medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
I thought this might be of interest to the list as it has something about
sin, penitence and foundation of religious houses - something we have
touched on from time to time.
Rosemary Hayes
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From: "The Medieval Review" <[log in to unmask]>
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Sent: Wednesday, September 05, 2012 3:01 PM
Subject: TMR 12.09.05 Costambeys, Innes and MacLean, The Carolingian
World(Collins)
Costambeys, Marios, Matthew Innes, and Simon MacLean. <i>The
Carolingian World</i>. Cambridge Medieval Textbooks. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. xix, 494. $34.99. ISBN: 978-
0521564946.
Reviewed by Sam Collins
George Mason University
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Published as part of the Cambridge Medieval Textbooks, the authors of
<i>The Carolingian World<i/> position their work as a one-volume
introduction to and overview of the period, and the Carolingian age is
more than overripe for such a volume. The standard introductions,
Rosamond McKitterick's <i>The Frankish Kingdoms Under the
Carolingians</i> and Pierre Riché's <i>The Carolingians: A Family Who
Forged Europe</i> are both now thirty years old, and despite the
persistent strengths of both these books the field has moved on in the
intervening years, often strikingly so. [1] For its intended audience
of advanced undergraduates, beginning graduate students, and non-
specialists, <i>The Carolingian World</i> is justifiably destined to
be the new standard point of departure.
After an initial chapter setting out the scope of the book and a
consideration of the different types of sources available to
historians of the period, the authors organize their material by
interspersing thematic chapters with chapters devoted to political
narrative. The three political chapters (Chapters 2, 4, and 8) take
readers from the origins of the dynasty in the later seventh century
through to 888 when the family's dynastic monopoly over kingship in
its core territories came to an end. The authors, taking their cue
from Regino of Prüm (427), defend 888 as an appropriate place to end
even if there is still a century of Carolingian royal history still to
come. The great strength of these political chapters is that, as in
the best Carolingian scholarship, the authors keep the sources ever on
full display, and never sacrifice careful, canny reflection on the
difficulties of the source base in preference for a tidied up
narrative of events. This is a solid pedagogical model for new
students of the period, and smart students of all levels will find
their way back to the sources and best treatments of the issues, and
thus to first rate essay topics, with ease from the notes.
Chapter 3 ("Belief and Culture"), the first of the thematic chapters,
offers an overview of the religiosity of the empire. Emphases fall
here on Christianization and what historians mean by this term, and on
early medieval ideas of sin and the mechanisms through which sin might
be mitigated. The strength of these choices in topics lies in how
thoroughly the authors show Christian belief embedded into those
structures of empire considered in the political chapters. Their
discussion of Christianization thus reflects on the discussions
elsewhere in the volume of the theory and practice of kingship, just
as their presentation of the early medieval preoccupation with the
danger of sin leads naturally into a lucid discussion of the practices
of aristocratic patronage of and gifts to monasteries. All in all,
this chapter advances the important point, so often forgotten or
resisted by students, that the Carolingian kingdom, like all early
medieval kingdoms, was a "symbiosis of the secular and ecclesiastical"
(131).
The book's most important contribution, however, is found in the three
middle thematic chapters: chapters 5 ("Villages and villagers, land
and landowners"), 6 ("Elite society"), and 7 ("Exchange and trade: the
Carolingian economy"). In these chapters readers encounter those
portions of Carolingian historiography that have changed most in the
decades separating <i>The Carolingian World</i> from the textbooks of
McKitterick and Riché. Chris Wickham's <i>Framing the Early Middle
Ages</i> casts a long shadow over this portion of the book, and the
analytical mode and set of questions that shaped <i>Framing</i> are on
full display here. [2] In these chapters, narrative and well-known
historical figures give way to analysis of social structures and
processes, often backed up by the evidence of the relatively recent
boom in early medieval archaeology.
Chapter 5 considers the changes in rural life brought about by the
fading away of the Roman state and the rise of Carolingian power.
Here we find treatment of the villa in its post-Roman incarnations, a
consideration of the makeup of the rural population, and a
presentation of the state of the question about the origins of the
bipartite manor. Throughout, the authors resist an older tendency to
see the early medieval countryside as static and unchanging, just as
they insist on the striking diversity of the use and organization of
land inside territories under Carolingian control. The holders of all
this land are the subjects of Chapter 6. The focus on ties of kinship
that once had dominated study of the Carolingian aristocracy recedes
here in favor of a consideration of "aristocratic identity," that is,
the modes and signs by which aristocrats defined themselves as
different from the rest of the population and how, in absence of the
complicated vocabulary of aristocratic titles familiar from the high
Middle Ages, they established and maintained internal hierarchy.
Chapter 7 presents a consideration of Carolingian economic activity in
which the authors argue for a gradual trend in the core Carolingian
territories toward increased agricultural productivity that in turn
leads to strengthened, increasingly specialized, and more widely
spread systems of market exchange. In addition, the authors want us
to see how these developments in the heart of the empire were aided
and abetted at its fringes, notably north among the Vikings and south
along the Mediterranean. Long distance trade in luxury goods, so
central to the style of economic analysis pioneered by Pirenne and
practiced by his many successors, retreats to a minor role, with the
center stage played here by much more local and much less flashy
agricultural production. While Carolingian economic vitality and
sophistication may not compare to that of subsequent medieval
centuries, the authors emphasize that this incremental Carolingian
prosperity in important ways should be seen as setting the stage for
the improved economic conditions of the central and high Middle Ages.
The greatest strength of chapters 5 through 7 is how the authors have
brought together and synthesized these often difficult
historiographies at a moment of great change and possibility. Students
and professionals needing to come up to speed on these productive
lines of inquiry into the early Middle Ages can safely start here and
then read back into the complicated literatures through the thorough
notes.
With all the space given over to villages, aristocrats, and economy,
other things had to be left out. As the authors admit (8), <i>The
Carolingian World</i> goes lightly through issues relating to what
used to be called the "Carolingian Renaissance": art, scholarship,
book production, and libraries all appear but briefly in a crisp ten
pages at the end of chapter 3 (142-53). So too does the book mostly
pass over monastic issues not directly related to practices of
monastic land holding. Benedict of Aniane and the often bitter ninth-
century debate over the shape of Carolingian monasticism turns up but
once, embedded into a wider discussion of Louis the Pious's strategies
of rule and self presentation (201). Even the Carolingian frontiers,
particularly the Spanish march and the interaction with neighbors to
the east, get little play. These omissions are not necessarily flaws
for, as the authors show, these are all topics well covered elsewhere,
not least in the textbooks of McKitterick and Riché <i>The Carolingian
World</i> is designed to replace. Still, the authors' preference for
detailed coverage of the most central elements of current Carolingian
historiography at the expense of some of the topics that once had
dominated the field but are now quiet means that <i>The Carolingian
World</i> is not exactly the one-volume introduction it might at first
appear to be. Perhaps instead we should see this book a little less
as a textbook, and more as both an extended demonstration of the
vitality and interest of contemporary Carolingian scholarship, and an
extremely attractive and useful invitation into this rapidly evolving
historiography for a new generation.
--------
Notes:
1. Rosamond McKitterick, <i>The Frankish Kingdoms Under the
Carolingians</i> (London and New York: Longman, 1983); and Pierre
Riché, <i>Les Carolingiens: une famille qui fit l'Europe</i> (Paris:
Hachette, 1983), English translation by Michael Idomir Allen as <i>The
Carolingians: A Family Who Forged Europe</i> (Philadelphia:
Philadelphia University Press, 1993).
2. Chris Wickham. <i>Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the
Mediterranean, 400-800</i> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
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