Download PDF | Rosamond McKitterick - History and Memory in the Carolingian World, Cambridge university press (2004).
355 Pages
Preface
This book’s themes are the writing and reading of history in the early middle ages. The primary focus is on the many remarkable manifestations of historical writing in relation to historical memory in the Frankish kingdoms of the eighth and ninth centuries. I consider the audiences for history in the Frankish kingdoms and the recording of memory in various new genres, including narrative histories, cartularies and Libri memoriales, and thus particular perceptions of the Frankish and Christian past. I offer analyses of manuscript material and of key historical texts from the Carolingian period, a remarkably creative period in the history of European culture. Presentations of the past developed in the eighth and ninth centuries were crucial in the formation of an historical understanding of the Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian past, as well as for the history of early medieval Europe in subsequent centuries. They also played an extraordinarily influential role in the formation of political ideologies and senses of identity within Europe.
This book draws in part on material already published in articles or chapters in books over the past decade, but here presented in a completely revised and augmented form. I am grateful to the original publishers as listed below for their kind permission to make use of my work in this way. In Cambridge I am fortunate in being able to draw on the wonderful resources of the Cambridge University Library, and I should like to thank all the staff in Manuscripts and Rare Books, the Periodicals Department, the West Room, the Reading Room, the Anderson Room, the Map Room, and the departments of Accessions and Cataloguing for their unfailing helpfulness over the years.
I am also greatly obliged to all the assistance given me as a reader by the staffs of the manuscripts departments of Bamberg Staatsbibliothek; Berlin, Deutsche Staatsbibliothek; Brussels, Biblioth`eque Royale; Copenhagen, Kongelige Bibliotek; D¨usseldorf, Universit¨atsbibliothek; The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek; Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek; London, British Library; Oxford, Bodleian Library; Paris, Biblioth`eque nationale de France; Prague, Knihovna metropolitn´ı Kapituli; Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana; St Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek; Valenciennes, Biblioth`eque Municipale; Vienna, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek; Wolfenb¨ ¨ uttel, Herzog August Bibliothek; and to many others for kindly meeting my requests for microfilms and photographs. Much of the material in this book, moreover, was first presented at conferences, as working papers at ‘workshops’, or as lectures in Aix, Auxerre, Bergen, Cambridge, Chapel Hill, Cividale, Copenhagen, Laurence (Kansas), Leeds, Lille, London, Oslo, Oxford, Paris, Perth (Western Australia), Rome, Sewanee, Utrecht, Vienna, Washington, DC, York and Zwettl.
I have consequently benefited greatly from the comments, suggestions and reactions from the many friends, colleagues and students who heard them, especially Sverre Bagge, Lars Boje Mortensen, Claude Carozzi, Christine Carpenter, Mayke de Jong, Flavia de Rubeis, David Ganz, Carl Hammer, Wolfgang Haubrichs, Martin Heinzelmann, Yitzhak Hen, Michael Hoeflich, Matthew Innes, Dominique Iogna-Prat, William Klingshirn, Regine Le Jan, Niels Lund, John Morrill, Ruth Morse, Marco Mostert, Jinty Nelson, Thomas Noble, Michel Parisse, Richard Pfaff, Walter Pohl, Susan Rankin, Alastair Reid, Susan Ridyard, Anton Scharer, Jonathan Shepard, Terje Spurkland, Jonathan Steinberg, Huguette Taviani-Carozzi and Chris Wickham. Many of these friends were also kind enough to send me photocopies of rare editions of texts and offprints of their own work, which have been of immeasurable help. Most of the ideas explored in this book, moreover, were initially formulated in the context of lectures and classes for undergraduates and research students in Cambridge, who provide an unfailingly stimulating and demanding audience.
Despite all the efforts of government institutions to make working in a university in Britain an exhausting and demoralizing juggling act, it is the students who continue to make university teaching and research so enjoyable and worthwhile. I was especially fortunate to be elected to a Hugh Baldson Fellowship at the British School at Rome in 2002 and should like to thank all at the School who helped to make my stay in Rome so productive and enjoyable. For assistance with visits to France (in connection with my collaborative research project with Dominique Iogna-Prat) I am indebted to the British Academy and the CNRS. I am grateful, as ever, for the support offered by the Principal and Fellows of Newnham College. I am particularly indebted to my audiences in Oxford, Paris and York in spring 2003 who commented on the material offered in the introduction. My greatest debt, however, is to my current and former graduate students in early medieval history in Cambridge, and to the gatherings of graduate students in Utrecht, Vienna and Cambridge since 1997 for the ‘Texts and Identities’ workshops, for the constant stimulus of their criticism and questions on all the topics discussed in this book.
I should especially like to thank Helmut Reimitz, Max Diesenberger and Richard Corradini in Vienna for the work we have done together and the generous help they have given me. As usual, I am indebted to Cambridge University Press and the unfailingly professional assistance and support they provide for their authors, but I wish here, in the year of his retirement, to acknowledge my long, happy and productive association with the History Editor William Davies. I am very grateful to Liz Hosier of the Faculty of History in the University of Cambridge, who gave me invaluable help with typing. My daughter Lucy has contributed in many ways to this book, both in practical assistance and with information and suggestions. But without my husband David the work for this book could not have been undertaken or completed; my lasting and most fervent thanks, as always, are to him. Cambridge, September 2003
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