Notes on the Carolingian Origin Myth of Paul the Deacon

In her Carolingians and the Written Word, Rosamond McKitterick discusses a select but highly suggestive body of evidence for Carolingian rulers and aristocratic lay men and women who borrowed books from monastic libraries. 1 Later annotations in a mid-ninth century library catalogue from St Gall yield some very distinguished borrowers and/or recipients of biblical commentary. King Charles the Fat (d. 888) received one of the volumes of homilies on the Gospels by Gregory the Great; he had also requested an "excellent lectionary" (lectionarium optimum) which Abbot Hartmot (872-883) did indeed give him. Hartmot duly replaced this volume with another one. Charles' spouse, Queen Richgard, borrowed Gregory's twelve homilies on the first part ofEzechiel, as well as Jerome's commentary on Jonas and three minor prophets. 2 This clearly reveals a royal interest in biblical commentary, which was by no means a new phenomenon. At that time, there was a tradition of four generations of Carolingian rulers commissioning biblical commentaries or being the grateful recipients of such texts offered to them, with the understanding that a good ruler who was responsible for the salvation of his populus christianus would need a firm grasp of the significance of the lex divina which was to guide both king and people. As time went on, royal knowledge of the intricacies of Scripture became the hallmark of the true Christian ruler. Thus, Louis the Pious's biographer Thegan, writing in 836, portrayed Charlemagne preparing for death by correcting the Gospels. 3 This was a view inspired by hindsight, but it was based on a by then well.:.established reputation of Charles as a learned king, who had commissioned a comriJ.entary on Genesis from the otherwise unknown cleric Wigbod. 4 Louis the Pious and his sons, notably Lothar and Louis the l R. McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word, Cambridge 1989, 261-66. 2 P. Lehmann, Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge Deutschlands und der Schweiz I, (Konstanz u. Chur), Miinchen 1918, 72-79. About the 'Bildungsstand' in the East Frankish kingdom, with a much more positive verdict than before, cf. W. Hartmann, Ludwig der Deutsche, Darmstadt 2002, 212-41. 3 Thegan, Vita Hludowici c. 7, E. Tremp (ed.), Thegan, Die Taten Kaiser Ludwigs, MGH SRG in usum scholarum, Hannover 1995, 184-86: Postquam divisi fuerant [i.e. Charlemagne and Louis], domnus imperator nihil coepit agere, nisi in orationibus et elemosinis vacare, et libros corrigere; et quattuor evangelia Christi, quae praetitulantur nomine Mathei, Marci, Lucae et Iohannis, in ultimo ante obitus sui diem cum Grecis et Siris optime correxerat. 4 M. Gorman, 'The Encyclopedic Commentary on Genesis prepared for Charlemagne by Wigbod', Recherches Augustiniennes 17 ( 1982) 173-201; Id., 'Wigbod and Biblical Studies under Charlemagne', Revue Benedictine 107 (1997) 40-711.

The annals have been recently re-edited by Roland Zingg, Die St. Galler Annalistik (Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke, 2019). The section White used in his article is found on p. 197 of the Saint-Gallen manuscript (which is paginated).

The Medieval History Journal, 2018

The Trojan War, which is traditionally considered to have occurred in the twelfth century bce, has been one of the most exploited subjects of European culture and history. Not only did it provide some of the most important literary motifs for ancient Greek and Roman culture, but it also played a role in the genesis of the nations of early medieval Europe. The Trojans had an afterlife that connected them to multitudes of subsequent peoples. This study examines the story of the Trojan origins of the Franks from its inception during the Merovingian period to its development under the Carolingians. Considering both textual and manuscript evidence, it discusses the dissemination of the origin story as well as its association with Charlemagne.

Early Medieval Europe 30, 2022

Carcassonne G 6, preserving a judicial oath from 833, is an exceptional source for the history of the Spanish March and more generally the workings of power in the Carolingian world. The oath, concerning at first glance a very local dispute, links a body of royal charters with the precepts for the hispani issued by Charlemagne, Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald. This link reveals the close entanglement of localities and centre that structured the better part of western Europe into a political entity. A critical edition, which was not available for this text before, is provided as an appendix. On 11 September 833, 1 a tribunal was held in the church of Notre Dame des Champs in Narbonne. A man named Teudefred 2 laid claim to the hamlet Fontes, which was currently occupied by another man named Dexter. 3 1 For the date, see the edition in the Appendix below. 2 A note on names: to facilitate identification of persons, proper names are given following P. Depreux, Prosopographie de l'entourage de Louis le Pieux (781-840) (Sigmaringen, 1997), if included there. The names of the proprietors of Fontes, John and Teudefred, are given in the form established in anglophone academic literature, see most recently C.J. Chandler, Carolingian Catalonia: Politics, Culture, and Identity in an Imperial Province, 778-987 (Cambridge, 2019), p. 136. Early modern names are given following data.bnf.fr (https://data. bnf.fr/), if included there, e.g. Charles Le Goux de La Berchère (archbishop of Narbonne 1703-19). See further the onomastic works used to reference names in the edition below. 3 The oath for Teudefred and his case was first treated, shortly after the earliest print of the document in 1875, by E. Cauvet, 'Étude historique sur l'établissement des espagnols dans la Septimanie aux VIIIe et IXe siècles et sur la fondation de Fontjoncouse par l'espagnol Jean, au VIIIe siècle', Bulletin de la commission archéologique et littéraire de l'arrondissement de Narbonne 1 (1877), pp. 343-520, at pp. 503-5. This work was reprinted as a monograph: E. Cauvet, Étude historique sur l'établissement des espagnols dans la Septimanie aux VIIIe et IXe siècles et sur la fondation de Fontjoncouse par l'espagnol Jean, au VIIIe siècle (Montpellier, 1898).

Early Medieval Europe 29, 2020

An investigation into the changing interpretation of the prohibition to engage in secular affairs (2 Tim 2.4) in the Carolingian period. This is part of an EME Special Issue on "The Early Medieval Secular".

In the twenty-first century, the chance to discover, study and edit a quasi-unknown and disregarded Latin text from the Early Medieval Ages is absolutely rare. The Homiliary of Luculentius offers such a seldom opportunity and all indicators at present favour our hypothesis that this considerable source, known only from selected parts, is a rarity in the proper sense: it appears to be the earliest autochthonous Latin monument of the so-called Spanish March, the north-eastern part of the Iberian Peninsula dominated by the Carolingians and their culture. Our new research project aims at the full edition of this work, the identification of its sources and the religious, social and political contextualisation of the probably monastic author and his network. The exploration of this work will fundamentally change our vision of Carolingian culture in a still underrated periphery of Charlemagne’s Empire.

Church History: Studies in Christianity and …, 2010

2018

A number of conferences have provided milestones along the way to this happy end. Special thanks are due to my fellow presenters and the organisers at 'Texts and Identities' in Cambridge, Berlin and Vienna, 'Rethinking Carolingian Correctio' in Cambridge and Utrecht, 'Medieval Rites' at Yale, 'Senses of Liturgy' in Bristol, 'Rewiring Romans' at the Norwegian Academy in Rome, 'Ritual and Historiography in the Middle Ages' in Münster and my colleagues at the Cambridge Medieval History Seminar, among others. For three special months the staff and my fellow award-holders at the British School at Rome made me a home away from home in the most amazing city on Earth. My college for seven years, Queens', has supported me through them all. For materially enabling the work without which this thesis could not have been accomplished, I would also like to thank the Trust of Roger and Ingrid Pilkington, the Bibliographical Society, the H.M. Chadwick Fund, Queens' College, and Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst. One of the great privileges of studying this stock of texts has been the chance to visit the great libraries and collections of Europe. The staff have been universally welcoming to a scholar, and sincerely interested in discovering what I will do with their manuscripts. For all their help, my gratitude goes to to the staff at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the Bibliothèque national de

2015

This study involves a close examination of the story of the Trojan origin of the Franks in the following works: the Chronicle of Fredegar, the Liber historiae Francorum, the Aethici philosophi Scythae cosmographia attributed to Saint Jerome, the Historia vel gesta Francorum, the Historia de origine Francorum attributed to Dares of Phrygia, the Chronicon universale usque ad annum 741, Paul the Deacon’s Liber de episcopis Mettensibus, Frechulf of Lisieux’s Historiarum libri XII, and Aimoin of Fleury’s Historia Francorum libri IV. It traces the continuity and differences, the similarities and influences among these works that utilise the Trojan narrative in order to construct a genealogy for the Franks. The study indicates a high point in the engagement with the story between the 720s and the 770s, a period of great transformation for the Frankish world. Furthermore, not only does the analysis of the different versions of the story in these works reveal that they are heavily interconne...

This is a publication of papers given at an international congress held in Lyon in 2016, which explored the impact of the city as an important cultural center during antiquity and especially in the ninth century, under its highly learned archbishops Leidrat, Agobard, and Amulo. The volume's focus is mainly on Agobard's time. It is a collaborative work of mostly French researchers. This reviewer counted only three scholars of the Anglo-American world and, curiously, no German-speaking scholars, who once dominated research on Lyon's rich manuscript production (including scholars such as Sigmund Tafel, Elias A. Lowe, and Bernhard Bischoff) and key figures and works of the Carolingian period (e.g., Egon Boshof, Hubert Mordek, and Klaus Zechiel-Eckes). The volume offers twenty-one chapters, which deal mostly with individual manuscripts, works, and persons either around Agobard or commissioned or written by himself. Several deal with more general topics concerning the place of Lyon in the network of Carolingian culture and politics. The chapters mainly provide detailed research on thematically limited topics and thus round out the broad picture of Lyon we already have at our disposal. Three chapters focus on Lyon as a city and its individual monasteries. Jean-François Reynaud describes ninth-century Lyon from an archaeological point of view and especially underscores the massive work of architectural renovation and transformation under Archbishop Leidrat, Agobard's predecessor. Charlotte Gaillard studies the monastic, architectural, and liturgical development of the fifth-century foundation of Saint-Martin de l'Ile-Barbe after its double reformation by Leidrat of Lyon and Benedict of Aniane, while Olivia Puel outlines the still under-studied religious, architectural, and liturgical fate of the younger ninth-century abbey of Saint-Martin de Savigny, the result of the introduction of Carolingian monastic reform in and around Lyon. These contributions bring us to Lyon as a crossroad of knowledge interchange and as a space and place of learning and writing. David Ganz gives a dense overview of the contemporaneous and later Carolingian use of Lyon's rich pre-Carolingian manuscript collection, based on Lowe's and Bischoff's paleographical work. His essay focuses on the many annotations before Florus and thus reopens the questions of which items were Lyonnais products and which were imported. Claire Tignolet describes the community of the Hispani in Lyon as an outstanding network of learning in the Carolingian Empire. She makes clear their impact on ninth-century cultural production and politics, especially in the southwestern parts of the empire, although without mentioning the material reflex of this impact-the still existing manuscripts. This Frankish-Hispanic relationship is later explored by Fernand Peloux, who demonstrates that there are traces of a Visigothic hagiographic text collection and of a Hispanic annotated manuscript (Rome, Biblioteca Vallicelliana, MS E 26) in the martyrology redacted by an anonymous compilator in Lyon. As previously mentioned, the majority of the essays deal with Agobard as an author and a thinker in the Carolingian theological and political quarrels. Caroline Chevalier-Royet and Michel Jean-Louis Perrin focus on Agobard's biblical erudition from different standpoints.