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  1. Home
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  3. The New Cambridge Medieval History
  • Cited by 26
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
March 2008
Print publication year:
1995
Online ISBN:
9781139055710
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521362924
Subjects:
Area Studies, European History 1000-1450, British History: General Interest, History, European Studies, European History 450-1000
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - British & European History
Series:
The New Cambridge Medieval History (2)
Information

Book description

This volume of The New Cambridge Medieval History covers most of the period of Frankish and Carolingian dominance in western Europe. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the authors consider developments in Europe as a whole, from Ireland to the Bosphorus and Iceland to Gibraltar. The chapters offer an examination of the interaction between rulers and ruled, of how power and authority actually worked, and of the impact of these on the society and culture of Europe as a whole. The volume is divided into four parts. Part I encompasses the events and political developments in the whole of the British Isles, the west and east Frankish kingdoms, Scandinavia, the Slavic and Balkan regions, Spain, Italy, and those aspects of Byzantine and Muslim history which impinged on the west between c.700 and c.900. Parts II, III and IV cover common themes and topics within the general categories of government and institutions, the church and society, and cultural and intellectual development.

Reviews

‘ … a very fine achievement … The volume is impressive in its range … we are also offered new and challenging views … the volume as a whole is extremely impressive.’

Source: The Times Higher Education Supplement

‘Chapter by chapter, the quality is extremely high … the clarity and vigour with which expertise is presented by almost every contributor will come as a welcome surprise to … the lay reader.’

R. I. Moore - Newcastle University

‘This is a massive and meticulously edited book, containing an impressive series of readily comprehensible expositions in lucid prose … there is no doubt that the book will be of immense use to students and will immensely reassure their teachers, while at the same time presenting these important centuries to a wider, albeit studious, public.’

Source: Early Medieval Europe

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Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • 24 - Religion and lay society
    pp 654-678
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In exploring the religion of the eighth and ninth centuries, this chapter inevitably explores its society too. Differentiations of religious experience by gender and by status are pointed out. The religion of the laity was as variegated as lay society itself. In surveying the religion of Europe over two centuries of pervasive change, one may well ask what the religion of the urban population of, say, early medieval Milan had in common with that of the new converts in Charlemagne's Saxony. Baptism provides an answer. Baptism distinguished Christians from non-Christians, the fideles from the pagani. Social status affected the way people participated in ecclesiastical celebrations. For the rich, festivals such as Christmas were opportunities to bedeck themselves in their finest apparel. In the course of the eighth and ninth centuries, the clergy of the Christian church took a steadily growing part in shaping the ritual and liturgy which encompassed so many aspects of human existence.
  • 25 - Eighth-century foundations
    pp 679-694
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter talks about the comparison of Anglo-Saxon intellectual culture with that of Frankish Gaul. Both Anglo-Saxon England and Frankish Gaul inherited the Roman script system. Many of the later eighth-century manuscripts from Francia and Italy reflect the early years of the Carolingian Renaissance. The chapter discusses the importance of the preservation of knowledge, copying of essential texts, compilations of excerpts from a range of authoritative authors and the building up of libraries with mainline as well as more obscure patristic and early medieval writers. There is one further genre of Christian writing to which many individuals, in every part of western Europe, made particularly creative contributions in the eighth century, and this is hagiography. From the overwhelmingly biblical and patristic orientation of early medieval intellectual endeavour one can gain a crucial indication of the formative influences and characteristics of early medieval religion and the institutional and intellectual frameworks established to support it.
  • 26 - Language and Communication in Carolingian Europe
    pp 695-708
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter focuses on the application of modern socio-linguistic advances to the Carolingian period. From the socio-linguistic point of view, the transition from different kinds of spoken Latin to the Romance languages, and the corresponding wreck of general Latin communication, led, from the 750s onwards, to the establishment of a situation of diglossia. The end of the Merovingian centuries and the whole of the Carolingian period in the linguistic and cultural history of Europe can be described in a way which, however complex its elements, reveals a creative development, much less confused than appeared at first sight; the ills and the disorders which the language of the Merovingian charters appears, time and time again, to display are the indirect sign of an intense linguistic activity, from which would emerge the new and unforeseen perfection of the Romance dialects, fruit of a process by which final order was born of apparent chaos.
  • 27 - The Carolingian renaissance: education and literary culture
    pp 709-757
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The Carolingian renaissance appears as a well-organised programme. Observers from the time of Notker Balbulus and Heiric of Auxerre to the present day have been impressed by the Carolingian achievement. Much of the variety inherent in Carolingian learning can be attributed to differences in resources, talents and interests across the cultural landscape. Only a few of the Carolingian schools have been studied systematically. Books were at the heart of Carolingian education. The most original development in Carolingian rhetorical studies linked rhetoric with rulership. Carolingian poetry was a ubiquitous feature of Carolingian literary culture and one of its most impressive achievements modern collection, was an ubiquitous feature of Carolingian literary culture. The example Carolingian leaders provided in their courts and legislation and which Notker Balbulus enshrined in his emblematic account of Charlemagne's life was not lost on later politicians who believed that learning was important for the spiritual health of the individual and also for Christian society.
  • 28 - Theology and the organisation of thought
    pp 758-785
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter explores how Carolingian writers on theology defined their topics, and with what methodologies they hoped to resolve uncertainties in a domain allowing little speculation and less doubt. It focuses on attitudes to the Trinity, to the process of salvation and the damnation of the wicked, to the ways in which the Eucharist might assist in human salvation, and on the mysteries of the soul. The chapter explores differences between eastern and western ecclesiology. For most Carolingian writers, the understanding of the divine nature was a part of faith or doctrine. A crucial feature of Carolingian religion was the dichotomy between the thought of Frankish prelates, secure in a national tradition of church councils and continuities, and the concerns of converts whom the expansion of Frankish territories had made Christian. Most Carolingian theology is rebarbative, because it offers an accumulation, a plurality of human texts as the only adequate exegesis of the divine text.
  • 29 - Book production in the Carolingian empire and the spread of Caroline minuscule
    pp 786-808
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The choice of scripts, and the extent and nature of book production in Spain, Britain and southern Italy, serve as a reminder of what might have happened without the resources of Carolingian faith and Carolingian power. The evidence for the manuscripts which could be used by Carolingian readers is twofold: manuscripts which have survived in whole or in part, and the few Carolingian catalogues of libraries. Book production throughout the empire on a scale required an increase in the number of scribes, and the formalisation of their training. Carolingian scriptoria developed a uniform script, Caroline minuscule, which could be used to copy texts in Greek, Latin, Old Irish, Old Saxon, and what one regards as the different dialects of German and Romance. Carolingian scribes used enlarged letters to indicate the start of a new section, and punctuation marks to guide the reader in different kinds of graded pause and in recognising questions. The Carolingians secured their classical and patristic heritage.
  • 30 - Art and architecture
    pp 809-844
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The eighth and ninth centuries were a formative period for medieval art. Court patronage was scarcely new to this period, but its focus and character had shifted with the decline of the cities. The expanded role given to images during the seventh and early eighth centuries led in the Byzantine world to the sharp reaction known as Iconoclasm, and ironically gave new force and definition to religious images. An important example of new forms and interpretations of traditional iconography is the image of the Crucifixion. The study of western European church architecture of the eighth and ninth centuries has been dominated for the past half-century by Richard Krautheimer's great article treating 'the Carolingian revival of early Christian architecture'. Sculpture in ivory and rock crystal was associated with Carolingian Francia during this period, but the other major medium for what may be thought of in the context of sculptural art, various kinds of metalworking, was widely employed across western Europe.

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