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The article reviews the book "Morality and Masculinity in the Carolingian Empire" by Rachel Stone.

The article discusses the Carolingian studies of the Roman imperial geographical and ethnographical tradition. The studies of Roman tradition responded to the needs of the time on several level. To Carolingian scholars, the studies fulfilled cultural and educational goals. In addition, these studies provide information for Carolingian imperial ideology.

This article focuses on the development of rhetoric in the Carolingian Empire. Many rhetorical scholars have dismissed the contributions of English theologian Alcuin and Charles the Great to the renascence of rhetoric and the other liberal arts. The Carolingian movement must not be sidestepped in the comprehensive treatment of the history of rhetoric. By isolating and examining the Schola Palatina, Conventus Litterati and Artes Liberalis, this article traces the impact of the liberal arts as the dominant force during the classical rebirth of the late eighth and early ninth centuries. The emphasis placed upon rhetoric, the central tool providing the foundation for many of the arts, is also examined.

The end of the Carolingian dynasty is often portrayed as the result of the weak reign of Emperor Charles III. His former wife Richgard, with whom he had not produced an heir, became a nun after their divorce. These events did not pass without much controversy: legends tell that the Carolingian empress was forced to prove her virginity by trial by fire after being accused of adultery. Shedding light on early and high medieval sources dealing with Richgard's alleged trial by fire, such as the twelfth-century Kaiserchronik, this paper shows how in the representation of the divorce Richgard was bestowed with agency. Empire politics, pressure to produce offspring, and the image of a pious female ruler lead us to review the end of the Carolingian dynasty from the perspective of its last empress, who up to the nineteenth century was much venerated in Strasbourg and the area around the cathedral city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unfree people in the Roman world could not legally marry, while they could in the Middle Ages. This paper explores the marriage of the unfree in the Carolingian empire (750–900 CE), a society with an intense moral concern about marriage. Carolingian churchmen wrote extensively about marriage, using a strongly gendered discourse focusing on how men should approach marriage and behave as husbands. However, these moral and legal texts rarely discussed unfree marriage, even though the practice was common. It is argued that this silence reflects the persistence of late antique class‐based gender models, in which masculinity was reserved for married property holders. Although legal prohibitions on unfree marriages had ended, Carolingian moralists continued to be influenced by patristic assumptions that these were not valid relationships. These assumptions, combined with Frankish social practices that largely excluded unfree men from other key male roles, such as arms‐bearing, meant that unfree husbands were not conceptualised as sufficiently 'manly' to have their marriages discussed. It is only from the tenth century onwards, when images of masculinity began to fragment more along lines of social status, that authors began explicitly to state that the Christian ideas of marriage applied to all, free and unfree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collapse of the Carolingian Empire in 888 dramatically changed the political and ideological landscape of Western Europe. For the first time since 751, in the kingdoms that formerly formed the Frankish Empire power was taken by non-Carolingian kings, who effectively broke the monopoly on kingship held by the descendants of Pepin the Short. However, the end of the Empire did not mean the end of the royal family itself: after 888, there were still kings who perceived themselves as members of Carolingian stirps regia. This article deals with three of the post-888 rulers, Berengar of Italy, Louis of Provence and Charles the Simple, who aspired to present themselves as the true heirs to the Carolingian tradition. Nonetheless, their not-so-self-evident adherence to the former royal family clearly demonstrates that the crisis of 888 did not only leave its mark on the political shape of the post-Carolingian Europe, but more importantly it touched the very idea of Carolingian familial identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally, scholars have depicted the early Ottonian kingdom, ruled by Henry I (919–936) as being deficient in royal administrative structures, particularly those that depended on the use of documents. Instead, Henry is supposed to have ruled his kingdom through a wide range of rituals associated with sacral kingship. However, it long has been recognized that both ecclesiastical and royal estates in the eastern portions of the Carolingian empire, which developed into the early German kingdom, were organized in a manner consistent with the dictates of the famous capitulary de villis. Recent scholarship has made it clear that this capitulary required the production of large numbers of documents, which were crucial both for the administration of individual estates and for the use of these estates by the king. This essay draws out the numerous ways in which Henry I and his officials used the ‘written word’ to administer the king's estates, and shows an important element of royal administration that demonstrates enormous continuities with the adminstrative structures that were in place in the Carolingian Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented which explores the description of pagan customs and witchcraft in the canon "Episcopi," a chapter in the 906 canonical collection of Regino, a former abbot of the Carolingian Prüm monastery. Topics discussed include the function of this canon with regard to the social context of the Carolingian Empire, the way the chapter acknowledged subjects such as women and demons, and the possibility that Regino derived the canon from a lost Carolingian synod.

The House of Europe? Aachen's Carolingian heritage and the German collective memory Due to its history as the centre of the Carolingian Empire and the coronation city of the Holy Roman Empire, Aachen's heritage was appropriated by nineteenth and twentieth century German nationalists. It was used by the Wilhelminian and the National-Socialist regime as a symbol of German pride. After the Second World War, this image became untenable. In this period Aachen's Carolingian heritage was stripped of its nationalist connotations and became a symbol of European integration and a UNESCO world heritage site. The transition of Aachen Cathedral from a symbol of the German nation to a symbol of international peace and solidarity exemplifies a broader trend of internationalization of Germany's heritage that must be seen against the backdrop of the German government's ambition to play an active role in the process of European integration and a general shift in Germany's collective memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is a study of the transmission and later use of Carolingian capitularies. Issued in the ninth century, in a number of cases these documents are known to us only through copies made in the tenth century, in the Ottonian empire. The goal of the study is to prompt a rethinking of the contrast often drawn between the text‐based legal culture of the Carolingian empire and the supposedly oral and ritual culture of Ottonian rule. A survey of seventeen capitulary manuscripts is offered, followed by two case studies. The first concerns a tenth‐century Metz manuscript; the second centres around a Mainz book. These appeal to the Carolingian past in order to shape legal claims in the present: as assemblages of legal texts, they bear important witness to the context of their production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The father–son relationship between Charles the Bald and his eldest son Louis the Stammerer is generally understood as one of hostility and distrust. This article takes several episodes from the final decades of Charles the Bald's reign to question this, re-examining how royal Carolingian fathers and royal Carolingian sons could take steps to overcome previous conflicts and arguing that political ties within the royal family were more robust, and consequently of different significance for our understanding of Carolingian politics, than is usually understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the Old English Orosius, a work traditionally viewed as a product of the educational reforms of King Alfred of Wessex (r. 871-899), can be constructively read in relation to developments in Anglo-Saxon political thought in the early tenth as well as in the late ninth centuries. The earliest extant manuscript of the Orosius was probably copied at Winchester in the early tenth century by the same scribe responsible for the entries for the late ninth and early tenth century in MS A of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This section of the Chronicle charts both the break-up of the Carolingian Empire and the conquests of Alfred and his successors, Edward the Elder and Æthelstan, over various kings and peoples of Britain. Treating the reports of Ohthere and Wulfstan contained in the geographical preface to the Orosius as an integral part of the text as it was read in the early tenth century, rather than as an extraneous interpolation, I suggest that this passage invites readers to consider the rapidly expanding West Saxon kingdom in relation to the great empires which preceded it. I then outline how the translator refashioned Orosius's 'universal history' into a work of imperial history which is more directly concerned with Rome's long and difficult rise than with its fall to the Goths in 410. I conclude that the Orosius might have encouraged early tenth-century Anglo-Saxon readers to interpret the recent rise of Wessex to overlordship in Britain as part of an ongoing process of translatio imperii, the transference or succession of empires, contingent on the Christian virtue of its rulers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the selected examples of early medieval texts written in the Carolingian Empire by Catholic clerics Agobard of Lyon, Amolo of Lyon and Prudentius of Troyes to answer questions concerning the knowledge of the Jewish religion. The questions include Christians' knowledge, comprehension and assessment about the other religion. Christian authors' knowledge about Judaism and Jewish faith are discussed.

This article considers some overlooked evidence for royal legislation in the dying days of the Carolingian empire, a series of charters known as the Ravenna constitutions. These documents, which deal with the status of Italian freemen, are often analysed as sources for social history but rarely as texts in their own right. Reconstructing the context in which the charters were issued enables us to cast light on political events and royal self-representation in early 880s Italy; and by drawing attention to the peculiarities of their form, we can use them to reflect more broadly on the nature of Carolingian capitulary legislation and the meaning of its disappearance at the end of the ninth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article seeks to develop a theoretical framework for interpreting social rituals and the notion of social and cultural imitation, specifically concerning the connections between religion, religious rituals and liturgy, and society. It draws on theories and scholarship from the fields of evolutionary biology, cognitive science, anthropology, social theory, and history. The model is developed with illustrative examples of Europe in the Middle Ages, especially reforms of religious practice and liturgy in the Carolingian Empire and the religious movement of the Cathars, and Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries, especially the Zulu-Christian syncretistic religious groups of the Nazareth Baptist Church of South Africa and the Church of Saints.

An essay which explored how the changing political culture of Carolingian and post-Carolingian Europe offered new opportunities for rule for countesses and duchesses, is presented. Topics covered include definition of political culture, emergence, meaning and use of the term "comitisa" (countess) in the Carolingian empire and how the advent of the title countess heralded the expansion of their roles into politics, justice and military affairs.

This essay situates Count‐Bishop Oliba of Vic in post‐Carolingian western Europe by comparing his spiritual and political roles to those of contemporary bishops beyond the Pyrenees: Fulbert of Chartres, Gerard of Cambrai, Burchard of Worms, and Aribert of Milan. Although not in direct communication with each other, these men faced similar challenges. Each bishop concentrated on securing the regional levers of power, either assuming the roles traditionally held by counts or else contesting these with actual counts. A major factor differentiating their careers was the presence or absence of strong royal authority, which determined not only their selection as bishops but also the extent to which, after consecration, they were obliged to respond to external authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the spread of European civilization into the borderlands of Easter Europe beginning with the year 800 during the Carolingian empire to the 21st century, focusing particularly on the development of Poland. The historiography of Eastern Europe, including the writings of historians Jenó Szúcs, Oskar Halecki, and Samsonowicz, is explored. Topics considered include the influences of both the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches on the region, the impact of the black plague of the fourteenth century, and the sixteenth-century formation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Boosted by a proliferation in metal-detected finds, categories of personal adornment now constitute a vital archaeological source for interpreting Viking-age cultural interaction in the North Sea region. Previous research in England has explored the potential of this metalwork in relation to the formation of 'Anglo-Scandinavian' identity, but without due consideration of a wider spectrum of cultural influences. This article redresses the balance by shifting attention to twenty-eight belt fittings derived from richly embellished baldrics, equestrian equipment, and waist belts manufactured on the Frankish continent during the period of Carolingian hegemony in the later eighth and ninth centuries AD. The metalwork is classified and then contextualized in order to track import mechanisms and to assess the impact of Carolingian culture on the northern peripheries of the Frankish empire. The main conclusion is that the adoption, adaptation, and strategic manipulation of Carolingian/northern Frankish identity formed an embedded component of cultural dynamics in Viking-age England, scrutiny of which sheds new light on patterns of interconnectivity linking peoples of the North Sea world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses pregnancy, childbirth and infancy in the Carolingian empire. The relationship between Germanic, Roman and Visigothic law with issues concerning childbearing is presented. The perspective of Carolingian Christian clerics in regard to marriage, divorce, female sterility, abortion, infanticide, sexual intercourse and in the nursing of babies by their mothers is discussed. The penalties for women who aided in abortions and for parents who committed infanticide is presented. The status of motherhood as a central form of identity among Carolingian women is also discussed.

Abstract: The Franks incorporated Saxony into the Carolingian empire through a long, brutal struggle coupled with forced conversion. When Saxons themselves began to write a few decades afterwards, they had to make sense of this history and of their role and identity in their contemporary Carolingian world. In contrast to the portrayal of Saxons in writers such as Einhard and Rudolf, three ninth-century Saxon accounts of relic translations — those of Vitus, Pusinna and Liborius — reinterpreted history to claim a place for the Saxons as a distinct group equal to the Franks within the populus Christianus under the Carolingian monarchs. As a key part of their literary strategies, these authors attempted to salvage from the story of their defeat and forced Christianisation an account of God''s sovereignty, native agency and virtue (especially fidelity) as a foundational element of Saxon identity. These texts prefigure the debates about post-conquest Saxon identity which would underlay the later and better-known Ottonian triumphal self-conceptions. Moreover, the concerns of these authors led them to remarkable hagiographical innovations in grappling with paganism, conversion, miracles, social class and faith. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article presents information on the scholarly controversy on the working of Carolingian royal government and Louis the Pious in context to the use of written documents for ruling the state. It mentions the presence of fundamental institutional continuity during the Roman Administration in the Merovingian era, and highlights the work of Rosamond McKitterick which relates the use of written documents for the economical, administrative and legal rule during the Carolingian empire. It further mentions the work of the book "Carolingians and the Written Word" on the use of the process for governmental and administrative rule.

The confraternity books (Libri vitae) of the Early Middle Ages record the names of individuals to be remembered in liturgical prayer. Since the middle of the 20th century, they have come more sharply into focus as historical source material. The records of rulers were of particular interest even then. In order to understand the lists of rulers in the Liber Vitae, the first subject of study is the development of prayers of remembrance for the living and the dead, and the subsequent emergence and shaping of liturgical commemoration of the ruler from late antiquity to the Carolingian period. These diverse developments merge with those of the liturgical Memoria in the confraternity books, indicating that the monasteries, in particular, were important keepers of monarchical Memoria. Taking as examples the Salzburg Liber Vitae (783) and the Reichenau Confraternity Book (824), the steps and methods are followed through and the lists of rulers interpreted in their historical context. The two confraternity books prove to be a source for the legitimisation of Carolingian sovereignty, particularly in terms of substantiating it historically and securing it liturgically. The regional perspective of each monastic community plays a major role here. Complex reference and interpretative systems are exposed in the confraternity books, whose orderliness, structure and prayer also served as a counterbalance to the disorder and crisis prevalent in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses the question to what extent the model of a 'temple society' can be fruitfully employed as a tool of analysis for the Carolingian ecclesia, by which we mean not only the rich, well‐endowed churches, but also the small, local ones. An investigation of the many different forms of ecclesiastical land‐holding, and of the various functions a church and its ministers did (and did not) fulfil for early medieval Christians, shows the shape of the Carolingian'ecclesia‐society' as it took shape in the course of the ninth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Abbey of St. Gallen was the foremost centre for the study of the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville in the Carolingian period. Not only can more than twenty early medieval manuscripts transmitting material from the Etymologiae be associated with Carolingian St. Gallen, but its scriptorium also produced two scholarly redactions of Isidore's encyclopaedia in the second half of the ninth century. The prototype codices of these two redactions survive today in Swiss libraries, one as Zofingen, Stadtbibliothek, Pa 32, the other as St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 231 - 232. The first redaction represents an attempt to enrich the Etymologiae by incorporating Isidore's De natura rerum into the encyclopaedia. The second redaction is the result of a collation of four sets of manuscripts of the Etymologiae, some of which survive today and bear collation marks and variant readings inserted into the margins. While none of the many hands that were involved in the collation and copying of the two redactions can be attributed to any of the known scholars active at St. Gallen in the ninth century, the redactions seem to have been produced over the course of several decades under the auspices of the praepositus and later abbot Hartmut. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the office of advocate at the abbey of Saint‐Martin of Tours. It studies what was regionally distinctive about its emergence there in the late ninth century and suggests a reason for the office's demise in the early tenth century. In doing so, it draws out the important discursive shifts which were part and parcel of both the setting‐up and the fading‐away of Carolingian 'reform', suggesting that the changes seen in the advocatial office were ones of mentality first and of administrative change only secondarily. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a series of Carolingian historians, writing in the early ninth century, who marginalized the role of God's agency, in sharp contrast to the pattern established by the Annales Regni Francorum. Where this has been noted before, largely in relation to Einhard's Vita Karoli, it has been explained either as a clash between lay and monastic ideals or as a by‐product of the classical renewal at the Carolingian court. Examining this process across multiple texts suggests, however, that these historians can be understood as self‐consciously 'secularizing' in response to contemporary crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In II Timothy II.4, the apostle Paul forbids the servant of God to involve himself in saecularia negotia. While traditionally understood as a reference to commercial activities, for Carolingian thinkers the verse became a way to reflect on the political engagement of prelates and the relationship between religious and secular duties carried out by ecclesiastical office‐holders. This article traces the changing significance of II Timothy II.4 in the first half of the ninth century, as councils and exegetes grappled with the question of whether there was a 'neutral' secular beyond the saecularia negotia prohibited by Paul? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What knowledge of Augustine might a Carolingian subject outside the ecclesiastical elite have possessed? If the all‐pervasive influence of Augustine is one of the hallmarks of the Carolingian era, how far into the Carolingian world did that influence (and conscious knowledge of it as 'Augustinian') actually extend? Toward preliminary answers to these questions, this study will consider the presence and various uses of Augustine in textual media that may have reached beyond elite, court‐connected circles, arguing that from such texts Augustine would indeed have been known to ordinary Carolingian Christians, although mainly as one key source of traditional authority operating in fundamental harmony with other such authorities, rather than as a singular figure within the imagination of the Latin Christian west. This ubiquitous emphasis on ostensible agreement among the great authorities of the Christian past should be understood as intimately connected to the Carolingians' efforts at effecting concord and unity in the broader social sphere of the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ermentrude's consecration in 866 has long been interpreted as the quintessential example of queen‐making as fertility rite. More recent scholarship has illuminated how Carolingian queen‐making articulated richer definitions of queenship and reflected wider political roles of queens. This article re‐examines the significance of fertility at Ermentrude's consecration. Close analysis of the introductory address that survives alongside the liturgy for anointing and coronation shows that fertility was an unusually important theme at Ermentrude's consecration – but not simply the queen's fertility. By modelling royal fertility on biblical templates, the consecration communicated not only hopes of future children but also political messages about divine sanction of dynastic continuity and good kingship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates a previously neglected aspect of diplomatic relations between the Carolingians and the Umayyads of al-Andalus, the camels sent by Emir Muḥammad I to Charles the Bald, King of the West Franks, in 865. In addition to being placed within a diplomatic and historiographical context, the meaning of these animals needs to be understood within the traditions both of the donor and the recipient. The unusual nature of camels for both al-Andalus and Francia is explored. For both Muḥammad and Charles and their respective courts, camels would have been resonant of eastern monarchy, strengthening a claim to parity with other Islamic rulers for the former, while contributing to Charles's presentation of himself as a Solomonic king. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have referred to the winged spearhead found on the southern slopes of Fruška Gora for more than 50 years. This paper fully describes and analyses this winged spearhead for the first time. The author briefly discusses the possible places of the spearhead's origin, compares the spearhead with morphologically and technologically similar artefacts found all over Europe, and places it within relevant typological-chronological classifications. Based on more or less close analogies, the Fruška Gora spearhead is dated to between the middle of the 9th century and the beginning of the 11th. The lack of archaeological context calls for caution when it comes to dating and interpreting this artefact and placing it in the course of known history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]