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Leading the Way to Heaven
Starting from manuscripts compiled for local priests in the Carolingian period, this book investigates the way in which pastoral care took shape at the local levels of society. They show what illiterate lay people learned about their religion, but also what priests themselves knew. The Carolingian royal dynasty, which ruled over much of Europe in the eighth and ninth century, is well-known for its success in war, patronage of learning and its ambitious style of rulership. A central theme in their plans for the future of their kingdom was to ensure God's everlasting support, and to make sure that all inhabitants – down to the last illiterate farmer – reached eternal life in heaven. This b...
The Resources of the Past in Early Medieval Europe
This volume examines the use of the textual resources of the past to shape cultural memory in early medieval Europe.
Annals in Carolingian Europe
In the 8th-9th centuries annals became the predominant genre of Frankish historiography, displaying a remarkable variety of texts. Yet for a long time scholarly appreciation of this variety has been limited, stuck in 19th-century fixations on urtexts and doubts about the proficiency of annalists. But for some years now, annals have resurfaced as historiographical texts sui generis, much helped by the increasing availability of digitised manuscripts. This has facilitated the study of codicological contexts in which annals functioned - a feature flattened out in 19th-century editions - and was accompanied by renewed interest in the genre’s role within Carolingian literary culture. The articl...
City, Citizen, Citizenship, 400–1500
This open access book explores how medieval societies conversed about the city and citizen in texts, visual imagery and material culture. It adopts a long-term, interdisciplinary, and cross-cultural perspective, bringing together contributions on the early, high, and later Middle Ages, covering both the medieval East and West, and representing a wide variety of disciplinary angles and sources. The volume is first and foremost about medieval perceptions and their articulation in text, image and material form. The principal focus is not on cities or citizenship per se, but on those who used such concepts, wrote about them, and visualized and depicted them. At the same time, the book seeks to address why the city remained such a salient concept also in non-urban contexts – the periphery, the desert, the monastery – and how medieval thinking on the ideal city and civic community could involve denunciation of the earthly city and its institutional trappings. It thus pushes scholarly boundaries, but also seeks to escape deeply entrenched notions of citizenship as either a form of political participation or legal status.
Saxon Identities, AD 150-900
"This study is the first up-to-date comprehensive analysis of the construction of continental Saxon identity in late antique and early medieval writing. It traces this process over the course of eight centuries, from its earliest roots in Roman ethnography to its reinvention in the monasteries of ninth-century Saxony. Building on recent scholarship, this study emphasises not just the constructed and open-ended nature of barbarian identity, but also the crucial role played by texts as instruments and resources of identity-formation. Though mentioned as early as AD 150, the Saxons left no written evidence of their own before c. 840. Thus, for the first seven centuries, we can only look at Saxo...
