medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
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Rosemary Hayes
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From: "The Medieval Review" <[log in to unmask]>
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Subject: TMR 13.09.24 Keefe, A Catalogue of Works Pertaining to
theExplanation of the Creed (Bruce)
Keefe, Susan. <i>A Catalogue of Works Pertaining to the Explanation of
the Creed in Carolingian Manuscripts</i>. Series: Instrumenta
Patristica et Mediaevalia: Research on the Inheritance of Early and
Medieval Christianity 63. Turnhout: Brepols, 2012. Pp. 402. EUR 110.00.
ISBN-13: 9782503544076.
Reviewed by Scott G. Bruce
University of Colorado at Boulder
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Anyone who has read Agobard of Lyon's early ninth-century treatise
<i>Liber contra insulsam vulgi opinionem de grandine et tonitruis</i>
("A book against the absurd belief of the common folk concerning hail
and thunder") comes away with the distinct impression that, despite
Charlemagne's best efforts, the tenets of Christianity had very little
adhesion in the Carolingian countryside. [1] As the work of the late
Susan Keefe has already shown, this was not for want of trying. [2]
Throughout the age of Charlemagne and his successors, Christian
intellectuals produced thousands of manuscripts for the purpose of
educating parish priests in the fundamental principles of Christian
belief and providing them with instruments of reference to aid them in
the instruction of their congregations. In the book under review,
Keefe has assembled an impressive catalogue of Carolingian manuscripts
containing explications of the creed and other statements of faith.
The book is unusual for a catalogue, because it presents both an
argument and an agenda for future research. In her short introduction,
Keefe argues that Carolingian intellectuals did not compose many
original texts to explain the creed, but rather gathered bits and
pieces of late antique and Merovingian texts from a surprising number
of genres and reorganized them into pastoral manuals and clerical study
books. [3] Beyond the scope of Keefe's book was an investigation of
the degree to which the impressive variety of source materials
collected and deployed by the Carolingians in the service of religious
education "reflects local preferences and even differences in the
teaching and understanding of the faith" (11). Fortunately for early
medieval historians and their students, the exploration of this
important question will be much easier thanks to the monumental efforts
that went into the assembly of this excellent resource.
Keefe's catalogue comprises two interdependent parts. While the
organization of the book seems confusing at first, the introduction
does a good job at explaining her rationale for presenting the material
in this way. The first part of the book is a straightforward list of
393 individual works composed or selected by Carolingian compilers for
the purpose of explicating statements of faith. These works are listed
alphabetically according to their incipit. Each entry assigns the text
a number (to aid in cross-referencing), provides the name of the author
and the title of the work (when known), lists medieval manuscript
witnesses and modern critical editions of the text in question, and
gives some idea of the function of the particular document. Keefe
identifies four broad categories of texts related to instruction in the
faith: (a) creed commentaries (<i>expositiones symboli</i>), in which
the author presents a word-by-word or line-by-line explanation of a
popular statement of faith, usually the Apostles' creed, the
Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed or the Athanasian creed; (b)
explanations of the faith, in which the author provides a summary of
Christian beliefs, including the nature of the trinity; the meaning of
the incarnation, passion, death, resurrection, ascension and second
coming of Christ; forgiveness of sins and salvation; and so on; (c)
professions of faith, either personal statements attributed to
patristic authorities or the pronouncements of church councils; and
lastly (d) polemical tracts that reaffirm the faith against the
encroachment of heretical ideas. As Keefe explains, these texts were
surprisingly varied in their literary forms, despite their common
function: creed commentaries could be short sermons or lengthy
treatises; explanations of the faith could take the form of patristic
florilegia or a personal letter, etc.
What makes Keefe's book so useful, though, is the second section, which
describes the contents of every Carolingian manuscript in which the
works listed in the first part of the catalogue were found. This
section is organized alphabetically by the name of the library holding
the manuscript, from the Bibliothèque municipale in Albi to the
Zentralbibliothek in Zürich. Here Keefe provides the date and place of
origin of the manuscript (when known), the number of folios, and its
physical dimensions, as well as a brief mention of any additional
information of use (like the presence of decoration or marginal glosses
or Old High German). She sometimes offers her own tentative ideas
about the function of particular manuscripts, with descriptions like
"clerical instruction reader" or "monastic schoolbook" or "perhaps a
bishop's collection of works for the instruction of his clergy." This
attention to the manuscript context of each individual work is crucial
for understanding how early medieval compilers understood these texts
in relation to one another and how these manuscripts compilations may
have functioned as a whole.
I came away from this catalogue with a much greater appreciation of the
pragmatism with which Carolingian intellectuals combed late antique and
Merovingian sources for useful tidbits of information pertaining to
instruction in the faith. I was particularly struck by the way that
they excerpted passages from Gregory of Tours' <i>Historiarum libri
decem</i>, a work that I did not expect to find in this context. In
one case (no. 80), a compiler copied out the personal statement of
faith that Gregory included in his prologue to Book 10 of his
<i>Historiarum</i>, attributed it falsely to Pope Gregory I and
circulated it under the name <i>Fides sancti Gregorii papae</i>. In
another case (no. 163), a compiler braided together separate narratives
of debates with heretics and a Jew that appeared in Books 5 and 6 of
Gregory's <i>Historiarum</i> to create a programmatic defense of the
faith.
Needless to say, this work is a veritable treasure trove of information
for scholars interested in Christian instruction in the parishes and
missionary fields of the Carolingian world. Appended to the book are
short indices of authors and places, but the anonymity of so many of
these texts limits their utility. It is much more rewarding to sit
with this book for a while, leafing back and forth between the two
sections to get a feel for how it works. Once I understood how the
book was organized, I spent much more time reading through the second
section describing the content of the manuscripts, because I found it
easier to move from the manuscript descriptions to the individually
numbered texts rather than the other way around. Anyone interested in
the spread of Christianity in the early Middle Ages should spend time
with this valuable resource. Seasoned scholars are sure to gain
insights from this book and graduate students will find an incomparable
resource for research topics on the contested parishes and missionary
outposts of the Carolingian countryside.
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Notes:
1. The most insightful study of this text remains Paul Edward Dutton,
"Thunder and Hail over the Carolingian Countryside," in <i>Agriculture
in the Middle Ages: Technology, Practice, and Representation</i>, ed.
Del Sweeney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995),
111-137; reprinted in idem, <i>Charlemagne's Mustache and Other
Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age</i> (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2004), 169-188.
2. See her <i>Water and the Word: Baptism and the Instruction of the
Clergy in the Carolingian Empire</i>, 2 vols. (South Bend, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2002). Professor Keefe died
unexpectedly in August 2012 at the age of 58.
3. This was an expression of a distinctly Carolingian aesthetic process
that Lynda L. Coon has called "bricolage." See Coon, <i>Dark Age
Bodies: Gender and Monastic Practice in the Early Medieval West</i>
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), esp. Chapter 2.
Keefe does not use this term in her catalogue.
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