Download PDF | Rob Meens - Religious Franks_ Religion and Power in the Frankish Kingdoms_ Studies in Honour of Mayke de Jong-Manchester University Press (2016).
590 Pages
Preface
Mayke de Jong is a historian of the early Middle Ages who not only left her mark in her field with fundamental studies on child oblation, Carolingian monasticism and the reign of Louis the Pious, but also inspired a whole gen¬ eration of younger scholars in the Netherlands and abroad. It would be odd, therefore, to let the occasion of her retirement from the chair of medieval his¬ tory at Utrecht University, which she occupied for almost thirty years, pass by without giving credit to her many merits for the field of early medieval history. This volume leaves no doubt that Mayke has been a great inspiration to all its contributors; to its readers, this will become immediately evident in the ensu¬ ing chapters.
It was also testified by the enthusiastic and prompt response from everyone we invited to contribute to the book. Yet, all of us know that Mayke has no real liking (to put it mildly) for the traditional Festschrift with which the academic community pays its tribute to outstanding scholars. One of her objections regards the miscellaneous nature ofsuch books. For this reason we have aimed at a thematically coherent book that would centre around the three themes that are central to her work: the Frankish world, politics and religion. All of the chapters below address these three themes and demonstrate how closely they were linked in the cultural world that was dominated by the ruling families of the Merovingians and Carolingians. Because Mayke has always been a real inspiration for younger scholars, we definitely wanted to include many of them, as well as as many of her closest friends and colleagues. Since the response to our invitation was truly over¬ whelming and the book we had in mind ran the risk of becoming unwieldy because of its size, we urged/asked some contributors to cooperate in writ¬ ing a chapter together, the more so since some of them intended to write on almost identical topics.
We think it appropriate to the spirit of cooperation that Mayke always fostered that we are able to include four co-authored chap¬ ters. Unfortunately, a few prospective authors had to withdraw from this pro¬ ject owing to the pressure of other academic obligations, yet the richness of this book amply illustrates the enthusiasm that Mayke has provoked in the authors who have contributed to it, as well as, undoubtedly, in many others who are not included here. A book like this cannot be written without the help and assistance of many.
First of all we would like to thank all the contributors for their smooth coop¬ eration. Furthermore, we want to thank Jelle Wassenaar for all the work he put into the process of correcting footnotes and composing an integrated bibliog¬ raphy. Financial assistance for the publication was provided by the Van Winter Fonds and the Department of History and Art History, to whom we would also like to express our warmest gratitude. But above all we thank Mayke her¬ self for the love she has instilled in all of us for that amazing subject that is early medieval history.
Notes on contributors
Philippe Depreux is Professor in Medieval History at Universitat Hamburg. His research focuses on the religion, culture and society of the early and high Middle Ages in the West. Recurrent themes in his work are the political life, standards in written official documents (capitularies, formulas, charters), social and cultural networks, and the history of the Eastern and Western Frankish Kingdoms and France. Among his books are Prosopographie de lentourage de Louis le Pieux (781-840) (Sigmaringen, 1997) and Charlemagne et la dynastie carolingienne (Paris, 2007). Albrecht Diem is Associate Professor in History at Syracuse University. He specialises in the field ofearly medieval monastic studies, in which he has pub¬ lished extensively. His major book is Das monastische Experiment. Die Rolle der Keuschheit hei der Entstehung des westlichen Klosterwesens (Munster, 2005).
Maximilian Diesenberger is Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Vienna. He publishes on the history ofBavaria in the eighth and ninth centur¬ ies as well as on sermons and sermon collections. He has edited, with Richard Corradini and Helmut Reimitz, The Construction of Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Texts, Resources and Artefacts (Leiden/New York/Cologne, 2003); and with Yitzhak Hen and Marianne Pollheimer, Compilers, Preachers and Their Audiences (Turnhout, 2013).
Stefan Esders has been a professor at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut of the Freie Universitat Berlin since 2006. One important theme in his work is the transition and continuity between the late antique and early medi¬ eval worlds. Other recurrent topics on which he has published extensively include the State, law and the military in Rome, Byzantium and the early medieval West; and antique and medieval realms and the formation of eth¬ nic identities. His publications include: Romische Rechtstradition und merowingisches Konigtum. Zum Rechtscharakter politischer Herrschaft in Burgund im 6. und 7. Jahrhundert (Gottingen, 1997), Der althochdeutsche Klerikereid. Bischojliche Didzesangewalt, kirchliches Benefizialwesen und volkssprachliche Rechtspraxis imfruhmittelalterlichen Baiern (Hanover, 2000), and recently Die Formierung der Zensualitat. Zur kirchlichen Transformation des spatromischen Patronatswesens imfruhen Mittelalter (Ostfildern, 2010).
Dorine van Espelo wrote her Ph.D. thesis with Professor Mayke de Jong at Utrecht University on the Carolingian collection of papal letters known as the Codex epistolaris carolinus and now works as Postdoctoral Researcher and Assistant Professor at Radbour University, Nijmegen. She is mostly interested in representations of the papacy in the sources and the relations between the early medieval papacy and the Carolingian court. She recently published the article A testimony ofCarolingian rule? The Codex epistolaris carolinus, its his¬ torical context, and the meaning ofimperium’, Early Medieval Europe 21 (2013).
Robert Flierman wrote his Ph.D. thesis ‘Pagan, pirate, subject, saint. Defining and redefining Saxons 150-900 AD’ with Professor Mayke de Jong at Utrecht University. He works on ethnicity, historiography and hagiography, with a particular emphasis on the continental Saxons and teaches at the Radboud University, Nijmegen and Utrecht University.
David Ganz is Visiting Professor of Palaeography at the University of Notre Dame and a Research Associate of Darwin College, Cambridge. His many interests include palaeography, books and the intellectual culture of the early Middle Ages. He has published numerous books, including the monograph Corbie in the Carolingian Renaissance (Sigmaringen, 1990). Currently he is working on Charlemagne’s biographer, Einhard. Erik Goosmann holds a postdoctoral position at Utrecht University as a member of the research project ‘Charlemagne’s Backyard? Rural Society in the Netherlands in the Carolingian Age’. He defended his Ph.D. thesis, ‘Memorable crises. Carolingian historiography and the making of Pippin’s reign, 750-900’, at the University ofAmsterdam in 2013. His research interests include Merovingian and Carolingian history; early medieval historiography; and early medieval political, social and economic history. Yitzhak Hen is Anna and Sam Lopin Professor of History, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His numerous publications include: Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul (Leiden, 1995), Tl'ie Sacramentary ofEchternach (London, 1997), The Royal Patronage ofLiturgy in Frankish Gaul to the Death ofCharles the Bald (877) (London, 2001), and Roman Barbarians: The Royal Court and Culture in the Early Medieval West (London/New York, 2007).
Gerda Heydemann is a postdoctoral researcher in the project ‘Christian discourse and political identities in early medieval Europe’ (the Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) Visions of Community) at the Institute for Medieval Research in Vienna, working on ethnic and political models in early medie¬ val exegesis. She wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on Cassiodorus’s commentary on the Psalms, which she is currently preparing for publication (Christentum und Ethnizitat im Fruhmittelalter. Die Exegese von Identitat und Alteritdt im Psalmenkommentar des Cassiodor (6. fh)). She has published articles on exegesis, relic translations, social metaphors and concepts of community, and has edited, together with Walter Pohl, Strategies ofIdentification. Ethnicity and Religion in Early Medieval Europe (Turnhout, 2013) and Post-Roman Transitions. Christian and Barbarian Identities in the Early Medieval West (Turnhout, 2013).
Bram van den Hoven van Genderen is Lecturer in Medieval History, Utrecht University. His publications mostly concern the history of Utrecht, as well as the religious and social history of the later Middle Ages. In 1997 he published his major study on the cathedral chapter ofOudmunster in Utrecht, which was reprinted in 2003: De heren van de kerk. De kanunniken van Oudmunster te Utrecht en hun kerkgebouw in de late Middeleeuwen (Zutphen). Bart Jaski is Keeper of Manuscripts and Curator of Rare Books at the University Library of the University of Utrecht. He holds a Ph.D. from Trinity College Dublin (1994). He has published on early medieval Ireland and on medieval manuscripts kept in Utrecht University Library. His major book is Early Irish Kingship and Succession (Dublin, 2000). Rutger Kramer defended his Ph.D. thesis ‘Great expectations. Imperial ideologies and ecclesiastical reforms from Charlemagne to Louis the Pious (813-822)’ at the Freie Universitat Berlin in 2014, and currently works at the Austrian Academy of Sciences as a postdoc and project coordinator. Regine Le Jan is Emerita Professor of Medieval History at the Sorbonne in Paris. She has published extensively in the field of medieval history, with a clear focus on the early Middle Ages and on topics such as family structures, elites, the role of women, political culture and royal power. Her numerous publications include Femmes, pouvoir et societe dans le haut Moyen Age (Paris, 2001) and La societe du haut Moyen Age: VIe-IXe siecle (Paris, 2003).
Rosamond McKitterick is Professor of Medieval History at Cambridge University. Her research interests include the political, cultural, intellectual, religious and social history ofEurope in the early Middle Ages, with particular interests in the Frankish Kingdoms in the eighth and ninth centuries, as well as palaeography and manuscript studies. Among her key publications are The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge, 1989), History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cambridge, 2004) and Charlemagne. The Formation of a European Identity (Cambridge, 2008). Sven Meeder is Lecturer in Medieval History at the Radboud University at Nijmegen. His research focuses on the intellectual history of the early Middle Ages, with a particular concentration on the dissemination ofideas and books. He has published on liturgical and legal texts as well as on St Boniface.
Rob Meens is Lecturer in Medieval History at Utrecht University. He has pub¬ lished widely on early medieval history. His most recent book is Penance in the Middle Ages, 600-1200 (Cambridge, 2014). Marco Mostert is Professor of Medieval Literacy at the University of Utrecht. He has published on a wide range ofsubjects, ranging from the earliest history ofthe Netherlands to book-theft in the early modern period, but his main sub¬ ject has been that ofliteracy, orality and the development ofliterary culture in medieval Europe. His recent publications include In de marge van de beschaving. Degeschiedenis van Nederland, 0-1100 (Amsterdam, 2009). Dame Jinty Nelson is Emerita Professor of Medieval History at Kings College London. In the past, she has been a vice-president of the British Academy (2000-01) and President of the Royal Historical Society (2000-04). Her research focuses on the early medieval Carolingian world and on Anglo-Saxon England. Recurrent themes in her work are kingship and (royal) ritual, gov¬ ernment and politics, religion, and women and gender. She has published extensively on these topics: among her works we find a biography of Charles the Bald (London, 1992), The Frankish World 750-950 (London, 1996) and many more. She is currently working on a monograph on Charlemagne.
Tom Noble is the Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Notre Dame University. He is a specialist in the history of the papacy in the early Middle Ages and the relations among the Carolingians, Rome and the Byzantine empire in the same period. His publications include The Republic of St. Peter. The Birth ofthe Papal State, 680-825 (Philadelphia, 1984) and Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). Steffen Patzold is Professor in Medieval History and Auxiliary Sciences at the Universitat of Tubingen since 2007. His research focuses on the history ofthe early and high Middle Ages, politics and Church history in the Carolingian period, and monasticism. His numerous publications include a monograph on eighth-to-tenth-century Frankish bishops: Episcopus. Wissen ilber Bischofe im Frankenreich des spaten 8. bisfriihen 10. Jahrhunderts (Ostfildern, 2008) and, most recently, a book on the life of Charlemagne’s biographer, Einhard: Ich und Karl der Grosse. Das Leben des Hoflings Einhard (Stuttgart, 2013).
Walter Pohl is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Vienna, and Director of the Institute for Medieval Research. In 2010 he received an ERC Advanced Grant for his project on ‘Social cohesion, identity and reli¬ gion in Europe (400-1200)’ and since 2011 he has been a project leader in the Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) Visions of Community. Comparative Approaches to Ethnicity, Region and Empire in Christianity, Islam and Buddhism (400-1600 ce). He has published widely on the topic of ethnic identity and ethnic and Christian discourse in the early Middle Ages. Among his main publications are Die Awaren. Ein Steppenvolk in Mitteleuropa, 567-822 n. Chr. (Munich, 1988), and Werkstdtte der Erinnerung. Montecassino und die langobardische Vergangenheit (Vienna, 2001). Recently he has published, with Clemens Gantner and Richard Payne, Visions ofCommunity in the Post-Roman World. The West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, 300-1100 (Farnham/ Burlington, 2012). Janneke Raaijmakers is Lecturer at the Department of History, Utrecht University. Her current research project (VIDi-grant awarded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research) examines debates about relic cults in the period 350-1150. She has published The Making of the Monastic Community ofFulda, c. 744-c. 900 (Cambridge, 2012), and articles concerning Carolingian monasticism and relic cults.
Irene van Renswoude is a postdoctoral researcher in the project ‘Marginal scholarship: the practice of learning in the early Middle Ages (800-1000)’ at the Huygens ING Research Institute in Den Haag, where she investigates practices of censorship. She wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on rhetorical con¬ structions of ‘free speech’ (‘Licence to speak: the rhetoric of free speech in ate Antiquity and the early Middle Ages’, forthcoming as a book from Cambridge), and has published on rhetoric, (self-)censorhip and literary constructions of identity. She has edited, together with Rosamond McKitterick and others, Ego Trouble. Authors and Their Identities in the Early Middle Ages (Vienna, 2010); and, together with Marco Mostert and others, Strategies of Writing. Studies on Text and Trust in the Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2008).
Carine van Rhijn is Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Utrecht. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Utrecht (2003) and has published on early medieval religious and cultural history. Her main publications are Shepherds ofthe Lord. Priests and Episcopal Statutes in the Carolingian Period (Turnhout, 2007), and Paenitentiale Pseudo-Theodori (Turnhout, 2009). Els Rose is Associate Professor of Medieval Latin at Utrecht University. In addition to numerous articles on medieval Latin, hagiography and liturgy, she has published Missale Gothicum e codice vaticano reginense latino 317 editum (Turnhout, 2005), and Ritual Memory. The Apocryphal Acts and Liturgical Commemoration in the Early Medieval West (c. 500-1215) (Leiden/Boston, MA, 2009).
Julia M. H. Smith holds the Edwards Chair in Medieval History at the University of Glasgow. She is currently leading two research projects about the central¬ ity of saints’ cults in medieval life: one focuses on Roman martyrs’ cults; the other deals with relics as ‘portable Christianity’. Her main publications include Europe after Rome. A New Cultural History 500-1000 (Oxford, 2005), ‘Portable Christianity: relics in the medieval West (c.700-c.l200)’; Proceedings of the British Academy 181 (2012); ‘Einhard: the sinner and the saint’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth series 13 (2003); and The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol. Ill: Early Medieval Christianities, c. 600-C.1100 (Cambridge, 2008), which she edited together with Thomas Noble.
Mariken Teeuwen is (Senior) Researcher at the Huygens Institute, Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences, and since 2011 has held the Endowed Chair for Transmission of Medieval Latin Texts at Utrecht University. She publishes mainly in the field of early medieval scholarly traditions with a particular focus on the reception of Martianus Capella. Her books include The Vocabulary of Intellectual Life in the Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2003); and Harmony and the Music of the Spheres. The Ars musical in Ninth-Century Commentaries on Martianus Capella (Leiden/Boston, MA/Cologne, 2002).
Giorgia Vocino is currently Newton International fellow, based at Cambridge University. She was Junior Research Fellow at the Institut fur Mittelalterforschung of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. She has published on hagiography and on the translation of relics as expressions of political power, and is currently preparing a monograph on hagiography writ¬ ten in the Carolingian kingdom of Italy (774-888) and the episcopal propa¬ ganda it channelled.
Ian Wood is Professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Leeds. He has published widely on the history of the Franks, historiography of the early Middle Ages, mission and Christianisation, barbarian migrations, and the fall of the Roman empire. His publications include The Merovingian Kingdoms (450-751) (London, 1994); The Missionary Life. Saints and the Evangelization of Europe, 400-1050 (London, 2001); with Danuta Shanzer, Avitus of Vienne: Letters and Selected Prose (Liverpool, 2002); and recently The Modern Origins ofthe Early Middle Ages (Oxford, 2013).
Introduction
Rosamond McKitterick Among early medievalists today it is a commonplace to state that in the early Middle Ages politics and religion were so closely intertwined that they can barely be separated, not even conceptually. This awareness, however, is quite a recent one. Until the 1970s the history ofreligion remained mainly the domain ofreligious specialists, while political historians in general kept their distance from treating religious issues. It was only from that decade onwards that his¬ torians of the early Middle Ages started to see religion as an integral part of mainstream historical research’.1 The process of deconfessionalisation and sec¬ ularisation in Europe and the United States in the latter part of the twentieth century had made it possible to study medieval Christianity more on its own terms, instead of looking at it as the origin of particular trends in the Catholic Church that were often regarded as backward and/or an aberration of true Christianity.
The cultural phenomenon known as the ‘Carolingian Renaissance’, or ‘Frankish reform movement’, for example, is now mainly understood as ‘the reformation and reconfiguration of all the peoples under Charlemagne’s rule to create a Christian realm in its institutional structures, moral behaviour and personal convictions’.2 In the past, however, it was often seen as a programme ‘to raise the intellectual standards of the realm’, as a recent textbook still for¬ mulated it.3 Raising intellectual standards should, however, rather be seen as a means to attain a truly Christian polity that would retain God’s favour and thus achieve success in war. One of the historians who has strongly advocated the integral importance of religion in early medieval society in general and particularly for the world ofthe Franks is of course Mayke de long. The title of her study ofthe reign ofLouis the Pious, The Penitential State, amply illustrates the intricate relationship between politics and religion.4
Throughout her professional career Mayke de Jong has staunchly main¬ tained that all historians, and especially early medievalists, must take religion seriously as integral to politics. Further, all historians should take early medi¬ eval Christianity seriously; it was no mere shadow of ‘real Christianity’; nor was it only a dim outline obscured by the notion, now thoroughly discredited, of ‘Germanic paganism’. Some of Mayke’s thinking about this was formed in her student days in Amsterdam in 1970s, when religion seems not to have had even a walk-on part in lectures on such topics as the Investiture controversy. Mayke explained this herself in the battle-cry introduction she wrote for the special issue of Early Medieval Europe in 1998, The Bible and Politics in the Early Middle Ages, based on sessions she organised for the Leeds International Medieval Congress in 1996.5 Indeed, this article served as both historiographi¬ cal dossier and manifesto for the way in which biblical models shaped new forms ofpolitical self-representation in the post-Roman West.
Mayke has been energetic in her championing of early medieval Christians who thought about their own positions in society vis-a-vis God, the past, and their present rul¬ ers. She has been unafraid in her confrontation of the intellectual, moral and emotional challenges faced by men and women in the early Middle ages, from the parents offering their children as oblates to monasteries, to the challenges faced by early medieval exegetes in relating the text of the Bible to contempo¬ rary politics and the texts relating to Wala of Corbie’s tussles with Louis the Pious. Mayke has brought her sharp intellect and erudition as well as a distinc¬ tive imaginative sympathy to the elucidation ofher subjects’ thinking and their predicaments. A survey of Mayke’s work over the decades of her career exposes strong and consistent themes as well as a steady intensification of her approach, the clar¬ ity of her thinking and her close engagement with the texts of her protagonists so that we can understand their society from their own perspectives. Mayke never merely presents material on a topic. All her work addresses major ques¬ tions, explores hypotheses, and offers finely honed arguments in a wonderfully direct and accessible manner.
In her first book published in English, based on her earlier Amsterdam dissertation, she studied the phenomenon ofthe oblatio puerorum in the early Middle Ages: a child offered to God by child oblation - a living sacrifice - to a monastery by his or her parents. Here Mayke argued that child oblation was indeed to be understood as a gift to God with all that that implies in relation to social strategies of gift giving and communication with the supernatural.6 She exposed how secular concerns of modern scholars had contrived to obscure the religious implications and importance of child oblation. She also demonstrated the intertwining ofthe religious, political and social strands of early medieval monasticism more generally, which led to a number of new perspectives on the role of monasteries within Carolingian society, not least as powerhouses of prayer’.7 It is one ofMayke’s special contri¬ butions to Carolingian studies that she has insisted upon the secular as well as the religious dynamics of eighth- and ninth-century monasticism.
These ideas expanded still further to embrace Maykes concept of ecclesia - that is, a polity in itself, encompassing the secular public sphere as well as the ecclesiastical institutions generally called ‘the Church’ - as well as her emphasis on religion as a formative element of identity.8 In Samuels Image also emphasised the paramount inspiration and source for creative adaptation provided by the Bible, especially the Old Testament, within early medieval law, liturgy and religious practice. In a happy turn of phrase characteristic of Maykes remarkable feel for language, she described this as an ‘elective affinity, based on a perceived similarity and continuity between the biblical past and the present’.9 The cultural transformation that such absorption of the Bible into early medieval thought entailed was further developed in relation to Carolingian politics in other articles, such as her clas¬ sic studies of Hrabanus Maurus and the Old Testament, and her explorations of the impact of biblical commentary, both on contemporary thinking and on the construction of historical narrative.10 Maykes interest in perceptions of incest, purity and penance, moreover, remains one crucial element of her elucidation of Carolingian society and politics.11 Two interwoven strands of her work have been how institutions functioned in relation to their underlying ideologies and how those ideologies themselves were formed. In other words, she has focused on the ‘intricate connection between the physical topographies of power and their mental counterparts’.12
Her particular conceptualisation of this connection bore rich fruit in the col¬ lection of essays she edited on the Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages. This volume was itself both an outcome of and a complement to the European Science Foundation Transformation of the Roman World research project (1992-97) in which Mayke had been a leading spirit. Mayke’s keen understanding ofthe conjunction between penance and polit¬ ical action needs to be seen against this wider conceptual framework. Specific aspects ofit were evident at an early stage, with the publication, among others, of her preliminary study of Louis the Pious’s penance in 1991, and culminating in The Penitential State.13 This path-breaking examination of the political and cultural context and implications of Louis’s public penance in 833 offered a finely nuanced reading oftexts by Carolingian authors reflecting on legitimate political authority and the definition of political crime as sin.14
It is one of the special qualities of this book that it combines literary, philological, historical and political analysis in a way few other medievalists can manage. Mayke’s analysis of the politics of Louis’s reign made it clear that the Epitaphium Arsenii, or Life of Wala, a major political protagonist in the circle of Louis the Pious, written by Paschasius Radbertus of Corbie, merited a detailed discus¬ sion of the political, religious and intellectual context of this extraordinarily sophisticated and subtle text in its own right. Nothing daunted, Mayke set out to provide just such a discussion in her new study, Epitaph for an Era}5 Mayke’s intellectual profile might be seen as that of an adventurous explorer, ever pushing at the boundaries both of political discourse in relation to politi¬ cal action in a fundamentally religious context, and of our understanding and interpretation of the history of early medieval Europe.
Her study of the Epitaphium, for example, has enabled her to explore the deployment oflament and invective, the role of asceticism and ofwriting about asceticism as an ideal, Paschasius Radbertus’s own personal engagement with his subject, his classical and biblical frame of reference, and the wider discourse about public duty in antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Mayke has always been notably receptive to the possibilities of methods and insights from other disciplines while maintaining her own disciplinary integrity.16 Authors ofthe many books and ideas with which she has engaged, even wrestled, ought to appreciate the serious critical attention and respect¬ ful evaluation she accords their work, whether of fledgling undergraduates or her doctoral students, her colleagues, or other established scholars. Among the many joys of my long and much treasured friendship with Mayke are the lively and candid discussions about our own research and reactions to books, articles and papers we have had over the years.
There have been many opportunities: during the year she spent as Visiting Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge; our year together at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study in 2005/06 when I was a member of the research group Mayke convened on Carolingian politics and identity; our meetings at the Leeds International Medieval Congress since that conference’s inauguration two decades ago; and a regular sequence of visits among Cambridge, Amsterdam and latterly Utrecht; let alone the number of times we have coincided at conferences or seminars in Berlin, Paris, Rome, Spoleto, Vienna, Princeton and elsewhere. In between times there has been the exchange of letters and, thanks to the technology ofthe mid-nineties onwards, emails. I hope Mayke will not mind if I give an extract from one ofthese from May 2014 as a characteristic example of her reflective way ofworking and her unerring eye for flaws in an argument, especially those that arise from assertions based on ignorance: It’s very hot here still. I’m reading Averil Cameron, Dialoguing in Late Antiquity - a highly instructive small book she made out of lectures given in Germany. I need this for my 2nd chapter - this is my excuse for sitting in the garden in the shade and reading ... While I do so, my ideas take a more precise shape.
There’s a whole bunch of people ... who think Xtianity killed the public arena, public debate, and ‘real’ dialogue (= open-ended). When I read [their work] in Princeton I thought, no no, my dears, this won’t wash. It now turns out I’m in distinguished company. Thus insights from cultural anthropology, confessional history, archaeology, literary criticism and political philosophy have been absorbed and turned to the service of helping to elucidate aspects of the early medieval texts Mayke has studied. Mayke remains a ‘Young Turk’, and a wonderfully articulate, clear headed and creative one. She always has new things to say and new perspec¬ tives to offer. Her systematic confrontation of evidence has also been a feature of her teaching, but she has also introduced generations of students to the fascinations of the study ofthe early Middle Ages. She communicates why the study ofthe past matters so well that she has galvanised the study ofthe Middle Ages in the decades during which she has held the Chair of Medieval History in Utrecht. It was a bold appointment at the time, in 1987, of a very young scholar; Utrecht University should congratulate itself on its courage and wis¬ dom, for Mayke has offered unfailing leadership for medieval studies generally in her time at Utrecht. She has a particular gift for inspiring young students as well as more senior scholars, in drawing out interesting themes in seminar discussions, and in encouraging the young to advance their ideas but insisting that they do it from a secure base ofknowledge and technical accomplishment.
The chapters in this book are consequently far more than a tribute to a beloved friend, respected and admired colleague, and superb scholar, though they are all of that of course. They also bear witness to the ways in which Mayke’s work has inspired further reflection, whether to complement her insights or build upon them. The editors have commissioned chapters with a strong theme - religion and power in the Frankish Kingdom - and have created a coherent book rather than a miscellany of papers. They have neatly organised the book to embrace the principal themes of both Mayke’s own interests and contributions to scholarship, and the work she has inspired among her students. The first set of chapters are concerned with religious discourse and political polemic in studies that take up the themes ofidentity, the creative deployment of the language of the Old Testament within Frankish society, law and the definition ofroyal authority. They address different instances ofthe uses of the resources of the past for contemporary debates. Thus Gerda Heydemann and Walter Pohl explore early medieval uses of the biblical metaphor of a chosen people in the early Middle Ages and show how the use of ethnic rhetoric in a Christian context shaped medieval perceptions of community. Rutger Kramer considers the implications ofthe invocation ofthe Emperor Constantine in the debates about Adoptionism at the end of the eighth cen¬ tury. The involvement of Frankish rulers in Carolingian religious controver¬ sies reflects the kings’ understanding of their role as protectors ofthe Church. This theme is also addressed in a companion piece by Janneke Raaijmakers and Irene van Renswoude. They focus on one particular aspect of the kings responsibility as guardian of orthodoxy: namely, his role as arbiter, taking an active role as hearer and judge in deliberations about theological issues. Raaijmakers and Van Renswoude shed light on the great variety of possible examples and traditions to which Carolingian kings and their advisers could turn for guidance and inspiration.
In an explicit continuation of a discussion begun by Mayke de Jong, moreover, Philippe Depreux investigates all the sources - annals, treatises, normative texts - that mention the assembly at Attigny and Louis the Pious’s first penance in 822, and consider the renovatio of the Frankish realm. Depreux incorporates a discussion of what he regards as an instance of a ‘working document’ - a further set of capitula to the discus¬ sion, namely, the Admonitio ad omnes regni ordines in which Louis exhorts the bishops, counts andfideles with whom he shared his power. This document is made to yield further light on the involvement of bishops in political matters during the ninth century. All the chapters in this book push into new territory, pulling texts into new contexts, analysing hitherto neglected texts, and unpicking and explaining the implications of interesting manuscripts.
They collectively address, to one degree or another, manifestations of royal power, reform, correctio, monasticism and centres of learning, the power of bishops, and the Franks’ relations with Rome. Thus Bart Jaski challenges the customary interpretation by art his¬ torians of some illustrations in the Utrecht Psalter as being related to politi¬ cal events and containing political messages. Jaski shifts the tocus to the text and places it in the context of the production of psalters and gospel books at Reims in particular. David Ganz turns his attention to the lections in the eighth-century Northumbrian Gospel Book, now Durham Cathedral Library, A.II. 16. These lections differ from other lections from Northumbria in that they share Gallican readings. This leads Ganz to suggest a hitherto unnoticed link, perhaps via Wilfrid of Hexham, between Northumbria and the Merovingian Church. Marco Mostert comments on the ludicrous scribal errors in manu¬ script copies ofthe Admonitio generalis of 789, such as the early-ninth-century Saint-Bertin manuscript, now Brussels, Bibliotheque royale lat. 8654-72.
If this chapter exposes the inadequacies of certain scribes, Mariken Teeuwen analyses the annotations in three different manuscripts related to Auxerre that demonstrate how students and scholars commented upon texts and at times engaged in a discussion about the proper transmission or interpretation of a text. She makes a strong case for the way such manuscripts reflect not only a world of scholarship in which an insistence on orthodoxy is paramount, but also a set of shared practices and language of signs within a widely dispersed scribal community - signs also specific enough to identify particular masters or centres. Another kind of community is identified by Regine Le Jan in her study of the nomina amicorum viventium, or ‘living friends’ of the monas¬ tery of Reichenau. These comprise members of the Carolingian royal family, bishop, abbots, priests and lay counts. Le Jan interprets the list as a representa¬ tion of an ordered Christian society that embodies not only the connections between the monastery and the secular world but also competition between aristocratic families and the underlying ideas of peace, love and unity in Carolingian ideology Excerpts from Justinian’s Novels relating to Church property pre¬ served in Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Phillipps 1735, a late-eighth- or early-ninth-century codex from Burgundy, afford Stefan Esders and Steffen Patzold the opportunity to demonstrate the kind of questions the Carolingian reproduction ofsuch texts on ecclesiastical property might raise, as well as the wider issue ofthe degree to which early Carolingian rulers and Louis the Pious in particular may have been influenced by Roman ideas from Constantinople.
The implications of particular compilations of texts in a particular historical context are also considered by Dorine van Espelo in her study of the copy made at Cologne under Archbishop Willibert (870-89) of the Codex epistolaris carolinus (now Vienna, Osterreichsiche Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 449), the unique copy of papal letters to the early Frankish rulers originally compiled at Charlemagne’s request in 791. Van Espelo reflects on the social and ideological function of the collection both in 791 and when the sole surviving copy was made in the later ninth century.
Another early-ninth-century Frankish manuscript in Brussels, Bibliotheque Royale, lat. 2839-43 is investigated by Yitzhak Hen. This contains a copy ofthe compendium comprising the apocryphal correspondence between Seneca and St Paul and the supposed exchange ofletters between Alexander the Great and Dindimus, king of the Brahmins. The compendium was apparently originally compiled by Alcuin for Charlemagne. Hen suggests that this compendium was carefully crafted in order to soothe the emperor’s anxiety and reassure him that his rule was rightful in God’s eyes. A mirror for ‘princes who had opted out’ is identified by Erik Goosmann and Rob Meens in their interpretation of Regino of Priim’s detailed account of Carloman (Pippin Ill’s elder brother) and his retirement to the monastery of Monte Cassino. A further instance of the particularity of Carolingian commemoration at Prtim is the curious story, reconstructed by Julia Smith, of Pippin III and the relics of the sandals of Christ.
She suggests that ancient fragments of elaborately worked leather preserved at Priim, first mentioned as relics in the ninth century, were Christ relics invented by Pippin III. She argues that ninth-century biblical exegesis retrospectively established a context for these relics. Els Rose takes Marco Mostert’s doubts about the accuracy ofthe copying of Latin in the ‘Carolingian Renaissance’ an important step further by analysing the language deployed in Frankish liturgical texts. She raises the question of the accessibility of the language and how much these texts might have been understood and appreciated by congregations in Frankish churches. That the ‘Carolingian Renaissance’ was not confined to intellectual audiences, but also reached the local levels of Frankish society, is borne out by a short priests’ examination analysed and edited by Carine van Rhijn. Closely related to issues of correctio in language and understanding are per¬ ceptions and representations of reform. Ian Wood assesses the development of the reform imperative in the early Carolingian Church in the light of his reappraisal ofthe Vita Columbani and Vita Iohannis ofJonas of Bobbio.
Wood proposes that the Carolingian reform agenda was not so much a response to the failings of the Merovingian Church as a need to respond to the massive transfer ofwealth to monasteries in the seventh and eighth centuries. Looking at correctio and reform from a different angle, but one that also depends on the effectiveness of language, Maximilian Diesenberger looks closely at the ‘rhetoric of improvement’ and moral discourse in the reign of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious in the light of an early instance of such moral criticism, namely, the Sermo de cupiditate of Ambrosius Autpertus. Conflict and disagreement about various aspects of Louis the Pious’s reform agenda, most particularly the role envisaged for bishops, abbots, the laity and rulers in such reforms, are exposed by Albrecht Diem’s study ofsuch major monastic hagiographic texts as the Vitae Galli and the Vita Benedicti Anianensis. Diem also stresses the ‘pasts’ evoked and invoked in these texts, whether institutional or ideological. He highlights the ways the construction of the past could become a tool for the expression of controversial ideas. In particular, he discusses the tension between the content ofthe Regula Benedicti and the reality of monastic reform, and the ‘textual techniques’ authors used to reconcile norms and practice. Attention to the invocation of particular forms of language and established discourses also enables Robert Flierman to offer a new interpretation of the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae, usually dated between 782 and 795.
Flierman suggests that the Saxons are actually not being addressed as pagans who need to be converted but Christian members ofthe Frankish realm, in which allegedly pagan practices were actually acts of infidelity. Two underlying themes of these specific studies of particular texts and manuscripts are, firstly, the ways in which the responsibilities of a Christian ruler within a Christian society are defined and, secondly, how the imperatives of Church governance are articulated. These themes are investigated more fully with particular reference to texts relating to or by bishops and popes. Papal letters to the Frankish kings in the second half of the ninth century are the subject of Tom Noble’s contribution. He addresses the large corpus of letters from Pope Nicholas I, and extracts what Nicholas’s letters can tell us about papal and Frankish thought and action in the middle of the ninth century. Noble teases out both papal and Frankish thinking on questions of authority and Church governance. Further elucidation ofChurch governance is provided by Jinty Nelson in her examination of the relationships between Charlemagne and his bishops, while Giorgia Vocino presents some ‘mirrors for bishops’. Vocino shows how a range of texts - vitae of exemplary bishops such as Martin, Hilary, Ambrose and Augustine as well as homilies, funeral orations and letters containing hagiographical and biblical exempla - helped to shape new hagiographical writing in Carolingian Italy in the late eighth and the ninth centuries, with striking portraits of the ideal bishop. One particu¬ lar Carolingian bishop is the subject of Bram van den Hoven van Genderen’s study of the reality and legend of Frederic, bishop of Utrecht (826 x 834) and the construction of a martyr saint in the tenth and eleventh centuries.
The chapters in this volume are designed to complement Mayke’s own work. The authors hope to contribute to an understanding of how texts shaped political identities, and to elucidate how early medieval ideologues had to rely on both the normative world of the Old Testament and a bristling arsenal of later commentary and creative composition. The chapters are offered with love, admiration and gratitude to Mayke de Jong on her sixty-fifth birthday and on the occasion of her retirement from the Chair of Medieval History in the University of Utrecht. I have emphasised Mayke’s scholarship throughout this introduction, but no tribute to Mayke should omit thanks to her too for her extraordinary com¬ mitment and hard work, her inspiring teaching, her extraordinary personal as well as intellectual generosity, her sense of fun, and her fabulous parties and picnics. We have written these chapters for her, but in the spirit we know she will endorse for a wider public as well, to demonstrate the remarkable creativ¬ ity evidenced in the early Middle Ages and, above all, the intertwining of reli¬ gious and political issues in these truly formative centuries of early medieval Europe.
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