessors — inspired trepidation. Indeed, as an editor of two versions of a martyro­logy in the late 830s, Florus certainly cultivated a rich understanding of believers’ obligation to the martyrs, who had suffered violent death at the hands of infidels.29 Therefore, sacred things, those objects closest to the deity whom the Franks willingly served, were to be feared. This religious dread was not just an emotion. It was an aesthetic way of confronting sin’s uncanny powers to corrupt and ruin as weirdly indivisible from divine wrath and punishment. While diabolical forces might tempt humans to sin and thereby share in their rebellion against the deity, the Franks knew that they were the source of their own evil and, therefore, responsible for their own spiritual perversion. It was understood that if sin were given a free rein, then it would spread — like a disease or virus — from one to another, infecting the Franks with criminal ideas and actions until they degenerated into immoral miscreants. Nevertheless, the violence and destruction they wreaked upon themselves would be a divinely ordained punishment in this world, to be followed by eternal suffering in hell. Therefore, the Franks once shuddered with dread before sacred things out of fear for both sin’s corrupting nature and their awe-inspiring Lord’s readiness to punish. This religious dread, however, was precisely what the Franks had now lost. The result was, as Florus put it, divine scourges and dread calamity’s afflictions, which he described in grave detail as a criminal world awash in blood and corpses: Continuis praedis plebes miseranda laborat,      Nobilitas discors in mutua funera saevit,

 29 Quentin, Les martyro­loges historiques, pp. 383–90; and Dubois and Renaud, Edition pratique des martyro­loges, p. i.

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     Sanguine terra madet, fervescunt cuncta rapinis,      Et rabies scelerum ruptis discurrit habenis. Flagrat adulterium, periuria nulla timentur,      Funditur innocuus nullo iam vindice sanguis,      Iam regum legumque metus mortalia liquit,      Tartareum clausis oculis iamque itur ad ignem.30 (Wretched people fall prey to ceaseless plundering,      The backbiting nobility cruelly makes corpses of one another;      The earth swims with blood, all places burn red-hot from pillaging,      And the rage of criminals runs rampant from broken reins. Adulterous passions burst aflame, no false oaths are feared,      Now innocent blood pours out with no protector,      Now the mortal dread of kings and laws melts away,      Now one even enters the fire of Tartarus with eyes shut.) Piling one horrific image atop another, the lament conjures up the magnitude of Frankish cruelty and madness: plundering, pillaging and burning; the corpses of bickering nobles floating in a sea of blood; the murder of unprotected innocents; the reins of law and decency sundered. In the same way that the Franks’ religious dread had departed, their mortal fear of kings and laws — that deathly terror that once restrained their worst impulses — had melted away. Frankish sinners now entered Hell with closed eyes, because they did not see their crimes as the cosmically aware audience saw them — instead, they were spiritually blind, because they were spiritually dead. Nevertheless, the Franks themselves were to blame for their blindness: they entered Tartarus with eyes shut, intentionally and wilfully not seeing how their mortal sins led them to everlasting death. Florus recorded the moment of the Franks’ sinful degeneration, relating how spooky portents unveiled the coming Frankish cataclysm — fiery celestial armies, flaming comets, and frightful eclipses linked divine rage to the evil approaching the empire.31 Tellingly, these grim signs first lit up the night with their disturbing fire throughout the empire, and then interrupted Christian devotions, portending doom and revealing heavenly fury at the Franks’ loss of religious terror: Saepe malum hoc nobis caelestia signa canebant,      Cum totiens ignitae acies seu luce pavendae      Per medias noctis dirum fulsere tenebras,      Partibus et variis micuerunt igne sinistro. Cum mediante die populis ieiunia festa      Devotasque preces per templa agitantibus alma,

 30 Florus of Lyons, Querela, ll. 21–28, ed. by Dümmler, p. 560.  31 Dutton, ‘Of Carolingian Kings and their Stars’, p. 109.

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     Sol nitidum tristi texit ferrugine vultum      Ac stellas radiare polo miro omine fecit.32 (Many times celestial signs prophesied this evil to us,      As fearsome fiery battle forces often glared      Ominously with radiance through the midnight gloom,      And flashed with baleful flame over diverse regions. When folk at noon fasted on the holy feasts      And offered pious prayers in their blessed churches,      The sun veiled its splendid visage in dismal dusky red      And made heaven’s stars shine forth with strange foreboding.) The frequency of the celestial signs revealed how often the Franks failed to heed their warnings. The portents’ ominous radiance and baleful flames disclosed the supernatural fury of the deity’s punishing and destructive side that was about to be unleashed on the empire through the Franks’ own wickedness. The eclipse’s darkening of the sun foreshadowed the dark and deadly times to come, when Frankish sins would overshadow the remnants of Frankish piety and the cosmos would rage against them. Indeed, this darkening of noontime devotions was the pivotal moment. For then Florus’s text reminded the audience: Quod monstrum scimus bellum ferale secutum      Quo se christicolae ferro petiere nefando,      Et consanguineus rupit pia foedera mucro,      Atque ferae volucresque simul pia membra vorarunt.33 (We know that deadly war followed this ill omen      When Christworshipers assailed one another with heinous steel      And the blade of blood kin bursts pious bonds,      And beasts and birds together greedily gobble up pious limbs.) Here the violent, but abstract imagery of steel blades of blood kin cutting bonds of piety is rendered all too g­ raphic: broken pious bonds led to a landscape of severed pious limbs, where creatures of earth and sky feasted on Carolingian carrion. Here the text pinpointed Christians killing Christians as the most horrendous evil — a line crossed that marked a transgression unknown among the Franks in living memory. The power of Florus’s poetic language conjures up only glimpses of this terrible event — the heinous, kindred steel blade cutting; the greedy beasts of battle gobbling up bits of Christian flesh — as if describing or seeing the actual slaughter in poetic form would be unbearable. In good lament tradition, the abject corpse was enough to instil horror.

 32 Florus of Lyons, Querela, ll. 89–96, ed. by Dümmler, p. 562.  33 Florus of Lyons, Querela, ll. 97–100, ed. by Dümmler, p. 562.

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Christian violence to Christian flesh was matched with the ferocity of heavenly fire, as Florus recounted: Cum diri caelo totiens arsere cometae,      Humano cladem generi excidiumque minantes,      Inter quos unus flammanti crine coruscus      Mense fere toto truculento lumine fulsit.34 (When boding comets blazed so often in the skies      Threatening calamity and ruin to humanity,      One among them, flashing its flaming tail,      Glared nearly a full month with fell radiance.) Divine wrath turned the skies monstrous as the Franks themselves devolved into monsters slaughtering one another. The threatening comets foreboded worse destruction, if the Franks did not return to their senses before it was too late. But, as the lament continued, it already was too late: Quem regionum atrox vastatio, motio regum      Et rabies belli et regni scissura secuta      Continuis miserum quatiunt terroribus orbem.35 (Then followed the savage ravaging of territories, the deposing of kings,      The madness of war, the cutting up of the kingdom,      Shaking the wretched world with perpetual terrors.) Here violence against regions, rulers, and the realm terrorized an already desolate landscape. Yet, worse still, these fallen Franks now delighted in their evil rather than lamenting it. Florus related how no one worried about the eternal debt to be paid for such crimes or grieved for them.36 Here perversity took hold of the Franks, who having lost their religious dread dismembered their empire in 843. Now it was clear, Florus wrote, that the Franks were spiritually dead: Gaudetur fessi saeva inter vulnera regni,      Et pacem vocitant, nulla est ubi gratia pacis.37 (There is rejoicing amid the wearied realm’s savage wounds      And they call it peace, where the grace of peace is gone.) The Franks were wicked not only because of their crimes, but because they enjoyed them. They did not see spiritually what they had done, as the audience could. They did not worry about what cosmic punishment, what great and everlasting terror awaited them, let alone grieve for the destruction

 34  35  36  37

Florus of Lyons, Querela, ll. 101–04, ed. by Dümmler, p. 562. Florus of Lyons, Querela, ll. 105–07, ed. by Dümmler, p. 562. Florus of Lyons, Querela, ll. 109–10, ed. by Dümmler, p. 562. Florus of Lyons, Querela, ll. 111–12, ed. by Dümmler, p. 562.

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of their realm. The audience — seeing from its spiritually sensitive, cosmic perspective — lamented, while the Franks did not, because they were evil. Florus was not the only author of the 840s to link nature and the cosmos to the Frankish catastrophe. The poet Angelbert and the historian Nithard — both participants in the fighting — did so artfully. In his lament for the Battle of Fontenoy (841), Angelbert sang about the earth as a horrified witness: 3. Caedes nulla peior fuit campo nec in Marcio. Fracta est lex christianorum; sanguinis profluit Unda manans; inferorum gaudet gula Cerberi. […] 6. Fontaneto fontem dicunt, villam quoque rustice, Ubi strages et ruina Francorum de sanguine. Orrent campi, orrent silve, orrent ipsi paludes. […] 14. O luctum atque lamentum! Nudati sunt mortui; Illorum carnes vultur, corvus, lupus vorant acriter. Orrent, carent sepulturis, vanum iacet cadaver.38 (3. There was no worse slaughter on the field of Mars. The law of Christians is broken; a surge of blood Flows forth; Cerberus’s maw rejoices in hell. […] 6. Peasants call the spring ‘Fontenoy’, and the village too, Where befell the butchery and downpour of Frankish blood. The fields tremble, the woods tremble, the fens tremble. […] 14. O the weeping and wailing! The dead are stripped; Their flesh the buzzard, crow, and wolf devour fiercely. They grow stiff, they lack graves, their corpse lies helpless.) Here Christian and pagan imagery emphasized Frankish crimes: the demonic Mars oversaw the Franks breaking Christian laws in slaughter, pouring forth a tide of blood, while monstrous, infernal Cerberus rejoiced at his meal.39 Nature as horrified witness heightened the audience’s sense of dread. Angelbert amplified the dire image with birds and beasts devouring Frankish flesh from the recently slaughtered corpses, a grim pairing to the demonic feast of souls taking place in Hell. Conversely, the historian (and grandson of Charlemagne) Nithard described an angry nature’s response to Frankish violence, selfishness, and insanity.40 He related in the last lines of his work how  38 Angelbert, Rhythmi de pugna Fontanetica, ed. by Godman, pp. 262–64.  39 Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming, pp. 118–20; Godman, Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, pp. 48–50 and 262–64.  40 Nelson, ‘Public Histories and Private History’; Booker, Past Convictions, pp. 5–7 and 39–42; and de Jong, The Penitential State, pp. 96–102.

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a severely cold, long, and disease-ridden winter befell the empire, harming agriculture, animals, and bees — in other words, all that fed and clothed the Franks. Frankish folly caused ‘the elements once favourable to everything [to be] now turned against all everywhere’, he wrote, citing a passage from Ecclesiasticus: ‘And the world will fight against the mad’.41 Nithard recorded how an eclipse of the moon (20 March 843) revealed God’s condemnation of omnipresent Frankish pillaging and evil, which was followed by heavy snowfall, filling every heart with sorrow and ‘snatching away the hope of all good things’.42 In these ways, Angelbert and Nithard also elevated Frankish evil and bloodshed to the level of a cosmic disaster. Angelbert finished his lament by calling upon the living to pray for the dead, suggesting that their sins might be forgiven.43 Yet the vicious damage of Frankish crimes on earth could not be undone. Nithard’s finale — the theft of hope for all good things — becomes even more dystopian when we consider that he was most likely killed in a Frankish ambush in Aquitaine the following June.44 Florus saw a rather different outcome for this cataclysm. At the point in his poem where the Franks rejoiced in their crimes rather than lamented them, his text began to unveil the uncanniness of divine election. Florus equated the Frankish disaster with the Prophet Amos’s ‘alarming vision’.45 According to the poem, God abandoned Israel, as a master lets his rotten garden wall collapse rather than repair it, after which he strips his trees of fruit and leaves, while starving them of water and all sustenance.46 Though the wicked remained ignorant, Florus stressed how the pious discerned this dreadful state of affairs, seeing and lamenting the ‘thundering gospel voice menacing from heaven’s mouth’.47 The text then breaks into an apocalyptic vision:48      Filius en hominis veniens ex arce polorum      Invenietne, putas, fidei vestigia terris?

 41 Nithard, Histoire, ed. and trans. by Lauer, rev. by Glansdorff, pp. 154–56, with the quotation on p. 156: ‘Ipsa elementa tunc cuique rei congrua, nunc autem omnibus ubique contraria’; and Wisdom 5. 21: ‘Et pugnabit orbis terrarum contra insensatos’. See also Dutton, ‘Of Carolingian Kings and their Stars’, pp. 108–09.  42 Nithard, Histoire, ed. and trans. by Lauer, rev. by Glansdorff, pp. 156–58: ‘spem omnium bonorum eripiebat’.  43 Angelbert, Rhythmi de pugna Fontanetica, st. 15, ed. by Godman, p. 264.  44 Nelson, ‘Public Histories and Private History’, pp. 291–93; and The Annals of St-Bertin, trans. by Nelson, p. 58, n. 9.  45 Florus of Lyons, Querela, ll. 117–18, ed. by Dümmler, p. 563: ‘Iam vatis sancti metuendum cernimus Amos | Compleri in nobis deflendo ex ordine visum’. See also Amos 7. 7 and 8. 11–12.  46 Florus of Lyons, Querela, ll. 119–28, ed. by Dümmler, p. 563.  47 Florus of Lyons, Querela, ll. 129–30, ed. by Dümmler, p. 563: ‘Vocem evangelicam divino ex ore tonantem | Quis non iam videat doleatque instare piorum?’.  48 On the rich tradition of Carolingian apocalypticism, see Palmer, The Apocalypse in the Early Middle Ages, pp. 130–88; and Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming, pp. 113–56.

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Cordibus humanis latebrosa foramina vulpes      Inmundae et caeli nidos fecere volucres,      Fraus haec atque tumor diri late obtinet hostis.49      (Behold the Son of Man coming from the starry citadel,      Will he find, do you think, the vestiges of faith on the earth? In human hearts, foxes have dug their secret holes      And the sky’s filthy birds have built their nests,      This deceit and the dire enemy’s pride widely prevail.) Yet, Florus emphasized: Haec inter gemat et fidat grex ille pusillus,      Cui pater aeterni conservat gaudia regni,      Deducatque oculis lacrimas noctuque dieque      Ac precibus vitae pulsans ad limina perstet.50 (Among them that tiny flock may groan and trust,      For whom the Father preserves his eternal realm’s joys,      And let it bring forth tears from its eyes night and day,      And stand fast with prayers, pounding at life’s threshold.) Florus then added that the tiny flock’s ‘true faith’ feasted and fed each member as Christ’s ‘faithful friend’.51 Groaning, weeping, and praying — these were the manifestations of religious dread. This tiny flock’s pious feasting was an obvious contrast to the beasts and birds eating Carolingian carrion, to which the passage on filthy foxes and birds in Frankish hearts alluded. Instead of evilly feeding on earthly flesh, the tiny flock feasted mystically on faith alone. Likewise, Florus continued, Christ’s faithful friend was not deceived by diabolical tricks, because each had true, spiritual sight: Non lapidem sumat, si panem postulet umquam,      Nec pro pisce caput virosi senciet hydri,      Nec pro ovo fallax inludet scorpius olli,      Fronte velut mitis, sed caudae vulnere saevus.52 (He takes up no stone, if ever he asks for bread,      Nor deems the head of a deadly watersnake as a fish,      Nor will a cunning scorpion fool him as an egg,      Sporting a mild guise, but spiteful with its tail’s sting.) Instead, the deity ‘gives by his favouring will all good things to his children’, meaning those ‘who know to loath the goods and evils of the unsteady  49 Florus of Lyons, Querela, ll. 131–35, ed. by Dümmler, p. 563.  50 Florus of Lyons, Querela, ll. 137–40, ed. by Dümmler, p. 563.  51 Florus of Lyons, Querela, ll. 143–44, ed. by Dümmler, p. 563: ‘Vera fides […] | His fruitur dapibus, his fidum pascit amicum’.  52 Florus of Lyons, Querela, ll. 145–48, ed. by Dümmler, pp. 563–64.

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world | And follow God with zealous virtue’.53 Exactly what following God with zealous virtue meant became clear in the lament’s closing prayer. Up to this point in the poem’s apocalyptic section, the audience saw the tiny flock as distinguished from the rest of wicked humanity by its true vision, lamentation, and faithfulness to the deity. Now, however, the poet — and the audience — prayed in first person voice as the elect for understanding into the uncanny nature of election and the ability to lament: O domine omnipotens, da nobis mente videre      Tot mala, tot clades et tot lacrimanda pericla,      Da gemere et toto fac nos ea corde dolere,      Assiduisque tuum precibus deposcere numen.54 (O almighty Lord, grant us to see in our mind      So many evils, so much calamity, and so many woeful dangers,      Grant us to lament and make us grieve them wholeheartedly,      We entreat your divine will with constant devotions.) This prayer for vision, for discernment of catastrophe, for the power to lament and grieve, was the pious response to the disaster — the elect begged for these things in the face of their own destruction. Next, the audience of the elect prayed for their own suffering, because such pain and misfortune would purify them and mystically transport them heavenward; in addition, they prayed for the ruin of the proud, meaning their Frankish enemies.55 Then, the elect finished their prayer: Tu nos, sancte pater, hic verbere caede paterno,      Tu virga baculoque tuo nos corripe, firma;      Omne malum mundi fiat purgatio nostri,      Qui te semper amant, omni discrimine crescant, Quatinus erepti pelagi de fluctibus atris      Teque gubernante iam portum pacis adepti      Carpamus dulcem tristi de semine frugem      Perpetuaque tuos recinamus laude triumphos.56 (Strike us here, holy Father, with fatherly slaughter,      Seize us and toughen us with your rod and staff;      Let the world’s every evil be our purgation,      May those, who always love you, rise higher with each crisis,

 53 Florus of Lyons, Querela, ll. 152 and 155–56, ed. by Dümmler, p. 564: ‘bona cuncta suis prono dat numine natis, | […] Qui bona sive mala fluitantis temnere mundi | Norunt instantique deum virtute secuntur’.  54 Florus of Lyons, Querela, ll. 157–60, ed. by Dümmler, p. 564.  55 Florus of Lyons, Querela, ll. 161–64, ed. by Dümmler, p. 564.  56 Florus of Lyons, Querela, ll. 165–72, ed. by Dümmler, p. 564.

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So that snatched away from the sea’s dark waves      And having reached peace’s harbour now by your steering      We may pick sweet fruit from sorry seed      And sing once more your triumphs in perpetual praise!) Notice how the language of violence was now directed at the praying audience. These closing stanzas were the very description of election: the deity’s tiny flock begged for slaughter, evil, and pain — which signified Frankish crimes — because these divine scourges toughened and purified them, raising them out of the world’s sinful maelstrom and up into heavenly peace. Such pleasures of horror enabled the elect to pick sweet fruit from sorry seed — an uncanny image of election that captured their sense of pleasure in purifying their rotten humanity through chastisement and suffering. Thereafter, the elect praised divine triumphs in song forever. Indeed, as willing victims of Frankish crimes and, simultaneously, divine chastisement, the elects’ own suffering and purification would have been included among the deity’s victories of which they sung. Lament’s traditional, biblical dynamic was to move singers from mournful repentance to divine praise.57 Clearly, Florus’s poem worked within that mode, converting its pious and sensitive singers to their uncanny election. As already noted, Florus composed his poem while engaged in an intense study of Augustine’s works.58 That Florus understood the tiny flock as the elect becomes clear from his theo­logical writings. In a text written against Amalarius a few years before the lament, Florus identified the tiny flock as the few who enter the narrow gate and are saved (Matt. 7. 13–14), to whom Christ said in the Gospel: ‘Don’t fear tiny flock, because it pleased your father to give you the kingdom’ (Luke 12. 32).59 Florus then finished off this passage with a quotation from the Prophet Amos to which he alluded in the lament, suggesting that he later saw a connection between his poem and this earlier text.60 In the 850s, Florus connected the tiny flock to the elect even more distinctly in the predestination controversy. Claiming that the elect could never perish, he described them as Christ’s sheep who hear his voice and follow him ( John 10. 27–29), as God’s tiny ones who will not perish (Matt. 18. 14), and as the tiny flock to whom is given the kingdom of heaven (Luke 12. 32).61 Florus’s particular understanding of the tiny flock was informed by Archbishop Agobard, who had also used ‘pusillus grex’ in his treatise De spe et

 57 Mandolfo, ‘Language of Lament in the Psalms’; Brown, Seeing the Psalms, pp. 1–14; and Westermann, Praise and Lament in the Psalms, pp. 52–90.  58 See note 23 above.  59 Florus of Lyons, Invectio canonica, ed. by Zeckiel-Eckes, p. 9: ‘Nolite timere pusillus grex, quia complacuit patri uestro dare uobis regnum’.  60 Amos 8. 11.  61 Florus of Lyons, Libellus de tribus epistolis, i, 7, ed. by Zeckiel-Eckes, p. 332.

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timore to designate those whom Christ elected since they preferred heavenly riches to earthly ones in contrast to their wicked contemporaries.62 *    *    * This essay has read Florus’s lament as a literary experiment with theo­logical consequences. His poem transformed self-abjection — what I call pleasures of horror — into a vehicle for revealing his audience’s election through illumination and salvific prayer. In this way, his work shares certain qualities with hymns about divine election composed by Florus’s contemporary, the theo­logian of predestination and heretic Gottschalk of Orbais.63 Like Gottschalk’s hymns, Florus’s text certainly offered a different expression of spiritual affect than was common in early medi­eval Christianity, when calling for correction in the face of God’s apparent chastisement of sinners was typical. Examples of such appeals abound from earlier authors, such as Gildas the Wise of Britain, and from Florus’s own contemporaries, including the anonymous author of the Translatio sancti Germani Parisiensis, who related Saint Germain’s miracles during the Danish assault on Paris in 845 in order to return readers’ hearts to God.64 Authors such as these mourned the ills of their age in order to correct their audiences, but they did not describe how those same terrors of sin and chastisement strangely transformed them spiritually into God’s elect. Instead, they sought to reveal that the audience must repent its sinful nature to restore their right relationship with God in this world, to cure the maladies of their time, and hopefully to earn their heavenly reward in the hereafter. In contrast, Florus — who, as Klaus Zechiel-Eckes demonstrated, was a brilliant theo­logian, textual critic, and aggressive polemicist65 — was able here to reveal how his audience’s victimhood at the hands of their contemporaries was a potent, desirable cure for their own sins. Therefore, the metamorphosis Florus described was a radical response to the Frankish civil wars, a stunning break with the past. No longer spiritually Franks, these readers were instead their willing victims, who celebrated their own suffering as a form of spiritual purgation and a sign of divine grace. Indeed, I would suggest that Florus’s text encouraged greater certainty that his prayer would manifest his audience’s election than many contemporaries would have liked, including Haimo of Auxerre, who when commenting on the Prophet Amos wrote that those thinking themselves to be counted among the elect in this world will go to hell.66  62 Agobard of Lyons, De spe et timor, ed. by van Acker, p. 449.  63 For an analysis of some of Gottschalk’s hymns, see Gillis, Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire, pp. 86–89 and 172–75; and Gillis, ‘The Uncanny Witness’.  64 Gildas, De excidio Britonum, ed. by Winterbottom, pp. 87–142, and Higham, The English Conquest, for analysis, including esp. pp. 11–13 and 190–91; and Translatio sancti Germani Parisiensis, ed. by de Smedt, van Hooff, and de Backer, and Gillis, ‘Dreaming of Saint Germain’, for a discussion of this text.  65 Zechiel-Eckes, Florus von Lyon, pp. 249–52.  66 Haimo of Auxerre, In Amos prophetam, ed. by Migne, cols 119–20. On Haimo, see Matthew Gabriele’s essay in this collection, and Shimahara, Haymon d’Auxerre. See also Chazelle, The

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Of course, Florus’s text framed this outcome poetically and in prayer, but its finale expressed election as a palpable reality. The fact that the lament’s theo­ logical consequences have gone unnoticed by scholars suggests that the text’s message might have required knowing readers, those so to speak already in on its theo­logical ‘secret’ in the manner described by Frank Kermode in his study The Genesis of Secrecy.67 Or, at least, such readers must have shared Florus’s profound sense of loathing for humanity at that particular moment in history. To read the lament as a work in support of Emperor Lothar’s bid for supremacy in the negotiations leading up to the Treaty of Verdun, which dismembered the empire in 843, or as a nostalgic desire to reunite the Carolingian world into a single entity,68 seems to me to overlook the work’s theo­logical consequences. While Florus’s lament nostalgically recalled the empire’s former glory — something Anne Latowsky and others have rightly noticed and which it is beyond the scope of this essay to consider — such nostalgia mourned what was lost rather than prayed for its restoration.69 Indeed, I see this lament as something far more experimental and, frankly, alien to the Carolingian Empire — a vision spawned by the realm’s division rather than one seeking to prevent it. For as Courtney Booker tells us, ninth-century nostalgia was as much about the future as it was about the past.70 As part of a small body of ninth-century literature of grace and election — perhaps a ‘minor literature’ (to borrow a term from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari) — I’d suggest that Florus’s lament used Carolingian modes of religious expression to imagine the salvation not of all baptized Christians, but of only a select minority, the tiny flock, while condemning the rest as prideful and despicable degenerates.71 Such a revelation abounds in animosity towards fallen humankind and amounts to ‘an effective hostility’ against this present life, a sensibility akin to martyrdom and one not particularly suited to pro-imperial politicking.72 This mournful loathing of the Franks was key to the uncanny climax of Florus’s text, where the full horror of Frankish sin — lamented so intently in the poem — became fully desirable as divine chastisement, enabling those eager victims to pluck strange, sweet fruit from sorry seed.

Crucified God in the Carolingian Era, pp. 181–208, for others who were hostile to Florus’s theo­logy of grace.  67 Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy.  68 See note 21 above.  69 Latowsky, Emperor of the World, p. 36; Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming, pp. 121–22; and Godman, Poets and Emperors, p. 150.  70 Booker, Past Convictions, pp. 6–7.  71 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka. On Gottschalk of Orbais’s other contributions to such a literature, see Gillis, Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire, pp. 185–90; Gillis, ‘The Uncanny Witness’; Pezé, Le virus de l’erreur, pp. 327–30; and Pezé, ‘Doctrinal Debate and Social Control in the Carolingian Age’.  72 Houellebecq, H. P. Lovecraft, p. 119, describes the horror of Lovecraft, who as an atheist em­braced a non-religious form of his ancestors’ Puritan world view, in these terms — terms which I find, despite the aeons between Lovecraft and Florus, resonate strongly with Florus’s work.

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Biblio­graphy Primary Sources Agobard of Lyons, De spe et timor, in Agobardi Lugdunensis opera omnia, ed. by Lieven van Acker, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, 52 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981), pp. 429–54 Angelbert, Rhythmi de pugna Fontanetica, ed. by Peter Godman, Poetry of the Caro­ lingian Renaissance (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1985), pp. 262–64 The Annals of St-Bertin, trans. by Janet L. Nelson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991) Florus of Lyons, Carmina, ed. by Ernst Dümmler, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Poetae Latini medii aevi, 2 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1884), pp. 507–66 —— , Collectio ex dictis XII Patrum, ed. by Paul-Irénée Fransen and others, 3 vols, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, 193–193B (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002–2007) —— , Expositio in epistolas beati Pauli ex operibus sancti Augustini, vol. iii, ed. by Paul-Irénée Fransen and others, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, 220B (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011) —— , Invectio canonica in Amalarium officio­graphum, ed. by Klaus Zeckiel-Eckes, in Opera polemica, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, 260 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 7–32 —— , Libellus de tribus epistolis, ed. by Klaus Zeckiel-Eckes, in Opera polemica, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, 260 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 317–417 —— , Opera polemica, ed. by Klaus Zechiel-Eckes and Erwin Frauenknecht, Cor­ pus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, 260 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014) —— , Querela de divisione imperii, ed. by Ernst Dümmler, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Poetae Latini medii aevi, 2 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1884), pp. 559–64 Gildas, De excidio Britonum, ed. by Michael Winterbottom (London: Phillimore, 1978) Haimo of Auxerre, In Amos prophetam, ed. by Jacques-Paul Migne, Patro­logiae cursus completus: series latina, 117 (Paris: Garnier, 1881), cols 107–20 Nithard, Histoire des fils de Louis le Pieux, ed. and trans. by Philippe Lauer, rev. by Sophie Glansdorff (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2012) Translatio sancti Germani Parisiensis, ed. by Charles de Smedt, Guilleme van Hooff, and Joseph de Backer, Analecta Bollandiana, 2 (1883), 69–98 Secondary Works Bachrach, Bernard, Early Carolingian Warfare: Prelude to Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001) Bataille, Georges, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. by Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986)

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—— , Inner Experience, trans. by Stuart Kendall (Albany: SUNY, 2014) Booker, Courtney, Past Convictions: The Penance of Louis the Pious and the Decline of the Carolingians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) Brown, William, Seeing the Psalms: A Theo­logy of Metaphor (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002) Charlier, Célestin, ‘La compilation augustinienne de Flore sur l’Apôtre: Sources et authenticité’, Revue Bénédictine, 57 (1947), 132–86 —— , ‘Florus de Lyon’, in Dictionaire de spiritualité, vol. v (Paris: Beauchesne, 1964), cols 514–26 —— , ‘Les manuscrits personnels de Florus de Lyon et son activité littéraire’, Revue Bénédictine, 119 (2009), 252–69 Chazelle, Celia, The Crucified God in the Carolingian Era: Theo­logy and Art of Christ’s Passion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Coupland, Simon, ‘The Rod of God’s Wrath or the People of God’s Wrath? The Carolingian Theo­logy of the Viking Invasions’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 42 (1991), 535–54 Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. by Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) Dubois, Jacques, and Geneviève Renaud, Edition pratique des martyro­loges de Bede, de l’Anonyme Lyonnais et de Florus (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1976) Dümmler, Ernst, ‘Flori Lugdunensis Carmina’, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Poetae Latini medii aevi, 2 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1884), pp. 507–09 Dutton, Paul Edward, ‘Of Carolingian Kings and their Stars’, in Charlemagne’s Mustache and Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), pp. 93–128 —— , The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994) Firey, Abigail, A Contrite Heart: Prosecution and Redemption in the Carolingian Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2009) Garrison, Mary, ‘The Franks as the New Israel? Education for an Identity from Pippin to Charlemagne’, in The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages, ed. by Yitzhak Hen and Matthew Innes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 114–61 Gillis, Matthew Bryan, ‘Dreaming of Saint Germain: Violence, Visions and Holy Vengeance in the Translatio sancti Germani Parisiensis’, in In This Modern Age: Medi­eval Studies in Honour of Paul Edward Dutton, ed. by Courtney Booker and Anne Latowsky (Budapest: Trivent Publishing, forthcoming) —— , Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire: The Case of Gottschalk of Orbais (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) —— , Religious Horror and Holy War in Viking Age Francia (Budapest: Trivent Publishing, 2021) —— , ‘The Uncanny Witness: Gottschalk of Orbais and the Scriptural Poetics of Election’, in L’Ecriture d’Origène à Laurent Valla, ed. by Gilbert Dahan (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming)

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Godman, Peter, Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985) —— , Poets and Emperors: Frankish Politics and Carolingian Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) Halsall, Guy, Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West, 450–900 (New York: Routledge, 2003) Heinzle, Georg Friedrich, Flammen der Zwietracht: Deutungen des karolingischen Brüderkrieges im 9. Jahrhundert (Co­logne: Erzbischöfliche Diözesan- und Dombibliothek mit Bibliothek St. Albertus Magnus, 2020) Heydemann, Gerda, and Walter Pohl, ‘The Rhetoric of Election: 1 Peter 2:9 and the Franks’, in Religious Franks: Religion and Power in the Frankish Kingdoms. Studies in Honour of Mayke de Jong, ed. by Rob Meens, Dorine van Espelo, Bram van den Hoven van Genderen, Janneke Raaijmakers, Irene van Renswoude, and Carine van Rhijn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), pp. 13–31 Higham, Nicholas, The English Conquest: Gildas and Britain in the Fifth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994) Houellebecq, Michel, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, trans. by Donna Khazeni, intro. by Stephen King (San Francisco: Believer Books, 2005) Jauß, Hans Robert, ‘Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory’, trans. by Elizabeth Benzinger, New Literary History, 2 (1970), 7–37 Jong, Mayke de, Epitaph for an Era: Politics and the Rhetoric in the Carolingian World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) —— , The Penitential State: Authority and Atonement in the Age of Louis the Pious, 814–840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) Kalmanofsky, Amy, Terror All Around: The Rhetoric of Horror in the Book of Jeremiah (New York: T&T Clark, 2008) Kermode, Frank, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979) Kershaw, Paul, Peaceful Kings: Peace, Power, and the Early Medi­eval Political Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) Kripal, Jeffrey, ‘The Traumatic Secret: Bataille and the Comparative Erotics of Mystical Literature’, in Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion, ed. by Jeremy Biles and Kent Brintnall (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), pp. 153–68 Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. by Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) Latowsky, Anne, Emperor of the World: Charlemagne and the Construction of Imperial Authority, 800–1229 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013) Mandolfo, Carleen, ‘Language of Lament in the Psalms’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Psalms, ed. by William Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 114–30 Meister, Jan Christoph, ‘“It’s Not What You See – It’s How You See What You See”: The Fantastic as an Epistemo­logical Concept’, in Collision of Realities: Establishing Research on the Fantastic in Europe, ed. by Lars Schmeink and Astrid Böger (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), pp. 21–28

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Nelson, Janet L., ‘Public Histories and Private History in the Work of Nithard’, Speculum, 60 (1985), 251–93 —— , ‘The Search for Peace in a Time of War: The Carolingian Brüderkrieg, 840–843’, in Träger und Instrumentarien des Friedens im hohen und späten Mittelalter, ed. by Johannes Fried (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1996), pp. 87–114 Palmer, James, The Apocalypse in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) Perkins, Judith, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1995) Pezé, Warren, ‘Doctrinal Debate and Social Control in the Carolingian Age: The Predestination Controversy (840s–860s)’, Early Medi­eval Europe, 25 (2017), 85–101 —— , Le virus de l’erreur: La controverse carolingienne sur la double prédestination. Essai d’histoire sociale (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017) Phelan, Owen, The Formation of Christian Europe: The Carolingians, Baptism, and the Imperium Christianum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) Quentin, Henri, Les martyro­loges historiques du Moyen Âge, 2nd edn (Paris: Galbada, 1908) Reimitz, Helmut, History, Frankish Identity and the Framing of Western Ethnicity, 550–850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) Romig, Andrew, Be a Perfect Man: Christian Masculinity and the Carolingian Aristocracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) Rosenwein, Barbara, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006) —— , Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) Shimahara, Sumi, Haymon d’Auxerre, exégète carolingien (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013) Shklovsky, Victor, ‘Art as Technique’, in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. and trans. by Lee Lemon (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), pp. 3–24 Stella, Francesco, The Carolingian Revolution: Unconventional Approaches to Medi­ eval Latin Literature I (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020) Straub, Peter, ed., American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now, vol. ii (New York: The Library of America, 2009) Szövérffy, Josef, Weltliche Dichtungen des lateinischen Mittelalters, vol. i (Berlin: Schmidt, 1970) Tudor, Andrew, ‘Why Horror? The Peculiar Pleasures of a Popular Genre’, in Horror: The Film Reader, ed. by Mark Jancovich (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 47–56 Westermann, Claus, Praise and Lament in the Psalms, trans. by Keith Crim and Richard Soulen (Atlanta: John Knox, 1981; repr., 1965) Zechiel-Eckes, Klaus, Florus von Lyon als Kirchenpolitiker und Publizist (Stuttgart: Thorbecke, 1999)

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Index

Aachen: 53, 63 Aaron: 261 Actard of Nantes: 89 Adalhard of Corbie: 40, 58, 166, 176 Adalind: 51 Adaltrude, daughter of Charlemagne and Gersvinda: 51, 62 Adam: 228, 229, 230 Adelaide, daughter of Charlemagne and Hildegard: 51, 62 Adelheid, granddaughter of Charlemagne: 62 Adhemar: 32 Adoptionism: 93, 95, 231 Aeneas of Paris: 37 Agobard of Lyons: 94, 254, 257–58, 259, 260, 273, 274, 283–84 Ahab: 258 Albi: 84 Albuin: 38 Alcuin: 94, 157, 174, 198, 227, 228 Alexander the Great: 40 Allen Valerie: 224 Álvares de las Asturias, Nicholas: 81 Amalarius of Metz: 94, 273 Amos: 280, 283, 284 Anastasius Bibliothecarius: 89 Angelbert: 279–80 Angelomus of Luxeuil: 228 Angers: 167 Anne Boleyn: 59 Anshelmus: 131 Antony of Egypt: 245–46, 251, 263 Apostles: 84

Aquinas: 224 Aquitaine: 54, 124, 127, 132, 139, 140, 143, 257, 280 Arabs: 257 Ardo: 33 Aristotle: 224, 225 Ark of the Covenant: 170 Arnulf of Carinthia: 61–62 Astronomer: 16, 32, 64, 123, 125, 126, 127, 131, 132, 139–42, 257 Athanasius of Alexandria: 245 Attigny: 179 Atula, granddaughter of Charlemagne: 62 Augustine of Hippo: 42, 96, 150–51, 152, 177, 224, 246, 247–48, 261, 273, 283 Augustus: 16, 63, 131, 143 Autun: 83 Auxerre: 83 Auxilius of Naples: 89 Avars: 38 Baal: 258 Babylonian Captivity: 17, 152, 155 Ballerini, Pietro and Girolamo: 75 Barcelona: 16, 124, 126, 127, 133, 134, 136, 138, 139, 141, 143 Bartlett, Robert: 222 Basil: 228 Basques: 126, 128, 131, 135, 142 Bataille, Georges: 272 Bavaria: 83 Bede: 152 Benedict of Aniane: 31, 33

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i n dex

Benedict of Nursia: 234 Bennett, Jane: 172 Bernard of Italy: 166–67, 179 Bernard of Septimania: 257–59, 260 Bernard, son of Charlemagne and concubine: 51 Bernard, son of Louis III: 15, 60, 61 Bertha, daughter of Charlemagne and Hildegard: 51, 62, 66 Berthaid, granddaughter of Charlemagne: 62 Bertrada: 58 Bibliothèque nationale de France: 191 Bigo: 135–36 Bobbio: 83, 84, 85, 87 Boethius: 225 Booker, Courtney: 285 Boso of Provence: 60 Bourges: 84 Brett, Martin: 80 Brittany: 138 Bruno of Chartreuse: 159 Byzantine Empire: 93 Cadaver Synod: 89 Caesar: 169 Cambrai: 84, 191, 192, 206 Camino de Santiago: 209 Canada: 171 Carloman of West Francia: 39 Carloman, son of Charles Martel: 64 Carloman, son of Louis the German: 61 Carloman, son of Pippin the Short: 56, 126 Cassinogilum (Chasseneuil): 139 Catalonia: 141 Cessy-les-Bois: 157 Chandler, Cullen: 127

Charlemagne: 9, 15, 16, 32, 33–34, 38, 40, 41, 49, 51–58, 59, 61, 62–67, 75–76, 78, 84, 93, 94, 123–32, 133, 134–43, 153, 165, 166, 167, 172–75, 177, 222, 228, 232, 252 Charles Martel: 60, 62, 64 Charles of Aquitaine: 38–39 Charles the Bald: 16, 17, 27–29, 30, 31, 32, 38, 59, 94, 155, 156, 257 Charles the Younger, son of Charlemagne and Hildegard: 51, 56 Charles III (the Fat): 15, 40, 60–62 Chelles: 84 Christ: 19, 187, 188–89, 195, 198, 200, 204, 206, 270, 271, 272, 274, 275, 281, 283 Chuneberg (Hun Mountain): 38 Chur: 84 Church: 10, 16, 19, 55, 57, 72, 82, 92, 95, 173, 189, 195, 199, 205, 254, 255, 272, 273, 274, 275 Clement: 40 Clothar: 98 Cluny: 159 Collins, Roger: 130 Cologne: 83, 84 Conant, Jonathan: 127 Contreni, John: 10, 157 Corbie: 58, 83, 84, 94, 259, 260 Cordoba: 126, 127 Council of Chalcedon: 71, 85 Council of Frankfurt: 94, 231 Council of Mainz: 96 Council of Meaux-Paris: 89 Council of Nicaea: 84 Council of Nicaea II: 94 Council of Paris: 252–54, 255, 262 Council of Quierzy: 96 Council of Regensburg: 94 Council of Toledo: 93, 96

index

Cuise: 38 Cummings, Brian: 224, 225–26 Cybele: 221 Cynocephali: 225, 229 Cyprian: 84 Danes: 136, 284 Daniel: 41, 156, 200 D’Archy, Luc: 81 Darwin, Charles: 223 David: 36, 153 David, artist-calligrapher: 191 De Jong, Mayke: 125, 133, 152, 154, 232, 252 Deleuze, Gilles: 285 Demons (and Demonic): 19, 190, 195, 205, 210, 211, 213, 214, 245–63 Denmark: 171 Desiderata: 51, 52, 57–58, 61 Desiderius, Lombard King: 57–58, 61 Devil: 209, 210 Dhuoda: 30–31, 35–36, 40, 41–42, 49 Drogo of Metz, son of Charlemagne and Regina: 51, 166 Duby, Georges: 49 Dungal: 175 Dungal of Saint-Denis: 175 Dutton, Paul Edward 11, 123, 138, 153, 256, 271 Ebo of Rheims: 96, 97 Einhard: 16, 31, 33–34, 52, 53, 56, 58, 63–64, 65, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 130, 131–32, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143, 231, 255 Egginhardus: 131 Election: 272–73, 280–85 Elisha: 190, 260 Elizabeth: 204, 213 Emathian Plain: 169

Endor: 251, 261 Engelberga: 60 Ermold the Black: 16, 27–29, 32, 49, 123, 127, 131, 132–36, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142 Eusebius: 125 Eve: 198, 199, 228, 230 Ezekiel: 154, 156, 157, 204 Fastrada: 38, 51, 52 Filioque: 93, 94, 95 Firey, Abigail: 227, 232 Fleury: 84 Florus of Lyons: 19, 89, 271–79, 280–85 Fontenoy: 157, 279 Formosus: 89 Fournier, Paul: 77–78, 82 Frankfurter, David: 247, 262 Fredigisus: 174–75 Freising: 83, 84, 87 Fulda: 83, 94, 154, 157, 260 Galileo: 177 Garrison, Mary: 153 Geary, Patrick: 222 Gennadius: 84 Gerald of Aurillac: 31, 32–33, 34–35, 37, 42 Gerbert of Aurillac: 159 Gelasius: 84, 100 Germany: 131 Gersvinda: 51 Gildas the Wise: 284 Gillis, Matthew Bryan: 235 Girona: 133 Gisela, daughter of Charlemagne and Hildegard: 51, 62 Gisela, daughter of Pippin the Short: 62 Godman, Peter: 271

2 93

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i n dex

Gottschalk of Orbais: 94, 95–96, 154, 235, 284 Gratian: 16, 72, 74, 79 Greeks: 72, 95, 185, 209 Greeley, June Ann: 171 Gregory the Great: 53, 79, 86, 233–34 Guattari, Felix: 285 Gundrada, granddaughter of Charlemagne: 62 Gunther of Cologne: 59 Hadrian I: 32, 75 Hadrian III: 60 Hannibal: 140 Haimo of Auxerre: 17, 151–52, 154–60, 284 Harald Klak: 32, 136 Hartog, François: 150 Hatto of Fulda: 260, 262 Head, Thomas: 222 Hebrews: 185, 187, 195, 200, 209, 210, 211 Heinzle, Georg Friedrich: 273 Heiric of Auxerre: 159 Heito of Basle: 53–54 Henry VIII: 59 Hercules: 221 Hildegar: 37 Hildegard, daughter of Charlemagne and Hildegard: 51 Hildegard: 51, 52, 139 Hildemar of Corbie/Civate: 231 Hildoard of Cambrai: 191 Hiltrude, daughter of Charlemagne and Fastrada: 51, 62 Hiltrude, daughter of Charles Martel: 64–65 Himiltrude: 51, 52 Hincmar of Laon: 89, 96

Hincmar of Rheims: 39–40, 41, 59, 89, 94, 96, 97, 99 Holy Land: 169 Horace: 40 Hrabanus Maurus: 17, 94, 151–52, 154–58, 160, 177–78, 228, 230, 232, 233, 235, 260–62 Hruodhaid, daughter of Charlemagne and concubine: 51, 62 Hruodlandus: 126, 131 Hugh of Lotharingia: 59 Hugh of Tours: 257 Hugh, son of Charlemagne and Regina: 51 Hunald: 139 Iconoclasm: 94 Ingobert: 64 Innes, Matthew: 125 Irmengard: 60 Isidore of Seville: 85, 152, 247 Israel: 152, 153, 154, 160, 185, 200, 209, 233, 251, 261, 262, 271, 280 Italy: 53, 60, 82, 87 James, Edward: 10 Jeremiah: 154, 230, 231, 256, 260 Jeroboam: 153 Jerome: 152, 156, 221–22, 232–33, 234 Jerusalem: 151, 158, 211 Jesus: 150, 155, 200, 204, 205, 206, 207, 211 Jews: 101, 198 Jezebel: 154, 258 Job: 36, 195 John: 201, 204 John the Baptist: 204 Jonah: 215 Jonas of Orléans: 36, 42, 55, 253 Jordan: 170

index

Josiah: 155 Judah: 204 Judith: 27, 256–60 Justin Martyr: 246 Justinian: 85, 96–97 Katherine of Aragon: 59 Kermode, Frank: 285 King Lear: 66 Knibbs, Eric: 90 Koselleck, Reinhart: 149 Kristeva, Julia: 272 Lake Constance: 83 Lantbert: 64 Laon: 83 Latowsky, Anne: 285 Lazarus: 200 Le Bras, Gabriel: 77–78, 82 Le Mans: 167 Le Puy-en-Velay: 209 Leo: 85 Leonidas: 40 Leviathan: 195, 206 Liutgard: 51, 52, 56 Liutward of Vercelli: 61 Livy: 170 Lombards: 56, 58, 251 Lombardy: 83 Lorsch: 85, 86 Lothar, twin brother of Louis the Pious: 32, 51 Lothar I: 58, 152, 166, 252, 272, 286 Lothar II: 15, 57, 58–60, 64, 97 Louis of Provence: 15, 60 Louis the German: 59, 60, 61, 152, 156, 166 Louis the Pious: 16, 17, 32, 37–38, 51, 53, 54, 56, 58, 62, 63, 64, 66–67, 84, 92, 94, 123–43, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 165–67, 179, 252, 256–60, 273

Louis the Stammerer: 39 Louis II: 60 Louis III: 39 Lowe, E. A.: 83 Lucan: 170 Lucifer: 246 Luke: 201, 204 Lupus of Ferrières: 37 Lyons: 83, 84, 89, 94 Maaßen, Friedrich: 88 Madelgard: 51 Magonia: 254 Mainz: 154, 158 Mancio: 169 Marcellinus and Peter: 255 Mark: 201, 204 Markus, R. A.: 151 Mars: 279 Martha: 200 Martin of Tours: 245–46, 251, 263 Mary, sister of Lazarus: 200 Matfrid of Orléans: 55, 257 Matthew: 201, 204 Matter, E. Ann: 94 McKitterick, Rosamond: 83, 86, 124, 125, 129, 130 Menéndez Pidal, Ramón: 128, 129, 133 Mérida: 127 Mermaids: 18, 185–90, 194, 195–99, 207–09, 214–15 Merovingians: 49, 52, 56, 91, 191, 250–51, 254 Michael the Archangel: 246 Moduin of Autun: 17, 165, 167, 169, 171, 178, 179 Moors: 134, 135 Mordek, Hubert: 81 Morrison, Karl: 100 Murman: 133, 138 Muslims: 124, 125, 127, 133, 140

295

2 96

i n dex

Navarrese: 128 Nebuchadnezzar: 154, 155–56, 211, 260 Nelson, Janet: 62, 126, 127 Nero: 157 Neustria: 191, 205 Newfield, Timothy: 173 New Materialism: 170–72 Nicholas I: 15, 59, 79, 100 Nithard: 257, 279–80 Noah: 206 Notker the Stammerer: 40–41, 52, 61 Odilo of Bavaria: 64 Odo of Cluny: 32–33, 34–35, 37, 42, 159 Odysseus: 185 Offergeld, Thilo: 30 Origen: 152 Ottewill-Soulsby, Samuel: 125 Paderborn: 126 Pamplona: 126, 128, 133, 135, 142 Paris: 191, 284 Paris, Gaston: 130 Paschasius of Dumium: 248–49 Paschasius Radbertus: 33, 41, 94, 257, 259–60 Pascoe, C. J.: 31 Paul of Tarsus: 35, 96 Paulinus of Aquileia: 231 Pavia: 84 Peter: 200 Peters, Edward: 222 Pharaoh: 261 Philistines: 251 Phillips, Jason: 149, 151 Pippin (originally Carloman), son of Charlemagne and Hildegard: 51, 56, 62 Pippin the Hunchback: 51, 52

Pippin the Short: 33, 58, 62, 64 Pippin I, son of Louis the Pious: 132, 133, 166 Pompey: 140, 169 Predestination: 19, 89, 93, 94, 96, 272, 283–84 Pseudo-Isidore: 77, 78, 90, 99 Ptolemy: 177 Pyrenees: 16, 124, 130, 131, 132, 139, 140 Quesnel, Pasquier: 81 Rachel: 213 Ramírez-Weaver, Eric: 177 Ratramnus of Corbie: 95, 225, 226, 228, 229 Rebecca: 213 Red Sea: 209 Regensburg: 37, 83 Regina: 51 Regino of Prüm: 38 Rehoboam: 153 Reichenau: 53, 71, 83, 84, 85 Reimitz, Helmut: 130 Remigius of Auxerre: 159 Reynolds, Philip: 57 Rheims: 94, 136 Rhine: 84 Ricbod, son of Charlemagne and concubine: 51 Richardis: 15, 60–61 Robert the Monk: 151 Roland: 143 Romans: 10, 53–54, 61, 76, 96, 97–99, 100, 131–32, 136, 137, 138, 143, 165, 170, 185, 191, 195, 209 Rome: 133 Romig, Andy: 141, 271 Roncesvalles: 16, 124, 126, 129, 133, 138, 143 Rotcharius: 53

index

Rotrude, daughter of Charlemagne and Hildegard: 51, 62, 65 Ruothild, daughter of Charlemagne and Madelgard: 51, 62 Russia: 171 Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port: 126 Salzburg: 83, 84 Samuel: 41, 251–52 Saracens: 128, 133, 134, 138, 140 Sarah: 213 Sarthe: 169 Satan: 205, 210, 215, 246, 255 Saul: 251 Saxons: 56, 126, 131 Seligenstadt: 255 Seneca the Younger: 222, 232 Septimania: 191 Sirens: 18, 185, 207–16 Slavs: 138 Smail, Daniel Lord: 224 Smaley, Beryl: 152 Smaragdus: 228 Solomon: 153, 154 Spain: 16, 72, 124, 125, 126–31, 133, 135–43 Stephen II/III: 58 Stephen III/IV: 57 Stone, Rachel: 134 Strasbourg: 84, 132, 255 St Gall: 83, 84, 85 St Germain (Paris): 48, 191, 284 St Germain of Auxerre: 157, 158 St Riquier: 84 Suetonius: 63, 125, 131–32 Sulpicius Severus: 125, 139, 245 Susanna: 200, 211 Symphorosus: 84 Synod of Troyes: 89 Synod of Whitby: 176 Synod of 809: 176, 178

Tartarus: 276 Tassilo of Bavaria: 65 Teutoburg: 132 Thegan: 123, 132, 137–38, 141, 143 Theoderada, granddaughter of Charlemagne: 62 Theoderic, son of Charlemagne and Adalind: 51 Theodore: 262 Theodore of Cambrai: 96–97 Theodosian Code: 96 Theodrada, daughter of Charle­ magne and Fastrada: 51, 62 Theodulf of Orléans: 17, 55, 165–71, 172, 178, 179 Theutberga: 15, 57, 58–59, 66, 97 Thyatira: 258 Toulouse: 169 Tours: 84, 169 Trier: 137 Trinity: 95, 207 Trudo: 37 Ullman, Walter: 100 Ummayads: 127 United States: 171 Urban II: 159 Uzès: 49 Venus: 221 Verona: 84 Virgil: 29 Virgin Mary: 18, 187–89, 191, 198–99, 207, 213, 214 Von Humboldt, Alexander: 226 Wala of Bobbio/Corbie: 33, 41, 64, 154, 166, 257, 260 Walahfrid Strabo: 33, 54, 55, 71–72, 137 Waldrada: 57, 58–59 Warnarius: 64

297

2 98

i n dex

Werner, Karl Ferdinand: 139 Wetti of Reichenau: 53–54, 55, 56 White, Hayden: 150 White, Stephen: 222 Wickham, Chris: 9, 10 Widukind: 126 Wiggo: 231, 255–56 William of Toulouse: 127, 134, 135, 191 William, son of Bernard and Dhuoda: 30–31, 35–36, 41–42 Willis, Paul: 29 Würzburg: 84 Zaragoza: 126, 127, 128 Zechariah: 204 Zechiel-Eckes, Klaus: 284