Charlemagne, we are told by one of his son’s courtiers, moved the statue of Theoderic the Ostrogoth from Ravenna to his palace at Aachen (MGH, Poetae ii: 370-8; for places mentioned in this chapter see Map 1). It is not as easy as we might think imaginatively to move it back. The revival of the Roman Empire in the west by Charlemagne and his family did not represent the interposition of a pious fiction that we can simply brush away. Our access to ‘‘Late Antiquity’’ is irreversibly refracted through the Carolingian prism. In the Latin world at least, almost every stone and every
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Map 1 Late Roman Learning in the West: Preservation and Transmission.
Word from the Later Roman Empire owes its survival to decisions taken in the eighth and ninth centuries. Fewer than 2,000 Latin manuscripts survive from the period before AD 800; from the century after ad 800, we have over 7,000. For every eighth-century copy of a text that has survived, we have ten copies from the ninth century (Lowe 193771; Bischoff 1998, 2004; Ganz 2004). Every serious student of Latin Late Antiquity must at some point acknowledge their dependence on Carolingian scribes and their masters, and reckon with the consequences. Traditionally, the story of the textual production of the Carolingian Renaissance, or more precisely its program of reform ( correctio), is told in a spirit of celebration; we give thanks, for example, for the preservation of Ammianus and Boethius. But empires, as Charlemagne knew from experience and from his favorite book, the City of God, are not built without loss, and we must also assess the cost of Carolingian cultural imperialism (Nelson 2006: 12).
The premise of correctio was a bold and self-conscious development in script and in language. Crudely put, before the Carolingian revolution, the Latin world knew a diversity of scripts, fundamentally based in late Roman upper-case lettering (uncial and rustic capitals). Around this had developed regional variations and systems of cursive script and shorthand (such as the so-called Tironian notes to be found in Merovingian manuscripts, a system itself subject to Carolingian correctio: Ganz 1991). From the late eighth century, having acquired the largest empire since the fall of Rome in the west, the Franks sought to impose a new uniformity in Latin book culture. Carolingian minuscule was a regular script that imposed not only new standards with regard to letter formation and conjunction but also new conventions on the page - the practices of word separation and punctuation, for example - which we moderns take for granted, but which were unknown in the Later Roman Empire (Parkes 1992; Ganz 1995). Words in the Carolingian empire were to be seen as well as heard. An oral culture was not enough to guarantee the persistence of memory. ‘‘For what purpose were letters invented? For the renewing of memory so that all you wish may be said; because of the variety of language memory grew weak and letters were invented’’: so a Carolingian grammar book (Berlin, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Diez B. Sant. 66: 345-6, cited by Ganz 1995: 796).
In this new age of facilitated Reproduzierbarkeit, a new literary language came into being. Although the matter remains open to debate, an influential analysis holds that, in ‘‘correcting’’ for what they saw to be the corrupted Latin of the texts they received, and in restoring what they presumed to be classical purity, the Carolingians instituted a decisive break with the living Latinity of the late Roman period (Wright 1982; Banniard 1992). Henceforward, there was a divide between the high literary language of the court and the vernaculars spoken around the empire. Here, perhaps most clearly, we see that the price of correctio in the name of preservation is inevitably to change the character of the thing so ‘‘preserved.’’
What, in terms of texts, did the Carolingians copy and what, can we guess, has been lost? Classicists, of course, owe their Roman history and poetry - Virgil, Livy, Caesar - to Carolingian scribes (Reynolds 1983). The expansion of Greek learning at St. Gall, for example, is often celebrated (Herren 1988). But we are entitled to guess at what has not come down to us. A large part of the story here (in particular with regard to municipal archives) doubtless has to do with the poor capacity of papyrus to survive the conditions of the Latin west. Also, of course, we must reckon with the predilection for Christian sources over non-Christian. But it is not just the secular inheritance that may have been impoverished (for example, the opening books of Ammianus, not transmitted in the one surviving ninth-century copy, Reynolds 1983: 6-8). Those Christian texts that were most in demand have suffered in the process: new copies have superseded old ones, leaving us little trace of what came before. Hence we have no copies of the Rule of St. Benedict prior to the eighth century, because Charlemagne was confident (or put it about that he was confident) that he had received the autograph direct from Montecassino (Zelzer 1989). Similarly, once Pope Hadrian II had made his edition of the Register of Pope Gregory the Great, compressing many thousands of letters on papyrus into two parchment volumes, this seems to have sapped the will of even the papal chancery to preserve the whole archive (Castaldi 2004).
Correctio involved canon formation. The Carolingians were largely (although not solely) responsible for the construction of the Latin patristic tradition. The four Latin Fathers - Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the Great - emerge clearly in the library catalogs of the ninth century (McKitterick 1989). If we scan backwards, we can see this canon taking shape in Bede, Isidore of Seville, Gregory, and before him, in the late Roman period itself, in Gennadius of Marseille and in Jerome (Vessey 1989). The antiquity of the canon was crucial for the Carolingians - more so, in fact, than its content. Take for example the pseudo-Gelasian decree regarding approved and nonapproved Christian reading (De libris recipiendis et non recipiendis). This is found first in late eighth-century copies, and then in abundance. Clearly, its systematic listing appealed to the Carolingian program of correctio, even though its prescriptions were not in fact followed. If they had been, we would know about the Roman cult of the martyrs only through hearsay. Scribes in fact cheerfully ignored the authority of Gelasius, even as they copied what they presumed to be his decree: in Fulda Bonifatius 2, the very earliest copy, the decree is followed by a work of Faustus of Riez, who is squarely on the pseudo-Gelasian list of‘‘nonapproved’’ authors (Dobschutz 1912).
Such wilfulness could surely cut both ways. In other contexts, the Carolingians were ruthless in implementing what they took to be the guidelines of the tradition they received. Let us take the case of Jerome, revered by the Carolingians for his correctio of the Bible. Every year, for over fifty years, the scriptorium at Tours produced two complete copies of Jerome’s Vulgate (Ganz 1995: 799-800). What were the consequences of this extraordinary effort for the copying of the correspondence and the controversies of Jerome? It is tempting to suppose that the letters of Paula, Eusto-chium, and Demetrias fell by the wayside here - although we should remember that it was in Jerome’s interest, as the literary client of these great patrons, to preserve his writings: the great could secure a record for themselves in the more durable medium of stone (Brubaker 1997). It is likely, however, that Jerome’s opponents were consigned to oblivion by Carolingian scribes. We know of Jovinian and Vigilantius only through Hieronymian polemical attack; but we know enough to see that these men themselves enjoyed exalted backing from the later Roman aristocracy. It has been shown, in fact, that the majority supported their position, and we should not be surprised by Jerome’s disgrace in the ad 380 s (Hunter 1987; Cooper 1996). Voluble as he remained in exile in Bethlehem, he cut an increasingly isolated figure. The evidence suggests, for example, that the virgin Demetrias and her kin paid more attention to Augustine than to Jerome when defining her profile as a patron (Kurdock, forthcoming). Only in the ninth century did Jerome emerge as the victor in his debates, and as an authority figure in his own right, as opposed to a decorative ‘‘ear-tickler’’ of Roman matronae (Fontaine 1988, on Jerome’s patron Pope Damasus).
Carolingian scriptoria determined not only the content of what has been passed on, but also its form. The idea of correctio involved generic principles of ordering. Sometimes those principles were inherited, as in the case of Gregory’s Register, where Hadrian followed long established chancery practice in dating the letters to indictions. Similarly, the emperor Charles the Bald, taking the Theodosian Code as his model, oversaw the fashioning in the Edict of Pitres (ad 864) of ‘‘the most remarkable piece of legislation between Justinian’s Novels and the twelfth century’’ (Nelson 1996: 93). But in other contexts, the Carolingians created their own genres. The most important of these, perhaps, was the historical annal. Annals ordered and recorded contemporary events according to the Incarnational dating system developed by Dionysus Exiguus in the fifth century, deployed first in historical writing by
Bede, and then taken over by myriad and unknown Carolingian compilers. A similar passion for order and system is displayed in the legendary of saints’ lives, and in Benedict of Aniane’s intervention in the tradition of the monastic Rule - both topics that I consider further below.
We can overestimate Carolingian textual uniformity. Sometimes, in fact, the uniformity is in the eye of later beholders. With regard to the annalistic tradition, we have recently begun to perceive the extent to which the procedures of nineteenth-century editors have suggested a degree of organization that was not in fact there (Reimitz 2004; Corradini, forthcoming). Thus, the so-called ‘‘Royal Frankish Annals’’ or the ‘‘Annals of Fulda’’ represent a bundle of traditions, the synoptic version of which was the creation of Georg Pertz in his edition for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. The most recent scholarship on Carolingian manuscript assembly has emphasized its profoundly improvised and provisional quality. For example, an anatomy of an imposing Carolingian history book containing the Royal Frankish Annals, Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne, the Liber Pontificalis, and an account of the martyrdom of St. Stephen plausibly relates the assemblage to a specific moment in September AD 869, the imperial coronation of Charles the Bald staged by Hincmar of Reims at St. Stephen’s in Metz, following the death of Charles’s nephew Lothar II (Reimitz 2000b). Although the codex endured, doubtless to be used by later generations of readers, its particular configuration of Frankish history, to celebrate the conjunction of the West Frankish and the Middle Kingdoms, was somewhat outmoded by August of the following year, when Charles and his brother Louis the German redivided the Frankish heartlands between them. Five years later, Charles’s coronation at Rome at the hands of Pope John YIII rendered the earlier coronation, and the commemorative manuscript that accompanied it, entirely obsolete.
Put another way, the Carolingian project of correctio and the ordering of tradition was an attempt to harness powers that they knew to be quite beyond their control. These empire builders and makers of memory were well versed in the frailty of institutional procedures, their liability to be disrupted and subverted. In the AD 820s, a monk at Reichenau experienced a terrifying vision of the emperor Charlemagne in hell, his genitals gnawed at by beasts for sins unspecified (Dutton 1994). A poor woman at Laon was recorded as experiencing a similar vision. It took another monk (possibly also from Reichenau) to experience the reassuring vision that everything was in order, and that the emperor had been spared the pains of hell, thanks to the prayers of the living. In recording these visions, Carolingian authors reached for late antique apocalyptic literature such as the Apocalypse of Paul and (in the same tradition) the fourth book of the Dialogues of Gregory the Great. The otherworldly landscape evoked by these texts was a space in which it was possible to meditate on Augustine’s grim pronouncements on the costs of empire, and on its fragility (e. g., August. De civ. D. 19. 7).
What these stories also point to is the prime mover of the ninth-century cultural memory in the Latin west: the greatness of Charlemagne. The first layman to receive biographical treatment in the post-Roman west, Charles was ‘‘magnus’’ in the eyes of his contemporaries (Lehmann 1929). He was a man who never slept, whose death was almost impossible to apprehend (Dutton 1994). Here was a mortal who had apparently managed to lift himself out of the temporal ebb and flow, to invite comparison with the fabled greatness of Rome. Charlemagne was of course to die, and his empire was to prove pitiably short-lived. Already in the ad 830s, as disputes between Louis the Pious and his sons spiraled out of control, Carolingian intellectuals were asking themselves where it had all gone wrong. But they continued to do so in the language of ancient and late antique Rome excited by Charlemagne’s monumental stature (Ganz 1987).
‘‘Greatness,’’ then, was abroad. It was a cultural good mediating the relation between the past and the present. By the end of the century, greatness was bestowed on others, notably, as we shall see, Gregory the Great. And while the political superstructures of the Carolingian empire collapsed, its religious and cultural base structures, set up for the recall and organization of the late Roman past, endured. To two such structures we now turn: the cult of the saints, and the monastic tradition.
World History
