Using and Not Using the Past after the Carolingian Empire

Sarah Greer is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of St Andrews. Her research explores the relationships between memory and power in the long tenth century. Alice Hicklin is a post-doctoral fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her research compares legal and diplomatic practices throughout western Europe in the early middle ages.Stefan Esders is professor of Late Antique and Early Medieval History at the Freie Universität Berlin, specialising in legal history. He has recently co-edited East and West in the Early Middle Ages: The Merovingian Kingdoms in Mediterranean Perspective (2019) with Yaniv Fox, Yitzhak Hen and Laury Sarti.

• 1) Introduction; Past Narratives; 2) The Future of History after Empire; 3) Remembering Troubled Pasts: Episcopal Deposition and Succession in Flodoard’s History of the Church of Rheims; 4) In the Shadow of Rome: After Empire in the late-tenth-century Chronicle of Benedict of Monte Soratte; 5) Infiltrating the Local Past: Supra-regional Players in Local Hagiography from Trier in the Ninth and Tenth centuries; 6) After the Fall: Lives of Texts and Lives of Modern Scholars in the Historiography of the Post-Carolingian World; Inscribing Memories;7) How Carolingian was Early Medieval Catalonia?; 8) Orchestrating Harmony: Litanies, Queens, and Discord in the Carolingian and Ottonian Empires; 9) Models of marriage charters in a notebook of Ademar of Chabannes (ninth-eleventh century); 10) All in the Family: Creating a Carolingian Genealogy in the Eleventh Century; 11) ‘Charles’s stirrups hang down from Conrad’s saddle’: Reminiscences of Carolingian Oath Practice under Conrad II (1024‒1039); Recalling Communities; 12) Notions of Belonging. Some Observations on Solidarity in the Late- and Post Carolingian World; 13) Bishops, Canon Law, and the Politics of Belonging in Post-Carolingian Italy, c. 930-c. 960; 14) Migrant Masters and their Books. Italian Scholars and Knowledge Transfer in post-Carolingian Europe; 15) The Dignity of Our Bodies and the Salvation of Our Souls. Scandal, Purity, and the Pursuit of Unity in Late Tenth-Century Monasticism; 16) Law and Liturgy: Excommunication Records, 900-1050

Many of the contributors present unique approaches to their topics; some bring little-known texts to the light; some force a reassessment of well-known sources. What this book does do, and does well, is demonstrate the necessity of reconsidering the traditional historiography of the post-Carolingian world, while providing a multifaceted view of the many different approaches and methodologies that can be used to explore it.Laura Wangerin, Seton Hall University, Early Medieval Europe 2022 30 (4)