Janet L. Nelson

Kingship and empire

For ideas of kingship, the period c. 750 to c. 1150 was no longer one of beginnings but of consolidation. It saw the formation of a single culture in an expanded Latin Christendom. It began with the incorporation of significant Spanish and insular contributions into the mainstream of western political thought, and it ended with new contributions from as far afield as Bohemia and Denmark. The history of the period was dominated first by the Frankish Empire, then by states that succeeded to or were profoundly influenced by it. Its creation strengthened in the short run the traditional elements in barbarian kingship, successful leadership of the people ( gens ) in wars of conquest and plunder bringing Frankish domination of other gentes. Hence the hegemonial idea of empire, of the emperor ruling many peoples and realms, arose directly from the political experience of the eighth-century West. In the longer run power devolved to kingdoms that proved durable, without a gentile identity or an economic base in plunder and tribute. This brought new formulations of the realm as a territorial and sociological entity, the aristocracy sharing power and responsibility with the king. The idea of empire detached from its gentile anchorage acquired Roman-Christian universality. In the eighth century the Frankish kings Pippin and Charlemagne successfully mobilised two elites, the higher clergy of the Frankish Church and the Frankish aristocracy. Power-sharing was built into the fabric of the Carolingian Empire though it was masked at first by a community of interest that evoked a chorus of praise for rulers evidently possessed of divine approval.

Royal saints and early medieval kingship

The problem I want briefly to focus on concerns the significance of the saint-king in early medieval cosmology: what is his relationship to the sacral king of so many pre-industrial societies? A commonly-accepted view has been that the sacral king was, quite simply, the immediate ancestor of the saint-king. To quote the recent but in some respects old-fashioned work of W. A. Chaney on Anglo-Saxon kingship: ‘The sacral nature of kingship.... would lead the folk to expect God to honour the stirps regia. The recognised form of this in the new religion was sainthood.’ Christianity, so Chaney implies, simply makes a saint out of the sacral king: in essentials, nothing is changed.

The problematic in the private

Paul Veyne (ed.), A History of Private Life from Pagan Rome to Byzantium, vol. 1 of Philippe Aries and Georges Duby (eds), A History of Private Life (1987), ix + 670 (Cambridge, Mass, and London, B...

England and the Continent in the Ninth Century: III, Rights and Rituals

This essay aims to show that in England and on the Continent, ninth-century individuals and groups in a wide variety of social milieux from peasants to substantial landowners, and including women, had a strong sense of rights to status and property that were rational in something like the modern sense while surrounded by rituals that seem very un-modern. Un-modern, too, seem the terms on which rights were held, and the forms and contexts in which rights were negotiated and renegotiated between local holders, lords and kings. With reference to material from Wessex and from various parts of the Carolingian Empire, it is suggested that the linkage of rights and rituals was symptomatic of sophisticated cultures with apt ways of managing conflict and creating consensus in localities and in kingdoms. The so-called decimation of King AEthelwulf is discussed as a meaningful case in point.

Gender, Memory and Social Power

Two books are reviewed here, the first, by a historian of western Europe, Elisabeth van Houts, the second by a Byzantinist, Lynda Garland. Aspects of van Houtss book discussed are: the complementary roles of women and men in the production of historical writing; the role of women in the transmission of oral testimony, especially on genealogies and on property rights claimed through women; and the gender-specificity of womens transmission of valued objects. The books contributions to the history of the family are stressed. Lynda Garlands treatment of a series of Byzantine empresses is appreciated as informative, but criticised for lack of reference to historiography on medieval female rulership in western Europe, and insufficient analysis of structural features of the Byzantine polity. A brief conclusion reflects on gender and power in early medieval east and west.

Women at the Court of Charlemagne: A Case of Monstrous Regiment?

I begin with an image: the rape of Proserpina, as depicted on a late second-century Roman marble sarcophagus (fig. 4.1), now in the Cathedral Treasury at Aachen, and at Aachen, apparently, since the time of Charlemagne (Schramm and Mutherich 1981: no. 18 [at 120]; Schmitz-Cliever-Lepie 1986: 8). Pluto, god of the underworld, abducts Proserpina with the help of Minerva, goddess of wisdom. On the viewer’s right, Mercury, messenger of the gods, leads a quadriga, a four-horse chariot — symbol of triumphal rulership. Behind, on the viewer’s left, preceded by female attendants with baskets symbolizing plenty, comes Proserpina’s mother, Ceres, goddess of fruitfulness, in a chariot drawn by serpents.1 A brief gloss can be added. The Proserpina myth was borrowed by the Romans from the Greeks and was popular throughout Antiquity. Ceres (Demeter) was one of the twenty “select deities” who had care of the universe; her rites at Eleusis were one of the best-known cults of the ancient world, and there were Roman equivalents. Ceres was identified as the Great Mother, “procuring the emission of the seed of women,” which (according to ancient medical theory) joined with the male seed to produce the foetus. Proserpina was the special goddess of fertile seeds. Open image in new window Figure 4.1. A late Roman marble sarcophagus depicting the rape of Proserpina (Cathedral Treasury, Aachen).

Women and the Word in the Earlier Middle Ages

It is a characteristic merit of Richard Southern—recently voted the historians’ historian in The Observer —that as long ago as 1970, in Western Society and the Church , he devoted some luminous pages to ‘the influence of women in religious life’. Though these pages nestle in a chapter called ‘Fringe orders and anti-orders’, twenty years ago such labels were not pejorative. Southern made women emblematic of what could be called a pendulum-swing theory of medieval religious history. First came a primitive, earlier medieval age of improvization and individual effort, of spiritual warriors and local initiatives; the central medieval period saw ‘a drive towards increasingly well-defined and universal forms of organization’ in an age of hierarchy and order; then, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, back swung the pendulum towards complexity and confusion, individual experiment, and ‘small, humble, shadowy organizations’.

On the limits of the Carolingian renaissance

Einhard tells us that Charlemagne had a special liking for ‘those books of St Augustine called The City of God’. If only he had told us why. Did Charlemagne demand readings from book 5 on the happy Christian emperors? Or was he, as Ladner suggests, particularly attracted by ‘the idea of a society embracing earth and heaven, a society which a man could join through personal renewal’? If Ladner is right, then, he tells us, we should talk not of a Carolingian renaissance—‘secondary classicising features notwithstanding’—but of a Carolingian reform ‘as just one phase in the unfolding history of the realisation of the Reform idea in Christian history’ and specifically ‘an attempt to recreate the religious culture of the fourth and fifth centuries’. But is Lander right about Charlemagne? I have my doubts: perhaps what he really enjoyed most was book 22’s meaty chapter on the resurrection of the flesh or its rattling good miracle-story.

Society, theodicy and the origins of heresy: towards a reassessment of the medieval evidence

I shall not be presenting in this communication the fruits of any original research: my aim will be simply to put together some of the results of recent work by others, and on that basis to offer a little contribution to ‘the great seven-storey library’ which professor Le Bras hopes will one day ‘be devoted to studies of the structure and whole life of every religion at every moment of its history’. It is best to begin with some explanation of my title: much of the debate on the origins of heresy has centred on the question of whether or not it represented a ‘social problem’. Thus when Grundmann asks if social questions were at the root of heresy, he means, was heresy the expression of material deprivation on the part of the unprivileged? This sort of connection has of course been made by historians usually stigmatised as Marxist (though Marx himself would, I think, have disowned some of their crude anachronisms); Werner, for example, explains heresy as a protest movement against the economic and social exploitation of the feudal system.

An essay in the history of a medieval ideal

John Bugge. Virginitas. The Hague: International Archives of the History of Ideas, Series Minor 17: The Hague Martinus Nijhoff, 1976, pp. 168. Guilders 47.50 Geoffrey Ashe. The virgin, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976, pp. 262. £5.25 Marina Warner. Alone of all her sex. The myth and cult of the virgin Mary, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976, pp. 400 + xix. £6.50