Editorial

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It is a pleasure to open this new volume of Early Medieval Europe by
announcing that the

2009 Early Medieval Europe Essay Prize was awarded

to Charles West for his article ‘The Significance of the Carolingian
Advocate’ (Volume

17, Issue 2).

This volume of the journal sees some changes among its editors. We

would like to welcome Chris Loveluck and Ian Wood as new members of
the Editorial Board; we are truly excited at the prospect of working with
them. Meanwhile, Chris Scull has stepped down as editor. We would like
to express our gratitude for all he has done during his period with us.

Paul Fouracre is also leaving us, although he will stay on as one of the

journal’s Corresponding Editors. The impact that Paul has had on Early
Medieval Europe, first as one of its editors and then as co-ordinating
editor, has been tremendous. That we have consistently been able to
attract submissions of outstanding quality is largely due to his energy,
vision and intellectual rigour. Working with him has been, for all of us at
Early Medieval Europe, inspiring, enlightening and immensly fun. Thank
you, Paul.

ANTONIO SENNIS

Early Medieval Europe

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A Dark Age Peter Principle: Beowulf’s

incompetence threshold

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2..25

ren Falk

Many readers, recognizing the incompatibility of heroism with the duties of
kingship, have argued that Beowulf tells a story of colossal failure. Drawing
on anthropological theory, I propose that the protagonist is more Big-Man
than king and that his heroism, far from a socially dysfunctional flaw, is in
fact the leash by which society yanks him back from establishing himself as
king. Beowulf thus speaks to an aristocracy disinclined to submit to royalty.
The poem shines a light on Anglo-Saxons’ aversion to despotic rule: to protect
its own decentralized political structure, society against the state foredooms
King Beowulf to death.

‘In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incom-
petence.’

Beowulf is difficult material to work, especially for butter-fingered histo-
rians, accustomed to kneading less nimble sources than verse.

On the

The origins of this paper, in an Early Medieval Europe session at the

38th International

Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo,

9 May 2003), should still be evident in its tone and

pacing, which I have not tried to revise radically. I am grateful to Danuta Shanzer for inviting
me to take part in that session; to Edward James, Walter Goffart and other participants for their
comments; and to Paul Fouracre for his patient encouragement. Thanks also to Nimrod Barri
for introducing me to the joys of Old English and to Guillaume Ratel for finding fault with my
French; to John Keane for his suggestive discussion of Clastres (Reflections on Violence (London,

1996), p. 138); to Jennifer Harris and Doug Puett for stimulating my thoughts on the subject;

and to Early Medieval Europe’s anonymous referee for an engaged, critical reading, packed with
helpful pointers.

L.F. Peter and R. Hull, The Peter Principle (New York,

1969), p. 26; see also Peter’s Corollary:

‘In time, every post in a hierarchy tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to
carry out its duties’ (p.

178). All references to the text of Beowulf are by line number, following

Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. R.D. Fulk, R.E. Bjork and J.D. Niles, Toronto
Old English Series

21, 4th edn (Toronto, 2008), except as otherwise noted; diacritical notations

have been omitted. Translations of Beowulf are adapted from R.M. Liuzza’s Beowulf: A New
Verse Translation (Peterborough, ON,

2000).

Cf. J.D. Niles: ‘Paradoxically, studies of the historical elements in Beowulf are likely to be most
productive when they are willing to let history go’: ‘Myth and History’, in R.E. Bjork and J.D.
Niles (eds), A Beowulf Handbook (Lincoln,

1997), pp. 213–32, at p. 229.

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one hand, one faces the opacity of the poem itself: there is so little we
know with confidence about it – and so much of what each of us does
know with any degree of certainty is flatly contradicted by what others
fancy they do, no less securely. (One need only pick up the composite
Toronto volume on The Dating of Beowulf to see how this particular song
and dance goes. The subtitle of Eric Stanley’s concluding chapter says it
all: ‘Some Doubts and No Conclusions’.)

On the other hand, if J.R.R.

Tolkien found it unprofitable ‘to read all that has been printed on, or
touching on, this poem’ by

1936, the rate of publication in Beowulfiana

nowadays literally makes it impossible to familiarize oneself with all of
the secondary literature and (almost as literally) ensures that nothing
really new could be said.

On the third hand (even merely to gripe about

Beowulf ’s terrific complexity, one needs three hands), certain rules of
etiquette have sedimented around the poem, setting limits to what can be
ventured about it without offending against decorum. Ever since Tolkien
issued a stern admonition against the practice, most readers have come to
reject as Very Bad Form any analysis ‘that is directed [not] to the under-
standing of [the] poem as a poem’ but seeks, rather, to reduce it to a
historian’s turnstile: a gateway into the early Middle Ages, which must be
traversed, of course, but which hardly constitutes a destination in its own
right. ‘Beowulf ’, rebukes Tolkien, ‘has been used as a quarry of fact and
fancy far more assiduously than it has been studied as a work of art.’
Critics travelling in his wake have seen fit to heed his call and turn back
from excavating the poem to reading it.

Another of these ubiquitous rules of etiquette states that any novel

investigation must start out by acknowledging the seminal role Tolkien’s
‘Monsters and Critics’ essay has played in setting the current research
agenda. Since I have already observed this particular custom, I shall for
the rest of my paper take the liberty of flying in the face of propriety. I
shall do so, first, by staying aloof from the kind of close reading that
Tolkien made de rigueur and opting, rather, for the excavational mode.
My concern is not so much with Beowulf the poem as with the historical

See E.J. Stanley, ‘The Date of Beowulf: Some Doubts and No Conclusions’, in C. Chase (ed.),
The Dating of Beowulf, Toronto Old English Series

6, 2nd edn (Toronto, 1997; orig. 1981),

pp.

197–211.

See J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, Proceedings of the British Academy

22 (1936), pp. 245–95; repr. in L.E. Nicholson (ed.), An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism (Notre

Dame and London,

1963), pp. 51–103, at p. 51. On the current state of affairs, see A. Orchard,

A Critical Companion to Beowulf (Cambridge,

2003), p. 3: ‘such has been the proliferation of

books and articles on Beowulf (with a new item a week appearing on average over the last
decade), that simply controlling the secondary material has become a near-impossible task’.

Tolkien, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, p.

52. On the distinction between reading and

excavating texts, see further M. Beard, ‘Re-reading (Vestal) Virginity’, in R. Hawley and B.
Levick (eds), Women in Antiquity: New Assessments (London and New York,

1995), pp. 166–77,

at pp.

171–2.

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reality which underlies it; nor do I balk at handling the specific literary
artefact cavalierly, if need be, in order to get at this submerged history.
Second, I shall impose on Beowulf ’s historical specificity some unabash-
edly anachronistic matrices. In other words, in my quest for the Dark
Ages, I import alien thought tools, enta geweorc, explicitly fashioned to
make sense of other times, other places and other mores. I wear as my
justification nothing more than the methodological eclectic’s traditional
(indeed, only) ribbon: use whatever works.

Finally, I shall offend by

suggesting that one of the very few points of consensus we do have about
this poem – that its subject matter is the resolute heroism of a bygone
(perhaps fictive) era, that ‘great contribution of early Northern literature’
(to quote Tolkien one last time), ‘the theory of courage . . . heathen,
noble, and hopeless’ – is, if not outright wrong, certainly misleading.

Let

me begin, then, with ‘heroism’, which – together with ‘hierarchy’ and
‘honour’ – is one of the watchwords organizing my discussion.

Heroism looms large in most readers’ perception of Beowulf, and

though few are so foolhardy as to offer a restrictive definition, the primary
focus is usually on the martial virtues. Beowulf himself most clearly
embodies the heroic ideal, epitomizing warrior values – bravery and
physical prowess – on an epic, larger-than-life scale. ‘[T]he notions
surrounding the idea of the hero are all associated with battle, war,
prowess, courage, bravery, self-defence, and defence of one’s king or
nation’, summarizes Leo Carruthers, adding: ‘Beowulf is . . . presented as
perfect hero.’

It is easy to find specific lines in the poem which supply

grist for this perception, such as Beowulf ’s pre-Grendelian boast: ‘I
resolved when I set out over the waves . . . that I would entirely fulfil the
wishes of your people, or fall slain, fast in the grip of my foe. I shall
perform a deed of manly courage, or in this meadhall I will await the end
of my days!’

Beowulf, whose physical prowess is presented repeatedly in

a variety of settings – contending with the savage Atlantic, tearing limbs

Historians seldom speak the word ‘eclectic’ except to disparage, but see N.Z. Davis’s prodi-
giously inspiring ‘A Life of Learning: Charles Homer Haskins Lecture for

1997’, ACLS Occa-

sional Paper

39, pp. 14–15.

Tolkien, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, pp.

70–1. One can hardly begin to page

through any work of Beowulf scholarship without finding enunciations of this consensus.

L. Carruthers, ‘Kingship and Heroism in Beowulf ’, in L. Carruthers (ed.), Heroes and Heroines
in Medieval English Literature: A Festschrift presented to André Crépin on the Occasion of his
Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Cambridge,

1994), pp. 19–29, at pp. 24–5. J. Garde, ‘Sapientia, ubi sunt,

and the Heroic Ideal in Beowulf ’, Studia Neophilologica

66 (1993), pp. 159–73, is slightly more

inclusive (noting, e.g., Beowulf’s ‘gentle nature . . . and spiritual aspirations’), but similarly
privileges martial characteristics: ‘extraordinary strength, size and reckless courage . . . enduring
loyalty . . . consistent boasting . . . poor reputation and persistent desire for praise [and] an
heroic penchant for revenge’ (p.

160).

Beowulf, ll.

632–8: ‘Ic þæt hogode, þa ic on holm gestah . . . þæt ic anunga eowra leoda / willan

geworhte oþðe on wæl crunge / feondgrapum fæst. Ic gefremman sceal / eorlic ellen, oþðe
endedæg / on þisse meoduhealle minne gebidan.’

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off nocturnal intruders, gripping with the strength of thirty men – here
commits to exerting himself to his fullest extent in Hroðgar’s service,
underscoring that he means to die before he fails in his task. Fifty years
on, neither his courage nor his commitment waver: before confronting
the dragon that will, indeed, end his days, he reiterates his vow that he
‘will do heroic deeds with daring . . . or grim death and fatal battle will
bear away your lord!’

Critics also sometimes stress elements like loyalty to one’s lord, cama-

raderie among brothers at arms and generosity towards one’s subordi-
nates as components of heroism. Beowulf’s touching devotion to his ‘dear
Hygelac’, Hroðgar’s lament for Æschere, his ‘shoulder-to-shoulder com-
panion’, or Beowulf’s (misguided, as it turns out) munificence towards
his retainers in later life can all be cited as examples.

But these latter

elements have received less attention in the portrayal of heroism, it seems
to me – note their absence from Carruthers’s recipe – because they
concern not so much the heroic individual in solitary relief as the hero
fully embedded within a societal matrix. And in the view of present-day
scholarship, genuine heroism demands a great man’s abstraction from
any communal context, to tower alone above a blank social horizon. The
poem, in Roy Liuzza’s estimation, ‘celebrates the warrior in heroic isola-
tion – fighting for honor and fame rather than hearth and home . . . root-
less, unmarried, without progeny’. Other critics likewise find the hero’s
relationship with society to be of secondary interest, at best. ‘Beowulf ’,
pronounces James W. Earl, ‘is a hymn to the individual hero as much as
to the group he belongs to – and which he transcends.’

Heroism in Beowulf is thus chiefly a matter of individual martial

aptitude, a distillation of manly prowess.

What, then, does it mean for

Beowulf, ll.

2535–7: ‘Ic mid elne sceall [eorlscype efnan] . . . oððe guð nimeð, / feorhbealu frecne

frean eowerne.’

Beowulf, l.

2434: ‘Hygelac min’; l. 1326: ‘eaxlgestealla’; ll. 2865–74 for Wiglaf’s assessment of the

futility of Beowulf ’s gift-giving.

Liuzza, ‘Preface’ to his translation of Beowulf, pp.

9–48, at p. 29, and J.W. Earl, Thinking about

Beowulf (Stanford,

1994), p. 185. Cf. K. O’Brien O’Keeffe, ‘Heroic Values and Christian Ethics’,

in M. Godden and M. Lapidge (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature
(Cambridge,

1991), pp. 107–25, who begins by stating that ‘[t]he touchstone of [the heroic] life

– as represented in Old English literature at least – is the vital relationship between retainer and
lord, whose binding virtue is loyalty’, but then goes on to argue that ‘a warrior’s paramount goal
is the achievement of a lasting reputation’, a quest for personal glory rather than imbrication in
a web of fidelity (pp.

107–8).

R.W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford,

1999), makes the same claim

for the chivalric literature of the High Middle Ages more generally, noting ‘the utterly tireless,
almost obsessional emphasis placed on personal prowess as the key chivalric trait. Not simply
one quality among others in a list of virtues, prowess often stands as a one-word definition of
chivalry . . . Prowess was thought to bring other qualities in its train . . . and these qualities may
have more appeal for most modern readers than prowess itself; but we will radically misunder-
stand the medieval view and the medieval reality if we push the bloody, sweaty, muscular work
done with lance and sword swiftly and antiseptically to the side’ (pp.

135, 138–9).

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George Clark to declare that ‘[t]he poem’s theme and the hero’s goal are
one’?

What, in other words, is at stake in insisting on the absolute

centrality of heroism? Clark is navigating, I think, among several cross-
currents of incompatible opinion, concerned with the dating, religious
outlook and moral thrust of the poem, whose consensual core is simply
this: that Beowulf, whatever its original context and ultimate message,
depicts a world in which heroic ideals possess an urgent reality. By
lumping together the many contested aspects of interpretation, I do not
mean to make light of the issues under debate. Surely it matters enor-
mously for our understanding of the poem, and of the history encoded in
it, whether Beowulf originated in the seventh century or in the eleventh;
whether it expresses an essentially pagan world-view or a Christian cri-
tique (perhaps even parody) of such a world-view; and whether the poet
means to extol Beowulf and his world or damn them. For the purpose of
the present discussion, however, it suffices to point out that the many
contested interpretations all tie back to our understanding of the indi-
vidual protagonist’s warlike stature within the poem. Clark’s formulation
should be acceptable to most, perhaps all, commentators on Beowulf:
correctly interpreting the image of heroism, of which Beowulf is the
ultimate representative, amounts to discovering a skeleton key to the
poem as a whole.

Beowulf ’s first

2200 lines seem relatively unproblematic in this respect;

they sing the praises of an abundantly successful overachiever. The ques-
tion is what to make of the last

1000 lines, where scholars have perceived

mounting tension between Beowulf’s two roles, that of hero and that of
king. The final third of the poem sees the protagonist die in an apparently
futile heroic exertion against a dragon. His suicidal readiness to lay down
his own life for his people could doubtless be excused, were it not that
both he and his achievements seem to go up in a thin plume of smoke: not
the grand exit we usually expect from our heroes,

and especially trouble-

some for those of us who have become accustomed to Hollywood por-
trayals of heroism. (One can but wonder what might have happened if
Ken Loach or any other Kitchen Sink director had got his hands on Neil
Gaiman and Roger Avary’s script, casting an undigitally enhanced
Michael Caine perhaps in the title role, and Lynne Perrie as Grendel’s
mother.)

A wide variety of ‘solutions’ have been offered for the seeming

‘problem’ of Beowulf’s inauspicious demise, all of which retain a focus on

G. Clark, ‘The Hero and the Theme’, in Beowulf Handbook, pp.

271–90, at p. 290.

Cf. Liuzza, ‘Preface’, p.

36: ‘For all [his praiseworthy heroism], Beowulf dies, and his death has

none of the triumphant sanctification of the death of a martyr like King Edmund, or a
Christian hero like Charlemagne’s champion in the French Chanson de Roland ’; cf. N. Kroll,
‘Beowulf: The Hero as Keeper of Human Polity’, Modern Philology

84 (1986), pp. 117–29, esp.

pp.

120, 129. See also Klaeber’s Beowulf, p. 270, n. to l. 3155b.

Cf. Beowulf: (Director’s Cut), dir. R. Zemeckis (Warner,

2007), DVD.

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the individual hero and king. Listen, for instance, to the tone of the
following quotations: Beowulf’s ‘decision to fight [the dragon] was not
the expression of selfish or misguided individualism which lightly put the
realm in jeopardy, but sprang from the consuming desire for that arete
characteristic of the hero and not easily understood by lesser men’.

again, ‘the parallel between the circumstances surrounding Beowulf’s last
hours and those surrounding Christ’s would . . . have sufficed for the
identification of [the dragon] episode with the Christian story of salva-
tion. But a climactic detail is added in this third allegorization of the story
which emphasizes the kind of savior – a savior who saves by losing his own
life.’

Finally (and conversely), ‘Beowulf [illustrates] unforgettably how

prodigious pride can make monsters of men’.

Each of these critics (like

dozens more I might have cited) locks in violent disagreement with the
others on how we should evaluate Beowulf; but all agree that our evalu-
ation of his heroic singularity is paramount to our decoding of the poem.

The de-emphasis on the social aspect of heroism emerges most clearly

from analyses like John Leyerle’s and those of others who have either
elaborated his thesis or objected to it. Leyerle does address the ‘problem’
of Beowulf ’s death as a social rather than merely personal issue, but his
conception of society remains so staunchly focused on individual action
that the collective dimension recedes:

The hero follows a code that exalts indomitable will and valour in the
individual, but society requires a king who acts for the common good,
not for his own glory . . . Heroic society inevitably encouraged a king
to act the part of a hero, yet the heroic king, however glorious, was apt
to be a mortal threat to his nation . . . [H]eroic society was inherently
unstable, for men who had been accustomed to conduct suitable to an
individual hero could not adjust to a rather different conduct suitable
to a king.

G.N. Garmonsway, ‘Anglo-Saxon Heroic Attitudes’, in J.B. Bessinger, Jr and R.P. Creed (eds),
Franciplegius: Medieval and Linguistic Studies in Honor of Francis Peabody Magoun (New York,

1965), pp. 139–46, at pp. 142–3.

M.B. McNamee, SJ, ‘Beowulf – An Allegory of Salvation?’, Journal of English and Germanic
Philology

59 (1960), pp. 190–207; repr. in R.D. Fulk (ed.), Interpretations of Beowulf: A Critical

Anthology (Bloomington and Indianapolis,

1991), pp. 88–102, at p. 100.

A. Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf Manuscript (Cambridge,

1995), p. 171.

On this point (if hardly on any other), I am thus in full agreement with G.V. Smithers, who
declares that ‘[t]here is probably no reader of Beowulf today who does not think of it as a heroic
poem’; see ‘Destiny and the Heroic Warrior in Beowulf ’, in J.L. Rosier (ed.), Philological Essays:
Studies in Old and Middle English Language and Literature in Honour of Herbert Dean Meritt
(The Hague and Paris,

1970), pp. 65–81, at p. 75.

J. Leyerle, ‘Beowulf the Hero and the King’, Medium Ævum

34 (1965), pp. 89–102, at pp. 89,

97–8. Cf. R.W. Hanning, ‘Beowulf as Heroic History’, Medievalia et Humanistica, ns 5 (1974),

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The society Leyerle imagines is rigidly hierarchical. The requirements it
makes of those who occupy the middle rungs, those who have significant
responsibilities both upwards and downwards, are categorically different
from the demands placed on the one and only office-holder at the apex.
But far from analysing the interplay among different positions within this
structure, Leyerle focuses on the personal obligations of men placed
amidships and opposes them to those of the captain on the bridge. The
contrast he sets up between heroism and kingship is thus really a contrast
between two modes of individual conduct, rather than between the
singular and the plural.

Nevertheless, Leyerle helps articulate the Problemstellung, the manner

in which the tension tugging at heroism is usually articulated: as a strain
of individualism not quite commensurable with the social good. A hero,
the argument goes, is a radical free agent; a king, in contrast, is the
lynchpin holding society together. ‘The question remains whether it is
the duty of a king to die in the heroic manner’, Carruthers muses
rhetorically, ‘or whether Hrothgar acted in a wiser fashion by inspiring a
younger and stronger warrior to fight for him.’ He hastens to answer his
own question, chiding ‘King Beowulf [for] insist[ing] on acting the hero
– to relive his youth, in a sense – thereby placing his people in danger’.

Considered from a systemic point of view, modern students of Beowulf
find no enduring value in heroism (even if some praise its virtue from
other perspectives). Harry Berger and Marshall Leicester express this
point clearly:

Beowulf’s [reign suggests] the double bind that confronts the great
hero as ruler: if by his excellence he holds fearful aggressors in abey-
ance . . . he erodes the Geat warrior ethos; if, on the other hand, he
wages continual warfare[,] every trophy he wins creates new enemies

pp.

77–102, at pp. 86, 97: ‘[Beowulf is] a “chosen” individual, uncompromisingly dedicated to

his destiny and endowed with powers and virtues that make him unique . . . In the last part of
Beowulf . . . cohesion gives way to isolation, disjunction, and impotence. Beowulf ’s obligations
as king come into conflict with the heroic imperatives still operating within his old frame.’
Other interpretations that, in paralleling, following or resisting Leyerle, isolate Beowulf the king
from his social context, include J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s
Son’ (orig.

1953); repr. in Tree and Leaf; Smith of Wootton Major; The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth

(London,

1975), pp. 147–75, at pp. 168–75; J. Halverson, ‘The World of Beowulf ’, ELH 36

(

1969), pp. 593–608; H. Berger, Jr and H.M. Leicester, Jr, ‘Social Structure as Doom: The

Limits of Heroism in Beowulf ’, in R.B. Burlin and E.B. Irving, Jr (eds), Old English Studies in
Honour of John C. Pope (Toronto,

1974), pp. 37–79; J.D. Niles, Beowulf: The Poem and Its

Tradition (Cambridge, MA,

1983), pp. 235–47; Earl, Thinking about Beowulf, pp. 175–87; C.R.

Davis, Beowulf and the Demise of Germanic Legend in England, Albert Bates Lord Studies in Oral
Tradition

17 (New York and London, 1996), pp. 147–50; K.J. Wanner, ‘Warriors, Wyrms, and

Wyrd: The Paradoxical Fate of the Germanic Hero/King in Beowulf ’, Essays in Medieval Studies

16 (1999), pp. 1–15; and Liuzza, ‘Preface’, pp. 37–9.

Carruthers, ‘Kingship and Heroism in Beowulf ’, p.

28.

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and lust for vengeance; in both cases . . . his people become losers. The
hero becomes the only winner.

In proclaiming Beowulf a victor for having fallen in battle, the two are
evidently adopting a point of view internal to heroic culture – the dying
Geatish king is only ‘the only winner’ inasmuch as he attains glory
through his doomed action – and in so doing, they privilege the indi-
vidual’s take on the warrior ethos over any collective assessment. The
hero actively chooses death before dishonour; his people, a huddled mass,
must passively endure any fate to which his action consigns them.

The Beowulf poet seems to provide abundant justification for such a

focus. The voices he quotes glorify the hero consistently for his singular
daring: ‘Now by yourself you have done such deeds that your fame will
endure always and forever’, marvels Hroðgar, and Beowulf himself boasts:
‘always on foot I would go before [Hygelac], alone in the vanguard’. Even
when he takes his position in formation, then, the hero cannot but pull
ahead of the multitude, as also happens when Beowulf wrestles with
Grendel at Hroðgar’s hall and with Grendel’s mother in her mere.

Likewise Sigemund, the archetypal dragon slayer, ‘alone assayed a bold
deed’; and Wiglaf – once he is done berating Beowulf’s do-nothing
retainers – assimilates his dead lord to Sigemund’s paradigm, modestly
editing his own role out of the narrative: ‘God, the Ruler of victories,
allowed that he, alone with his blade, might avenge himself.’ Even
Grendel, a ‘fearsome solitary prowler’, earns some measure of heroic
respect by striving ‘one against all’.

In contrast, the poet has Wiglaf complain that society at large gets the

short end of the stick: ‘Often many men must suffer misery through the
will of one, as has now happened to us.’ Wiglaf’s comment is one of

Berger and Leicester, ‘Social Structure as Doom’, p.

65. Cf., e.g., M. Puhvel, ‘The Concept of

Heroism in the Anglo-Saxon Epic’, in T. Pàroli (ed.), La funzione dell’eroe germanico: storicità,
metafora, paradigma. Atti del Convegno internazionale di studio, Roma,

6–8 Maggio 1993 (Rome,

1995), pp. 57–73. Puhvel discerns in the Germanic hero’s ‘obsessive-seeming concern with

attainment of maximum glory at every turn and at any cost’ (p.

67) a motivation of personal

salvation in the afterlife; he is utterly unconcerned with the fate of the hero’s society.

Beowulf, ll.

953–5: ‘Þu þe self hafast / dædum gefremed þæt þin dom lyfað / awa to aldre’; ll.

2497–8: ‘symle ic him on feðan beforan wolde, / ana on orde’; ll. 794–805 for the ineffectiveness

of Beowulf’s companions in the fight at Heorot; and ll.

1602–5 for the Geats’ watch at the mere.

See also ll.

424–32, 696–700, 2532–5, 2538–41, 2642–4, and perhaps even 2367–8 (where

Beowulf, ‘earm anhaga’ ‘wretched loner’, is the sole survivor of the disasterous campaign against
the Frisians).

Beowulf, ll.

888–9: ‘ana geneðde / frecne dæde’; ll. 2874–6: ‘him God uðe, / sigora waldend, þæt

he hyne sylfne gewræc / ana mid ecge’; ll.

165, 145: ‘atol angengea . . . [wan] ana wið eallum’. We

may note in passing that Grendel’s dam initially attacks Beowulf accompanied by ‘sædeor
monig’ (‘many a sea-beast’, l.

1510), but she, too, ends up grappling with the invader of her

‘ælwihta eard’ (‘alien homeland’, l.

1500) in single combat. K.S. Kiernan argues that she should

be counted ‘among the great Germanic heroines’: ‘Grendel’s Heroic Mother’, In Geardagum

(

1984), pp. 13–33, at pp. 13–14.

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several sombre notes sounded towards the end of the poem,

which have

been taken as confirmation of a dark future awaiting the Geats. Appar-
ently, society is unable to weather the storms ahead of it without heroic
Beowulf at the helm. It should be noted, however, that the evidence for
Geatish collapse, though it has been accepted at face value even by so
sceptical a reader as Eric Stanley, is in fact rather wispy. ‘The destruction
of the Geatish nation is foretold; and in Beowulf disasters foretold are
disasters come true’, writes Stanley, reinforcing readers’ inclination to
mistake hypothetical prediction for affirmation of fact. Stanley himself
offers reason to dismiss portions of the gloomy forecast: in his opinion,
lines

2884–90 ‘refer to [the cowards and] their families within the tribe

rather than to the tribe as a whole’, and he rightly declines ‘to accept . . .
the woman’s lament (lines

315[0]–55) as evidence for anything, since the

manuscript is so badly damaged here’. Other passages certainly anticipate
strife from Franks and Swedes, but hardly anything that should be
considered (in the words of another arch-sceptic) ‘an unprecedented and
inexplicable cataclysm’, in excess of ‘normal Dark Age activity’.

Even the

lines that, to Stanley, provide ‘the firmest evidence in the poem of the
subsequent destruction of the Geats’ – ‘[let the] fair maiden have no
ring-ornament around her neck, but sad in mind, stripped of gold, she
must walk a foreign path, not once but often, now that the leader of our
troop has laid aside laughter’ – are enigmatic enough to sustain more than
one possible interpretation.

Certainly a generic maiden, intimately asso-

ciated with the Geats, is depicted as enduring exile; but whether she is
supposed to stand in for all Geatish women seems less clear-cut. Given
the realities of intertribal sexual unions, be they peace-weaving marriages
or hostile ravishments, the woman who must now depart from the Geats,
golde bereafod, may well be a foreigner herself, like the wife Ongenþeow
had once rescued, golde berofene, from Hæðcyn’s clutches.

We should

also note that the prophecy comes from the mouth of the herald
announcing Beowulf’s death, hardly a disinterested soothsayer. His
lengthy peroration (ll.

2900–3027) harps repeatedly on the theme of the

Beowulf, ll.

3077–8: ‘Oft sceal eorl monig anes willan / wræc adreogan, swa us geworden is’; and

cf. ll.

2884–90, 2910–13, 2922–3, 2999–3007, 3015–27, 3150–5.

E.G. Stanley, ‘Hæthenra Hyht in Beowulf ’, in S.B. Greenfield (ed.), Studies in Old English
Literature in Honor of Arthur G. Brodeur ([Eugene],

1963), pp. 136–51, at pp. 141, 142 n.5; P.H.

Sawyer, The Age of the Vikings,

2nd edn (London, 1971), pp. 202–3.

Stanley, ‘Hæthenra Hyht’, p.

142; Beowulf, ll. 3016–20: ‘ne mægð scyne / habban on healse

hringweorðunge, / ac sceal geomormod, golde bereafod / oft nalles æne elland tredan, / nu se
herewisa hleahtor alegde’. Cf. Klaeber’s Beowulf, p.

263, n. to l. 3018f.: ‘Indeed, some have seen

a bright future for the [Geatish] nation.’

Beowulf, ll.

2928–32: ‘Sona him se froda fæder Ohtheres . . . bryd ahredde, / gomela iomeowlan

golde berofene, / Onelan modor ond Ohtheres’ (‘Immediately the ancient father of Ohthere . . .
rescued his wife, the old man his bride of yore, bereft of her gold, Onela’s mother and
Ohthere’s); I here follow Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg, ed. F. Klaeber,

3rd edn (Boston,

1936).

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great loss the Geats have suffered in the death of their king; he, like
present-day critics, sees the fate of society as hanging by the single thread
of individual prowess, be it Hygelac’s, Eofor’s or Beowulf’s. The narrator
later gives the herald’s speech his endorsement, saying that ‘he did not lie
much’, but even this litotes leaves open the question of whether we are to
take the herald’s every word as literal truth – not to mention the question
of whether we find the narrator himself entirely trustworthy. Historians,
trained to query the objectivity of their sources, should no more accept
the narrator’s praise of Beowulf on faith than we do Eusebius’s laudatio
of Constantine or Einhard’s of Charlemagne.

This brief and unquestionably partial survey of the scholarship has

shown a consensus, then, on some key points: that heroism is at the core
of Beowulf ’s poetic enterprise, unproblematically celebrated in the first
two thirds of the poem; that this heroism is an individual endeavour; and
that kingship, the individual office at the head of the social hierarchy,
is fundamentally incompatible with heroism. The poem’s final third,
recounting Beowulf’s personal downfall and intimating the communal
grief to which the Geats allegedly come, has been taken by many critics,
from Tolkien on, as confirmation of this incompatibility. Even those who
defend Beowulf’s conduct, such as John Niles, do so on grounds other
than that the personal prowess he pits against the dragon serves society’s
best interests.

But what if heroism, rather than a mortal malady afflicting the body

social, were an adaptive social strategy? What if it were a product not just
of individualist vainglory but also of rational collective culture? I should
like to broach the possibility that heroism in Beowulf is of fundamental
utility to society at large. At one level, I have no quarrel with the picture
Leyerle and others have brought into sharp focus: the individual hero’s
single-minded striving for glory is indeed incommensurable with the
stability of royal government. Must we, then, accept that Dark Age men
and women were either blind to this contradiction or, at least, powerless to
address it? This seems to be the only possible conclusion if, with Leyerle
and others, we assume that the contradiction posed a crippling problem for
the kind of society envisioned in the poem. But the core values of heroism,

Beowulf, l.

3029: ‘he ne leag fela’. The trustworthiness of the narrator is a complex issue that

cannot be adequately dealt with here, especially as there is no consensus about the Christian
poet’s attitude towards (or even agency in shaping) his pagan subject matter. In ‘Beowulf ’s
Longest Day: The Amphibious Hero in his Element (Beowulf, ll.

1495b–96)’, Journal of English

and Germanic Philology

106 (2007), pp. 1–21, at pp. 15–18, I hint at reasons for thinking that the

poem occasionally says things other than the poet presumably meant it to; contrast Niles,
Beowulf: The Poem and Its Tradition, pp.

237–8.

See Niles, Beowulf: The Poem and Its Tradition, pp.

243–7. Niles argues that Beowulf demon-

strates heroic concern ‘for the safety of his people’ and ‘the welfare of society’, but these are, as
he says of the king’s death and the fate of the dragon’s hoard, ‘incidental . . . not the point’
(pp.

246, 244).

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which clash with those of kingship, only appear problematic if kingship is
assumed to be in the best interest of the collective. Despite the Beowulf poet’s
moralizing protestations and despite the unexamined royalist prejudice of
modern readers,

I maintain that the poem actually shows a social system

which has little use for kings. In the world of Beowulf, heroism and the
honour code that propels it trump hierarchy not because individualism
overwhelms social responsibility but because the community rejects hier-
archy, dooming its most otiose member – the king – to perdition. Heroic
individualism is socially responsible, helping to immunize the community
against hierarchy. We need not fall back on discredited fictions of Ger-
manic sacral kingship to explain such readiness to dispose of crowned
heads. Instead, we need to shift the focus from the individual to the group;
as Marshall Sahlins long ago pointed out, ‘we have been too long accus-
tomed to perceive rank and rule from the standpoint of the individuals
involved, rather than from the perspective of the total society . . . And then
the breakdowns too . . . have been searched out in men, in “weak” kings or
megalomaniacal dictators.’

As seen from the community’s vantage point,

Beowulf ’s political programme springs from the prosaic sociological
imperative of a relatively undifferentiated society to defend its traditional
liberties against newfangled oppression.

To establish this point, I need to take a detour by way of both Sahlins’s

sunny Oceania and the humid murk of the Amazon jungle. In the

1960s

and

70s, anthropologist Pierre Clastres did fieldwork among some of the

most remote Indian tribes in the world, such as the Guayaki, the Chulupi
and the Ya˛nomamö. The societies Clastres describes in the Paraguayan
and Brazilian rainforest are reminiscent of those which, in Melanesia,
have been characterized as Big-Man societies (in contradistinction from
chieftainships). Sahlins defines the categories:

A petty chieftain is a ‘duly constituted authority’, the official headman
of a community . . . [I]t is an office position: the chief does not make
his preeminence so much as come into it, and his followers are not
so much personal subordinates as they are subject to the office as

See, for instance, Davis, Beowulf and the Demise of Germanic Legend, p.

99: ‘The Beowulf-poet’s

bias . . . is plainly royalist.’ The same bias informs Leyerle’s view of the poem: ‘Beowulf ’s action
as king combines Sigemund’s exploit with the result of Heremod’s. He kills a dragon, not as a
young champion, but as a mature king and loses his life; his people, left without mature
leadership, suffer terrible affliction from their enemies . . . The poem presents a criticism of the
essential weakness of the society it portrays . . . Such excess was inherent in the heroic age’
(‘Beowulf the Hero and the King’, pp.

93, 97). Wanner’s interpretation, articulated in opposition

to Leyerle’s, likewise sees the poem as a whole, and the dragon fight in particular, as a ‘[mythic]
expression of a seemingly insoluble paradox that has been generated by contradictions inherent
in the central ideologies and customs of [Germanic] culture’ (‘Warriors, Wyrms, and Wyrd ’, p.

2).

M.D. Sahlins, ‘Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and
Polynesia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History

5 (1963), pp. 285–303, at p. 300.

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members of the group . . . [In contrast,] the more spectacular ‘big-
man’ . . . makes himself a leader by making others followers: a fisher of
men, inducing compliance by the strength of his personality, by
his persuasiveness, perhaps by his prowess as a warrior, magician, or
gardener, and often by calculated disposition of his wealth, which puts
people under obligation to him and constrains their circumspection
. . . Though he holds no office or ascribed power, he does hold a grip
on others and a superior reputation – by consensus he is, in the
Melanesian phrase, a ‘big-man’.

Clastres does not apply the term Big-Man to the leaders he describes,
retaining instead the traditional nomenclature of chiefdom. But the
vagaries of terminology must not be allowed to mislead. His Amazon
chiefs are unmistakably closer, typologically, to what in Melanesia and
elsewhere have been termed Big-Men.

‘[I]ndependent political bodies

in the region typically include seventy to three hundred persons’, writes
Sahlins, with proportionate differences in territorial extent. (The
Guayaki with whom Clastres lived numbered fewer than one hundred.)
‘[C]haracteristic . . . tribal [organization] is one of politically uninte-
grated segments’, adding up to a ‘scheme of small, separate, and equal
political blocs’.

Leadership in these groups ‘is transient, moving from

person to person with context’, and always marked by

M.D. Sahlins, Tribesmen (Englewood Cliffs,

1968), pp. 21–2 (and cf. pp. 20–7). Cf. K.F.

Otterbein, Comparative Cultural Analysis: An Introduction to Anthropology,

2nd edn (New York,

1977), pp. 129–33. For further elaborations of the concept, see, e.g., M. Godelier, La Production

des Grands hommes: Pouvoir et domination masculine chez les Baruya de Nouvelle-Guinée (Paris,

1982), esp. pp. 157–210 (in English: The Making of Great Men: Male Domination and Power

among the New Guinea Baruya, trans. R. Swyer, Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology

(Cambridge and Paris,

1986), pp. 96–134); M. Godelier and M. Strathern (eds), Big Men and

Great Men: Personifications of Power in Melanesia (Cambridge and Paris,

1991); P. Brown, ‘Big

Man, Past and Present: Model, Person, Hero, Legend’, and eadem, ‘Big Men: Afterthoughts’,
Ethnology

29 (1990), pp. 97–115 and 275–8 respectively, at pp. 97–100 and 276. See also H.

Whitehouse, ‘Leaders and Logics, Persons and Polities’, History and Anthropology

6 (1992),

pp.

103–24, for a searching critique of Godelier, and cf. P. Clastres’s blistering comments in his

‘Les marxistes et leur anthropologie’ (orig.

1978), repr. in his Recherches d’anthropologie politique

(Paris,

1980), pp. 157–70 (in English: ‘Marxists and their Anthropology’, in Archeology of

Violence, trans. J. Herman (New York,

1994), pp. 127–38). On Clastres’s career, see S. Moyn, ‘Of

Savagery and Civil Society: Pierre Clastres and the Transformation of French Political Thought’,
Modern Intellectual History

1 (2004), pp. 55–80, esp. pp. 58–62.

As L. Lindstrom points out, the term chef ‘has survived much longer [as a generic catch-all] in
French anthropological usage’ than its English cognate ‘chief ’: ‘ “Big Man:” A Short Termino-
logical History’, American Anthropologist, ns

83 (1981), pp. 900–5, at p. 901. For ‘the wide

applicability of the [Big-Man] concept of achieved leadership’ beyond Melanesia, see Brown,
‘Big Man, Past and Present’, p.

100; F. Curta, The Making of the Slavs: History and Archaeology

of the Lower Danube Region, c.

500–700 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 328–29, adapts the terminology

to an early medieval European context.

Sahlins, ‘Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief ’, p.

287. Clastres himself calls attention to the

generalizability of the Melanesian Big-Man type; see ‘L’Économie primitive’, written as a

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the indicative quality of . . . personal power. Big-men do not come into
office; they do not succeed to, nor are they installed in, existing
positions of leadership over political groups. The attainment of big-
man status is rather the outcome of a series of acts which elevate a
person above the common herd and attract about him a coterie of
loyal, lesser men. It is not accurate to speak of ‘big-man’ as a political
title, for it is but an acknowledged standing in interpersonal relations
– a ‘prince among men’ so to speak as opposed to ‘The Prince of
Danes’.

The Big-Man, according to Lamont Lindstrom, is ‘a verbal metonym:
shorthand for a . . . typologic distinction (that opposition between big
man and chief ) and for a set of associated cultural characteristics. These
include achievement of leadership status; small, short-lived polities;
group members linked by kin and residence ties; competition for and
uncertainty of authority; political consensus; economic ability; individu-
ality and strength; shell valuables; pigs; etc.’

Setting aside hogs and

cowries, much of this sounds suspiciously similar to the world of Beowulf
in some important particulars – recall that Scyld, Beowulf and Wiglaf are
all novi homines, whose status is achieved rather than ascribed – though
perhaps distinct in a few others. I return to these differences presently.

Clastres, in turn, is especially interested in the mechanisms of Big-Man

power acquisition (and dissolution). He observes that in the small-scale,
acephalous tribes of the Amazon headlands, where centralizing institu-
tions are entirely absent and all contestants enjoy parity in principle,
competition for relative political pre-eminence becomes incessant. The
situation is similar to the honour-driven competitive culture of medieval
Iceland, where feuding, scheming and manipulation of þingmenn alle-
giance made for the burbling, lively play of mutual political predation. In
such societies, the shifting sands of political alliance undermine any
consolidation of centralizing power.

Where Clastres goes beyond most

sagas and straight to the heart of Beowulf is in maintaining that such
unremitting competition creates an escalating mechanism of testing for

preface to the

1976 French translation of Sahlins’s Stone Age Economics (Chicago, 1972), repr. in

Recherches, pp.

127–45 (in English: ‘Primitive Economy’, in Archeology of Violence, pp. 105–18).

On the number of Guayaki, see P. Clastres, Chronique des Indiens Guayaki: Ce que savent les
Aché, chasseurs nomades du Paraguay ([Paris],

1972), p. 347 (in English: Chronicle of the Guayaki

Indians, trans. P. Auster (New York,

1998), p. 345).

P.K. Wason, The Archaeology of Rank (Cambridge,

1994), p. 42, and Sahlins, ‘Poor Man, Rich

Man, Big-Man, Chief ’, p.

289 (emphasis original).

Lindstrom, ‘Big Man’, pp.

900–1.

J.L. Byock, Viking Age Iceland (London,

2001), explicitly speaks of Icelandic goðar as Big-Men

(see, e.g., p.

66). For an extended discussion of the operation of sociological imperatives that

limited the ascendance of aspiring rulers in medieval Iceland, see Ch.

4 of my forthcoming

study, This Spattered Isle: Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland.

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the individual. To gain a political edge over one’s rivals, every contestant
must perform feats with an ever-rising threshold of difficulty. Unless one
opts out of the political race altogether, the only way to end this cycle of
self-proving is to exceed the limit of one’s competence: to assay that feat
which one is doomed to fail. For a Big-Man whose power base is martial
achievement, this apex is crested at a sharply defined moment. His
political pre-eminence is maximized at the same instance and through the
same gesture that his ability to retain it is permanently minimized:

A warrior has no choice: he is condemned to desire war. It is precisely
here that the consensus by which he is recognized as [Big-Man] draws
its boundary line. If his desire for war coincides with society’s desire
for war, society continues to follow him. But if the [Big-Man]’s desire
for war attempts to fall back on a society motivated by the desire for
peace . . . then the relationship between the [Big-Man] and the tribe is
reversed: the leader tries to use society for his individual aims, as a
means to his personal end . . . What may happen in such situations?
The warrior will be left to go it alone, to engage in a dubious battle
that will only lead him to his death.

Death – in general, a rather grave hindrance to any individual’s capacity
to participate in politics – finally secures for the contestant the reputation
needed to exercise hegemony.

What Clastres further makes clear, however, is that this min-max

seesaw, whereby the infinitely maximized credit of reputation equals
infinitely minimized ability to cash it in the hard coin of political utility,
is no accident. It is a socially sanctioned machinery for preventing any
individual from establishing himself firmly as a permanent, dynastic
ruler:

The politics of the savages is, in fact, to constantly hinder the appear-
ance of a separate organ of power, to prevent the predictably fatal
meeting between the institution of [Big-Man]ship and the exercise of
power . . . Primitive society is society against the state in that it is

P. Clastres, La Société contre l’état: Recherches d’anthropologie politique (Paris,

1974), p. 179: ‘Un

guerrier n’a pas la choix: il est condmané à désirer la guerre. C’est exactement là que passe la
limite du consensus qui le reconnaît comme chef. Si son désir de guerre coïncide avec le désir
de guerre de la société, celle-ci continue à la suivre. Mais si la désir de guerre du chef tente de
se rabattre sur une société animée par le désir de paix . . . alors le rapport entre le chef et la tribu
se renverse, le leader tente d’utiliser la société comme instrument de son but individuel, comme
moyen de sa fin personnelle . . . Que peut-il alors se passer? Le guerrier est voué à la solitude,
à ce combat douteux qui ne le conduit qu’à la mort’ (in English: Society Against the State: Essays
in Political Anthropology, trans. R. Hurley (New York,

1987), p. 210, quoted with minimal

adaptation). Cf. Brown, ‘Big Man, Past and Present’, pp.

105–10; and L. Lindstrom, ‘Big Men

as Ancestors: Inspiration and Copyrights on Tanna (Vanuatu)’, Ethnology

29 (1990), pp. 313–26.

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society for war . . . There is an exchange between society and the
warrior: prestige for exploit. But . . . the ultimate exchange is that of
eternal glory for the eternity of death. From the outset, the warrior is
condemned to death by society . . . But why? Because the warrior
could [become] a separate organ of power . . . Primitive society is, in
its being, a society for war; it is at the same time, and for the same
reasons, a society against the warrior.

The circles in which Beowulf moves appear to follow this logic of

centrifugal political free-for-all. Unferþ is not merely drunk and cantan-
kerous when, as the narrator explains, ‘he did not wish that any other
man on this middle-earth should care for glory under the heavens more
than he himself ’; he is simply saying what is on every warrior’s mind.
Beowulf confirms this when he retorts in the same idiom that, on the
contrary, he ‘had greater strength on the sea, [overcame] more ordeals on
the waves than any other man’.

Like an Amazon forest tribesman,

Beowulf must perpetually vie for political distinction with men who are
his rough equals, like him suspended in a soupy political solution where
stable leadership is ultimately unattainable. In order to stand out from
the crowd, he must perform feats of arms whose level of difficulty
escalates continuously: from ‘the fishes of the sea’, to Grendel, to Gren-
del’s dam, to the ‘fierce firedragon’.

Beowulf grasps the political capital

to be gained by venturing on his own against any and all foes. He is
doubtless not alone in understanding this (as Grendel’s own solitary
heroism confirms); he is just more successful at it than others.

Until, that is, the dragon comes, as come it must. This final challenge

is calibrated at just a hair above Beowulf’s threshold of incompetence:
enough to break him, and at the same time to secure his political

P. Clastres, ‘La Question du pouvoir dans les sociétés primitives’ (orig.

1976), ‘Archéologie de la

violence: La Guerre dans les sociétés primitives’ (orig.

1977) and ‘Malheur du guerrier sauvage’

(orig.

1977), all repr. in Recherches, pp. 103–9, 171–207 and 209–48, at pp. 107–8, 206, 239

respectively: ‘La politique des Sauvages, c’est bien en effet de faire sans cesse obstacle à
l’apparition d’un organe séparé du pouvoir, d’empêcher la rencontre d’avance fatale entre
institution de la chefferie et exercice du pouvoir . . . La société primitive est société contre l’État
en tant qu’elle est société-pour-la-guerre . . . Il y a échange entre la société et le guerrier: le
prestige contre l’exploit. Mais . . . l’ultime échange, c’est celui de la gloire éternelle contre
l’éternité de la mort. D’avance, le guerrier est condamné à mort par la société . . . Mais
pourquoi en est-il ainsi? Parce que le guerrier pourrait [devenir] organe séparé du pouvoir . . .
[L]a société primitive est, en son être, société-pour-la-guerre; elle est en même temps, et pour les
mêmes raisons, société contre le guerrier’ (in English: ‘Power in Primitive Societies’, ‘Archeology
of Violence: War in Primitive Societies’ and ‘Sorrows of the Savage Warrior’, in Archeology of
Violence, pp.

87–92, 139–67 and 169–200, at pp. 91, 166, 193 respectively, quoted with minimal

adaptation).

Beowulf, ll.

503–5: ‘he ne uþe þæt ænig oðer man / æfre mærða þon ma middangeardes / gehedde

under heofenum þonne he sylfa’; ll.

533–4: ‘ic merestrengo maran ahte, / eafeþo on yþum, ðonne

ænig oþer man’.

Beowulf, l.

549: ‘merefixa[s]’; l. 2689: ‘frecne fyrdraca’.

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apotheosis. The dragon serves as a flashpoint for crystallizing society’s
countervailing resistance to Beowulf’s kingly might. The Geats’ censure
of their king is ambivalent, to be sure: the retinue of thanes stay behind,
allow Beowulf to perish, and only the overly ambitious Wiglaf (who
exerts himself ‘beyond [his] capacity’)

steps forward to the battle. But

the retainers, far from corroding the heroic code, as both the narrator and
many modern commentators charge – ‘craven oath-breakers’, the narra-
tor brands them for having obeyed Beowulf’s command that they hang
back

– embrace this code and uphold it. Theirs is a proactive social

choice, an (all but) unanimous vote for the preservation of honour-driven
society and, in the same breath, against kingship. They treasure Beowulf’s
heroism no less than they rankle at his royal pretensions. Similarly,
among the Baruya of Papua–New-Guinea, Maurice Godelier notes that

there were limits to [a great warrior’s] power and it was dangerous to
overstep them. There were many cases of [great warriors] who lost all
sense of proportion and, confident in their fighting abilities, gradually
gave themselves up to the pleasures of despotism . . . Many Baruya
began to hope that some enemy would rid them of their great man,
and their wish finally came true . . . Sometimes the Baruya did not
wait for their enemies to mete out justice by chance in some battle.
They carefully arranged the tyrant’s murder, supplying the enemy with
all the information necessary [to kill him]. Needless to say, the plotters
acted in the greatest secrecy, and were still at the future victim’s side,
smiling and joking, a few hours before the murder.

It may well be objected that the society Beowulf imagines (let alone the

Anglo-Saxon society which did the imagining), unlike that of the
Guayaki or the Baruya, is one in which kingship is firmly established as
a permanent institution. If one insists on an anthropological label under
which to file Beowulfian kingship, paramount chiefdom may seem a
better fit than context-dependent Big-Manhood. Whatever we call this

Beowulf, l.

2879: ‘ofer min gemet’.

Beowulf, l.

2847: ‘tydre treowlogan’ (cf. ll. 2529–30). For examples of modern critical opinion of

Beowulf’s retinue, see Halverson, ‘World of Beowulf ’, p.

606; Niles, Beowulf: The Poem and Its

Tradition, pp.

241, 251; and Earl, Thinking about Beowulf, pp. 47–8, 122–3, 133, 178.

Godelier, Production des Grands hommes, pp.

174–5: ‘ce pouvoir avait des limites qu’il était

dangereux d’outrepasser. Les exemples sont nombreux [des Grands guerriers] qui perdirent
toute mesure et qui, assurés de leur supériorité au combat, glissèrent peu à peu dans les plaisirs
du despotism . . . Beaucoup de Baruya commencèrent à espérer que des ennemis les débarrasse-
raient de leur Grand homme, ce qui finit par se produire . . . Parfois les Baruya n’attendaient
pas que la justice vienne des ennemis, au hasard d’une bataille: ils organisaient soigneusement
avec ceux-ci l’assassinat du tyran, leur fournissant toutes les informations nécessaires pour qu’ils
[le tuent]. Bien entendu, ceux qui organisaient le complot le faisaient dans le plus grand secret
et étaient encore aux côtés de la future victime, souriants, complaisants, quelques heures avant
le meurtre’ (in English: Making of Great Men, pp.

109–10, quoted with minimal adaptation).

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office, moreover, the poem expresses a consistently positive attitude
towards it, which seems to call into question the aristocratic push-back I
have hypothesized: ‘that was a good king’, we hear the narrator exclaim,
again and again.

Neither Danes nor Geats voice any doubt about the

propriety of rule by a single sovereign. Furthermore, this ruler’s office is
depicted as ideally hereditary rather than transitory: Wealhþeo’s moving
appeal to Beowulf to help preserve her sons’ access to Hroðgar’s throne is
predicated on just such an ideal.

Yet the queen’s concerns about the viability of the ideal afford us a

good initial clue that a significant gulf may yawn between the overt
ideology expressed in the poem and the unexamined assumptions built
into the reality which it depicts. Like all texts, after all, Beowulf serves as
a vehicle for a consciously crafted message, but also captures a record of
those truths which its author(s) held to be self-evident. Craig Davis
helpfully amplifies both the overt message and its incidental background
noises; drawing on Tacitus for his terminology, he observes a competition
within the Anglo-Saxon world-view between two principles of personal
sovereignty. On the one hand is the ‘rex ex nobilitate, the tribal patriarch
whose authority was based upon blood-line’; on the other, the ‘dux ex
virtute [is] innocent of any hereditary or consanguineous claim to pre-
eminence. [He] comes from nowhere [and] has no family, no pedigree’,
an upstart outsider who emerges during times of crisis to eclipse the stirps
regia.

Davis’s impersonal principles may be further mapped over two

distinct social strata. An ambitious aristocracy embraces the ideology of
dux ex virtute. Meritocracy allows each nobleman to imagine himself
clawing his way to the political summit, bootstrapping himself away from
the undifferentiated mass of his peers. The occupants of this political
pinnacle, in contrast, have every reason to pledge allegiance to the ideal
of rex ex nobilitate, which conserves the status quo that favours them.
Where you stand on political ideology depends on where you sit on the
political totem pole.

The narrator’s ideological sympathies are clearly with the crown, but

the poem he narrates resists him. This need not be a matter of a hypoth-
esized, archaic oral (or even historical) substratum refusing to yield to
the revisionary agenda of a latter-day poet. As John Lennon and Paul

Beowulf, ll.

11, 2390: ‘þæt wæs god cyning’. The second occurrence of this assessment may refer

to Beowulf himself; see Klaeber’s Beowulf, p.

244, n. to l. 2389f.

See Beowulf, ll.

1219–20, 1226–7. The precise political import of Wealhþeo’s appeal is disputed

(see Klaeber’s Beowulf, pp.

192 and 195, nn. to ll. 1169ff and 1219b–20, 1226b–7); but however it

is interpreted, the queen’s speech presupposes a principle of hereditary succession.

Davis, Beowulf and the Demise of Germanic Legend, p.

98 (and cf. pp. 18, 70, 144).

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McCartney rightly insist,

there’s nothing you can sing that can’t be

sung; the Beowulf poet could only express himself in the idiom available
to him, and that idiom knew how to rhyme ‘crown’ only with ‘cut it
down’. The poem proves so inhospitable to the narrator’s royalist leanings
because the society it portrays (and – on the level of an inarticulate
subconscious, at least – the society from which it sprang, too)

champi-

ons the contrary ideological vocabulary of heroism. Heroism simulta-
neously motivates the nobility ahead, dangling before it the carrot of
promotion to princely rank, and curtails its advancement, bludgeoning it
with the stick of untimely death and untenable dynasty. In recounting the
meteoric rise of brawny self-made men like the eponymous hero and
Scyld Scefing (who ‘seized the mead-benches from many tribes, troops of
enemies, struck fear into earls’),

Beowulf depicts a society in which the

aristocratic principle of meritocracy ultimately prevails over the royal
principle of heredity. The leader who uses his powers to promote peace
may gain a temporary respite – ‘I held this people fifty winters’, the dying
Beowulf reminisces, ‘held well what was mine, I sought no intrigues, nor
swore many false or wrongful oaths’ – but he too must fall, as surely as the
despot.

Having made Beowulf, the busy principle does not subside into

J. Lennon and P. McCartney, ‘All You Need Is Love’, on Magical Mystery Tour, The Beatles
(Capitol, LP record, SMAL

2835, 1967).

On the textual subconscious, see P. Macherey, Pour une théorie de la production littéraire, Théorie

4 (Paris, 1966), p. 115: ‘[On doit] mettre en évidence ce qu[e l’œuvre] est obligée de dire pour dire

ce qu’elle voulait dire, parce que non seulement l’œuvre aurait voulu ne pas le dire (c’est une
autre affaire), mais certainement parce qu’elle ne l’a pas voulu dire. Il n’est donc pas question
d’introduire une explication historique plaquée sur l’œuvre de son extérieur. Il faut montrer au
contraire une sorte d’éclatement à l’intérieure de l’œuvre: ce partage, l’inconscient qu’est pour
elle l’histoire qui se joue à partir de ses bords, et qui la déborde, est son inconscient dans la
mesure où il la possède; c’est pourquoi il est possible de faire le chemin qui va de l’œuvre
possédée à ce qui la possède. Encore une fois, il ne s’agit pas de doubler l’œuvre d’un
inconscient, mais de déceler dans ce geste même qui l’exprime ce qui n’est pas elle. Alors,
l’envers de ce qui est écrit, ce sera l’histoire’ (emphases original; in English: ‘[One should] shed
light on what [the text] is obligated to say in order to express what it wanted to say, because not
only would the text have preferred not to say it (that is a different matter), but certainly it did
not choose to say it. It is therefore not a question of plastering an historical explanation onto the
text from the outside. On the contrary, it is necessary to show a kind of fissure within the text;
this split, the subconscious that is the history which unfolds at the margins of the text and
extends beyond it, is [the text’s] subconscious, to the extent that it possesses [the text]. For this
reason, one can trace a path from the possessed text to that which possesses it. To repeat, it is
not a matter of pairing the text up with a subconscious, but of discerning in the very gesture of
its expression that which it is not. Thus, the reverse of what is written – that would be history.’
For a different translation, cf. A Theory of Literary Production, trans. G. Wall (London, Henley
and Boston,

1978), p. 94).

Beowulf, ll.

4–6: ‘Scyld Scefing . . . monegum mægþum meodosetla ofteah, / egsode eorlas’.

Beowulf, ll.

2732–9: ‘Ic ðas leode heold / fiftig wintra . . . heold min tela, / ne sohte searoniðas,

ne me swor fela / aða on unriht.’ Cf. Godelier, Production des Grands hommes, p.

174: ‘En temps

de paix, [le Grand guerrier] mettait . . . sa violence virtuelle et son prestige au service non plus
de la guerre, de la lutte contre les ennemis extérieurs, mais de la paix, de la lutte contre les
fauteurs de troubles intérieurs’ (in English: ‘In peacetime, [the great warrior] used his potential
for violence and his prestige not for war but for the sake of peace, in the struggle against

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idleness; once one virtuous warlord has been installed on the throne, the
same impulse continues to toil, inexorably working to unmake him. The
dragon is the meritocratic principle incarnate.

To describe the dragon in such terms is, of course, to slip from the

historian’s discourse into the literary critic’s; and, at the level of literary
construction, Sahlins’s Big-Man and Clastres’s society-against-the-state
models fit the Anglo-Saxon poem only imperfectly. Kings in Beowulf sit
on their thrones less securely than Wealhþeo might have wished, but the
poem certainly does not show us leadership roles flitting among warriors
and economic entrepreneurs, orators and shamans according to
contingent circumstances. Dark Age monarchy appears fixed, context-
independent, and acceptable without question to Danes, Geats and other
nations. Nor is Beowulf left to ‘go it alone’ as soon as he first comes close
to forming ‘a separate organ of power’; indeed, his stable reign lasts longer
than an average human lifespan. ‘Those who condemn the king for
dying’, Niles scoffs, ‘seem to assume that he was going to live forever’.

But to get caught up in such contrary evidence is to linger at the poetic
turnstile, privileging literary detail over structural constraint. It is hardly
a coincidence that kings who have ‘spent most of [their] life doing
everything right’, as Berger and Leicester comment of Hroðgar, ‘now
fin[d themselves] suffering for it’. The Danish ruler, too, may testify to
the way accomplished heroism defeats itself: ‘Then success in war was
given to Hroðgar, honour in battle, so that his beloved kinsmen eagerly
served him’, but their very justified exultation, ‘the joyful din loud in the
hall, with the harp’s sound, the clear song of the scop’, encites the enmity
that threatens to destroy them.

If Beowulf the poem – a tendentious,

biased, programmatic narrative – endorses kingship, Beowulf the histori-
cal document does not.

mischief-makers within the tribe’, Making of Great Men, p.

109). Also Brown, ‘Big Man, Past

and Present’, pp.

107, 109: ‘As a youth he showed the big man capacity for aggression as a

daredevil fighter . . . [As a mature Big-Man,] Kondom campaigned for peace, stopped fights,
adjudicated quarrels and took disputants to the government court. He promoted a new
standard of behavior, forbidding fighting and stealing . . . In the legend, Kondom helped
everyone, not just himself and his local group. He was generous, unselfish, brought [modern-
ization] to all the people.’

Niles, Beowulf: The Poems and Its Tradition, p.

245. Personal immortality is indeed an unfair

benchmark against which to measure any king’s success; cultivating an heir apparent would
have been a more reasonable goal, which Beowulf also fails to meet (cf. Davis, Beowulf and the
Demise of Germanic Legend, pp.

148–50).

Berger and Leicester, ‘Social Structure as Doom’, p.

44 (cf. pp. 44–5, 50–7); Beowulf, ll. 64–6,

88–90: ‘Þa wæs Hroðgare heresped gyfen, / wiges weorðmynd, þæt him his winemagas georne

hyrdon . . . Þær wæs [dream hlud in healle,] hearpan sweg, / swutol sang scopes’. Berger and
Leicester, like many other critics, see Grendel as a product of tensions internal to Danish
society; cf., e.g., Earl, Thinking about Beowulf, pp.

74–5: ‘Grendel is Heorot’s shadow . . .

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, and Grendel is its symbolic embodiment.’

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This distinction has nothing to do with the composition of the text

and everything to do with how this text is read. Beowulf as we now have
it in the Cotton Vitellius A.XV manuscript may or may not have had
earlier antecedents, some of them, for all I know, going back as far
perhaps as Migration Era legend. To have spoken to a turn-of-the-
millennium Anglo-Saxon audience, however, the poem need not have
borne any resemblance to the actual society of the ancestral homeland; it
does need to have encoded the expectations and presumptions that its
contemporary readers and listeners carried around in their heads, what
they unselfconsciously assumed to be the way of the world. The Beowulf
poet’s depiction of heroism suggests that, in spite of himself, he shared
with them a habit of thinking about individual ambition as simulta-
neously self-destructive and socially constructive. As so often happens,
force of habit proved more tenacious than conscious ideology.

Neither particularly pagan nor subversively Christian, the heroic code

in Beowulf is not immediately helpful in dating the poem.

Despite

earlier generations’ chronological optimism, there is no calendrical
Heroic Age to which we might assign Beowulf.

Heroism, rather, is

simply the code of a politically centrifugal society, in which kingship is a
motivating ideal but a practical impossibility. It is certainly instructive for
the historian to speculate on when, where and by whom such an ideal
might have found expression in pre-Conquest England. Did the social
logic espoused by fictive Danes and Geats resonate with the political
sensibilities of (some) real Anglo-Saxons? And, if so, would it have
appeared most appealing to (some) subjects of a Hengest, an Alfred or a
Cnut? The controversy between maximalist and minimalist views of the
Anglo-Saxon state

has tended to obscure from view the probability that

both options may have struck certain segments of the English populace in

Cf. L. Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)’
(orig.

1968), in his Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. B. Brewster (London, 1971),

pp.

121–73, on what he calls ‘obviousnesses, which we cannot fail to recognize and before which

we have the inevitable and natural reaction of crying out (aloud or in the “still, small voice of
conscience”): “That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s true!” ’ (p.

172, emphasis original; cf.

pp.

171–3, and, on the difficulty of finding a vantage point from which obviousnesses become

visible, pp.

127–8).

Cf. Earl, Thinking about Beowulf, pp.

17–18; Davis, Beowulf and the Demise of Germanic Legend,

pp.

159–64 and 165–73; Wanner, ‘Warriors, Wyrms, and Wyrd’, who insists on the resurgence of

a pagan, Germanic sentiment in Beowulf ’s portrayal of the heroic king; and Liuzza, ‘Preface’,
pp.

28–9.

Cf., e.g., H.M. Chadwick, The Heroic Age (Cambridge,

1912), pp. 29–30, speaking of a

‘ “Teutonic” Heroic Age’ that ‘extend[ed] over about two or possibly three hundred years, and
[came] to an end in the latter half of the sixth century’.

For the maximalist view, see the essays collected in J. Campbell’s The Anglo-Saxon State
(London and New York,

2000), esp. ‘The Late Anglo-Saxon State: A Maximum View’ (orig.

1994), ‘The United Kingdom of England: The Anglo-Saxon Achievement’ (orig. 1995), and

‘Some Agents and Agencies of the Late Anglo-Saxon State’ (orig.

1987), pp. 1–30, 31–53 and

201–25 respectively. The minimalist position is articulated clearly by P.R. Hyams, Rancor and

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the first millennium as equally odious. Kingship of any stripe need not
have seemed legitimate to those whom its nimbus of privilege did not
envelop, especially if they had not been acculturated over genera-
tions immemorial to endure its yoke. Alcuin’s remark, ‘the death of
kings signals suffering, and discord is the font of captivity’, need not
have expressed the views of anyone outside a narrow circle of courtly
privilege.

The subcultures of those who subscribed to more regnophobic senti-

ments are, naturally, more difficult to glimpse in the surviving record
than those of royalty’s cheerleaders. Nonetheless, we may spy traces of
such populations here and there – for example, in the Danelaw in the
early tenth century. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the deaths in

911

of two otherwise unknown Norse kings (alongside a host of lesser poten-
tates), battling against Edward the Elder’s expansionist Wessex: ‘and there
King Eowilisc was slain, as well as King Healden [Hálfdan] and Earl
Ohter [Óttarr] and Earl Scurfa [Skúfr?] and Yeoman Aþulf [Auðúlfr] and
Yeoman Agmund [

Ogmundr

]’.

The stature of the two men named here

as kings can only have been decidedly modest. Aside from this momen-
tary role as gilded minims in an Anglo-Saxon body count – blink and you
might miss them – they have left no impression on the written record,
nor are any material monuments (most importantly, coins) associated
with them. Their low profile may hint that they were hardly acknowl-
edged as kings at all, except perhaps in their own eyes and in the eyes of
those who, having suppressed them, found it convenient to elevate their
status posthumously. The vagaries of terminology must not be allowed to
mislead, but if these men’s royal titles do not reliably reflect the realities
of sovereign power, still they may give the measure of a gap separating
their aberrant ideological goals from the sociological context in which

Reconciliation in Medieval England (Ithaca and London,

2003), esp. Ch. 3, pp. 71–110 (e.g.,

pp.

72–3, 84–7, 98–101, 108–10).

Alcuin’s

796 letter to Eanbald, Archbishop of York: ‘mors regum miseriae signum est; et

discordia captivitatis origo’ (§

116 in MGH Epistolae 4, ed. E. Dümmler (Berlin, 1895), p. 171).

On the capacity of education to knuckle under and dislocate any ideological instincts in those
subjected to it, see Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, esp. pp.

131–3, 151–7.

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle [D]

911: ‘7 þær wæs Eowilisc cyng ofslægen. 7 Healden cyng. 7 Ohter

eorl.

7 Scurfa eorl. 7 Aþulf hold 7 Agmund hold’ (in Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel, ed.

C. Plummer and J. Earle,

2 vols, rev. edn (Oxford, 1892–9; repr. 2000), I, p. 97). Other

manuscripts have the forms Eowils (B and C, p.

97 n. 1) and Ecwils (A, p. 96) for Eowilisc.

Plummer plausibly notes that, though none of these forms readily corresponds to any known
Norse name, Eowilisc cyng may suggest a conflation of some original phrasing like Eowel Wilisc
cyng, ‘Hywel the Welsh king’ (II, p.

126). For hold (Old Norwegian hauldr), which I translate

‘yeoman’, see P.G. Foote and D.M. Wilson, The Viking Achievement (London,

1970), pp. 84–5.

For the reconstructed Old Norse name forms, see E.H. Lind (ed.), Norsk-isländska Dopnamn
ock fingerade Namn från Medeltiden (Uppsala and Leipzig,

1905–15).

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they operated. Put another way, Eowilisc and Healden look more like
overextended Big-Men whose ambitions outran their resources than like
fallen monarchs.

Around the same time, some Norse magnates in the southern Danelaw

did feel exalted enough to mint their own coinage – but, curiously, they
did not deem their pedigree sufficient to do so in their own names.
Unlike their renowned predecessor Guthrum (whose pennies from the

880s, under his baptismal name Æþelstan, survive), these unidentified
rulers issued, from perhaps as early as c.

895 and right up until the

subjugation of their last strongholds in eastern Mercia and East Anglia in

917–18, coins commemorating the Anglo-Saxon king of East Anglia, St
Edmund, martyred by vikings a generation earlier.

Minting is an

unequivocally regal act; it traces the arc of such magnates’ high-flung
aspirations. Yet anonymous minting, as oxymoronic as military intelli-
gence, undercuts its own premise. Coins which fail to identify those who
issued them all but concede that the nameless sponsors’ royal ambitions
were overblown and unsustainable.

The confluence of anonymous currency, on the one hand, with

ephemeral kings, on the other, suggests something of the political climate
in the Scandinavian-dominated eastern shires around the turn of the
tenth century. It hints at a political culture not unlike that which the
sagas document in Iceland (and which Sahlins drew attention to in
Melanesia), a culture of fierce competition for honour coupled with
engrained antipathy for hierarchy. Many in Anglo-Norse lands may have
entertained high hopes of gain and glory, for themselves, but would have
eyed overwrought claims to authority by any and all others with suspi-
cious disdain. An audience drawn from such a tough crowd might well
have applauded the Clastresian futility of Beowulf’s ascendence. Were
Beowulf performed to an aristocratic Anglo-Norse audience c.

900, in

other words, they should have had no difficulty recognizing the social
logic the poem presupposes and appreciating the ideological tensions it
explores. They may, indeed, have identified parallels to both in their own
lived political experiences.

Cf. Sahlins, ‘Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief ’, pp.

291–3, for the self-defeating impera-

tive to extend a Big-Man’s sphere of influence.

See M. Blackburn, ‘Expansion and Control: Aspects of Anglo-Scandinavian Minting South of
the Humber’, in J. Graham-Campbell, R. Hall, J. Jesch and D.N. Parsons (eds), Vikings and the
Danelaw: Select Papers from the Proceedings of the Thirteenth Viking Congress, Nottingham and
York,

21–30 August 1997 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 125–42, at pp. 132, 136.

Cf. Campbell’s comments: ‘A special, but a very solid, demonstration of the power of the
[eleventh-century] English state is the coinage . . . The coins themselves were powerful mes-
sengers of royal authority. They always bore on one side the name and portrait of the king’
(‘United Kingdom of England’, pp.

32–3).

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It is tempting to attribute such localized ambivalence towards monar-

chy to Scandinavian immigrants – perhaps even to resurrect hoary
hypotheses of Beowulf ’s origin in, or transmission via, the Danelaw.
There is solid evidence, however, that at least some of the customs
prevailing in the region in the early

900s manifested local continuities

from pre-viking Anglian practices and attitudes, often articulated in the
face of West Saxon imperialism.

We may not, therefore, pin anti-royalist

campaign buttons securely on Norse lapels. My point is not to deny that
Norse men of substance, whose brethren were at about this time setting
up a government by goðar in kingless Iceland, may have preferred Big-
Men to absolutist rulers and may have found the centrifugal ideology of
Beowulf refreshingly congenial to their own political inclinations. I wish
merely to suggest that there could also have been many other such
populations in Anglo-Saxon England, whose signature in the record is
probably even less traceable than that of conjectured royal antipathizers
among the Danes. We must not too hastily glom onto a convenient
identification when so many other potential candidates’ faces are irre-
trievably lost in shadow.

Though an histoire totale of Anglo-Saxon England will never be written

– we simply do not have the sources for reconstructing the bottom-up
portion of such an Annaliste ideal – reading the surviving elitist sources
against their ideological grain may offer us new insights into the cultural
attitudes that made up the totality of an Engla cyn. This cyn cannot be
summarized in the person of the cyning, much as the latter sought to
project a myth conflating his own interests with those of the nation;
inexorably, maverick heroes rose to challenge this narrative.

The Heroic

Age may never have existed in historical reality, but we sell the counter-
vailing force that honour exerted on hierarchy short if we discount the
impact heroism had on flesh-and-blood political contenders in early
medieval Europe.

For laterally minded Anglo-Saxon (or Anglo-Norse) Big-Men and

their supporters, the levelling mechanism that disposes of Beowulf the
king would have appeared not as the structural, personal or moral flaw
that many modern commentators on the poem have seen, but as the cool
and rational guillotine of social responsibility, methodically lopping off
any head raised too high. Kings, in such a view, are sacrificial, not sacral:

See, for instance, Blackburn’s discussion of Danelaw coin weights, which preserved an older
Anglian standard while mimicking Alfredian iconographic design; ‘Expansion and Control’,
pp.

129–30.

Cf. J. Campbell, ‘Bede’s Reges and Principes’ (orig.

1979), repr. in his Essays in Anglo-Saxon

England (London and Ronceverte,

1986), pp. 85–98, sifting the evidence for early Anglo-Saxon

‘kings’ (who may have gone by various titles) beyond and below the better-attested rulers of the
major Anglo-Saxon realms.

Cf. W.T.H. Jackson, The Hero and the King: An Epic Theme (New York,

1982).

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they embody an excess of the individual ambition which, in a tempered
hero, serves society well, but in an aspiring despot must be amputated
before it endangers the autonomy of the body social. At least as far as the
Peter Principle is concerned, then, Beowulf may propose the hypothesis
(testable, perhaps, also in other early medieval societies) that the differ-
ences between bureaucratic and charismatic polities are far less pro-
nounced than Max Weber would ever have suspected.

The politics of

the savages – be they Melanesian, Amazonian or Germanic – are to
promote individuals to the level at which they are no longer equal to the
challenges facing them. Having reached this threshold, men like Beowulf
are sent out to meet their dragons, to go over the top and undergo the
ultimate ‘ “percussive sublimation” (commonly referred to as “being
kicked upstairs”)’.

Golden parachutes and ghost-written autobiogra-

phies aside, plus ça change.

Cornell University

On the Weberian apparatus, see the various essays reprinted in R.M. Glassman and W.H.
Swatos, Jr, Charisma, History, and Social Structure, Contributions in Sociology

58 (New York,

1986). For a stimulating recent treatment in a medieval European context, cf. R.E. Barton,

Lordship in the County of Maine, c.

890–1160 (Woodbridge, 2004), most explicitly at pp. 7–9.

Peter and Hull, The Peter Principle, p.

27 n. (and cf. pp. 37–9).

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Inventing paganism in

eighth-century Bavaria

emed_289

26..42

onathan Couser

This article examines the hagiographies of Saints Emmeram and Corbinian
and the synod of Neuching from eighth-century Bavaria. It argues that the
references to pagan survivals in these texts are misleading, in the absence of
other evidence of paganism in the region. Rather, since these texts were
composed in a narrow window of time from

769–774, this anxiety reflects

concerns aroused by pagan uprisings in neighbouring Carantania, which
were only suppressed in

772. Thus, the texts’ authors ‘invented’ paganism in

their own culture as their perceptions of the dividing lines between Chris-
tianity and paganism grew sharper.

I. The ghost of paganism

Our vision of the Christianization of medieval Europe has changed
drastically over the last generation. It was once possible to see early
medieval Germany as a land of virgin paganism, into which missionaries
like Amandus, Willibrord and Boniface boldly brought an alien Christian
gospel.

This vision was framed in terms derived from the missionary

movements of western Christendom in the nineteenth and early twenti-
eth century. Recent scholarship has made this image untenable. The work
of Lutz von Padberg, for instance, has stressed the cultural similarities
between Christian and non-Christian peoples of Europe, which made
possible the incorporation of the latter into Christendom.

Ian Wood’s

study of the hagiographies of missionary figures, our main sources of

Among the more influential works of the pre-war generation are K.S. Latourette, A History of
the Expansion of Christianity, Volume II: The Thousand Years of Uncertainty, A.D.

500–1500 (New

York and London,

1938), J.T. Addison, The Medieval Missionary: A Study of the Conversion of

Europe, A.D.

500–1300 (Concord, NH, 1936). More recently, this tendency is also found in J.C.

Russell, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach (Oxford,

1994). Russell’s approach, however, has not gained much traction among contemporary schol-

ars.

L. von Padberg, Mission und Christianisierung: Formen und Folgen bei Angelsachsen und Franken
im

7. und 8. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1995).

Early Medieval Europe

2010 18 (1) 26–42

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350

Main Street, Malden, MA

02148, USA

information on Christianization, has shown the extent to which these
accounts are literary constructions, used by Christians to discuss mission-
ary agendas, rather than direct reflections of actual activities.

Archaeol-

ogy and careful analysis of the written sources have shown evidence of the
presence of Christianity in many ‘mission fields’ long pre-dating the
arrival of missionaries themselves. Personalities like Columbanus or
Boniface, once presented as exemplary early medieval missionaries, now
appear more like ‘reformers’ and ‘consolidators’ of existing Christian
communities.

Early medieval Bavaria is a striking example of the shift from narratives

of mission and conversion to those of reform and organization. Scholarly
opinion up to the mid-twentieth century generally thought that Chris-
tianity virtually disappeared from the former Roman provinces of Rhaetia
and Noricum in the sixth and seventh centuries. Post-war historians,
however, particularly following the lead of Friedrich Prinz, moved toward
seeing a strong continuity of Christianity in the area.

Thus, Bavaria’s

re-entry into European Christendom in the eighth century now seems
like a process of reorganization and reform rather than of mission and
conversion.

The continuity paradigm has carried the field, but it leaves a lingering

question: what to make of those sources which older scholarship took as
evidence of paganism? If there was no great mission converting the
Bavarians to Christianity, why did Bavarian authors sometimes write as
though there had been? These sources betray an anxiety on the part of the
Bavarian Christian leadership of the eighth century that their people had
been entangled in actual paganism in the recent past, and that some
current practices might still be tainted by demonic influences. These texts
do not, in fact, reflect memories of actual militant paganism in the
region. Significantly, all of them were written within a narrow time
frame, between

768 and 772. This article will argue that such sources

indicate a shift in the mentalities of the Bavarian clergy, particularly

I. Wood, The Missionary Life (Harlow,

2001). Wood does, however, hold that the concerns aired

in hagiographic literature did often reflect actual missionary experiences.

Efforts to find Bavarian paganism in mid-century scholarship include E. Klebel, ‘Zur
Geschichte des Christentums in Bayern vor Bonifatius’, in idem, Probleme der bayerischen
Verfassungsgeschichte: Gesammelte Aufsätze (Munich,

1957), pp. 100–22; I. Zibermayr, Noricum,

Bayern und Österreich: Lorch als Hauptstadt und die Einführung des Christentums (Munich and
Berlin,

1944); and R. Bauerreiss, Kirchengeschichte Bayerns, Vol. 1 (St Ottilien, 1958). Friedrich

Prinz’s arguments for continuity appear in numerous publications, particularly Frühes Mönch-
tum im Frankenreich: Kultur und Gesellschaft in Gallien, den Rheinlanden und Bayern am Beispiel
der monastischen Entwicklung (

4. bis 8. Jahrhundert), 2nd edn (Munich, 1988).

The strongest recent representative of the continuity paradigm is S. Freund, Von den Agilulfin-
gern zu den Karolingern: Bayerns Bischöfe zwischen Kirchenorganisation, Reichsintegration und
Karolingischer Reform (

700–847) (Munich, 2004). Freund minimizes Boniface’s work of 739,

arguing that he only tinkered with a cohesive episcopal organization dating back to

716.

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expressed by Bishop Arbeo of Freising, as the clergy developed a mission-
ary agenda and encountered setbacks in the pursuit of that agenda. These
setbacks caused Arbeo and the other clergy to re-imagine their own past
and thus to invent a pagan past for their own people.

Two of the texts in question are saints’ lives. In the year

768, Arbeo

arranged for the relics of St Corbinian to be translated from his tomb
high in the Alps at Mais down to Freising, where Corbinian had served
as bishop some forty years earlier.

Not long thereafter, Arbeo composed

a hagiography of his patron saint. Among other things, this Life claimed
that Corbinian had visited Rome twice, apparently between

710 and 720,

and received a pallium and preaching commission from the papacy which
authorized him to preach Christianity throughout the world. He had
chosen to settle in Bavaria to execute this commission, since ‘our people
[the Bavarians] were only halfway into the Christian religion, as it were
still unformed in the novitiate of its conversion’.

Within a few years, by

772, Arbeo followed Corbinian’s Life with another on St Emmeram, a
former bishop at the ducal residence of Regensburg who had been
martyred within Arbeo’s own diocese. Emmeram, according to Arbeo,
desired to evangelize the Avars of the Pannonian plains, but was per-
suaded to work in Bavaria instead when he saw that its inhabitants still
‘drank the chalice of Christ together with that of the demons, as their
fathers did’.

Emmeram’s dates are uncertain, but his association with

Duke Theodo would put his ministry between the

680s at the earliest and

715 at the latest.

To judge by Arbeo’s accounts, the Bavarians counted as

a newly Christian people during this era; their ancestors must only have
been converted a generation before that.

Arbeo was not the only one to think that Bavarians had lingering

pagan habits to worry about. In

771, when he must have been at work on

Emmeram’s Vita, he and other Bavarian nobles and senior clergy met at

The Lives of both Emmeram and Corbinian are edited in Arbeonis Episcopi Frisingensis: Vitae
Sanctorum Haimhrammi et Corbiniani, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SRG

13 (Hanover, 1920). For

introductions to these texts and their interpretation as a whole, see Wood, Missionary Life, pp.

150–60, and J. Couser, ‘A Usable Past: Early Bavarian Hagiography in Context’, Studies in

Medieval and Renaissance History, ns

4 (2007), pp. 1–55. Lothar Vogel’s highly critical decon-

struction of the Vita Corbiniani, Vom Werden eines Heiligen: Eine Untersuchung der Vita
Corbiniani des Bischofs Arbeo von Freising (Berlin and New York,

2000) has drawn sharp

criticism from numerous quarters: for a recent defence of Arbeo’s factuality, see C. Hammer,
‘Arbeo of Freising’s “Life and Passion” of St. Emmeram: The Martyr and His Critics’, Revue
d’Histoire Ecclésiastique

101 (2006), pp. 5–36.

Vita Corbiniani, c.

15, p. 203.

Vita Haimhrammi, c.

7, p. 36.

The dating of Emmeram’s life and martyrdom has been a subject of controversy that need not
concern us here; opinions vary between a date in the mid- to late seventh century and one
around

715. Hammer defends the earlier dating (see n. 6), but in fact the evidence is too slim

to be decisive either way.

Jonathan Couser

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2010 18 (1)

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the Synod of Neuching.

Duke Tassilo presided over this council, and

most of its legislation (some twenty-eight canons in all) concerned secular
matters: rules on slavery and manumission, theft, and defying the com-
mands of the duke. In the midst of these laws, however, were three items
forbidding non-Christian practices. All of them have to do with processes
of dispute resolution, especially oath-taking and trial by combat:

iiii. Concerning a fight between two men, called the wehadinc: that
there is to be no lot-casting beforehand, when they have been pre-
pared, nor any songs at all nor are devilish devices or magic arts to be
slipped in.
v. He who, at the aforementioned fight, which we call a chamfwich,
may presume to set himself up against those making the accusation for
a similar judgement, should swear the oath called ahteid in a church
with three designated oath-helpers.
vi. Concerning that which the Bavarians call the stapsaken, in the
words of which we perceive the idolatry of pagans from old custom,
that it should not be made henceforward otherwise than that he who
seeks the compensation should say; ‘You have stolen these things from
me unjustly, which you ought to return and make compensation with
so many solidi.’ Let the other say against him, ‘I have not stolen them
nor do I owe compensation.’ Let him say to the one seeking the
compensation with raised voice, ‘Let us extend our right hands to the
just judgement of God.’ And then let them both extend their right
hands to heaven.

Of the three, canon

6 states most clearly that the old custom seemed

to perpetuate pagan idolatry. Thus, an explicitly Christian oath, made in
church, had to replace the traditional one. Canon

4 does not refer to

paganism per se, but its condemnation of ‘devilish devices’ draws on
long-standing Christian discourse for condemning traditional religious

Concilium Neuchingense, ed. A. Werminghoff, MGH Concilia II (Hanover and Leipzig,

1906),

pp.

98–105.

Concilium Neuchingense, ‘IIII; De pugna duorum, quod wehadinc vocatur, ut prius non
sortiantur, quam parati sunt, ne forte carminibus vel machinis diabolicis vel magicis artibus
insidiantur. V. Qui supra predicte pugno, quod chamfwich diximus, peracto iudicio se simile
vindictae erigere contra querentem presumpserit, sacramentum, quod ahteid dicunt, iuret in
aecclesia cum tribus nominatis sacramentalibus. VI. De eo, quod Bawarii stapsaken dicunt, in
quibus verbis ex vetusta consuetudine paganorum idolatris repreimus, ut deinceps non aliter
nisi, ut dicat qui querit debitum: “Hec mihi iniusto abstulisti, quae reddere debes et cum tot
solidis componere.” Reus vero contra dicat: “Nec hoc abstuli nec componere debeo.” Iterata
voce requisito debito dicat: “Extendamus dexteras nostras ad iustum iudicium Dei.” Et tunc
manus dexteras utrique ad caelum extendant.’ Componere, which I have translated ‘make
compensation’, refers to ‘composition’, or making a wergild payment, not payment of an
ordinary debt (compensare), according to Niermeyer, Mediae latinitatis lexicon minus (Leiden,

1976), p. 229.

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beliefs. By its placement between these two, we can safely infer that the
requirement in canon

5 that the new ahteid be sworn inside a church was

another innovation to replace a customary, but suspect, practice. The
canons indicate that traditional conflict-resolution procedures, left alone
until now, seemed to be tainted with ‘pagan survivals’ and needed to be
replaced with explicitly Christian alternatives.

None of these sources present an elaborate image of a pagan world,

complete with gods, monsters, myths and rituals. Arbeo’s contemporaries
in Anglo-Saxon and Frankish circles did imagine paganism in such terms,
preparing themselves to debate whether beings who begat descendants
could really be gods, cutting down sacred trees or defiling holy springs,
and casting the gods and heroes of their religious opponents variously as
Woden and Ingeld or Jupiter and Saturn. As James Palmer has recently
shown, simply to define ‘paganism’ was always a tendentious affair for
early medieval writers, overshadowed by the classical past and hampered
by a lack of interest or means to comprehend cultures neither ‘civilized’
nor Christian.

Instead of such elaborate characterizations, what we find in Arbeo and

at Neuching is a ghost of paganism, conjured up only to be exorcized.
This ghost haunted the late eighth century not because it had walked the
earth fifty or sixty years before, but because it embodied current concerns
of the Bavarian church. The phantom is formed mainly of allusions and
hints. The words, not quoted, of Neuching’s ahteid convey the ‘old
idolatry of pagan custom’, and the ‘recently converted’ Bavarians – Arbeo
never says when they actually were converted, or how – have still not fully
uprooted their idolatry, still drinking the ‘chalice of demons’ along with
that of Christ. These texts speak to an anxiety over the purity of one’s
Christianity. Such an anxiety is common enough in Christian history.
But it is worth enquiring why this anxiety is expressed in terms of a pagan
taint, rather than as moral vices, heresy, or general worldliness.

It would be another generation before anyone attempted to pin down

the supposed date of the original conversion of the Bavarians. A summary
of the property holdings of the bishops of Salzburg from around

800, the

Breves Notitiae, began by describing the arrival of St Rupert from Worms
in

696.

At this time, Rupert is said to have baptized Duke Theodo – the

same who had invited Emmeram and Corbinian to stay in the duchy –
thus claiming Rupert as the original ‘apostle of the Bavarians’. This story
was repeated in the Conversio Bagoariorum et Carantanorum of

870/1 and

passed into high medieval hagiography. However, it is absent from the

J. Palmer, ‘Defining Paganism in the Carolingian World’, EME

15 (2007), pp. 402–25.

Notitia Arnonis und Breves Notitiae: Die Salzburger Güterverzeichnisse aus der Zeit um

800:

Sprachliche-historische Einleitung, Text und Übersetzung, ed. and trans. F. Losek (

1990).

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report of Rupert’s career in the Notitia Arnonis, another property
summary compiled around

790, and from the Life of St Rupert written

in the

790s on the basis of a lost model of the 770s.

As Ian Wood has

shown, the image of Rupert tangibly evolves through these texts, begin-
ning as a saintly bishop in the earlier versions but becoming a missionary
figure by the ninth century.

The apostolic claim appears to have devel-

oped in support of the elevation of Salzburg to archiepiscopal status in

798. The reluctance of other bishops to accept suffragan status required
that Salzburg make bold claims, which were expressed through Rupert’s
missionary work.

This review of the sources shows that the idea of a Bavarian conversion

from paganism was first raised in texts from

768 to 772, before Salzburg

capitalized on it after

798. Just how new this claim was will be established

by consideration of the evidence – or rather lack of evidence – in older
texts dealing with Bavaria, and then with the portrait of the duchy’s
religion that emerges from texts composed in Bonifatian circles. Finally,
we will return to the immediate context of these texts, and ask what was
new in the

760s that might have prompted their portrait of a semi-pagan

background.

II. Absence of evidence: Bavaria between late antiquity and the

eighth century

The evidence for the continuity of Christianity in what became Bavarian
territory is strong, if not absolutely conclusive. Christianity had come to
the area in late antiquity, before the Bavarians coalesced as an ethnic
group. The land that would become the Bavarian duchy was then divided
between the imperial provinces of Rhaetia Secunda and Noricum
Ripense.

The Life of St Severinus, our main source for late antique

Noricum, never describes its hero having to deal with pagans at all. This
need not mean that there weren’t any; its author, Eugippius, wrote for an
audience in Ostrogothic Italy, where Severinus’ struggles with Arian

Vita Hrodberti episcopi Salisburgensis, MGH SRM

6, ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison (Hanover

and Leipzig,

1913), pp. 140–62, and Die Conversio Bagoariorum et Carantanorum und der Brief

des Erzbischofs Theotmar von Salzburg, ed. F. Losek (Hanover,

1997). Its dependence on a lost

original from around

774 was established by H. Beumann, ‘Zur Textgeschichte der Vita

Ruperti’, in Festschrift für Hermann Hempel zum

70. Geburtstag, vol. 3, Veröffentlichen

des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte

36/III (1972), pp. 166–96. Wood, Missionary Life,

pp.

146–50, demonstrates the evolution of Rupert’s image through the eighth and ninth

centuries from a simple saintly bishop to Apostle of the Bavarians.

Wood, Missionary Life, pp.

145–50.

See H.-J. Kellner, ‘Die Zeit der römischen Herrschaft’, in M. Spindler (ed.), Handbuch der
bayerischen Geschichte,

1. Band: Das Alte Bayern das Stammesherzogtum bis zum Ausgang des

12. Jahrhunderts, 2nd edn (Munich, 1981), pp. 65–100.

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barbarians doubtless resonated more than any confrontations with
pagans would have done. But his failure to mention Norican paganism is
striking.

When the ‘Bavarians’ first appear in written sources in the mid-sixth

century, no one mentioned their religion.

The first duke to be attested,

Garibald, was connected to the Franks and so was presumably Catholic
to some degree. His daughter, Theodelinde, came to represent the Catho-
lic party at the Lombard court, but that role probably had as much to do
with Italian church politics as with her upbringing.

The bishoprics of

late antique Rhaetia and Noricum lay on either Slavic or Alemannic
territory and several of them had disappeared entirely.

There is archaeo-

logical evidence that a limited number of Roman churches continued to
be used through the sixth and seventh centuries, and a few new churches
founded, but how they were staffed in the absence of an episcopal
superstructure to ordain priests, we cannot say.

Although there was no canonical church structure in Bavaria, none of

their neighbours ever said that the Bavarians were pagans or worshiped
pagan gods. Early in the seventh century Eustasius, abbot of Luxeuil and
a disciple of St Columbanus, undertook a mission to Bavaria. The brief
mention of his mission in the second part of the Life of St Columbanus
does not claim that Eustasius converted pagans or idol-worshipers to
Christianity; rather, it seems to associate the Bavarians with another
group, the Warasci, who supposedly held the Bonosiac heresy, denying

Eugippius, Vita sancti Severini, ed. H. Sauppe, MGH AA I.

2 (1877; repr. Munich, 1985). It is

unclear whether Eugippius had personal experience of Noricum. Nevertheless, his current
concerns with leading monks in a sixth-century Italian environment may mean that the Vita
privileges stories that were relevant there, where paganism was not very prominent. The key
work on the Vita Severini is F. Lotter, Severinus von Noricum: Legende und Historische Wirkli-
chkeit. Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters

12 (Stuttgart, 1976), though Lotter’s

‘maximal Severinus’ has been rejected; see also the studies in Eugippius und Severin: der Autor,
der Text und der Heilige, ed. W. Pohl and M. Diesenberger (Vienna,

2001).

In the absence of either a native origin legend or appearance in Roman sources, the Bavarians
have been labelled the ‘foundlings of the barbarian migrations’. See H. Wolfram, Die Geburt
Mitteleuropas: Geschichte Österreichs vor seiner Entstehung (Vienna,

1987), pp. 319–25, and

K. Reindel, ‘Grundlegung: Das Zeitalter der Agilolfinger (bis

788)’, in Spindler, Handbuch,

pp.

101–13.

W. Pohl, ‘Deliberate Ambiguity: The Lombards and Christianity’, in Guyda Armstrong and Ian
Wood (eds), Christianizing Peoples and Converting Individuals, International Medieval Research

7 (Turnhout, 2000), pp. 47–58.

H. Wolff, ‘Die Kontinuität der Kirchenorganisation in Raetien und Noricum bis an die
Schwelle des

7. Jahrhunderts’, in E. Boshof and H. Wolff (eds), Das Christentum im Bairischen

Raum: Von den Anfängen bis ins

11. Jahrhundert (Weimar and Vienna, 1994), pp. 1–28.

An excellent collection of studies on the state of current church archaeology in the region is
H.R. Sennhauser, Frühe Kirchen in Ostalpengebiet: von der Spätantike zur ottonische Zeit,

2 vols

(Munich,

2003). It is difficult to assess what proportion of Roman era churches remained in use,

but some clearly did so, for instance a church at Boiotro opposite Passau: see R. Christlein, ‘Das
spätrömische Kastell Boiotro zu Passau-Innstadt’, in J. Werner and E. Ewig (eds), Von der
Spätantike zum frühen Mittelalter (Sigmaringen,

1979), pp. 91–123.

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the virginity of Mary.

It seems improbable that either group were

Bonosiacs in any formal sense, but rather that Jonas of Bobbio was trying
to categorize people whose religious life was inadequate by Columbanian
standards. The key thing to note, however, is that Jonas reached for a
classification of Christian heresy, not paganism, to describe the targets of
Eustasius’ missions.

The case of St Amandus, with whom Jonas co-operated on mission

projects in northern Francia, also illustrates the Bavarians’ ambiguous
religious life. Amandus was the first churchman in medieval Europe to
practice the biblical commission to preach the gospel to ‘all nations’.

Besides his principal mission field around Ghent, Amandus also tried to
evangelize the Basques and the Danubian Slavs.

His journey to the latter

group must have taken him through Bavarian territory. Yet his Vita gives
no indication that Amandus paused to preach in Bavaria or saw the area
as requiring his attention in any way. This does not indicate that the
Bavarians had a fully functioning church organization, but it does imply
that for a dedicated missionary like Amandus, they were not the kind of
pagans which would attract his attention. The Bavarians’ kind of local,
irregular Christianity, which warranted a mission in the eyes of Eustasius,
was nothing to trigger the evangelistic agenda of Amandus.

In the late seventh and early eighth century, Duke Theodo began a

policy of inviting outside bishops to come to Bavaria and organize
Christian religious life there. The aforementioned hagiographies of
Rupert, Emmeram and Corbinian recalled this policy, while we know
only the bare names of other participants, such as Erhard at Regensburg,
and Anzogolus and Flobrigis, Rupert’s successors at Salzburg.

Theodo

visited Rome in

715/16 to obtain papal co-operation in the organization

of a Bavarian church province. This plan failed in the short term, but was
revived by Duke Odilo and the Anglo-Saxon missionary Boniface in

738/9. The creation of an archbishopric, envisioned in 715/16, had to wait
until

798.

At no point do we hear of pagan resistance to the new

churches or of a need to convert pagan Bavarians to Christianity.

Ionae, Vitae sanctorum Columbani, Vedastis, Iohannis, II.

8, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SRG 37

(Hanover and Leipzig,

1905), p. 244.

Testamentum Amandi episcopi, ed. B. Krusch. MGH SRM

5 (Hanover, 1910), p. 483. The

emergence of a concept of universal mission in the Hiberno-Frankish circle around Amandus
was traced by W. Fritze, ‘Universalis Gentium Confessio: Formeln, Träger und Wege
universalmissionarischen Denkens im

7. Jahrhundert’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 3 (1969),

pp.

78–130.

Vita Amandi episcope I.

16, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SRM 5 (Hanover, 1910), pp. 483–5.

Anzogolus and Flobrigis, with variant spellings of their names, appear in the Conversio, c.

98, and in the Liber Confraternitatum Vetustior, in Monumenta Necrologia Monasterii S. Petri

Salisbergensis, ed. S. Herzberg-Frankel, MGH Necrologia Germaniae

2 (Berlin, 1904), col. 18.

Le Liber Pontificalis: Texte, Introduction et Commentaire, ed. l’Abbé L. Duchesne, vol.

1, 2nd edn

(

1955; repr. Paris, 1981). See Freund, Agilolfingern zu den Karolingern, pp. 24–42.

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The only outside sources to attribute any pagan taint to the Bavarians

come from the corpus of writings from St Boniface and his circle. Such
statements are absent from Willibald’s Vita Bonifatii, which describes
three visits to the area: passing through briefly in

719; then a visitation in

734 when he inspected local priests and prosecuted a ‘heretic’ there
named Eremwulf; and then the creation of the bishoprics in

738/9. The

issues mentioned by Willibald for Bavaria are similar to those of the
Frankish heartlands – basically, failure to live up to proper canonical
order.

Boniface’s letters offer more detail. In a letter of

748, responding to

Boniface, Pope Zacharias discusses the case of baptisms performed by
deceased priests who had sacrificed to pagan gods. Since this letter goes
on to address a conflict between Boniface and Virgil, later Bishop of
Salzburg, it is possible that the priests in question were Bavarians.

However, the same issues appear earlier in Boniface’s correspondence, of

732 and 745, from other regions of Germany.

Thus, the

748 letter might

describe Thuringia or Austrasia rather than Bavaria, and cannot stand
alone as clear evidence of active pagan or syncretist cult in the duchy.

One other source from Bonifacian circles that accuses the Bavarians of

pagan practices is the Vita Wynnebaldi, written by the nun Hugeburc
sometime after

786. Hugeburc claims that, at the time Odilo invited

Boniface to Bavaria, he had to prohibit their fornication and depravity
and pagan deceptions.

The language of the passage is vague and clearly

draws on the stereotyped language of religious criticism from the Boni-
facian tradition. It might strengthen an interpretation of the

748 letter as

a reference to Bavaria. However, given the conflicts between Boniface and
the Bavarians, and the fact that by the time Hugeburc was writing Duke
Tassilo of Bavaria was already under pressure from Charlemagne (if
indeed the Life was not written after Tassilo’s fall in

788), Hugeburc’s

evidence confirms little.

Even if the Anglo-Saxons thought that the Bavarians were pseudo-

pagans, it seems that the leaders of the Bavarian church at the time did
not accept this judgement. Bishop Virgil and his colleague Sidonius, later
bishop of Passau, defended local priests from Boniface’s criticism and
Duke Odilo backed them. In

743 the duke even went so far as to obtain

Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, ed. M. Tangl, MGH Epistolae Selectae

1 (1916; repr.

Munich,

1989), nos. 45, 68 and 80. V.I.J. Flint, ‘Monsters and the Antipodes in the Early Middle

Ages and Enlightenment’, Viator

15 (1984), pp. 65–80, and J. Carey, ‘Ireland and the Antipodes:

The Heterodoxy of Virgil of Salzburg’, in Speculum

64.1 (January 1989), pp. 1–11.

Briefe, nos.

28 and 60.

Hugeburc, Vita Wynnebaldi Abbatis Heidenheimensis, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH SS

15.1

(Stuttgart,

1887), p. 110.

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a new legate from the pope, no doubt due to his political break with
Pippin and Carloman but perhaps also from dissatisfaction with Boni-
face’s approach.

Texts written in Bavaria before

768 do not remember a pagan past. In

terms of legislative sources, the three canons promulgated at Neuching
are the first to mention supposedly ‘pagan’ practices at all. The Bavarian
law of the

730s (the Lex baiuvariorum) devoted its opening title to church

law, but not one article of its content condemns or even mentions any
kind of pagan or superstitious practice.

The prologue associated with

several manuscripts of the law claims that pagan elements had been
purged by Frankish kings, but the claim is spurious and may have
Frankish or Alemannic law in mind.

By comparison with the frontal

assaults launched on paganism and syncretism in Frankish legislation, the
Neuching canons are modest. The Concilium Germanicum of

743 had

given Austrasian bishops sweeping responsibility to root out any mani-
festation of paganism within their dioceses.

The Indiculus supersti-

tionum, compiled about the same time, likewise testifies to an effort to
suppress a broad range of non-Christian practices on the north-east fringe
of the Frankish world.

Not long after Neuching, Charlemagne issued

his Saxon capitularies, listing pagan practices with draconian penalties for
each.

Compared to these, the canons of Neuching restrict only a handful

of superstitious behaviours rather than stamping out a pervasive system of
beliefs and customs.

The absence of earlier legislation to suppress superstitions was not due

to a lack of synodal activity. When Duke Tassilo III came of age in the
mid-

750s, the Bavarian abbots and bishops gathered at Ascheim to pass a

string of canons asserting their own dominance in the duchy’s religious
affairs.

The canons of this synod show that the assembled leaders of the

Bavarian churches were thinking along lines similar to those of mid-
eighth-century Frankish reform synods. It is not clear that the influence

Jahn, Ducatus, pp.

188–9.

Lex Baiwariorum, ed. E. von Schwind, MGH Leges nationum germanicarum

5.2 (Hanover,

1926). I have argued for dating the Lex Baiuvariorum to 735–38 in ‘The Chalice of Christ and

the Chalice of Demons: The Making of Christendom in Agilulfing Bavaria,

500–788 A.D.’,

Ph.D. thesis, University of Notre Dame (

2006), pp. 195–212.

C. Schott, Lex Alamannorum: Das Gesetz der Alamannen. Text-Uebersetzung-Kommentar zum
Faksimile aus der Wandalgarius-Handschrift, Codex Sangallensis

731 (Augsburg, 1993), pp. 12–17.

Concilium Germanicum, ed. A. Werminghoff, MGH Concilia II (Hanover and Leipzig,

1906),

pp.

33–4.

Indiculus Superstitionum, ed. A. Boretius, MGH Capitularia

1 (Hanover, 1883), pp. 222–3.

Capitulare Saxonicum, ed. H. Pertz, MGH Leges in Folio vol.

5 (Hanover, 1889), pp. 85–93.

Concilium Ascheimense, ed. A. Werminghoff, MGH Concilia II (Hanover and Leipzig,

1906),

pp.

56–8.

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was direct; there are no verbal quotations from the Frankish councils, nor
are identical solutions advanced for the same problems. The synod of Ver
in

755 has been suggested as a model for Ascheim, but in fact only a few

canons echo Ver’s concerns.

Ascheim sought to assert the authority of

the bishops over church personnel and property, to require canonical
conduct of the clergy, and to protect widows, orphans and the poor from
exploitation by the powerful. Remarkably, the synod called for ecclesias-
tical oversight of ducal officers in the execution of their duties. But not
one of these canons refers to any non-Christian behaviour or belief which
might call for the bishops’ intervention. It would appear that anxiety over
pagan survivals had not driven the agenda of the Bavarian dukes or
church for the thirty-plus years since Boniface had established the
duchy’s bishoprics. These few canons of

771 are the first trace of worry

in legislation that current Bavarian customs were tainted with the
demonic.

Scattered as these sources are in time, they form a consistent message.

External missionaries and reformers found much that was lacking and
much that needed improvement among the Bavarians; they were irregular
in their organization, prone to odd teachings, and performed the sacra-
ments incorrectly. But these sources never claimed that the Bavarians
were, or had recently been, a pagan people. Of course, the absence of
evidence is not evidence of absence. It is possible that the sudden appear-
ance of concern over paganism around

770 is simply an accident of the

far from comprehensive sources for the Agilulfing period. Perhaps the
Bavarian churches had been struggling to prevail over popular paganism
for some time without producing textual evidence of the effort. Never-
theless, it is striking that when one looks for evidence of Bavarian
paganism, the only traces one finds are in a group of sources composed
within a few years of each other starting at the end of the

760s. Can their

appearance be explained by contemporary events, rather than as a trick of
fragmentary documentation?

The dating of Ascheim to

756/7 is based on its reference to Tassilo as a youth, apparently on the

brink of coming of age. If Matthias Becher is right in arguing that Tassilo already came of age
in Bavaria in

754, any dependence of Ascheim on Ver would be impossible. See M. Becher,

Eid und Herrschaft: Untersuchungen zum Herrscherethos Karls des Grossen, (Sigmaringen,

1993),

pp.

25–35.

On the Bavarian synods generally, see Wilfried Hartmann, Die Synoden der Karolingerzeit im
Frankenreich und Italien, ed. Walter Brandmüller, Konziliengeschichte, Reihe A: Darstellungen
(Paderborn,

1989), pp. 88–96, and Wilfried Hartmann and Heinz Dopsch, ‘Bistümer, Synoden

und Metropolitenverfassung’, in Hermann Dannheimer and Heinz Dopsch (eds), Die Baju-
waren: Von Severin bis Tassilo

488–788. Gemeinsame Landesausstellung des Freistaates Bayern und

des Landes Salzburg, Rosenheim/Bayern, Mattsee/Salzburg,

19. Mai bis 6. November 1988,

pp.

318–27.

Jonathan Couser

Early Medieval Europe

2010 18 (1)

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

III. Mission, resistance and remembering

The answer may lie in a growing missionary agenda in Bavaria. Arbeo’s
Lives of Emmeram and Corbinian have missionary motifs as important
framing or structural elements, even though they do not provide specific
examples of missionary activity by their subjects. Arbeo clearly saw both
of his holy men as participants in a larger Christian world which was
expanding across the face of Europe. He opened Emmeram’s Vita with a
bird’s-eye panorama of this growing Christian world, describing how the
Gospel had reached the English, Irish, Britons, Gauls, Alemanni, and
‘part of Germany’. Besides this, it was also known in Gothia, Septimania,
Spain, and finally Aquitaine, Emmeram’s homeland.

Emmeram, while

a recluse, heard of the Avars’ paganism and decided to evangelize them,
thus bringing him to Bavaria. Corbinian’s Vita claims that his only
aspiration was to withdraw into ascetic confinement, but when he sought
the pope’s support to shield him from the attention of the worldly, he
received instead an episcopal consecration, a pallium, and a preaching
commission in unquestionably missionary terms: ‘He was enabled to
exercise the office of preaching everywhere throughout the entire
world.’

The entire episode was probably a fiction of Arbeo’s; but it is

significant that the carte blanche commission he imagined far exceeded
that of St Boniface, whose authority only extended to Gaul and Ger-
many.

Its universality recalls that of St Amandus. Arbeo probably meant

these claims to rival those of the famous Anglo-Saxon martyr. Indeed, the
accounts of these saints from Theodo’s time, well before the generation of
Odilo and Boniface, may have been intended to repudiate the criticisms
of the Bonifatian circle.

These passages function only to frame the main action of these hagiog-

raphies rather than to drive it; very little of either saint’s recorded activity
suggests that they engaged in any significant missionary work in Bavaria,
still less that they dealt with pagans. Emmeram’s gruesome martyrdom
had nothing to do with his preaching, but with his entanglement in a

Vita Haimhrammi, c.

1, pp. 26–7: ‘(Christi) in partibus mundi fama percreverat, ita ut Europae

non modica pars insegniter sacris christianitatis indagine florere dinosceretur, ita ut occidentales
tot angulorum, Brittaniae, Hiberniae, Galliae, Alamanniae, Germaniae pars, paulatim mirifico
modo in Dei laude constanter fulsissent. Inter quas provintias Gotia, Septemania, Spania,
Aquitania cum habitatoribus suis deponentes idolatria unicum Dei filium colere coeperunt. In
cuius Aquitaniae praedictae partibus Pictavis urbs antiqua sita dinoscitur, ex qua ortus est puer
vocabulo Haimhrammus.’

Vita Corbiniani, c.

9, p. 197: ‘Ubique praedicationis officium exercere per universum orbem

potuisset.’

I discuss the reliability of Corbinian’s pilgrimage accounts in ‘Virtual Pilgrimages: The Roman
Journeys of St. Corbinian of Freising’, in E. Coleman and W. Day (eds), Travel and Movement
in Medieval Italy (forthcoming).

Wood, Missionary Life, pp.

157–8.

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court intrigue involving the duke’s pregnant unmarried daughter.

Cor-

binian encounters non-Christian practices only once, when he leaps from
his horse to thrash a peasant woman who tried to cure the duke’s son with
magic.

But the frames drawn by Arbeo’s description of his protagonists’

alleged motivations and his deprecating depiction of prior Bavarian reli-
gion give them the aura of missionary saints. Why were these missionary
motifs so important to Arbeo, when he had so little material to flesh them
out in his narratives?

A generation earlier, perhaps in the

740s, the Bavarians had displaced

the Avars as overlords of the Slavic Carantanians who lived on their
south-eastern frontier.

As part of this overlordship, the Carantanian

Duke Boruth sent his son Cacatius and his nephew Cheitmar to Bavaria
as hostages. Both were baptized, and on Boruth’s death first his son and
later his nephew returned to Carantania, bringing Bavarian priests with
them as personal chaplains. In the

750s Cheitmar requested additional

clergy from Bishop Virgil of Salzburg in order to evangelize his people. At
first things seemed to go well, but beginning in

763 a series of revolts

broke out, called carmula in our source, the Conversio Bagoariorum et
Carantanorum. The term carmulum itself is not common, but seems to
have had local currency. It appears in the Lex baiuvariorum, referring
to conspiracies to overthrow the duke.

Later, in the Annals of St

Emmeram, the revolt of the disinherited Bernard of Italy in

818 was also

called a carmulum.

The motivation of the revolts, therefore, was prob-

ably secular rather than religious. Presumably the Carantanian leadership
felt that they had only traded one overlord for another and sought to
remove Cacatius and Cheitmar with their Bavarian connections.

Whatever the motivations from the Carantanians’ perspective, the

Bavarians took the uprisings as a religious event as well as a secular one.
The Carantanian dukes’ chaplains had been the thin end of a wedge
introducing western missionaries to the region. There is little sign that
these missionaries had gained many adherents among the local popula-
tion, and they were forced to flee when the violence began.

In the ninth

century, the author of the Conversio pointed to these conflicts as a crisis
in the mission, when Christianity had withdrawn from the area alto-

Vita Haimhrammi, c.

9, pp. 39–40.

Vita Corbiniani, c.

29, pp. 221–2.

Conversio, cc.

3–5, pp. 100–7.

Lex Baiwariorum II.

Annales sancti Emmerammi Ratisbonensis maiores, ed. G.H. Pertz, MGH SS

1 (Hanover, 1826),

93: ‘818. Pernhardus rex carmalum levavit.’ Note that while the Lex baiuvariorum had

identified the carmulum as a revolt against a duke, in this later notice it is used for a revolt by
the disinherited King Bernard of Lombardy against Emperor Louis the Pious.

B. Wavra, Salzburg und Hamburg: Erzbistumsgründung und Missionspolitik in karolingischer Zeit
(Berlin,

1991), pp. 167–75.

Jonathan Couser

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2010 18 (1)

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gether. A regular rotation of priests could only begin once Tassilo had
defeated the last and greatest revolt in

772. It appears that a line of annals

associated with Salzburg also remembered the carmula of

763–72 as a

religious event. One early annal paired Tassilo’s victory of

772 with

Charlemagne’s destruction of the Irminsul, which took place in the same
year.

Later annals, from Garst and from Admont, connected it with the

baptism of Tassilo’s son, who bore the significant name Theodo, at the
hands of the pope.

The struggle against the carmula also brought Tassilo a letter from a

peregrinus named Clement, one of the few texts to give us insight into the
ideological discourse of the Agilulfing court. Most famously, Clement
hailed the duke as a ‘new Constantine’.

Clement’s letter does not jump

directly to the Constantine comparison, however; he begins by invoking
a series of Old Testament figures, all of whom received divine aid to defeat
their earthly enemies. He is sensitive to the fine points of ranking; when
speaking of non-royal Israelite leaders like Abraham, Gideon and
Samson, he compares them directly to Tassilo personally. In fact, he calls
the war leaders from the book of Judges ‘dukes’ (duces), a term which is
not used for them in the Vulgate. When he mentions royal personalities
like David, however, he discreetly compares God’s aid for them to God’s
aid for the Bavarians collectively. Only Constantine himself breaks this
pattern.

Mary Garrison has shown that Clement’s letter was not intended

simply as a letter, even a public one.

Its structure and language are

liturgical; it is a prayer for the Bavarian court. Through this liturgical
discourse, Clement’s letter anticipates later Carolingian texts which
would increasingly identify the Franks as a new Israel.

The identification

has not yet fully emerged in this letter; it is a simile, not yet a metaphor,
and Tassilo’s fall in

788 would prevent its further development in his

principality. The letter is often treated as a work of praise and congratu-
lation for Tassilo’s victory, based on Dümmler’s dating of

772. However,

the text is undated, and Clement’s invocations of Biblical exempla are
consistently phrased in the future tense or in the subjunctive. That is, he
does not declare that God has fought for Tassilo as he did for Gideon or

The annals were published in E. Klebel, ‘Eine neuaufgefundene Salzburger Geschichtsquelle’,
in Probleme der bayerischen Verfassungsgeschichte: Gesammelte Aufsätze (Munich,

1957),

pp.

123–43.

Klebel, ‘Geschichtsquelle’, pp.

123–43.

Epistolae variorum Carolo Magno regnante scriptae, ed. Ernst Dümmler, MGH Epistolae Selectae

4 (1895; repr. Munich, 1978), no. 1, pp. 496–7.

Mary Garrison, ‘Letters to a King and Biblical Exempla: The Examples of Cathuulf and
Clemens Peregrinus’, EME

7 (1998), pp. 305–28.

Mary Garrison, ‘The Franks as the New Israel?’, in Y. Hen and M. Innes (eds), The Uses of the
Past in the Early Middle Ages (Cambidge and New York,

2000), pp. 114–161.

Inventing paganism in eighth-century Bavaria

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Samson, but rather predicts that God will do so, or prays that He would.
As Garrison points out, some large gathering of the ducal court would be
the logical milieu for the presentation of the letter, and the most likely
event we know of would be the Synod of Neuching itself.

Thus, the

synod might have been Tassilo’s effort to get his religious and secular
house in order on the eve of marching away to war in the east. If the letter
was written for public reading at the synod, it interpreted the coming
struggle, not merely as a secular battle to control the rebellious Caranta-
nians, but as a religious campaign to deliver God’s people and smite His
enemies.

As we have seen, Neuching was also the only Bavarian synod to betray

anxiety about lingering paganism in Bavaria. Arbeo was certainly present
there, and the church he headed was involved in the eastern mission.
Although not directly on the eastern frontier like Salzburg or Passau,
Freising still played a role there. In

769, returning from Italy, Tassilo gave

property in the Alps at Innichen to Freising’s daughter house of
Scharnitz-Schlehdorf, which Arbeo had led prior to his elevation to the
episcopacy and which was then under Atto, who succeeded Arbeo at
Freising in

783. The explicit purpose of the grant was to found a mon-

astery which could serve as a mission base for the Drau watershed to the
east.

We have little documentation of the Innichen mission’s progress,

but charters from the

820s suggest that it did indeed develop interests

among the Carantanians.

The preservation of the grant among the

episcopal charters indicates that Freising felt itself engaged in its daughter
house’s work there.

While obscured by Carolingian historiography, Tassilo’s victory of

772

was a key moment in the Christianization of Carantania for the churches
of his own principality. Salzburg annals recorded the event alongside
Charlemagne’s destruction of the pagan Irminsul shrine in Saxony, delib-
erately juxtaposing them as a two-pronged advance of Christianity
against the pagan world. In many ways, religiously and ideologically as
well as militarily, the victory of

772 marked the high point of Tassilo’s

power and independence. At the same time, it may be that the celebra-
tion of the end of the carmula reflects the degree of anxiety these
uprisings had provoked in the Bavarian leadership, particularly the
ecclesiastical authorities. The outbreak of the first carmulum in

763

coincided with Tassilo’s controversial decision to abandon the Frankish
army in Aquitaine; in fact, Tassilo may have left the Franks precisely to

Garrison, ‘Letters to a King’, p.

322.

Die Traditionen des Hochstifts Freising, ed. T. Bitterauf,

2 vols, Quellen und Eroerterungen zur

bayerischen und deutschen Geschichte. Neue Folge Band

4 (1905; repr. Munich, 1967), TF 34.

472 and 550.

Jonathan Couser

Early Medieval Europe

2010 18 (1)

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

respond to it.

But then it would have been plain to all that this pagan

uprising was responsible for dangerously upsetting Franco-Bavarian rela-
tions. In

768, as Arbeo began writing his hagiographies, the outcome of

this struggle was still unclear. The Slavs, long in possession of the ruins of
the ancient Norican bishoprics, had already proven themselves dangerous
to the project of building the Bavarian church, having destroyed the cell
of St Maximilian sometime between

720 and 735, a highly valued project

between the Agilulfing dukes, the bishops of Salzburg, and influential
families of local Romani. The persistence of Carantanian unrest after the
suppression of the carmula of

763 and c.766 raised the spectre of a long

struggle without decisive victory.

The carmula of

763–72, then, formed one of the decisive issues of

Tassilo’s reign, a challenge to his own authority as duke over a frontier
territory, to his capacity to lead the Bavarians in war, and to the aspira-
tions of the newly organized Bavarian churches. Though they ended in
triumph, while they were ongoing they represented a crisis both political
and religious, which planted the dangers of a militant paganism firmly in
the minds of the Bavarian leading classes. It was the anxiety provoked by
this crisis that seems to have prompted Arbeo and the others at the
council of Neuching to look again at their own culture and history and
imagine paganism lurking where they had not perceived it before.

The early medieval Bavarians were certainly not unique in their mix of

Christian authorities presiding over all manner of unauthorized ‘super-
stitions’. Reformers and preachers throughout Christian history have
struggled with such heterodoxies right down through modern times. Still,
though never fully pagan themselves, the Bavarians had undergone a long
process of growth into full participation in western Christendom from
the beginning of the eighth century. Bishoprics had been organized,
synods held, the clergy recognized as a privileged estate under Bavarian
law, dukes had made pilgrimages to Rome and Bavarians held prominent
ecclesiastical offices abroad as abbots of Fulda and bishops of Langres.
Numerous new monasteries sprang up in the

760s, reflecting a new piety

and a new sense of identity among the aristocratic families that founded
and supported them.

It was at the peak of this process of growth that the

Bavarian church encountered a pagan ‘other’, and found that this
complex Christian identity was not alone in the world, but could be
challenged by an alternative identity – a pagan one. It was precisely in the
crisis of foreign mission during the final carmulum of

769–72 that Bavar-

Annales Mettenses Priores for

763, ed. B. von Simson MGH SRG 10 (1905; repr. Hanover, 2003),

52.

See L. Holzfurtner, Gründung und Gründungsüberlieferung. Quellenkritische Studien zur Grün-
dungsgeschichte der bayerischen Klöster der Agilolfingerzeit und ihrer hochmittelalterlichen Über-
lieferung, Münchner Hist. Studien. Bayer. Gesch.

11 (Kallmünz, 1984).

Inventing paganism in eighth-century Bavaria

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ian Christendom re-imagined its own past, redrew the boundaries of the
Christian and the pagan, and learned to be discontented with its own
religious achievements. Bavaria had never had a moment of conversion
itself, but found that, in the face of crisis in the conversion of others, such
a moment of conversion would need to be invented. It was not only in
Salzburg’s struggle for pre-eminence after

798, but in the maturing of the

Christianization process itself, that Bavaria imagined itself to have once
needed an apostle for its salvation.

University of New Hampshire

Jonathan Couser

Early Medieval Europe

2010 18 (1)

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

The Venerable Bede and Gregory

the Great: exegetical connections,

spiritual departures

emed_290

43..60

cott DeGregorio

This article revisits the familiar comparison between the thought and writings
of Bede and Gregory the Great. Bede was keen to foreground his debt to
Gregory and past assessments have illuminated aspects of it, but this investi-
gation offers a more searching analysis of the interface between biblical
exegesis and spiritual teaching, a subject that highlights Bede’s frequent
reliance on Gregory as well as his calculated departures from him. Accord-
ingly, the article first examines the different ways Bede in his commentaries
could deploy Gregory’s writings as a source, then discusses the more pragmatic,
less mystical thrust of Bede’s thought that sets him apart from Gregory.

Gregory the Great has loomed large over the study of early medieval
England, especially the so-called ‘Age of the Bede’ where, amongst other
things, the earliest known uita of the pope was authored, and the figure
of Bede himself may hold claim to the title of his most fervent disciple.

M.L.W. Laistner, in his

1935 inventory of Bede’s library, implied as much

when he spoke of Bede’s ‘constant indebtedness to the pope’s writings’.

Nearly thirty years later, Paul Meyvaert deemed the point self-evident
when he devoted the entirety of his

1964 Jarrow Lecture to the subject of

Or to use Moorhead’s nice phrase, ‘one of Gregory’s finest readers’: J. Moorhead, Gregory the
Great (London,

2005), p. 17. For recent study of Gregory’s influence in early England, see the

essays in R.H. Bremmer, K. Dekker and D. Johnson (eds), Rome and the North: The Reception
of Gregory the Great in Germanic Europe, Mediaevalia Groningana

4 (Paris, 2001). On the

Whitby life of Gregory, see A. Thacker, ‘Memorialising Gregory the Great: The Origin
and Transmission of a Papal Cult in the Seventh and Early Eighth Centuries’, EME

7 (1998),

pp.

59–84.

M.L.W. Laistner, ‘The Library of the Venerable Bede’, in A. Thompson (ed.), Bede: His Life,
Times and Writings: Essays in Commemoration of the Twelfth Centenary of his Death (Oxford,

1935), pp. 237–66, at p. 248. Laistner’s findings will soon be supplemented by an essay on the

subject by R. Love, ‘The Library of the Venerable Bede’, in R.G. Gameson (ed.), A History of
the Book in Britain, Volume

1: From the Romans to the Normans (Cambridge, forthcoming).

I would like to express my thanks to Dr Love for allowing me to read her splendid essay
in advance of publication.

Early Medieval Europe

2010 18 (1) 43–60

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350

Main Street, Malden, MA

02148, USA

Bede and Gregory.

Meyvaert’s inquiry remains the most thorough

probing to date of the nature of Bede’s indebtedness to Gregory, making
it a requisite starting point for further exploration of the topic. Much of
his lecture focused on Bede’s use of the Liber pontificalis and the Libellus
responsionum in crafting his account of the Gregorian mission, a topic I
shall bypass in what follows.

My interests lie rather in a set of questions

Meyvaert addressed near the end of his lecture, having to do with the
nature of Bede’s debt to Gregory ‘where his exegetical and theological
opinions are concerned’.

As far as I know, Meyvaert was the first to raise

this issue seriously but was himself unable to resolve it, being hampered,
as he lamented, by the lack at that time of ‘fully annotated editions of
Bede’s works, especially of the Scriptural commentaries, listing all the
known sources from which he borrowed, and therefore showing us in
what sections Bede is most at his own’.

Yet the want of proper resources

did not stop him from wondering whether Gregory had influenced Bede
‘on some kind of “deeper level”’ and, more boldly, from postulating that
‘[s]ome kind of spiritual affinity, not easily discernible, links them
together in a subtle way’.

These are shrewd insights, and they are not easily improved upon even

with the proper resources to hand. Nevertheless, having the critical
editions of Bede’s exegetical works that Meyvaert longed for, we are better
positioned to undertake a more searching examination of the impact of
Gregory’s writings on them. The pages that follow attempt to take some
additional steps towards assessing that impact. If Meyvaert was correct to
observe that ‘from the beginning of his literary career the Jarrow monk
was already well familiar with the pope’s works and was reading them
with an attention to style as well as content’,

then it remains a task for

present and future scholarship to keep deepening our knowledge of
Bede’s Gregorian inheritance. The conclusions offered here, it is hoped,
will stimulate others to refine and build upon them. I shall first address
the issue of determining how much and in what manner Bede’s

P. Meyvaert, Bede and Gregory the Great (Jarrow Lecture,

1964); reprinted in Bede and His World:

The Jarrow Lectures,

2 vols (Aldershot, 1994), I, pp. 103–32.

Nonetheless, it is tempting, in the light of the arguments I make below, to speculate about a
connection between the Gregorian element in Bede’s writings and the foundations of Christian
monastic thought being laid on early Anglo-Saxon soil by the missionaries Gregory himself sent
to evangelize the English.

Meyvaert, Bede and Gregory, p.

15.

Meyvaert, Bede and Gregory, pp.

14–15.

Meyvaert, Bede and Gregory, pp.

18–19. In a later piece, Meyvaert returned briefly to the

Gregory–Bede comparison, calling the pope ‘much more of an introvert than Bede’ and Bede
‘more of an extrovert’. See ‘Bede the Scholar’, in G. Bonner (ed.), Famulus Christi: Essays in
Commemoration of the Thirteenth Centenary of the Venerable Bede (London,

1976), pp. 40–69, at

47.

Meyvaert, Bede and Gregory, p.

14.

Scott DeGregorio

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2010 18 (1)

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

commentaries borrow from the writings of Gregory, before turning in the
second half of this article to a discussion of the long-term effects of this
reliance, especially in terms of Meyvaert’s suggestive postulation of a
‘spiritual affinity’.

The indices to the editions of Bede’s exegetical works in the Corpus

Christianorum, Series Latina (CCSL) are a good starting point for our
first task.

For the borrowings recorded there not only from Gregory but

also from Ambrose, Augustine and Jerome can provide some glimpse of
Bede’s reliance on the exegesis of his four acknowledged heroes.

Except

in those cases where Ambrose supplied a direct source (for example,
Genesis and Luke’s Gospel), the data suggest that Bede owes the least to
him.

Even the quickest scan of the entries for Augustine and Jerome

reveals that in his commentaries Bede’s debt to them is more extensive
than his debt to Ambrose, not only in terms of the number of works Bede
cites but also in terms of the regularity with which he cites them.

Gregory, meanwhile, though not always Bede’s most formative source in
a given work, is clearly the authority who figures most frequently in each
CCSL volume, suggesting that, of these four Fathers, he is the auctor
whom Bede consults most consistently throughout his exegetical oeuvre.
In nearly every Bedan commentary, that is to say, some trace of the
Moralia in Job, the homilies on the Gospels or those on Ezekiel, and the

M. Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library (Oxford,

2005), also relies principally on these indices in

attempting to account for the Latin sources known to Bede; see ‘Appendix E: Latin Books Cited
by the Principal Anglo-Saxon Authors’, pp.

191–228, which provides a convenient breakdown of

the data.

On Bede’s reverence for these four Fathers, see B. Kaczynski, ‘Bede’s Commentaries on Luke
and Mark and the Formation of a Patristic Canon’, in S. Echard and G. Wieland (eds),
Anglo-Latin Literature and Its Heritage: Essays in Honour of A.G. Rigg on His

64th Birthday,

Publications of the Journal of Medieval Latin

4 (Turnhout, 2001), pp. 17–26.

Thus it was sound of Laistner, ‘Library of Bede’, p.

247, to write that ‘Of the four, Ambrose was

the least well represented at Wearmouth-Jarrow.’ The picture is confirmed also by more recent
investigations: see D.A. Bankert, J. Wegmann and C. Wright, Ambrose in Anglo-Saxon England,
with Pseudo-Ambrose and Ambrosiaster, Old English Newsletter, Subsidia

25 (Kalamazoo, 1997);

and Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, pp.

194–5, which lists the citations from Ambrose in the

CCSL editions of Bede’s commentaries. In sum, the majority of those citations come from
Bede’s Genesis and Luke commentaries, where Ambrose’s own commentaries on those biblical
books served as models. By contrast, much slighter use of Ambrose appears in Bede’s com-
mentaries on the Song of Songs, Acts, I John, and the Apocalypse, as well as in his Gospel
homilies, whilst the commentaries on the tabernacle, the temple, Samuel, Kings and Ezra–
Nehemiah make no use of Ambrose at all, according to the CCSL editions of those texts.

Augustine and Jerome both receive multiple entries in each CCSL volume, Jerome especially for
his exegetical handbook on Hebrew names, which evidently was never far from Bede’s side.
See Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, pp.

196–204, 215–17. Laistner’s view (‘Library of Bede’,

pp.

248–9) that, after Gregory, Augustine and Jerome (in that order) held the next places in

Bede’s affection still appears to be credible. But on Bede’s debt to Augustine, see now A.
Thacker, Bede and Augustine: History and Figure in Sacred Text (Jarrow Lecture,

2005; published

2008). And for a recent analysis of the prose style of Bede’s later commentaries arguing for the

pervasive influence of Jerome’s own later exegesis, see R. Sharpe, ‘The Varieties of Bede’s Prose’,
in T. Reinhardt, M. Lapidge and J.N. Adams (eds), Aspects of the Language of Latin Prose
(Oxford,

2005), pp. 339–56, at pp. 350–5.

The Venerable Bede and Gregory the Great

Early Medieval Europe

2010 18 (1)

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Regula pastoralis may be consistently found.

As we know, Gregory’s

works likely reached Anglo-Saxon England quite early on, in some cases
even possibly arriving with the missionaries sent by Gregory himself.

And whatever the means of their spread throughout the island, the
process evidently did not take long. By the late seventh century they
could be accessed at Lindisfarne and Whitby,

and to judge from Bede’s

intimate knowledge of them, there is no doubt that they were staples of
the Wearmouth-Jarrow library whose shelves, it seems, lacked just two of
the pope’s works: the commentary on the Song of Songs, and a complete
collection of the papal letters, not put together as such until Carolingian
times.

But in the end, of course, this methodology of relying on the apparatus

fontium in the CCSL editions of Bede’s commentaries can yield only so
much. For, as anyone who has used them well knows, the sourcing in
these now standard editions is (to say the least) often unreliable. All too
often what they present as attributions would be better categorized as
reminiscentiae rather than verbatim borrowings in the strict sense,

and –

far worse – nor is it uncommon for them to include works that, it turns
out, Bede either lacked or did not know. Of the eight volumes of Bedan
exegetical material now printed in the CCSL, only two may be safely
excepted from such charges: Laistner’s edition of the Expositio Actuum
Apostolorum, drawn from his earlier critical edition of that work pub-

For a handy list of citations, see Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, pp.

209–12.

See R.G. Babcock, ‘A Papyrus Codex of Gregory the Great’s Forty Homilies on the Gospels
(London, Cotton Titus C. XV)’, Scriptorium

54 (2000), pp. 280–9, which contends that this

manuscript derives from one brought by the missionaries to Anglo-Saxon England. See also
T.N. Hall, ‘The Early English Manuscripts of Gregory the Great’s Homiliae in Evangelia and
Homiliae in Hiezechihelem: A Preliminary Survey’, in Bremmer et al. (ed.), Rome and the North,
pp.

115–36.

See B. Colgrave (ed. and trans.), Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert (Cambridge,

1985), pp. 12, 14, and

idem (ed. and trans.), The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great (Cambridge,

1985), p. 53, along with

Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, p.

43.

Bede nowhere explicitly mentions or cites from Gregory’s Expositio super Cantica canticorum;
the few parallels listed by Hurst in his CCSL edition (

119B, pp. 461–2) are typically dubious,

proving nothing conclusive. Evidently mislead by Hurst, Lapidge also assumes the work was
known to Bede: see Anglo-Saxon Library, p.

128. But in this instance the earlier conclusion of

J.D.A. Ogilvy, Books Known to the English,

597-1066 (Cambridge, MA, 1967) is preferable: ‘If

Bede had known the Expositio he would have used it liberally in his own commentary on
Cantica’ (p.

149). For a corroborating view, see A.G. Holder, ‘The Patristic Sources of Bede’s

Commentary on the Song of Songs’, Studia Patristica

34 (1999), pp. 370–5, at p. 372. On

Gregory’s letters, see Laistner, ‘Library of Bede’, p.

248. I omit Gregory’s commentary on I

Kings, the authenticity of which has been much debated, and which, though it may contain
some authentic Gregorian material, is now agreed to be datable to the twelfth century. See A.
de Vogüé, ‘L’Auteur du Commentaire des Rois attribué à saint Grégoire le Grand: un moine de
Cava?’, Revue bénédictine

106 (1996), pp. 319–31.

Cf. M. Gorman, ‘Source Marks and Chapter Divisions in Bede’s Commentary on Luke’, Revue
bénédictine

112.3–4 (2002), pp. 246–90, at p. 262: ‘In some recent editions sources have been

confused with parallel passages or vague allusions. The apparatus fontium should be reserved
primarily for works that were actually cited verbatim.’

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2010 18 (1)

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lished by the Medieval Academy; and Roger Gryson’s magisterial edition
of the Expositio Apocalypseos.

The remaining volumes, for the most part

the work of Dom David Hurst, are an altogether different story.

Not

only do they often do a poor job of editing the text but they also tend to
give an incomplete and occasionally erroneous account of Bede’s
sources.

To cite a single example: Hurst’s CCSL edition of Bede’s In

Ezram et Neemiam fails to record no less than seventeen borrowings from
Gregory’s commentaries.

Those omissions significantly alter the picture

presented in the volume’s Index locorum, listing as it does only one
borrowing from the Homiliae in Hiezechihelem (where in point of fact
Bede cites that work a total of seven times) and none from either the
Regula pastoralis or the Dialogues, both of which Bede uses in his com-
mentary.

Whilst Hurst’s edition nevertheless remains an improvement

over the even more inadequate nineteenth-century version reprinted in
volume

91 of Migne’s Patrologia Latina, there is no question that it is not

a reliable witness to the sources of Bede’s text. In short, new editions of
this and other Bedan commentaries will have to be produced if legitimate
appraisals of what Bede is doing in them are to be essayed.

Bede refers to Gregory by name about thirty times in his commentar-

ies. In his exegesis of the Seven Catholic Epistles, he resolves the uncer-
tainty of the meaning of the word ‘pleasure’ (uoluptas) as it is used in II
Peter II.

13 by stating that ‘I have considered that the distinction which I

M.L.W. Laistner (ed.), Expositio Actuum Apostolorum, CCSL

121 (Turnhout, 1983), idem,

Expositio Actuum Apostolorum et Retractatio (Cambridge, MA,

1939; repr. 1970); and R. Gryson

(ed.), Expositio Apocalypseos, CCSL

121A (Turnhout, 2001). Cf. Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library,

35, n. 25, who calls the editions by Laistner and Gryson ‘excellent in every respect’, and

Sharpe, ‘Varieties of Bede’s Prose’, p.

343, who agrees, remarking of the other CCSL editions

that ‘one must often wonder whether the difficulty in understanding a passage is caused by
undetected corruption in the textual history’.

The following thirteen texts, listed by CCSL volume, are edited by Hurst: In Regum librum XXX
quaestiones and In primam partem Samuhelis, CCSL

119 (Turnhout, 1962); De tabernaculo, De

templo, and In Ezram et Neemiam, CCSL

119A (Turnhout, 1969); In Cantica canticorum, In

prouerbia Salomonis, In Tobiam, and In Habacuc, CCSL

119B (Turnhout, 1983); In Lucam and

In Marcum, CCSL

120 (Turnhout, 1960); In epistolas VII catholicas, CCSL 121 (Turnhout, 1983);

and Homiliae euangelii, CCSL

122 (Turnhout, 1965). The edition of In principium Genesis,

CCSL

118A (Turnhout, 1967) by C.W. Jones, albeit not as troublesome as those by Hurst, has

also drawn criticism: see Gorman, ‘Source Marks and Chapter Divisions’, pp.

256–8; and

Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, p.

35, n. 25. But note that the sourcing in Jones’s edition is now

supplemented by C.B. Kendall (trans.), Bede: On Genesis, Translated Texts for Historians

(Liverpool,

2008).

Cf. Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, p.

35, n. 25.

For these borrowings, see S. DeGregorio (trans.), Bede: On Ezra and Nehemiah, Translated Texts
for Historians

47 (Liverpool, 2006), pp. 258–9. The Gregorian texts utilized by Bede in this

work are the Dialogues, the Homiliae in euangelia, the Homiliae in Hiezechihelem, the Moralia
in Iob, and the Regula pastoralis.

In Ezram, ed. Hurst, p.

414.

Thus Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, p.

35, n. 25: ‘The sourcing of the biblical commentaries

needs to be redone, using electronic databases, on the model of the excellent apparatus compiled
by Laistner and Gryson.’

The Venerable Bede and Gregory the Great

Early Medieval Europe

2010 18 (1)

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found in the works of the blessed Pope Gregory is the one that ought to
be followed.’

In De tabernaculo, he associates the coverings that protect

the tabernacle curtains (see Exodus XXVI.

12–13) with teachers who

protect the church, as when ‘Gregory unravels those temptations of the
ancient enemy that assail good morals.’

And at the beginning of the

sixth book of his In Cantica canticorum, he explains that the purpose of
this final book is to gather together the abundant comments on the Song
of Songs scattered throughout the works of ‘our pope and blessed father
Gregory’, in order that ‘if there be anyone who thinks that our trifling
works rightly deserve to be spurned, he might have at hand the pro-
nouncements to read of him who, it is agreed, should in no way be
spurned’.

Gregory’s name is also dropped frequently in the non-

exegetical works. As Meyvaert noted, he figures prominently in the De
orthographia, probably Bede’s earliest work, as well as in the De arte
metrica.

He occupies a prominent place in the chronicle of World

History that forms Chapter

66 of De temporum ratione, where Bede

mentions first, under the entry for Tiberius’ reign (AM

4536), Gregory’s

mission as papal legate in Constantinople, his composing the Moralia in
Iob, and his refutation of the Patriarch Eutychius for denying corporeal
resurrection,

before referring to him, in the following entry for Mau-

rice’s reign (AM

4557), as the ‘bishop of Rome and outstanding teacher’

In epistolas VII catholicas, ed. Hurst, p.

274, lines 212–13: ‘Sed nos distinctionem quam in beati

papae Gregorii opusculis inuenimus sequendam esse putauimus.’ Trans. D. Hurst, The Vener-
able Bede: Commentary on the Seven Catholic Epistles, Cistercian Studies Series

82 (Kalamazoo,

1985), p. 143 (translation modified).

De tabernaculo, ed. Hurst, p.

57, lines 594–607: ‘Repellunt enim saga imbres obsistunt procellis

arcent solis ardores cuncta foris aduersantia fortiter abigunt ut decor cortinarum interius
intemeratus persistat cum Augustinus omnia quae fidem turbare poterant hereticorum uenena
euacuat cum Gregorius ea quae mores bonos impugnant temptamenta antiqui hostis explicat
cum Cyprianus infirmos ne in martyrio labantur piis confortant exhortationibus cum alii
uenerabiles episcopi ac doctores quaeque turbare ecclesiam poterant longius temptamenta
propellunt et quaeque eidem sint ad salutem proficua sollerti indagine prospiciunt quatenus
undique tuta conuersatio religiosa fidelium libero corde uirtutibus studere atque in conspectu
sui conditoris et opere praefulgida lucere et ipsius quoque contemplationi possit oculum mentis
intendere.’ Trans. A.G. Holder, Bede: On the Tabernacle, Translated Texts for Historians

(Liverpool,

1994), p. 63.

In Cantica canticorum, ed. Hurst, p.

359, lines 10–14: ‘Cudatur ergo septimus in cantica

canticorum liber nostro quidem labore collectus sed beati Gregorii sermonibus et sensu com-
positus ut si quis forte sit qui nostra opuscula iure spernenda aestimet habeat in promptu
legenda eius dicta qui constat nullatenus esse spernendus.’ My translation.

Meyvaert, Bede and Gregory, pp.

13–14; see also Laistner, ‘Library of Bede’, p. 248, and C.

Vircillo Franklin, ‘The Date of Composition of Bede’s De schematibus et tropis and De arte
metrica’, Revue bénédictine

110 (2000), pp. 199-203.

De temporum ratione, ed. C.W. Jones, CCSL

123B (Turnhout, 1977), p. 522, lines 1736–9:

‘Gregorius, tunc apocrisiarius in Constantinopolim, post Romanus episcopus, libros Exposi-
tionis in Iob condit. Et Euthicium euisdem urbis episcopum in fide nostrae resurrectionis
errasse Tiberio praesente conuicit . . . ’ Bede’s source for these events is the Moralia itself: as the
passage continues (see lines

1740–5), he cites that work twice, both times referencing Gregory’s

debate with Eutychius. Both citations are from Book

14: see Moralia XIV.56.74, ed. M. Adriaen,

CCSL

143A (Turnhout, 1979), p. 745, lines 74–6; and XIV.56.72, p. 743, lines 4–5.

Scott DeGregorio

Early Medieval Europe

2010 18 (1)

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

who convoked synods and authorized the Augustine mission.

And

finally, in his discussion of the word allegory in De schematibus et tropis,
Bede concludes by telling us ‘I have said that it can be taken “allegori-
cally” in reference to the Church, following the example of that learned
commentator, Pope Gregory the Great, who, in his Moralia, regularly and
properly used the term “allegory” in connection with those verbal expres-
sions and historical events which he interpreted figuratively as referring to
Christ or the Church.’

Yet, as Laistner noted in

1935, whilst Bede’s debt to Gregory can be

traced throughout all the commentaries, ‘the occasions on which he
names that pope are a very small percentage of the places where he cites
him at greater and shorter length’.

As is well known, Bede put a ‘G’ in

the margins of his commentaries on Luke and Mark to indicate his
myriad borrowings from Gregory, employing comparable nominum signa
to record what he took from Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine as well, ‘lest
it be said that I steal the words of those who have gone before me and
compose them as if they were my own’.

If he employed similar practices

elsewhere, no direct evidence that he did so has survived. Consequently,
one must try to unearth the countless places in his commentaries where
Bede borrows from Gregory without indicating so, not to mention all
those other instances of ‘meta-hermeneutical use’, to employ Joseph
Kelly’s handy phrase,

where questions of influence exceed the notion of

direct quotation or borrowing – surely no easy task even with the assis-
tance of modern resources. Hence, until our editions of Bede’s commen-
taries are improved, any attempt to evaluate his overall usage of Gregory
must concede up front the provisional nature of its conclusions.

De temporum ratione, ed. Jones, p.

523, lines 1758–64: ‘Gregorius Romanae ecclesiae pontifex et

doctor eximius anno Mauricii imperii XIII, indicatione XIII, synodum episcoporum XXIIII ad
corpus beati apostoli Petri congregans de necessariis ecclesiae decernit. Idem missis Brittaniam
Augustino, Mellito, et Iohanne et aliis pluribus cum eis monachis timentibus Deum, ad
Christum Anglos conuerit.’ My translation.

De schematibus et tropis, ed. C.B. Kendall, CCSL

123A (Turnhout, 1975), p. 169, lines 279–83:

‘Iuxta allegoriam de ecclesia diximus sequentes exemplum doctissimi tractatoris Gregorii, qui in
libris Moralibus ea, quae de Cristo siue ecclesia per figuram dicta siue facta interpretabatur,
allegoriam proprie nuncupare solebat.’ Trans. C.B. Kendall, Bede: The Art of Poetry and Rhetoric,
Bibliotheca Germanica, series nova

2 (Saarbrücken, 1991), p. 207.

Laistner, ‘Library of Bede’, p.

240.

In Lucam, ed. Hurst, p.

7, lines 105–11: ‘Quorum quia operosum erat uocabula interserere per

singula et quid a quo auctore sit dictum nominatim ostendere commodum duxi eminus e latere
primas nominum litteras inprimere perque has uiritim ubi cuiusque patrum incipiat ubi sermo
quem transtuli desinat intimare sollicitus per omnia ne maiorum dicta furari et haec quasi mea
propria componere dicar.’ My translation. On the inaccuracy of the source marks in this CCSL
edition, see Gorman, ‘Source Marks and Chapter Divisions’, p.

261; and Sharpe, ‘Varieties of

Bede’s Prose’, p.

343.

J. Kelly, ‘Bede’s Use of the Fathers to Interpret the Infancy Narratives’, Studia Patristica

(

1999), pp. 388–94, at p. 389.

The Venerable Bede and Gregory the Great

Early Medieval Europe

2010 18 (1)

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

That said, it is possible, by comparing the earlier and later commen-

taries, to discern in the data currently available something of a pattern in
Bede’s use of Gregory.

In his earlier commentaries, Bede’s reliance on

Gregory’s exegesis not infrequently takes the form of longer, verbatim
quotations, suggesting a kind of dependency that does not always apply
to the method of his later commentaries. For instance, Bede’s Expositio
Actuum Apostolorum, usually dated between

709 and 716,

frequently

excerpts whole chunks from the Moralia in Iob, the homilies on both
Ezekiel and the Gospels, and the Regula pastoralis, and deploys them and
them alone to comment on given verses. So in treating Acts II:

38 (‘Do

penance and be baptized, every one of you’), Bede lifts a comment from
the Regula pastoralis on this verse and uses that as the extent of his
exegesis;

and later on he deals with Acts VIII:

20 (‘May your money go

with you to perdition’) in a similar fashion, glossing it with exegesis from
the Moralia in Iob.

The same pattern is discernible in such other early

works as the commentaries on the Apocalypse, the Catholic Epistles, and
Luke’s Gospel.

Bede’s later commentaries, by contrast, rarely feature this kind of

verbatim reliance on Gregory. In his In Ezram et Neemiam – which I have
argued may be the latest of the extant commentaries, a distinction tra-
ditionally given to De templo

– Bede’s usual practice is to quote not

Scholarship on Bede’s commentaries divides them into ‘early’ and ‘late’, using the years

720–5

as the dividing line between the two categories. For further discussion, see S. DeGregorio, ‘The
Reforming Impulse of Bede’s Later Exegesis’, EME

11 (2002), pp. 107–22, at pp. 110–15; and

Sharpe, ‘Varieties of Bede’s Prose’, pp.

342–3.

See M.L.W. Laistner and H.H. King, A Hand-List of Bede Manuscripts (Ithaca, NY,

1939), p. 20,

and Laistner’s more extended remarks on pp. xiii-xvii of his critical edition of the Acts
commentary (see above, n.

18).

Expositio Actuum Apostolorum, ed. Laistner, p.

22, lines 224–7: ‘Paentitentiam inquit agite et

baptizetur unusquisque uestrum. Dicturus baptisma praemisit paenitentiae lamenta, ut ecclesiae
more prius se aqua suae adflictionis infunderent et postmodum sacramento baptismatis lauar-
ent.’ The passage is taken verbatim from Gregory, Regula pastoralis III.

30 (PL 112A).

Expositio Actuum Apostolorum, ed. Laistner, p.

40, lines 28–36: ‘Pecunia tua tecum sit in

perditione, et cetera. Sancti uiri cum maledictionis sententiam proferunt non ad hanc ex uoto
ultionis sed ex iustitia examinis erumpunt; intus enim subtile dei iudicium aspiciunt et mala
foras exsurgentia, quia maledictio debeant ferire cognoscunt et in maledicto non peccant, ex
quo et ab interno iudicio non discordant. Cum enim et maledicentis innocentia permanet, et
tamen eum qui maledicitur usque ad interitum maledictio absorbet, ex utriusque parties fine
colligitur quia ab uno intimo iudice in reum sententia sumpta iaculatur.’ The passage is taken
verbatim from Gregory, Moralia in Iob IV.

1.2, ed. M. Adriaen, CCSL 143 (Turnhout, 1979),

165, lines 60–6, 76–80.

E.g. Expositio Apocalypseos, ed. Gryson, p.

275, lines 272–4, quoting Gregory, Moralia in Iob

XXVI.

28.53, ed. M. Adriaen, CCSL 143B (Turnhout, 1983), p. 1307, lines 34–7; In epistolas VII

catholicas, ed. Hurst, p.

320, lines 32–5, quoting Gregory, Homiliae in euangelia II.30.1, ed. R.

Étaix, CCSL

141 (Turnhout, 1999), p. 256, lines 14–20; and In Lucam, ed. Hurst, p. 324, lines

1143–51, quoting Gregory, Moralia in Iob XXIII.6.13, ed. Adriaen, CCSL 143B, p. 1153, lines 7–12.

S. DeGregorio, ‘Bede’s In Ezram et Neemiam and the Reform of the Northumbrian Church’,
Speculum

79 (2004), pp. 1–25. For a different view, holding that In Ezram should be dated c.715,

see P. Meyvaert’s reply to my article, ‘The Date of Bede’s In Ezram and His Image in the Codex

Scott DeGregorio

Early Medieval Europe

2010 18 (1)

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whole passages from Gregory but rather small sentences or even mere
phrases. Accordingly, in Book

1 he offers this comment:

But in the spiritual sense the latomi, in building the house of God, are
those who by teaching or admonishing educate the hearts of their
neighbours, whom they fit to the stones round about by squaring
them up, so to speak, when they teach them to stand firmly in place
among the partakers of His grace. ‘For no matter which way you turn
it, a squared object will be stable’.

We can use this example for two purposes, actually: to demonstrate
Bede’s appropriation of patristic material, and also to illustrate the
perils posed by Hurst’s edition. The problem concerns the concluding
sentence, ‘For no matter which way you turn it, a square will be stable’
(‘Quocumque enim uerteris quadratum stabit’). The sentence occurs
both here in In Ezram et Neemiam as well as in De templo, which is
edited in the same CCSL volume.

Whereas Hurst gives it no attribu-

tion in In Ezram et Neemiam, in De templo he attributes it to Gregory’s
Ezekiel homilies.

However, more thorough checking reveals that it is

found in the fifteenth book of Augustine’s De ciuitate Dei too, a fact
which Hurst evidently overlooked.

The wording in Augustine’s

version is in fact closer to what we find in Bede, so the Bishop of
Hippo rather than Gregory was likely his source. Even so, it is notable
that the next most substantial instance of direct borrowing from
Gregory in this commentary is just as diminished. In Book

3, discuss-

ing Nehemiah’s shutting the gates of the rebuilt city on the Sabbath
(see Neh. XIII:

19), Bede equates the shut gates with our making time

for prayer and then suddenly adds:

Amiatinus’, Speculum

80 (2005), pp. 1087–1133, along with my detailed rebuttal of his argu-

ments in the introduction to my translation, Bede: On Ezra, pp. xxxvii–xlii.

In Ezram, ed. Hurst, p.

273, lines 1299–1304: ‘Spiritali autem sensu latomi sunt in constructione

domus Dei qui corda proximorum docendo uel increpando instituunt quos dum firmo gradu
inter participes eiusdem gratiae consistere docent quasi quadrando circumpositis lapidibus
aptant. Quocumque enim uerteris quadratum stabit.’ Trans. DeGregorio, Bede: On Ezra, p.

56;

translation modified. The quotation is from Gregory, Homiliae in Hiezechihelem, ed. M.
Adriaen, CCSL

142 (Turnhout, 1971), p. 359, lines 155–62. Cf. De templo, ed. Hurst, p. 212, lines

794–5 and p. 154, lines 304–5; In principium Genesim, ed. Jones, p. 105, line 1147.

In Ezram, ed. Hurst, p.

273, line 1305; De templo, p. 212, lines 794–5, and also p. 154, lines 304–5.

See De templo, ed. Hurst, p.

154, lines 304–5, where in his note to these lines Hurst cites Gregory,

Homiliae in Hiezechihelem, ed. Adriaen, p.

359, lines 155–7: ‘Quos enim hoc loco lapides

quadros accipimus, nisi quoslibet Sanctos, quorum uita in prosperitate atque aduersitate nouit
fortiter stare? Lapis etenim quadrus aeque stat, in quocumque latere fuerit uersus.’

Augustine, De ciuitate Dei XV.

26, ed. D. Dombart and A. Kalb, CCSL 48 (Turnhout, 1955),

494, lines 26–8: ‘Et quod de lignis quadratis fieri iubetur, undique stabilem uitam sanctorum

significant; quacumque enim uerteris quadratum, stabit.’

The Venerable Bede and Gregory the Great

Early Medieval Europe

2010 18 (1)

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

And since ‘no one reaches the top suddenly’, but only after the long
progress of a holy way of life should one arrive, with the help of
Christ’s grace, at this perfection and peace of mind of which we speak,
it is rightly added concerning these matters . . .

In this sentence, the words ‘no one reaches the top suddenly’ (‘quia nemo
repente fit summus’), which are found in De tabernaculo and De templo
also,

are taken again from Gregory’s Homiliae in Hiezechihelem, though

here as well they are not identified as such in the CCSL edition.

A possible conclusion to draw from this lack of extensive verbatim

quotation from Gregory in the later commentaries is that, in his mature
years, Bede had grown more confident in his own abilities and so relied
less on direct usage of the Fathers as a whole than was possible for him in
his days as a young budding exegete.

That conclusion would appear to

be consonant with the fact that, early on, Bede tended to take up books
of Scripture which had already been the subject of extensive comment –
for example, the Apocalypse and the Luke’s Gospel – whereas later in life,
once he was more exegetically seasoned, he evidently preferred to venture
into uncharted territory by treating books that had not been the subject
of systematic comment before. It may appear to follow from this that the
earlier commentaries, in so closely following the ‘footsteps of the Fathers’
(‘uestigia patrum sequens’), therefore owe a heavier debt to Gregory than
the later ones, which, we might say, were the product of a Bede now more
inclined to prefer his own uestigia to those of his illustrious predecessors.

While perhaps true quantitatively – that is, in terms of what Bede took

from Gregory – such a claim requires some modification. For even if less
dependent in terms of direct quotation, the exegesis of Bede’s mature
years is profoundly indebted to Gregory in ways that go beyond the
borrowing of this or that passage. Meyvaert himself may have had this
conclusion in mind when he spoke of a ‘spiritual affinity’ between Bede

‘Et “quia nemo repente fit summus” sed ex longo sanctae conuersationis profectu quis debet ad
hanc de qua loquimur perfectionem ac pacem mentis iuuante Christi gratia peruenire merito de
his subinfertur ac dicitur . . . ’ Bede, In Ezram, ed. Hurst, p.

390, lines 2047–50; trans.

DeGregorio, Bede: On Ezra, p.

224. The quotation is from Gregory, Homiliae in Hiezechihelem,

ed. Adriaen, p.

238, lines 53–5. Cf. De tabernaculo, ed. Hurst, p. 89, lines 1877–8; De templo, ed.

Hurst, p.

225, lines 1300–7; In Lucam, ed. Hurst, p. 270, lines 1550–5 and p. 309, lines 547–9;

and In Marcum, ed. Hurst, p.

549, lines 286–8.

De tabernaculo, ed. Hurst, p.

137, line 1731; De templo, ed. Hurst, p. 225, line 1300.

Gregory, Homiliae in Hiezechihelem, ed. Adriaen, p.

238, lines 53–5: ‘Nemo enim repente fit

summus, sed in bona conuersatione a minimis quisque inchoat, ut ad magna perueniat.’

This accords with the opinion of Meyvaert, ‘Bede the Scholar’, p.

45.

On the subject of Bede’s patristic self-fashioning, see the recent essays in S. DeGregorio (ed.),
Innovation and Tradition in the Writings of the Venerable Bede, Medieval European Studies

(Morgantown, WV,

2006), many of which push for a rather different reading of what Bede

meant in using the phrase ‘following in the footsteps of the Fathers’.

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and Gregory that is not easily characterized.

In this connection, I

suspect I am not the only one who, when reading Bede’s exegesis along-
side Gregory’s, detects something that is not discernible in quite the same
way in Bede and Augustine, or in Bede and Jerome, or in Bede and
anyone else for that matter. So what is it? If not in terms of direct
borrowings, how are we to explain the pervasive ‘Gregorianism’ of Bede’s
later exegesis?

One way would be to try to pinpoint the various larger ideas that Bede

and Gregory share – or rather, that Bede appropriated from Gregory.
George Hardin Brown was surely on the mark when, in his

1996 Jarrow

Lecture, he spoke of the personal character of both as having been formed
by the monastic virtue of discretio.

In addition, Alan Thacker has

adeptly shown how Bede derived an entire ideology of reform and
vocabulary of pastoral care from Gregory’s writings.

But is Bede’s Gre-

gorianism reducible to a collection of ideas alone? He borrowed much
from Augustine and Jerome too, and yet it does seem less apposite to
describe the spiritual orientation of his later commentaries as Augustin-
ian, or Hieronimian, whatever their debt to them.

This is by no means

to minimize the influence of Augustine and Jerome on Bede, merely to
differentiate it from the influence of Gregory. Doubtless all three were
supreme sources of authority in Bede’s eyes, patres in the truest sense of
the word. But as exegetes Augustine and Jerome still were not models for
Bede in the same way Gregory was. Their approach to the Sacred Page
had been immensely varied, Augustine shifting between the roles of
polemicist, apologist, philosopher and theologian, Jerome between those
of historian, philologist and textual critic.

In Gregory, by contrast, there

was a comparable simplicity, a unity of vision and purpose that resulted
in a wholly sui generis mode of exegesis whose aims could be more readily
appropriated as Bede’s own.

Meyvaert, Bede and Gregory, p.

19.

G.H. Brown, Bede the Educator (Jarrow Lecture,

1996), pp. 1–2.

A. Thacker, ‘Bede’s Ideal of Reform’, in P. Wormald with D. Bullough and R. Collins (eds),
Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society: Studies Presented to J. M. Wallace-Hadrill
(Oxford,

1983), pp. 130–53, and idem, ‘Monks, Preaching and Pastoral Care in Early Anglo-

Saxon England’, in J. Blair and R. Sharpe (eds), Pastoral Care Before the Parish, Studies in the
Early History of Britain (Leicester,

1992), pp. 137–70.

Recently Sharpe, ‘Varieties of Bede’s Prose’, makes a compelling case for the influence of
Jerome’s later exegesis on the Latin style and sentence structure of Bede’s later commentaries,
though he allows for the presence of other models as well and gives a nod to Gregory’s ‘immense
influence’ (p.

354). It should be emphasized that my interest here and elsewhere in the present

article is the spiritual content of Bede’s commentaries, not their style or the syntactic organi-
zation of their prose.

On Augustine, see the essays in F. Van Fleteren and J. Schnaubelt (eds), Augustine: Biblical
Exegete, Augustine Historical Institute Series (New York,

2001); on Jerome, see M. Williams,

The Monk and the Book: Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship (Chicago,

2006).

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Those differences between Augustine and Jerome on one hand, and

Gregory on the other, are due in part at least to cultural and religious
changes that took place during the years separating them. The fourth-
century world in and for which Augustine and Jerome wrote consisted of
a mixed and varied intellectual setting where not everyone shared their
religious affiliations or world-view; raised as they were on the pagan
classics, theirs was a world whose political and cultural traditions were
still largely those of Rome’s secular past, hence one wherein the idea of an
exclusively Christian identity was still undergoing a process of negotia-
tion.

As Robert Markus has shown, both Gregory’s sixth-century

culture and his experience of being a Christian within it differed pro-
foundly from such a world. ‘Gregory’s historical consciousness’, Markus
writes, ‘was shaped by a sense of the crumbling away of the secular
institutions and the profane traditions rooted in Rome’s pagan past . . .
Gregory’s contemporaries identified themselves in primarily religious
terms.’

Or as Markus has put it in a more recent publication: ‘Gregory

could take Christianity for granted: the framework of understanding, of
explanation and discourse was defined by Christianity. His culture was
essentially a biblical culture: formulated within scriptural horizons and
with scriptural concepts.’

Applied to Bede, this evolution towards a purely biblically oriented

culture and the attendant distinctions it implies must not, to be sure, be
overstated. Bede knew and wrote of a Germanic pagan past from which
the gens Anglorum had recently been converted; furthermore, his com-
paratively quiet experience as a monk in the outer reaches of western
Christendom was in many ways incomparable to the tumultuous and
elite surroundings in which Gregory moved first as a young Roman
aristocrat and later as bishop of Rome. Yet, despite those obvious points
of contrast, Bede’s was essentially a biblical culture too, the main work of
conversion having come and gone through the efforts of an earlier gen-
eration.

And like Gregory, Bede was first of all a monk for whom there

was no question as to what took precedence – the Bible or the classics, as
his rejection of the books of the Platonists for those of the Apostles in his

The discussions of Peter Brown on these topics remain invaluable: see the essays in Society and
the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley,

1982), as well as his later reflections in The Rise of Western

Christendom: The Making of Europe (Malden, MA,

1997), esp. pp. 3–92.

R. Markus, ‘The Sacred and the Secular: From Augustine to Gregory the Great’, Journal of
Theological Studies

36 (1985), pp. 84–96, along with his more extended study of the theme, The

End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge,

1990), esp. pp. 222–8.

R. Markus, Gregory the Great and His World (Cambridge,

1997), p. 41. See also the fine analysis

of Gregory’s outlook in C. Straw, Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection, Transformation
of the Classical Heritage

14 (Berkeley, 1988), esp. pp. 4–12.

So argued G. Bonner, ‘Bede and Medieval Civilization’, ASE

2 (1973), pp. 71–90.

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commentary on I Samuel shows.

Hence whatever differences may have

separated Gregory and Bede, and doubtless there are many, their views on
Scripture and its interpretation were largely of a piece. To hear Markus
again: ‘How to be a Christian, how to live to the fullest Christian life: this
was Gregory’s central preoccupation in all his preaching.’

That preoc-

cupation was, I submit, also Bede’s.

Perhaps the clearest illustration of this demonstrably Gregorian

approach to Scripture is the moral direction that can, with great consis-
tency, be seen to inform Bede’s exegesis of sacred texts. Like Gregory,
Bede, in the later commentaries especially, writes not with the theological
profundity of an Augustine nor with the grammatical acumen of a
Jerome, but primarily as a pastor concerned to foster right behaviour.

Continually for Bede, the primary question asked of a scriptural text is
not what it means literally, or just what it says allegorically about Christ,
the church or the sacraments, but rather how its messages can be trans-
lated into a script for our actions. The focus is nos ‘we’ – that is, not the
church conceived abstractly, but the community of believers here and
now in whom the dictates of Scripture are to be actualized through the
practice of living them. Each mysterium held deep within Holy Writ
contains for Bede an agendum, a directive to be enacted. So the beloved’s
words in the Song, ‘Show me your face; let your voice sound in my ears’
(II.

4), are to Bede’s mind laden with significance for preachers, as he

imagines the voice of Christ admonishing them:

‘You who desire to hide yourself in the concealment of secret repose
like a dove in the clefts of a rock or in the hollows of a wall, I beseech
you to come forth into the public place of action, show your faith by
works, and reveal your interior beauty as an example for others on the
outside as well . . . And let your voice sound in my ears, namely the

E.g. In primam partem Samuhelis, ed. Hurst, p.

121, lines 2218–19: ‘Sed multo cautius necesse est

acutis rosa in spinis quam mollibus lilium colligatur in foliis multo securius in apostolicis quam
in Platonicis quaeritur consilium salubre pagellis.’ Bede’s position towards the pagan classics
could, however, be more nuanced than advocating outright rejection: see R. Ray, ‘Bede and
Cicero’, ASE

16 (1986), pp. 1–16, and his 1997 Jarrow Lecture Bede, Rhetoric and the Creation of

Christian Latin Culture (Jarrow,

2001); and S. DeGregorio, ‘Literary Contexts: Cædmon’s

Hymn as a Center of Bede’s World’, in A.J. Frantzen and J. Hines (eds), Cædmon’s Hymn and
Material Culture in the World of Bede, Medieval European Studies

10 (Morgantown, WV, 2007),

pp.

51–79. For a recent reply to Ray’s claims about Bede’s Ciceronianism, see G.H. Brown,

‘Ciceronianism in Bede and Alcuin’, in V. Blanton and H. Scheck (eds), Intertexts: Studies in
Early Insular Culture Presented to Paul E. Szarmach, (Tempe, AZ,

2008), pp. 321–31.

Markus, Gregory the Great and His World, p.

41.

For supplementing discussion, see S. DeGregorio, ‘The Venerable Bede on Prayer and Con-
templation’, Traditio

54 (1999), pp. 1–39; and A. Thacker, ‘Bede and the Ordering of Under-

standing’, in DeGregorio (ed.), Innovation and Tradition, pp.

37–63, at pp. 43–4. Also still useful

is T. Eckenrode, ‘The Venerable Bede and the Pastoral Affirmation of the Christian Message’,
The Downside Review

99 (1981), pp. 258–78.

The Venerable Bede and Gregory the Great

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voice of praise or preaching; that is, the one that either praises me in
psalms and hymns and spiritual songs [Col. III.

16] or through its

preaching calls upon the neighbors’ mouths and minds to praise
me’.

Or consider his remarks on the temple’s cedar construction (I Kings
VI.

15), which he interprets as follows:

Now everything from the floor of the house to the top of the walls and
even the ceiling is covered by wood when the elect, from the first
rudiments of the faith to the perfection of good behaviour and even to
their entrance into the heavenly homeland, do not cease in their efforts
to perform good works, when from the first righteous persons to the
last at the end of the world, all strive after virtue and by their merits
can justly claim, We are the aroma of Christ to God in every place [II Cor.
II.

15].

Or note this comment on Ezra III:

3, which outlines his interpretation of

the holocaust or burnt-offering:

We offer a holocaust to the Lord on His altar when, with the com-
plete devotion to his faith established in our hearts, we attend to
good actions. And we do this morning and evening when we clearly
remember that we both have received from Him the beginnings of
salvation-giving intention and cannot complete the good works we
have begun without the help of his grace. And so we make offerings
of thanks to him in all things with an ardent desire to live in a
devout way. Likewise, we offer a holocaust in the morning when,
having received the light of spiritual understanding, we repay our
Creator in our turn by living well; and we offer a holocaust in the
evening when, for the sake of the eternal repose that we hope we are

In Cantica canticorum, ed. Hurst, p.

225, lines 541–5, 50–3: ‘Quae in abdito secretae quietis quasi

columba in foraminibus petrae siue in cauerna maceriae delitescere cupis precor in publicum
actionis procedas ostendasque ex operibus fidem tuam et quid intus pulchritudinis habeas aliis
etiam foras in exemplum declares; . . . sonet uox tua in auribus meis uox uidelicet laudis siue
praedicationis, id est ea quae uel me in psalmis et hymnis et canticis spiritalibus laudet uel ad
laudem meam proximorum ora mentesque praedicando excitet.’ My translation.

De templo, ed. Hurst, p.

170, lines 922–9: ‘Teguntur autem omnia lignis a pauimento domus

usque ad summitatem parietum et usque ad laquearia cum electi a primis fidei rudimentis usque
ad perfectionem bonae actionis et usque ad ingressum patriae caelestis bonis insudare non
desistunt operibus, cum a primis iustis usque ad ultimos in consummatione saeculi omnes
uirtutibus student quorum merito iure ualeant protestari quia Christi bonus odor sumus Deo in
omnia loco.’ Trans. S. Connolly, Bede: On the Temple, Translated Texts for Historians

(Liverpool,

1995), p. 35.

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going to receive from him after doing good works, we burn with
unending zeal.

Here as elsewhere, the voice is that of a preacher: his aim, to make the
mysteries of Scripture take concrete shape as a guiding force in the lives
of his audience. What we have in these examples, then, is not a case
merely of Bede’s preferring the allegorical sense to the literal, but of his
deploying a perceptibly monastic, recognizably Gregorian brand of spiri-
tual interpretation that runs in markedly tropological directions, its goal
being conuersio morum, the passage from sin to virtue.

All this brings us full-circle to Meyvaert’s claim about a so-called

‘spiritual affinity’ between Gregory and Bede. Can this idea, in the light
of the foregoing pages, be specified any further? Two points may be
offered here. First, if there is reason to speak of a genuine spiritual affinity
between Bede and Gregory, and in my view there is, then it must be said
that the harmony underlying their approach to exegetical commentary is
surely one of its prime causes. For both of these monastic exegetes, the
spiritual life is not some other realm that results from reading and
commenting on Scripture; rather, that hermeneutical process is itself one
of the primary forms their spirituality takes, and so it may be justly
termed a ‘scriptural spirituality’. It is easy to forget, in all the talk of
Gregory as a great spiritual master, that he produced no separate system-
atic treatises on the spiritual life, no tracts on contemplative prayer or the
soul’s ascent, but (amongst other things) several biblical commentaries
wherein such topics are embedded in a wholly exegetical process and in
which context they exhibit their full power and insight.

Scriptural

interpretation, in other words, is the bedrock of Gregory’s spirituality,
and so it is with Bede, who made a point of foregrounding the primacy

In Ezram, ed. Hurst, p.

266, lines 1010–22: ‘Offerimus namque holocaustum domino super

altare ipsius cum stabilita in corde nostro fidei eius integra deuotione bonis actibus operam
damus. Et hoc mane ac uespere facimus cum nos pro certo meminerimus et initia salutiferae
intentionis ab illo accepisse et non nisi per auxilium gratiae eius ea quae inchoauimus bona
posse perficere ideoque illi uota gratiarum in omnibus cum ardente desiderio piae conuersa-
tionis referimus. Item mane holocaustum facimus cum pro lumine accepto spiritalis scientiae
conditori nostro uicem bene uiuendi rependimus, uespere holocaustum facimus cum pro requie
sempiterna quam nos in illo post bona opera accepturos speramus incessabili studio flagramus.’
Trans. DeGregorio, Bede: On Ezra, p.

45.

On the monastic tenor of Bede’s exegesis, see S. DeGregorio, ‘Bede, the Monk, as Exegete:
Evidence from the Commentary on Ezra-Nehemiah’, Revue bénédictine

115 (2005), pp. 343–69,

and idem, ‘Bede and Benedict of Nursia’, in S. Baxter et al. (eds), Early Medieval Studies
in Memory of Patrick Wormald, Studies in Early Medieval Britain (Burlington, VT,

2008),

pp.

149–63.

B. McGinn, ‘Gregory the Great: A Contemplative in Action’, in The Growth of Mysticism (New
York,

1999), pp. 34–79, at p. 37.

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of his exegetical writings when he took stock of his life’s work at the end
of the Historia ecclesiastica.

Yet, as I have argued elsewhere, Bede’s appropriation of a Gregorian

scriptural spirituality involved some key modifications.

For in Gregory

the role of commentator-as-pastor or commentator-as-spiritual-guide
finally merges with yet another of his authorial identities, for which he is
perhaps best known – namely, that of commentator-as-mystic. Exegesis
for Gregory, that is to say, should lead to contemplation, a subject about
which Bede is a good deal more circumspect.

Thus, in Gregory’s inter-

pretation, the holocaust is an image not only of good works but also of
our offering our mind to God in contemplation – an interpretation
censured by Bede, who preferred to use the image to underline the need
for believers to perform good works.

However much Bede can be seen to follow the exegetical mode at work

in Gregory, such interpretative discrepancies thus point up certain key
differences that do indeed distinguish them from one another – differ-
ences traceable not just to variations in psychological temperament, as
Meyvaert’s calling Bede an ‘extrovert’ would have it,

but just as much to

the particulars of the social setting in and for which Bede was writing.
Like Gregory, Bede wrote for the spiritual benefit of his immediate
cloistered brethren.

At the other end, it is clear too that both men shared

a sense of their doctor-like role as a religious writer and teacher whose
works would reach a wide international audience of ecclesiastical readers
throughout Latin Christendom, as we know they did.

But in all this

Bede faced limitations that Gregory did not, limitations whose outlines
become imposingly distinct when we encounter those passages in his
commentaries lamenting the indolent readers, the corrupt teachers and
the watered-down standards of pastoral care which together constitute

Historia ecclesiastica V.

24, in B. Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (eds), Bede’s Ecclesiastical History

of the English People, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford,

1969), pp. 566–71, at pp. 568–9. On the

significance of Bede’s self-presentation here, see R. Ray, ‘Who Did Bede Think He Was?’, in
DeGregorio (ed.), Innovation and Tradition, pp.

11–35, at pp. 15–17; and Thacker’s remarks in

the same volume, pp.

46–7.

DeGregorio, ‘Bede on Prayer and Contemplation’, esp. pp.

13–14, 29–34.

DeGregorio, ‘Bede on Prayer and Contemplation’, pp.

29–32. See also G. Zinn, Jr., ‘Exegesis

and Spirituality in the Writings of Gregory the Great’, in J. Cavadini (ed.), Gregory the Great:
A Symposium (Notre Dame,

1995), pp. 168–80.

For an example, compare the passage from Bede quoted above in n.

63 to the very different

interpretation of the holocaust offered by Gregory in Moralia in Iob I.

35.49, ed. Adriaen, CCSL

143, p. 51, lines 2–18.

Meyvaert, ‘Bede the Scholar’, p.

47.

See, e.g., Historia ecclesiastica V.

24, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 566, where Bede mentions

writing for the benefit of his brethren: ‘meae meorumque necessitati’.

For recent discussion of these wider aspirations in Bede, see DeGregorio, ‘Bede’s In Ezram et
Neemiam’, pp.

23–4; Ray, ‘Who Did Bede Think He Was?’, in DeGregorio (ed.), Innovation and

Tradition, pp.

11–35, at pp. 12–19; and Thacker, ‘Bede and the Ordering of Understanding’, in

ibid., pp.

37–63, at pp. 44–6.

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another reception context for his writings, and which are given emphatic
local colouring from the detailed missive he sent to his friend and
confidant, Egbert bishop of York, regarding the deplorable state of his
native Northumbrian church.

Whatever else it may do for our percep-

tion of Bede (for the effects of its rhetoric are seismic), the letter tells us
something very special about his own perceived role as a reformer, the
difficulties he knew such an agenda faced at home, and the nature of the
broader regional mission he hoped, notwithstanding, his writings could
fulfil. As Judith McClure has noted, the contrast with Gregory’s aims and
audience is substantial: ‘Gregory had been surrounded by a group of
earnest, highly educated Roman monks, who were searching for the most
subtle points of spiritual guidance in the Scriptures, who delighted in
lengthy and illuminating digressions, and who included among their
number skilled notarii well able to take down every word from the lips of
their spiritual father.’

It is a far cry from the fractured world behind the

Epistola ad Ecgbertum and Bede’s anxious attempt to repair it.

It follows from this disparity that the mystical side of Gregory’s exege-

sis, whilst surely admirable in its own right, is something that, in the end,
Bede perforce had to regard with caution, given the pressing need for
active ministration in the Northumbrian church of his day. In view of
that troubled setting, Bede had to worry much more than did Gregory
about the repercussions too keen a desire for contemplation could have
on the social obligations of his fellow religious, whose instruction and
healthful examples were so desperately needed, and whose preaching
formed the channel through which the teachings of the faith outlined in
Bede’s writings could have flowed to the masses.

This is, of course, no

more than saying that an effective and dedicated pastorate was in Bede’s

Epistola ad Ecgbertum Episcopum, ed. C. Plummer in Baedae Opera Historica,

2 vols (Oxford,

1896; reprinted as one volume, 1946). For discussion of the letter’s key themes, see DeGregorio,

‘Bede’s In Ezram et Neemiam’, pp.

6–9, as well as the insightful comments of John Blair, The

Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford,

2005), pp. 100–8. Bede’s remarks in his commentaries

about the less than ideal state of ecclesiastical affairs in his day are discussed by DeGregorio,
‘Reforming Impulse’.

J. McClure, ‘Bede’s Notes on Genesis and the Training of the Anglo-Saxon Clergy’, in The Bible
in the Medieval World: Essays in Memory of Beryl Smalley, Studies in Church History, Subsidia

(Oxford,

1985), pp. 17–30, at p. 22. See also her comments on pp. 27–30.

A key passage in Bede’s commentary on Ezra–Nehemiah confirms his perception of these three
levels of audience: namely

1) the exegetical doctores like Bede whose writings strengthen 2) the

praedicatores, who in turn disseminate the truths of the faith to

3) the untutored laity, e.g. In

Ezram, ed. Hurst, p.

275, lines 1345–52: ‘Dant autem principes patrum Iosue uidelicet et

Zorobabel ac fratres eorum pecunias eisdem latomis et cementariis quo eos promptiores ad
operandum reddant cum euangelizantibus uerbum hi qui tempore merito eruditione
praecessere doctores Christo auctore uel exempla uirtutum suarum proponunt uel diuinorum
apicum paginas largiuntur quorum exhortationibus uel promissis confortati minus in labore
coelesti lassescant.’ For an English translation, see DeGregorio, Bede: On Ezra, p.

58. Cf.

Thacker, ‘Monks, Preaching and Pastoral Care’, p.

154, who similarly notes that Bede ‘intended

his monastically trained teachers and preachers to have an impact outside the religious
communities’.

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reformist outlook vital to the spiritual health of society and its religious
institutions. Consequently, in producing works of commentary that,
amidst other objectives, would have sought to educate, instruct and
encourage Northumbrian preachers, he had to act as a discriminating
reader of Gregory’s writings, filtering those ideas that would most aid the
work of evangelization. This he achieved in part by emphasizing those
teachings of Gregory that stressed either the connection between con-
templation and action or, as we have seen, the priority of action above
all.

Thus Bede writes not about Job and Ezekiel, two great visionaries,

but about Ezra and Nehemiah, two great religious reformers; he has the
Bride in the Song of Songs arouse her lover from contemplative rest ‘in
order to care also for the salvation of your neighbours through the pursuit
of diligent preaching’;

and he depicts the pope, in the sketch of his

career in Book

2 of the Historia ecclesiastica, as more a pastor than a

contemplative.

In other words, as much as Gregory’s exegesis provided

a model for his own, Bede adapted it to what is, in the end, a more
practically oriented scriptural spirituality than Gregory’s, one that pre-
ferred the tropological to the mystical, the active to the contemplative.
Even here, then, in ‘following the footsteps’ of this his favourite church
Father, Bede left behind imprints that are quite clearly his own, relative to
his unique mission as a doctor scripturarum in the Gregorian mould.

University of Michigan – Dearborn

E.g. In primam partem Samuhelis, ed. Hurst, p.

88, lines 841–5: ‘Ille enim doctor uere in excelso

diuinae contemplationis se fuisse demonstrat qui ad loquendum humilibus infirmisque con-
descendens cuncta quae dicturus est praedicando consona uoci manu praemonstrat operando
quo modo de domino scriptum est: quae coepit Iesus facere et docere.’

In Cantica canticorum, ed. Hurst, p.

221, lines 415–20: ‘Surge de stratu illo multum tibi amabili

in quo tuimet curam agere in psalmis et orationibus ceterisque uitae studiis delectaris propera
et ueni ad impendendam etiam proximis curam salutis per studium sedulae praedicationis quasi
enim tot passibus ad uocantem nos dominum properamus quot pro eius causa uirtutum opera
patramus.’ My translation.

Historia ecclesiastica II.

1, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 122–35.

On Bede’s self-perceived status as a doctor, see Thacker, ‘Bede and the Ordering of Under-
standing’, in DeGregorio (ed.), Innovation and Tradition, pp.

37–63, at pp. 44–6.

Scott DeGregorio

Early Medieval Europe

2010 18 (1)

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Editorial practice in Smaragdus of

St Mihiel’s commentary on the

Rule of St Benedict

emed_291

61..91

atthew D. Ponesse

This paper examines the editorial principles that guided Smaragdus of St
Mihiel (fl.

809–26) in the composition of his commentary on the Rule of St

Benedict. Scholars in the late eighth and early ninth centuries actively
engaged in an official programme of educational reform that called for the
production of accurate texts. Smaragdus’ commentary provides a valuable
witness to this movement, revealing how scholars applied grammatical and
doctrinal criteria to root out errors in the manuscript tradition. Smaragdus’
concern with the monastic life also draws attention to the importance of
considerations of practice and observance in the pursuit of textual authority.

The reception and transmission of knowledge in the Carolingian period
is a subject that has long been tied to an institutionalized programme of
educational reform begun by Charlemagne in the late eighth century.
Much is known about the principles and aims of this movement, but
questions remain about its implementation, particularly with regard to
the activity of scholars who sought out and reworked the teachings of
earlier writers for a new generation of readers. The impetus for educa-
tional reform can be traced to two documents that sought to improve the
quality of education among the clergy: the Epistola de litteris colendis and
the Admonitio generalis. The first, a letter sent by Charlemagne to Abbot
Baugaulf of Fulda as early as

784, recalls the correspondence of several

communities of monks on whose prayers Charlemagne relied for spiritual
support.

While Charlemagne notes that the sense of various passages was

correct, he laments the uncouth words and improper grammar that

I am grateful to Michael V. Dougherty and Lawrence Masek for comments on earlier versions
of this paper. I would also like to express my gratitude to the reviewer and to the editor of Early
Medieval Europe for additional suggestions and careful reading of this paper.

Epistola de litteris colendis, MGH Leges

2, Capitularia 1, ed. A. Boretius (Hanover, 1883),

pp.

78–9. On the date and composition of the document, see T. Martin, ‘Bemerkungen

zur “Epistola de litteris colendis” ’, Archiv für Diplomatik

31 (1985), pp. 227–72, at pp. 266–8.

Early Medieval Europe

2010 18 (1) 61–91

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350

Main Street, Malden, MA

02148, USA

adorned them. He attributes the poor quality of their letters to negligence
in learning, and urges all monks to attend to their studies so that a simple
error in language might not lead to a more grievous error in understand-
ing. The second document, the Admonitio generalis of

789, was more

broadly conceived, intending to correct the practice of the clergy in
general, but also containing specific articles pertaining to the reception,
correction, and dissemination of texts.

Article

72, in particular, directs

scholars to seek out canonical books – those written by the church
Fathers – so that in reading them all Christians might approach Scripture
without falling into doctrinal error. The article also points to the necessity
of providing students with well-emended texts, indicating that manu-
scripts handed down to the current generation had been corrupted
through careless transcription:

And let schools for teaching boys the psalms, musical notation,
singing, computation and grammar be created in every monastery and
episcopal residence. And correct catholic books properly, for often,
while people want to pray to God in the proper fashion, they yet pray
improperly because of uncorrected books. And do not allow your boys
to correct them, either in reading or in copying; and if there is need to
copy the gospel, psalter or missal, let men of full age do the writing,
with all diligence.

Together, the Epistola de litteris colendis and the Admonitio generalis

point to a systematic programme of reform that had as its immediate goal
a properly educated clergy, but which was ultimately intended to lead all
people to the proper conduct of the Christian life.

Latin literacy was

promoted as the vehicle for this reform. If monks were to serve society by
offering acceptable prayers to God on behalf of the kingdom, it was
necessary that they be instructed in the Latin of the Vulgate and the
church Fathers, a language that differed in many respects from the

On its connection to the Carolingian educational reform, see J. Contreni, ‘The Carolingian
Renaissance: Education and Literary Culture’, in R. McKitterick (ed.), New Cambridge Medi-
eval History, Vol.

2 c.700–c.900 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 709–56, at pp. 725–35. For an English

translation of the text, see P.D. King, Charlemagne: Translated Sources (Lambrigg,

1987),

pp.

232–3.

Admonitio generalis, ed. A. Boretius, MGH Leges

2, Capitularia 1 (Hanover, 1833), pp. 52–62. On

the circumstances and content of the capitulary, see G. Brown, ‘The Carolingian Renaissance’,
in R. McKitterick (ed.), Carolingian Culture: Emulation and Innovation (Cambridge,

1994),

pp.

1–51, at pp. 17–21.

Admonitio generalis

72, pp. 59–60; trans, King, Charlemagne, p. 217.

In addition to the Admonitio generalis and De litteris colendis, the programme of educational
reform is supported by numerous other capitularies and treatises. For a valuable discussion of
this evidence, see R. McKitterick’s chapter on correctio in Charlemagne: The Formation of a New
Identity (Cambridge,

2008), pp. 292–380.

Matthew D. Ponesse

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2010 18 (1)

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

conventions of everyday discourse.

The reform of spoken Latin also had

implications for the written word, since both monks and priests were
enjoined to produce useful manuals for students, to implement new
standards in copying, and to instruct youths in a curriculum that placed
the liberal arts in service to the study of the Bible. Teachers in the
monastery and cathedral schools necessarily had to have a solid founda-
tion in Latin grammar and Christian doctrine.

A certain level of literacy

was also expected of the parish clergy who were to use these texts to
instruct the laity on the proper expression of the Christian life.

The output of instructional texts in the late eighth and early ninth

centuries not only reflects the responsiveness of scholars to the call for
educational reform, but attests to the fact that they possessed the ability
and resources to carry it out. They were not blind transmitters who
preserved for posterity a tradition they could not possibly understand or
put to use; rather, they were inheritors of a body of learning that they
made accessible for a new generation of readers.

Examinations of librar-

ies and manuscripts in the Carolingian period reveal that scholars had an
unprecedented access to, and – perhaps more significantly – were able to
work with, classical and patristic texts.

Works produced by Carolingian

scholars also reflect a great degree of sophistication. While they limited

The distinctions between spoken and written Latin in the Carolingian period have been
discussed extensively by M. Banniard, Viva Voce: Communication écrite et communication orale
du IV

au IX

siècle en occident latin (Paris,

1992), pp. 305–68; ‘Language and Communication

in Carolingian Europe’, in McKitterick (ed.), New Cambridge Medieval History, pp.

695–708;

M. Richter, ‘Die Sprachpolitik Karls des Grossen’, in Studies in Medieval Language and Culture
(Dublin,

1995), pp. 86–108; R. Mckitterick, Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge,

1989), pp. 7–22; R. Wright, ‘Late Latin and Early Romance: Alcuin’s De orthographia and the

Council of Tours (AD

813)’, in Francis Cairns (ed.), Papers of the Liverpool Latin Seminar, Third

Volume,

1981 (Liverpool, 1981), pp. 343–61, at pp. 353–9; R. Wright, ‘Speaking, Reading and

Writing Late Latin and Early Romance’, Neophilologus

60 (1976), pp. 178–89.

On grammar as the basis of the Carolingian liberal arts curriculum, see J. Contreni, ‘The
Pursuit of Knowledge in Carolingian Europe’, in R. Sullivan (ed.), The Gentle Voices of Teachers:
Aspects of Learning in the Carolingian Age (Columbus,

1995), pp. 106–41, at pp. 115–23.

Brown, ‘The Carolingian Renaissance’, p.

19.

For traditional assessments of the Carolingian intellectual achievement that I here call into
question, see B. Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (

1941; repr. Notre Dame,

1978), pp. 37–38; M.L.W. Laistner, Thought and Letters in Western Europe, A.D. 500 to 900

(Ithaca, NY,

1957), p. 301; R.R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries: From the

Carolingian Age to the End of the Renaissance (Cambridge,

1954), p. 126.

I note here the indispensable work of B. Bischoff, Manuscripts and Libraries in the Age of
Charlemagne (Cambridge,

1994). Other significant studies include, D. Ganz, ‘Texts and Scripts

in Surviving Manuscripts in the Script of Luxeuil’, in P. Ni Chatháin and M. Richter (eds),
Ireland and Europe in the Early Middle Ages: Texts and Transmission (Dublin,

2002), pp. 186–204;

D. Ganz, ‘Book Production and the Spread of Caroline Minuscule’, in McKitterick (ed.), New
Cambridge Medieval History, pp.

786–808; D. Ganz, Corbie in the Carolingian Renaissance

(Sigmaringen,

1990), pp. 121–58; J. Contreni, The Cathedral School of Laon from 850 to 930: Its

Manuscripts and Masters (Munich,

1978), pp. 29–79; R. McKitterick, ‘Script and Book Pro-

duction’, in McKitterick (ed.), New Cambridge Medieval History, pp.

221–47. McKitterick has

also published numerous lectures on Carolingian book production in Books, Scribes, and
Learning in the Frankish Kingdoms,

6th–9th Centuries (Aldershot, 1994).

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their task to the application of existing learning and did not presume to
engage in independent work, they were able to transform their intellec-
tual inheritance through the correction and adaptation of sources. Later
writers would build upon their efforts, laying claim to the writings of the
past and consciously improving the teachings of an earlier age.

Based upon the available evidence, it is convenient to think about the

Carolingian educational reform as a consistent and unified effort under-
taken by the clergy in response to Charlemagne’s call for an ideal Chris-
tian society. Recent studies, however, make it clear that the movement
was less centralized than the sources suggest, as they call attention to the
diverse talents, individual interests, and varying resources of those who
carried out the reform.

The lack of uniformity in the activity of Carol-

ingian scholars also has much to do with the legislation emanating from
the royal court, which articulated the principles of the reform movement
but lacked specific direction on how they were to be implemented. Many
points of detail have been explored, including the definition and
make-up of schools,

the priorities of the educational curriculum,

and

There is evidence to suggest that even by the mid-ninth century Carolingian writers thought of
themselves as successors to medieval learning, ones who combined earlier works in such a way
as to improve on the teachings of the past. See, for example, the preface to Paschasius
Radbertus’ Expositio in Matheo, ed. B. Paulus, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Medievalis

(Turnhout,

1984). Similar perceptions of authorship can be found in Angelomus of Luxeuil’s

letter preface to his commentary on the Canticle of Canticles, ed. E. Dümmler, MGH Epistolae

5 (Berlin, 1899), pp. 26–30. For an opposing view, see J. Le Goff, Intellectuals in the Middle Ages,

trans. Teresa L. Fagan (Cambridge, MA,

1993), pp. 9–13, where he identifies the twelfth century

as the age of intellectualism, a period which saw the emergence of a new class of professional
scholars who thought consciously about the activity of writing and desired to advance beyond
the intellectual achievements of the past. This argument is supported by Jacqueline T. Miller,
Poetic License: Authority and Authorship in Medieval and Renaissance Contexts (New York and
Oxford,

1986), pp. 10–11.

This assessment is made by Contreni in ‘The Carolingian Renaissance’, p.

712. For an overview

of the diverse talents and activities of scholars, see R. McKitterick, ‘The Carolingian Renais-
sance of Culture and Learning’, in J. Story (ed.), Charlemagne: Empire and Society (Manchester,

2005), pp. 151–66, at pp. 162–4; P. Depreux, ‘Ambitions et limites des réformes culturelles à

l’époque carolingienne’, Revue historique

623 (2002), pp. 721–53, at pp. 740–6; Brown, ‘The

Carolingian Renaissance’, pp.

34–44.

Recent studies include M. de Jong, ‘From scolastici to scioli: Alcuin and the Formation of an
Intellectual Élite’, in L.A.J.R. Houwen and A.A. MacDonald (eds), Alcuin of York: Scholar at the
Carolingian Court (Groningen,

1998), pp. 45–57; M. Hildebrandt, The External School in

Carolingian Society (Leiden,

1992); R. McKitterick, ‘The Palace School of Charles the Bald’, in

M. Gibson et al. (eds), Charles the Bald: Court and Kingdom (Oxford,

1981), pp. 385–400; J.

Contreni, ‘The Carolingian School: Letters from the Classroom’, in C. Leonardi and Enrico
Menestó (eds), Giovanni Scoto nel suo tempo. L’organizzazione del sapere in età carolingia
(Spoleto,

1989), pp. 81–111; P. Riché, ‘Les moines bénédictins, maîtres d’école, VIIe–XIe siècles’,

in W. Lourdaux and D. Verhelst (eds), Benedictine Culture,

750–1050 (Leuven, 1983), pp. 96–113.

On the pursuit of the liberal arts in the eighth and ninth centuries, see J. Fried, ‘Karl der Große,
die Artes liberales und die karolingische Renaissance’, in P.L. Butzer et al. (eds), Karl der Grosse
und sein Nachwirken,

2 vols (Turnhout, 1998), I, pp. 25–43; Contreni, ‘The Pursuit of Knowl-

edge in Carolingian Europe’, pp.

106–41.

Matthew D. Ponesse

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2010 18 (1)

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

the introduction of new standards in copying,

but the investigation is in

no way complete. In the area of scribal reform, for instance, it is necessary
to question what was involved in the production of ‘well-emended’ texts.
The Admonitio generalis indicates that errors had worked their way into
existing manuscripts through negligent copying, but it does not specify
the exact nature of these errors, or how Carolingian scholars were to bring
these texts into effective contact with the present. It is the purpose of this
article to examine the editorial practice of Carolingian writers, demon-
strating how scholars applied different standards of correction to improve
texts for use by their generation. I will focus, in particular, on the writing
of Smaragdus of St Mihiel, who as an early ninth-century grammarian,
theologian and monastic reformer produced numerous works for the
court and cloister. His commentary on the Rule of St Benedict is par-
ticularly valuable, not only for its discussion of monastic spirituality and
the daily observance of monks, but also because it exhibits the complexity
of philological and hermeneutical principles arising in the wake of the
Carolingian educational reform. While Smaragdus’ editorial practice was
not always consistent or necessarily well informed, he reveals in his
practice of emendation a critical approach to the authorities of the past.

The practice of emendation

What errors did Carolingian writers perceive when they first looked to
improve the quality of existing texts? We can infer from the Epistola de
litteris colendis and the Admonitio generalis that many of these errors had
to do with orthography and grammar, since these are the likely sources of
poorly spoken Latin addressed by each source.

These errors were not

necessarily the product of negligent copying, but emerged rather with
changes in the function and expression of Latin in the early Middle Ages.
By the Merovingian period, writers had moved away from the rigid
paradigms of classical Latin to employ an increasing array of orthographi-
cal, grammatical and syntactical forms.

With the arrival of the first

For studies on the development and uses of Carolingian script, see Ganz, ‘Book Production and
the Spread of Caroline Minuscule’, pp.

786–808; R. McKitterick, ‘Script and Book Production’,

in McKitterick (ed.), Carolingian Culture: Emulation and Innovation, pp.

221–47. For a detailed

discussion of the features of Carolingian script, see B. Bischoff, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity
and the Middle Ages (Cambridge,

1990), pp. 112–27.

Epistola de litteris colendis, p.

79; trans. King, Charlemagne, p. 233: ‘For what pious devotion

dictated faithfully as regards matter, an uneducated tongue was unable, through neglect of
learning, to express without fault as regards form.’ Admonitio generalis

72, p. 60; trans. King,

Charlemagne, p.

217: ‘for often, while people want to pray to God in the proper fashion, they

yet pray improperly because of uncorrected books’.

For a useful introduction to the development of orthography and syntax in the medieval period,
see A.G. Rigg, ‘Morphology and Pronunciation’, in A.G. Rigg and A. Mantello (eds), Medieval
Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide (Washington, DC,

1996), pp. 79–82; and A.G.

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scholars at the Carolingian court, however, an effort was undertaken to
normalize the conventions of spoken and written Latin. Peter of Pisa
(

744–99), the first of a number of Lombard scholars invited to court by

Charlemagne, produced a grammatical treatise that looked back to clas-
sical usage for rules of expression.

Other grammarians, including Alcuin

of York (c.

735–804) and Smaragdus of St Mihiel, placed this instruction

in service to the study of the Bible, producing a model of correct expres-
sion that defined Christian writing for the next generation of students.

In addition to holding to classical paradigms and the Latin of the Vulgate,
Carolingian scholars sought to emulate the language of those who had
first made a study of the Bible in the Latin tongue and who were believed
to have come closest to penetrating the mysteries of Scripture: the church
Fathers. Needless to say, works produced or copied in the early Middle
Ages often did not meet the new standard of Latin usage that was
promoted by Carolingian reformers. When Charlemagne entrusted
scholars with producing well-emended texts for use in the schools, they
responded by bringing existing texts in line with current grammatical
conventions. This practice involved rooting out medievalisms that had
worked their way into classical and patristic texts, and imposing consis-
tent and regular forms of written expression on the teachings of early
medieval writers, as we shall see below.

Quality of expression was only one criterion that separated classical

and early medieval Latin writers. Works produced in antiquity were also
thought to convey teachings beyond the comprehension of most medi-
eval readers. The challenges facing well-educated Carolingians is perhaps
most famously illustrated by Gisela and Rotrud, respectively the sister
and daughter of Charlemagne, who once asked Alcuin to explain to them
the Gospel of John because they found the commentary written by
Augustine to be too difficult. Alcuin assures the royal nuns in the preface

Rigg, ‘Morphology and Syntax’, in ibid., pp.

83–92. On the development of Merovingian Latin

in particular, see R. Maltby, ‘Neologisms in the Latin of Gregory of Tours’, Archivum Latinitatis
Medii Aevi

63 (2005), pp. 61–9; M. Banniard, ‘Latin et communication orale en Gaule franque:

le témoignage de la Vita Eligii’, in J. Fontaine and J. Hillgarth (eds), Le Septième siècle:
Changements et continuities (London,

1992), pp. 58–86; G. Calboli, ‘Aspects du Latin mérol-

ingien’, in J. Herman (ed.), Latin vulgaire – latin tardif (Tübingen,

1987), pp. 19–35. Els Rose

provides a very extensive analysis of Merovingian liturgical Latin in her introduction to the
Missale Gothicum, ed. E. Rose, CCSL

159 (Turnhout, 2005), pp. 37–181.

On the content and versions of Peter’s grammar, see V. Law, ‘The Study of Grammar’, in
McKitterick (ed.), Carolingian Culture: Emulation and Innovation, pp.

88–107, at p. 93.

Alcuin, for instance, encourages the reader of his little book on grammar to ascend through the
liberal arts, starting first with grammar and then proceeding to rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic,
geometry, music and astronomy, until the student was sufficiently mature in age and robust in
mind to arrive at the heights of holy scripture: De grammatica, PL

101, cols 853D–854A. For a

discussion of Christian Latin in Smaragdus’ commentary on Donatus, see V. Law, ‘The Study
of Grammar’, pp.

99–103; J. Leclercq, ‘Smaragde et la grammaire chrétienne’, Revue du moyen

âge latin

4 (1948), pp. 15–22.

Matthew D. Ponesse

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to his commentary that he would proceed with unadorned language so
that they might be able to understand the sense of the Fathers.

Carol-

ingian scholars attempted to make the works of earlier writers more
accessible by digesting their teachings and presenting them in a simplified
form for their audience. In fact, it was common for the writing of a single
author to be transmitted in abridgement or in works of compilation,
since Carolingian scholars were more concerned with producing conve-
nient and useful manuals for use in their own age than with preserving
their intellectual inheritance for posterity. Thus, we might broaden our
understanding of emendation to include not only grammatical correc-
tion, but also abbreviation and elaboration among the list of editorial
tools employed by scholars in the late eighth and early ninth centuries.

Notwithstanding this effort to relate the teachings of earlier writers in

a useful and meaningful way, Carolingians scholars approached some
works more cautiously than others, attributing to them a standard of
authority against which they dared not deviate. The books of Scripture
headed this list, followed next by the works of the Fathers. Most scholars
were accustomed to drawing upon Scripture from memory, having learnt
to commit verses to heart early on through their participation in the
liturgy, but they did not actively seek to deviate from the literal word of
God, knowing that such a practice was the first step towards heresy.
Patristic writings had also withstood the test of time and were believed to
embody the standards of correct faith approved by the ages. Although
there were some notable exceptions, many scholars chose to transmit the
teachings of the Fathers verbatim so as not to impose on them any notion
that was not originally conceived by the author. For instance, Alcuin
states in the preface to his commentary on John that he preferred to
transcribe his source word for word rather than commit the sin of
presumption and transmit teachings contrary to the sense of the
Fathers.

Rabanus Maurus (c.

780–856) apologizes to anyone who might

be turned off by the length of his commentary on the Psalms, explaining
that it was necessary to compose thirty books if he was to preserve his
sources without adulteration.

Far from being routine disclaimers added

under the rhetorical topos of humility, these and other statements made
by Carolingian writers reflect a general reluctance to alter the authorita-
tive word of their sources. Clarification of these works was often
expressed through the medium of commentary, enabling the writer to

MGH Epistolae

4, ed. E. Dümmler (Berlin, 1895), pp. 356–7. On the education of women in the

Carolingian period, see Rosamond McKitterick, ‘Women and Literacy in the Early Middle
Ages’, in R. McKitterick (ed.), Books, Scribes and Learning in the Frankish Kingdoms,

6th–9th

Centuries (Aldershot,

1994), pp. 1–43.

Alcuin, letter preface to the commentary on John, MGH Epistolae

4, p. 357.

Rabanus Maurus, preface to the Enarrationum in epistolas beati pauli libri triginta, PL

111, col.

1273B.

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stay true to the verba of the text and relate its sensus in a framework that
could be more easily understood by the reader.

No matter how much care was taken in the transmission of existing

sources, meticulous copying practices did not guarantee that Carolingian
scholars were passing on accurate teachings to their audience. Works
conceived in the past were often transmitted in a form that was either
incomplete, corrupted by error, or adapted to various uses. While Char-
lemagne did not directly call on scholars to bring texts back to their most
authentic state, it is likely that writers were guided by this principle in the
transmission of early medieval learning. Indeed, most if not all scholars
understood that deviation from the authorities of the past could lead to
transgressions in practice, a danger made all the more difficult to over-
come by the numerous recensions of works circulating in their day.
Modern studies on the history of textual criticism say very little about the
pursuit of authority in the eighth and ninth centuries.

If Carolingian

scholars are mentioned at all, they are most often characterized by a
conservative fidelity when it came to the task of reproducing texts. A
closer look reveals, however, that Carolingians not only worked actively
to overcome textual discrepancy in particular works, but that they also
applied specific criteria in determining the authenticity of a text.

A considerable amount of work in this area has revolved around

Carolingian biblical criticism. Between

800 and 804 Alcuin worked on

several copies of a new Bible text: two were presented to Charlemagne,
one privately in

800 and the second for his chapel at Aachen in 801; two

were produced for the community of Tours; and two others were sent to
private individuals. While the content and layout of these Bibles was not
necessarily fixed, the hierarchy of scripts used to convey the internal
divisions of the text indicate that legibility had become a priority in the
production of de luxe manuscripts at the scriptorium of Tours.

Alcuin’s

effort to produce a standard version of the Bible text also served to correct
the many errors that had found their way into existing copies of the
Vulgate. But while Alcuin compared several of these copies, he did not
make use of all the manuscripts at his disposal, nor did he attempt to go
back to the texts in the original Hebrew or Greek. His emendation of the

Introductions to the practice of textual criticism in antiquity and the Middle Ages include
J.E.G. Zetzel, Latin Textual Criticism in Antiquity (New York,

1981); E.J. Kenney, The Classical

Text: Aspects of Editing in the Age of the Printed Book (Berkeley,

1974); S. Prete, Observations on

the History of Textual Criticism in the Medieval and Renaissance Periods (Collegeville, MN,

1969).

For select studies on the scribal culture and transmission of texts in the Middle Ages, see J.H.D.
Scourfield (ed.), Texts and Culture in Late Antiquity: Inheritance, Authority, and Change
(Oakville, CN,

2007); O. Pecere et al. (eds), Formative Stages of Classical Traditions: Latin Texts

from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Spoleto,

1995), pp. 7–38.

D. Ganz, ‘Mass Production: Carolingian Bibles from Tours’, in R. Gameson (ed.), The Early
Medieval Bible (Cambridge,

1994), pp. 53–62, at p. 59.

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Vulgate text was most likely limited to the correction of orthography and
grammar, subjects on which he taught and wrote, and which he applied
in the production of new works.

For this reason, the Alcuin Bible is best

thought of as a cleaned-up version of the Vulgate rather than an entirely
new edition.

A more critical approach to the textual history of the Bible

is revealed in the work of Theodulf of Orléans, who undertook a revision
of the Vulgate after his consecration as bishop in

798. While not as

successful as the Alcuin Bible, Theodulf’s text seeks to re-establish the
purity of Jerome’s original by returning as closely as possible to the
Hebrew tradition. His approach has been described as scientific and
systematic, for by consulting a greater number of manuscripts he was able
to identify variant readings and resolve passages that posed a problem.

In fact, his decisions often resulted in a reading that was much closer to
the Hebrew text than the translation produced by Jerome, reflecting a
preference for a more literal understanding of the original language.

Outside of biblical scholarship, the most famous editor of texts in the

Carolingian period is Lupus of Ferrières, who was known to have sought
out multiple copies of the same work for the purpose of comparison and
correction. In one letter, for instance, he asks Einhard for his copy of
Cicero’s De rhetorica, explaining that the one in his possession was greatly
inferior, having already compared the two.

Although Lupus did not

employ a sophisticated method for distinguishing authentic readings
against variants, his interest in collation and active pursuit of textual
authority makes him notable among Carolingians.

Studies on the authors mentioned above reveal that Carolingians

looked critically at the manuscripts in their possession and sought to root
out variant readings that had worked their way into the manuscript
tradition. Still, very little has been said about the criteria used in the

On Alcuin’s correction of the Vulgate, see B. Fischer, Die Alkuin-Bibel (Freiburg,

1957),

pp.

18–19.

R. McKitterick, ‘Carolingian Bible Production: The Tours Anomaly’, in Gameson (ed.), The
Early Medieval Bible, pp.

63–77, at p. 63. This study includes a useful discussion of the

transmission and influence of the Alcuin Bible.

C. Chevalier-Royet, ‘Les révisions bibliques de Théodulf d’Orléans’, in S. Shimahara (ed.),
Études d’Exégese carolingienne: autour d’Haymon d’Auxerre (Turnhout,

2007), pp. 237–56, at

pp.

245–6.

Royet suggests that this preference is probably that of a contemporary corrector, since marginal
glosses attributed to Theodulf reveal an ignorance of fundamental concepts in Hebrew, ‘Les
révisions bibliques’, p.

246.

MGH Epistolae

6, ed. E. Dümmler (Berlin, 1925), p. 8. Thomas Noble provides a good

introduction to this author’s life and career in ‘Lupus of Ferrières in his Carolingian Context’,
in A.C. Murray (ed.), After Rome’s Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History
(Toronto,

1998), pp. 232–50.

On Lupus as textual critic, see L. Holtz, ‘L’humanisme de Loup de Ferrières’, in Gli Umanesimi
medievali (Florence,

1998), pp. 201–13. For a study of his correspondence, see B. Löfstedt, ‘Zu

den Briefen des Lupus von Ferrières’, in W. Berschin (ed.), Ausgewählte Aufsätze zur lateinischen
Sprachgeschichte und Philologie (Stuttgart,

2000), pp. 285–8.

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correction of texts, perhaps owing to the fact that such investigations are
limited by the available evidence. Indeed, there was little need in the
Carolingian period to reproduce an exemplar once it was replaced by a
new and improved text. In such cases where the exemplar has not sur-
vived to the present, it has become difficult to establish the editorial
principles that guided scholars in the transmission of sources. But even if
we cannot draw conclusions from a comparison of existing manuscripts,
basic determinants of authority can be inferred from our discussion
above.

First of all, we can be fairly certain that writers in the late eighth and

early ninth centuries were aware of the grammatical, syntactical and
orthographical differences between classical, early Christian and medieval
Latin, a fact substantiated by the transmission of usages and expressions
not in keeping with Carolingian standards of Latin, not to mention the
numerous texts composed on the subject.

Carolingians looking to

support their works on the teachings of earlier writers would have devel-
oped a familiarity with the quality of Latin known to be in use by a
particular author or at the time of a work’s composition, and most
certainly worked to correct usages that were incompatible with an
author’s mode of expression.

The degree to which a work adhered to the standard of orthodoxy was

another measure used to assess its authenticity. Carolingian scholars
believed that the teachings accepted in the canon of Christian thought
were uniform and consistent. They drew upon the works of the Fathers
interchangeably in order to provide their generation with convenient and
useful manuals for the study of Scripture and the Christian life. Rabanus
Maurus, for instance, explains in his commentary on Jeremiah how a lack
of available texts compelled him to fill in the gaps of tradition by using
the teachings of other authors.

He and other Carolingian writers fre-

quently used the terms terms colligendo, interponenendo, miscendo and
alternando to describe the way in which they drew upon their sources.
With these texts placed side by side, they were in a position to identify
and emend perceived errors that had found their way into the manuscript
tradition.

Alcuin, for example, wrote treatises on both orthography and grammar. For editions of these
works, see De orthographia, ed. S. Bruni (Florence,

1997); Ars grammatica, ed. J.-P. Migne, PL

101, cols 849–902. On the subject of Latin in Alcuin’s correspondence, see M. Cristiani, ‘Le

vocabulaire de l’enseignement dans la correspondence d’Alcuin’, in O. Weijers (ed.), Vocabulaire
des écoles et des méthodes d’enseignement au Moyen Age (Turnhout,

1991), pp. 13–32. Other authors

of grammatical works include Peter of Pisa, Clemens Scottus, Smaragdus, Murethach of
Auxerre (and later of Metz), Sedulius Scottus and Remigius of Auxerre.

Rabanus Maurus, letter preface to the commentary on Jeremiah, MGH Epistolae

5, Epistolae

Karolini Aevi

3, ed. E. Dümmler (Berlin, 1899), p. 443.

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Lastly, in their effort to establish correct and accurate texts for use in

schools, Carolingian scholars did not make a distinction between teach-
ings long accepted by the church and those which promoted right prac-
tice. In other words, scholars often made decisions based on the utility
and efficacy of an author’s teaching. The pursuit of textual authority in
the Carolingian age was thus driven in part by the understanding that
what had passed the test of orthodoxy in an earlier age would no doubt
foster good practice in the present.

Carolingian scholars committed themselves to a programme of estab-

lishing authoritative texts by employing grammatical, doctrinal and
practical criteria. In the remaining section of this article these principles
will be examined through an analysis of Smaragdus of St Mihiel’s com-
mentary on the Rule of St Benedict. This work is particularly useful in
determining the principles that lay behind Smaragdus’ editorial practice,
for while many of his contemporaries promoted an improved and up-to-
date version of the Benedictine Rule that survives today in numerous
manuscripts, Smaragdus chose to preserve what he thought to be the text
originally set down by Benedict of Nursia himself. Not only does Smarag-
dus call attention to the interpolated version on a number of occasions, but
he looks to find support for his preferred text in the rules and conventions
of grammar, theological teaching, and current monastic practice.

Smaragdus of St Mihiel as textual critic

Smaragdus first appears in connection with the Carolingian court in

809,

when he drafted an official response to the filioque controversy, a dispute
concerning the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the
Son. This treatise survives in the form of a letter sent by Charlemagne to
Pope Hadrian, and contains a catalogue of scriptural references and
patristic excerpts in support of the dual procession of the Spirit.

Not

much is known of Smaragdus prior to the composition of this work. His
commentary on the Ars minor of Donatus was probably written some-
time in the first decade of the ninth century, when he served as master of
the school of Castillio, a monastery dedicated to St Michael and situated
twenty-three miles south of Verdun, France, on a mountain overlooking
the River Meuse.

Other works likely to have been composed during this

Smaragdus’ De processione spirtus sancti has been newly edited by H. Willjung in Das Konzil von
Aachen

809, MGH Concilia II, Supp. 2 (Hanover, 1998), pp. 303–12. Studies on the De processione

include H. Willjung, ‘Zur Überlieferung der Epistola de processione Spiritus sancti Smaragds
von Saint–Mihiel’, Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters

47 (1991), pp. 161–6; Fidel

Rädle, Studien zu Smaragd von Saint–Mihiel (Munich,

1974), pp. 60–2.

In the prologue of the grammar text, Smaragdus refers directly to teaching students in the
classroom, see Liber in partibus Donati, ed. B. Löfstedt, L. Holtz and A. Kibre, CCCM

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time include a commentary on the psalms and his Liber comitis, a book
of patristic readings organized around the liturgical year.

There has been a considerable amount of debate regarding Smaragdus’

possible origins. Max Manitius first proposed that he was an Irishman, or
that he had at least received an Irish education, on the grounds of his
observation of Breton glosses in an early manuscript of Smaragdus’
commentary on Donatus.

This argument was later supported by Adele

Kibre, who established several points of contact between Smaragdus’
commentary on Donatus and the grammars produced by Julian of Toledo
and Clemens Scottus, both of which were transmitted primarily through
insular manuscripts.

Bernhard Bischoff strongly refuted these claims,

offering an alternative possibility for the origins of Smaragdus in his study
of the Irishman Muridac.

Although this grammarian had often been

confused with Smaragdus, Bischoff notes several characteristics of the
commentary on Donatus that would place it outside the so-called Irish
tradition, most notably that Smaragdus did not follow the Irish method
of using analytical questions to conceptualize the parts of speech, and
that his declensions of Germanic names in the first declension would
have been unfamiliar to an Irishman.

More recently, Louis Holtz has

pointed to other passages in the commentary that support a continental
origin for Smaragdus, making note of the phrase ‘it is our custom to use’
that precedes the list of Germanic proper names, as well as drawing
attention to the fact that Smaragdus incorporates Visigothic names into
his section on patronyms. That Smaragdus refers at all to Visigothic
names is revealing of his possible Spanish roots, given that his commen-
tary was most probably written for a Frankish audience in the climate of
Carolingian educational reform.

This theory is further supported by circumstances surrounding the

composition of his Via Regia, a discourse on Christian rulership written

(Turnhout,

1986), p.1. The text names him as ‘presbyter’. On the dating of this text, see L.

Holtz, Liber in partibus, p. xviii.

The preface to the Expositio psalmorum has been published in PL

129, cols 1021D–1024B, where

it is falsely ascribed to a Smaragdus of St Maximin. The text of the Liber comitis is published in
PL

102, cols 13C–552D. On the biographical arrangement of these works, see Rädle, Studien,

21.

For the note on Paris, BN Lat.

13029, Max Manitius, Geschichte der Lateinischen Literatur des

Mittelalters,

3 vols (Munich, 1911), 1, p. 466.

See Kibre’s Prolegomena to the Unpublished Text of Smaragdus’ Commentary on Donatus, ‘De
partibus orationis’ (Chicago,

1930), pp. 65–80.

B. Bischoff, ‘Muridac doctissimus plebis, ein irischer Grammatiker des IX. Jahrhunderts’,
Celtica

5 (1960), pp. 40–4, at p. 42.

Bischoff, ‘Muridac’, p.

42.

L. Holtz, ‘Nouveaux prolégomènes à l’édition du Liber in partibus Donati de Smaragde de
Saint-Mihiel’, Bulletin de la Société nationale des antiquaires de France (

1983), pp. 157–70.

Matthew D. Ponesse

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812.

Max Laistner first argued that Smaragdus intended this text for

Louis the Pious as king of Aquitaine, making it likely that the author had
a personal interest in the direction and governance of the region.

Rädle builds upon this premise, observing similarities between the Via
regia and Visigothic ‘Mahnverse’, poetry containing advice for royalty.

He also points to other evidence to connect Smaragdus with Spain,
including the use of a relatively rare Spanish source – the Sententiae of
Taio of Saragossa – in his monastic writing, and Smaragdus’ possible
contact with the monastic reformer Benedict of Aniane, born Witiza, son
of a Gothic count.

The date of Smaragdus’ promotion to abbot has also been contested.

The Via regia identifies Smaragdus for the first time as abbot in

812, but

Rädle argues that he probably became abbot before

809, since his work

on the procession of the Holy Spirit was undertaken through the court,
and since in such cases no simple and unknown monks were asked to
produce ecclesiastical treatises representative of the kingdom. It is just as
likely, however, that Smaragdus produced his work on the filioque as an
up-and-comer at the Carolingian court and that the abbacy was later
given to him as a reward for service. While there remains doubt as to the
exact date of his promotion, Smaragdus was active as an abbot in securing
charters confirming the rights and privileges of his community. In

816, he

obtained charters from Louis the Pious confirming the immunity of the
monastery, its exception from taxation on transported goods, and the
right of the community to collect tithes from all those who held land in
benefice.

During his years as abbot, Smaragdus also produced works to

serve the needs of his community. He composed his Diadema monacho-
rum sometime before

816, a compendium of patristic spirituality and

biblical exegesis intended to be read as a companion text to the Rule of
St Benedict.

His last known work, the commentary on the Rule of St

Benedict, was composed soon after the council of Aachen in

816, when

monastic reformers sought to restrict the practice of monks by imposing

The text of the Via regia is printed in the PL

102, cols 931B–970C.

M.L.W. Laistner in ‘The Date and the Recipient of Smaragdus’ “Via regia” ’, Speculum

3 (1928),

pp.

41–4. See also, Rädle, Studien, pp. 62–7; Otto Eberhardt, Der Fürstenspiegel Smaragds von

St. Mihiel und seine literarische Gattung (Munich,

1977), pp. 224–7; H.H. Anton, Fürstenspiegel

und Herrscherethos in der Karolingerzeit (Bonn,

1968), pp. 132–89.

Rädle, Studien, p.

18.

On his use of Taio of Saragossa, see Rädle, Studien, pp.

75–7.

André Lesort, Chronique et chartes de l’abbaye de Saint-Mihiel (Paris,

1912), p. 57–67. These

privileges are also summarized in the chronicle narrative, Chronicon Sancti Michaelis monasterii
in pago Virdunense, in Chronique et Chartres, p.

Diadema monachorum, PL

102, cols 593B–690A. Fidel Rädle provides an almost complete list

of the sources used in Studien, pp.

71–3. Other studies on the Diadema include Réginald

Grégoire, ‘La tradizione manoscritta del Diadema monachorum di Smaragdo (+ca

830)’, Inter

Fratres

34 (1984), pp. 1–20; Jean Leclercq, Le diademe des moines (Vaubon, 1949).

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a single rule and practice on Carolingian monasteries.

Smaragdus was

also notable for moving the monastic community one mile from its
original location on a mountainside to a new site in the estuary of
Marsoupe on the River Meuse.

This new construction was also dedi-

cated to St Michael, a decision that did not offend the will of its angelic
patron, a later chronicler assures us, for while St Michael was accustomed
to select high mounts for his veneration, it was not considered unworthy
for mortals to require a place more conducive to their needs.

Smaragdus

died shortly after

826.

The breadth of Smaragdus’ writings bears witness to his active partici-

pation in the political life of the empire as well as his significant contri-
bution to the Carolingian educational reform. His instructional texts are
filled with the learning of antiquity and reflect the model curriculum of
monks in his day, directing inexperienced students to learn the rudiments
of grammar before ascending through the commentaries of the Fathers to
the more advanced study of Scripture. He was also responsive to the call
for well-emended texts. As a grammarian, Smaragdus promoted a stan-
dard of Latin that was consistent with the principles of the Carolingian
educational reform. In his commentary on Donatus, for instance, he uses
biblical passages to elaborate on various grammatical concepts, believing
that classical references in earlier grammars have contributed to a general
decline in education.

In fact, he recalls that many monks had asserted

that grammar had been rightly neglected by all Christians since God was
not read or named in any grammatical texts. Smaragdus counters this
argument, explaining that it is possible to draw from the art of grammar
at the same time as to speak of God. To illustrate this point, he refers his
reader to the escape of the Israelites from Egypt. This people, he says,

For a critical edition of Smaragdus’ commentary on the Rule, see Expositio in Regulam S.
Benedicti, ed. P. Engelbert and A. Spannagel, Corpus Consuetudinum Monasticarum

8 (Siegburg,

1974). All subsequent translations of the text in this study are my own. More interested readers

are encouraged to consult the recent translation of the commentary by D. Barry, Smaragdus of
St Mihiel: Commentary on the Rule of St Benedict (Kalamazoo,

2008). Studies on the commen-

tary include, M.D. Ponesse, ‘Smaragdus of St Mihiel and the Carolingian Monastic Reform’,
Revue Bénédictine

116 (2006), pp. 367–92; T. Kardong, ‘The Earliest Commentator on RB:

Smaragdus on Benedict’s Prologue’, American Benedictine Review

55 (2004), pp. 171–93; B.

Löfstedt, ‘Zu Smaragdus’ Kommentar der Benediktinerregel’, Arctos

18 (1984), pp. 37–43; O

Mazal, ‘Ein neues Fragment der Expositio in regulam S. Benedicti von Smaragdus von St.
Mihiel’, Scriptorium

13 (1959), pp. 210–16; B. Steidle, ‘Der Rat der Brüder nach den ältesten

Regula Benedicti-Kommentaren des Abtes Smaragdus (+ um

826) und des Magisters Hildemar

(+ um

850)’, Erbe und Auftrag 53 (1977), pp. 181–92.

Lesort, Chronique et chartes, pp.

67–9.

Lesort, Chronique et chartes, p.

Ernst Dümmler reproduces Smaragdus’ epitaph in MGH Poetae latini aevi Carolini (Berlin,

1881), I, p. 605. Although we do not have a precise date for Smaragdus’ death, it is likely that

he died sometime after

826, the year in which he obtained the charter providing for the election

of future abbots after his departure from the world.

Prologue to the Liber in partibus, pp.

1–2.

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took with themselves the wealth of their captors, offering to God in
obedience what they despoiled from the temples of the pagans. He
believes that Christians should approach the study of grammar in such a
way, taking from the wealth of pagan literature and directing this learning
in obedience to God.

Not limiting his practice of emendation to the correction of early

medieval grammatical usages, he also abbreviated and digested many of
his sources for his audience, believing that ‘brevity removed distaste’ on
the part of the reader and opened the intellect of the heart to those things
that ‘hide under the cover of letters’.

For Smaragdus, the practice of

emendation ensured that texts would be properly understood, remem-
bered, and acted on by the reader. Smaragdus worked hard to bring his
sources in line with the educational needs of his day, but there were
nonetheless times when he considered it necessary to transmit his sources
in the original, particularly if he determined that negligence in the
transmission of a text was responsible for current errors in practice. He
felt that this was particularly true of the Rule of St Benedict.

Over the course of the eighth and early ninth centuries, the Benedic-

tine rule was gradually promoted as the central rule governing monastic
life in Frankish monasteries. Reformers had come to view this text as a
means of distinguishing monks from priests and canons, having observed
that certain monastic communities had become accustomed to enjoying
privileges typically associated with the secular clergy, such as the owner-
ship of property, the freedom to move beyond the confines of the cloister,
and the right to enjoy a diverse diet and luxurious clothing.

To return

monks to the vigour of their original vocation, reformers met at numer-
ous church councils to acknowledge the Rule of St Benedict as the
singular text governing monastic life and to impose a more rigorous
practice on all monks. Attempts to curb the abuses of monks culminated
in

816 and 817, when Louis the Pious summoned leading ecclesiastical

officials to Aachen to address the laxity of monastic communities and to
renew the programme of monastic reform. According to the monk Ardo,
the disciple and biographer of the leading reformer, Benedict of Aniane,
those in attendance first discussed the entire text of the Benedictine Rule,
clarifying obscure expressions, explaining ambiguous passages, removing
old errors and confirming its useful practices.

They then supplemented

the rule with customs drawn from the wealth of monastic tradition and

Preface to the Expositio psalmorum, cols

1022BC–1023A.

For these specific abuses, see Concilium Francofurtense a.

794, cc. 11, 13, 14, 16, ed. A. Werming-

hoff, MGH Leges

3, Concilia II.I (Hanover, 1906), p. 168; Concilium Rispacense, Frisingense,

Salisburgense a.

800, c. 19, MGH Leges 3, II.I, p. 210; Concilium Aquisgranense a. 802, MGH Leges

3, Concilia II.I, p. 230.

Ardo, Vita S. Benedicti Anianensis, ed. G. Waitz, MGH Scriptores

15, p. 215.

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presented this to the emperor in a capitulary for his approval. Thus, all
monks were expected to adhere to the principles articulated in the Rule
as well as the new practice introduced by reformers, which included a
frugal diet, plain dress, restrictions on travel and contact with visitors,
and an increasing amount of time devoted to prayer.

The centrality of the Benedictine Rule in the lives of Carolingian

monks was supported by the acquisition and circulation of a text believed
to have been copied from the autograph of St Benedict. Charlemagne had
the opportunity to view the autograph during a visit to Monte Cassino in

787, and shortly thereafter requested a copy be made and sent to Aachen
so that all monks in Francia might benefit from reading a transcription of
the original rule. While this transcription no longer survives, Ludwig
Traube has convincingly demonstrated that the text received by Charle-
magne served as the standard edition of the Rule (Normalexemplar) in the
Carolingian period. In his monumental study of the textual history of the
Rule of St Benedict, Traube suggests that this text was probably discussed
and confirmed by reformers at the council of Aachen in

802, the council

of Mainz in

812 and the council of Aachen in 816; he also connects this

text to a copy of the Rule produced by the monks of St Gall around

820,

known as St Gall

914.

Traube notes that a letter bound in the St Gall

codex refers directly to the standard text as its exemplar.

The authors of

the letter – two monks of Reichenau named Grimalt and Tatto – tell us
that they had been sent out by their abbot to observe the newly imposed
practice of monasticism being modelled at an abbey on the Inde River,
near Aachen. At the request of their librarian, they also sought out and
copied the manuscript of the Rule known to have been produced from
the text written by St Benedict. Grimalt and Tatto returned with this new
copy to Reichenau, where it stayed until Grimalt presumably moved it to
St Gall upon becoming abbot in

840.

Historical evidence places St Gall

914 as the closest witness to the

standard text of the Rule, and only one or two steps removed from the
programme of monasticism set down by Benedict’s own hand. This
evidence is further substantiated by Traube’s analysis of the textual vari-

The ordinances of

816 and 817 have been edited by J. Semmler in the Corpus Consuetudinum

Monasticarum I: Initia Consuetudinis Benedictinae: consuetudines saeculi octavi et noni (Siegburg,

1963), pp. 451–81. A leading study of the councils of Aachen and the impact of the Carolingian

monastic reform is provided by J. Semmler, ‘Benedictus II: Una regula – una consuetudo’, in
W. Lourdaux and D. Verhelst (eds), Benedictine Culture,

750–1050 (Leuven, 1983), pp. 1–49. For

a more recent consideration, see M. de Jong, ‘Carolingian Monasticism: The Power of Prayer’,
in McKitterick (ed.), New Cambridge Medieval History, pp.

629–34.

L. Traube, Textgeschichte der Regula S. Benedicti (Munich,

1898), pp. 31–2. For reference to the

standard text of the Rule in the proceedings of these councils, see MGH Concilia I, Concilia Aevi
Karolini I, ed. A. Werminghoff (Hanover,

1906), pp. 230 and 263, and Synodi Primae Aquis-

granensis decreta Authentica (

816), Corpus Consuetudinum Monasticarum I, pp. 457–8.

Traube reproduces the text of the letter in Textgeschichte, pp.

89–90.

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ants of the Rule, which he undertook to determine which of the two
main recensions – St Gall

914 (A) or Oxford, Bodleian, MS Hatton 48

(O) – preserves the most authentic text. Even though Oxford Hatton

predates St Gall

914 by a century, Traube demonstrates that the earlier

manuscript contains an interpolated version of the Rule with numerous
alterations and corrections. St Gall

914, he determines, has a purer text

than that found in the Oxford manuscript.

Later philological studies of

the Rule have since confirmed that St Gall

914 preserves a quality of Latin

that was common in Italy in the sixth century, but unacceptable in the
ninth.

In other words, both the scribes of Monte Cassino and Grimalt

and Tatto of Reichenau went against conventional standards of Latin to
preserve a text that was faithful to the original.

The transmission of the Rule in the Carolingian period does not end

with the production of St Gall

914. Traube’s analysis reveals close textual

affinity between St Gall

914 and other works produced in the context of

the Carolingian monastic reform, including Benedict of Aniane’s Con-
cordia regularum and the commentaries on the Rule written by Smarag-
dus and Hildemar of Civate.

A study of these works reveals that there

was a considerable degree of variation in the transmission of the standard
text in the early ninth century. In fact, ninth-century reformers were
responsible for introducing many variants to the text of the Rule in a
conscious effort to normalize the antiquated words and expressions used
by St Benedict. They promoted a version of the Rule that can be referred
to as the ‘revised-text’, for they incorporated into its discussion certain
marginal glosses believed to have been introduced to the Rule’s standard
text by Paul the Deacon at Monte Cassino, and later transcribed by
Grimalt and Tatto at Aachen.

Others variants probably worked their

way in over time and widely circulated in the eighth and ninth centuries,
though we must infer their existence from surviving works.

Smaragdus’ commentary provides a valuable witness to this particular

period of the history of the Rule of St Benedict. To begin with, he does
not follow his contemporaries in adopting the revised text of the Rule,
but preserves – almost without exception – the sixth-century Latin of the

For the list of significant variants, see Textgeschichte, pp.

9–21.

Notable studies include C. Mohrmann, ‘La latinité de saint Benoît’, Revue Bénédictine

62 (1952),

pp.

108–39; and C. Mohrmann, ‘La langue de saint Benoît’, in P. Schmitz (ed.), Sancti Benedicti

Regula Monachorum (Maredsous,

1955), pp. 9–39. A. Mundó, ‘L’authenticité de la Regula Sancti

Benedicti’, in Commentationes in Regulam Sancti Benedicti (Rome,

1957), pp. 105–58.

Benedict of Aniane’s Concordia regularum has been edited by P. Bonnerue in the Corpus
Christianorum series of medieval Latin texts, CCCM

168 (Turnhout, 1999). For Hildemar’s

commentary, see Expositio regulae, ed. R. Mittermüller (Regensburg, NY, and Cincinnati,

1880).

The marginal corrections in St Gall

914 are commonly referred to as the ‘revised text’ of the rule

and designated Codex a in the manuscript tradition.

For example, see below at n.

81.

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standard text, which he attributes to St Benedict’s own hand.

This

unconventional approach is brought into even starker contrast when one
considers that Smaragdus relied heavily on Benedict of Aniane’s Concor-
dia regularum when establishing his own text, as we shall examine below.
In addition to preserving the standard text of the Rule, Smaragdus makes
reference in his commentary to other textual traditions circulating in his
day. He does not treat these discrepancies as a passing curiosity, but
acknowledges them as the source of much frustration on the part of
monks. By confronting textual variants directly, Smaragdus explains how
the reader may reconcile the inconsistencies in the manuscript tradition
while at the same time giving precedence to the venerable language of the
Rule of St Benedict.

Smaragdus’ practice of establishing textual authority is not informed

by any one principle. He certainly seems to have a reverence for the word
that his contemporaries did not, though it is unlikely that he simply
preserved authority for its own sake and selected the text that to his own
mind seemed most antiquated. On the other hand, there is no evidence
indicating that Smaragdus was so sophisticated in his practice that he
sought multiple manuscripts of a single text in order to improve the copy
in his possession. As a teacher and abbot, Smaragdus was concerned that
students understand the meaning of the words and phrases contained in
the Rule of St Benedict, and that they be able to apply this instruction to
daily life. Consequently, many of the editorial decisions in his commen-
tary stem from problems in the interpretation of grammar and syntax, or
reflect more broadly difficulties in the practice of ninth-century Carol-
ingian monasticism. If Smaragdus strove to uphold the venerable lan-
guage of the Rule, it is because the medium of commentary allowed him
to clarify its meaning and find in its instruction a relevant expression of
the monastic life.

The instruction of monks

Smaragdus’ concern for textual problems can be traced to an important
source of glosses on the Rule of St Benedict that, at present, are extant in
only two manuscripts.

With an ample supply of word definitions,

etymologies and grammatical explanations, these glosses served as the
basis for much of Smaragdus’ straightforward exposition. More impor-

On this attribution see below, at n.

81.

Valenciennes MS

288 s. IX in and Trier MS Paris BN nouv. acq. lat 763 s. X ex. While the glosses

are anonymous and cannot be dated with accuracy, their concern with grammatical and textual
problems place the work in the context of the Carolingian educational reform, sometime
between

780 and 816/817, the date of the composition of Smaragdus’ commentary. I am grateful

to David Ganz, who brought the glosses to my attention and had first established their
connection to Smaragdus’ commentary on the Rule of St Benedict.

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tantly, the glosses also uphold the standard text of the Rule against other
variants in the manuscript tradition. Smaragdus’ dependence on this
source for the purpose of establishing an accurate text is evident from the
very first passage of the commentary, where he discusses the confusion
surrounding Benedict’s exhortation to monks:

‘Obsculta.’ (RB, Prologue

1) Haec nos hortantis beati verba sunt

Benedicti. Ille etenim, Spiritu sancto repletus, ut nos ad meliora
proficiscamur, hortatur. Sunt enim qui eum ausu temerario reprehen-
dere conantur dicentes ‘ausculta’ debuit dicere, non ‘obsculta,’
nescientes qui sicut recte dicitur obaudi et obtempera et obsecunda et
alia multa talia, ita rectissime dici potest obsculta.

‘Listen.’ These are the words used by St Benedict to encourage us.
Indeed, he was full of the Holy Spirit and so urged us to advance to
greater things. For there are some who attempt to criticize him [Bene-
dict] with reckless impudence, saying that he ought to have said
ausculta, and not obsculta; they do not know that just as obaudi,
obtempera, obsecunda and other such [words] are rightly constructed,
so too is obsculta able to be expressed most correctly.

Smaragdus first explains to the reader that St Benedict’s words of encour-
agement were intended to advance the reader to the consideration of
greater things. However, Smaragdus finds that many monks in his day do
not necessarily have this objective in mind, correcting (often conve-
niently) what they perceived as errors in the literal expression of the Rule.
To illustrate his point he incorporates an excerpt from the glosses admon-
ishing those who would emend the verb obsculta to the more conven-
tional ausculta.

According to the glossator, these monks have no basis for

criticism, since many compound verbs with an implied force of obliga-
tion or obedience are formed with the prefix ob, such as obaudi, obtempera
and obsecunda. We are to understand that St Benedict formed obsculta in
a similar way, taking the verb colere (to cultivate) and giving it the added
sense of obedience.

Smaragdus made use of the glosses in several other instances, where it

quickly becomes apparent that he wished to uphold the standard text of
the Rule with convincing, if not actually well-founded, explanations of

Prologue to the Expositio in regulam, p.

Valenciennes MS

288, fol. 3v. For the ‘ausculta’ text in the writing of Smaragdus’ contempo-

raries, see the revised text of the rule (Codex a), Benedict of Aniane, Concordia regularum

20, and Hildemar of Civate, Expositio regulae, p. 4.

This explanation is, in fact, dubious, since ausculta is not a compound verb and does not derive
from colere.

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Benedict’s unconventional language. This priority is particularly evident
in the following passage, also taken from the commentary on the pro-
logue of the Rule.

‘Ad te ergo mihi sermo dirigitur.’ (RB, Prologue

3) Multi hoc in loco

meus pro mihi quasi emendantes commutare conantur, nescientes
quia hoc genere locutionis multi scolasticorum doctores usi sunt, sicut
quodam loco beatus Gregorius ait: Haec mihi ad eos dicta sint. Et
alibi: Iam enim mihi ad vos sermo convertitur.

‘Therefore, my word is directed to you.’ Many who would like to
emend [the text] try to change mihi in this place to meus, not realizing
that many doctors of the church have used this type of expression, just
as St Gregory says in a certain place, ‘My words are spoken to them.’
And elsewhere, ‘For now my word is directed to you.’

Once again drawing on the glosses by way of exposition, Smaragdus
informs his reader that many monks have attempted to understand the
pronoun mihi for meus in the phrase ad te ergo mihi sermo dirigitur. While
his contemporaries adopted meus for the purpose of clarity, Smaragdus
believes mihi to be the more authentic reading, even if it is not so easily
understood.

According to his source, this peculiar usage of the dative is

found in the writings of many church Fathers; the glossator even provides
two extracts from Gregory the Great to illustrate his point. It is clear that
the glossator understands this pronoun as a dative of agency, a usage
regularly found in classical Latin with the gerundive, less frequently with
compound tenses of the passive voice, and occasionally with the uncom-
pounded tenses of the passive. Smaragdus does not elaborate on this
argument or attempt to trace the examples to their source – these refer-
ences, in fact, are so general that it is almost impossible to track them
down – but is confident that he has supported his own preferred reading
on credible sources.

Smaragdus’ reliance on the glosses only went so far in supporting his

preference for the standard text of the Rule, since they did not address
every point of disparity in the manuscript tradition. In fact, he was often
left to make an independent case for authority in the Rule, requiring him
to rise above the prevailing climate of intellectual humility and engage in
creative work. Not all of his explanations are particularly involved. In the
following passage, for instance, he resolves a relatively minor textual

Expositio in regulam, Prologue

3, pp. 11–12.

Valenciennes MS

288, fol. 4v. Cf. Codex a, Benedict of Aniane, Concordia regularum 2, p. 21

and Hildemar, Expositio regulae, p.

9, all of which preserve the meus variant.

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problem simply by preserving the venerable text of the Rule in the lemma
and adopting the more conventional reading in his subsequent
discussion.

‘Cavendum est ergo omni hora fraters sicut dicit in psalmo propheta,
ne nos declinantes in malo et inutiles factos aliqua hora aspiciat deus.’
(RB

7.29) Ille enim declinat in malum, qui prius stetit in bono; et qui

prius in statu rectitudinis stetit si declinaverit in malum, factus est
inutilis servus et pravus.

‘Therefore, we ought to be vigilant at all times, brothers, just as the
prophet says in the Psalms, so that God does not see us at any hour
falling into evil and made useless.’ For one who falls into evil first
stood in goodness; and one who first stood in the state of righteousness
is made a worthless and depraved servant if he falls into evil.

St Benedict’s cautionary lesson about falling into evil (declinantes in malo)
is not expressed in accordance with the conventions of ninth-century
Latin grammar. The noun in St Benedict’s original participial phrase can
only be understood as an ablative of place, which does not normally
follow a verb indicating motion towards according to classical and Car-
olingian rules of grammar. Unlike his contemporaries, however, Smarag-
dus did not adopt the emendation (declinantes in malum) circulating in
the revised text of the Rule, but uses his commentary to bring the
construction in line with normative use.

By preserving the standard text

and by indicating how Benedict’s words were to be understood by the
current generation of monks, Smaragdus is able to ensure the accuracy of
the teachings conveyed without compromising the need for intelligible
and consistent texts. What is more, instead of drawing attention to
Benedict’s irregular expression, he leaves his reader with an implicit
lesson in the flexible standards of early medieval Latin.

Admittedly, the decision to uphold or emend the original text in the

example above would not have had a significant impact on the practice of
monasticism either way, but it is indicative of two (sometimes compet-
ing) methodologies in the instruction of students: the need for clarity and
textual accuracy. Smaragdus, for his part, would have argued that the
corrected grammatical forms incorporated into the revised text of the
Rule did not always improve on Benedict’s instruction, and possibly
conveyed a sense that was quite different from the original.

Expositio in regulam

7.29, p. 176.

For the normalized variant, see Codex a, Benedict of Aniane, Concordia regularum

11, p. 136;

Hildemar, Expositio regulae

7, p. 222.

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Smaragdus’ commentary on the qualities of an abbot, for instance,

reveals that one particular emendation to the Rule, though widespread in
his day, was nevertheless intrinsically problematic.

‘Omnia bona et sancta factis amplius quam verbis ostendat ut capaci-
bus discipulis mandata Domini verbis proponere duris corde vero et
simplicioribus factis suis divina praecepta monstrare.’ (RB

2.12) Sub-

auditur ‘debet’. ‘Ut’ enim adverbium hoc in loco pro ‘et’ coniunctione
posuit. ‘Capacibus’ dixit, id est memoriosis, adcommodatis vel intel-
legibilibus, qui ea quae a magistris audiunt velociter capiunt, memo-
riter retinent et operibus conplent. ‘Proponere’ dixit id est anteponere,
quia capaces et simplices discipuli quae prius vivaciter de praeceptis
domini intellegentes audiunt, postea sagaciter implere contendunt.

‘The abbot should demonstrate all things good and holy more by deed
than by word . . . and [he ought to] extend the commandments of the
Lord to his able disciples with words, and also demonstrate God’s
instruction to the stubborn and dull-witted with deeds.’ Here, [the
verb] debet is understood. For he [St Benedict] puts the adverb ut in
this place as a substitute for the conjunction et. He says capacibus, that
is to say, those who have a good memory, who are able and sensible,
who quickly grasp, retain in memory and apply in works what they
hear from their teachers. He says proponere, that is to say, anteponere,
because capable and humble students wisely strive to fulfil afterwards
what they first heard with enthusiasm about the commandments of
the Lord.

Smaragdus begins his discussion by drawing attention to the ambiguity in
the wording of the passage, most notably, the lack of a finite verb within
the clause (‘ut . . . proponere . . . monstrare’). His contemporaries over-
came this seemingly ungrammatical construction by adopting the variant
in the revised text in which the infinitives have been conjugated in the
third person singular and placed in the subjunctive mood: ‘ut capacibus
discipulis mandata Domini verbis proponat, duris corde vero et simpli-
cioribus factis suis divina praecepta demonstret’.

This solution is

awkward at best. In no way can the passage be understood as denoting
purpose and the subordinate clause lacks necessary information to imply
result. Alternatively, if ut was understood as a coordinating conjunction
linking jussive subjunctives in a single clause, it is likely that it would
have been changed to et in the revised text to avoid confusion. Smarag-

Expositio in regulam

2.8, pp. 63–4.

See Codex a; Benedict of Aniane, Concordia regularum

5, p. 64; Hildemar, Expositio regulae 2,

97.

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dus, as a grammarian, was no doubt aware of these difficulties before he
found his solution in the standard text of the Rule. His answer was to
supply the finite verb debet from the context of the passage, and explains
that ut was in fact acting as a conjunction connecting the two infinitives,
thereby circumventing the problems inherent in the sentence.

If Smaragdus dismissed certain corrections to the Rule on the grounds

that they did not make its language or expression any more intelligible to
monks in his day, he had even more reason to reject emendations that
obfuscated the sense of the author’s teachings. In his commentary on the
procedure for admitting brothers to the monastery, for instance, he
chooses to preserve an imprecise regulation in the standard text of the
Rule instead of adopting the less ambiguous variant transmitted in other
recensions. In his mind, it was better to clarify the authentic instruction
of the Rule than to introduce a reading that deviated from the author’s
original programme of monasticism.

‘Postea autem sit in cella novitiorum, ubi meditent et manducent et
dormiant.’ (RB

58.5) ‘Novitiorum cella’ dicit, non hospitum sed pul-

santium, ubi noviter veniens, sive cum his quos ibi invenerit, sive cum
magistro quem habuerit meditetur in canticis et psalmis et hymnis sive
in regularibus praeceptis quibus tradendus est observandis.

‘Afterwards, let him [the postulant] be placed in the house for novices,
where they reflect, eat and sleep.’ ‘The house of novices’, he says, not
of guests but of those seeking admission [to the community]. When he
first comes to this place, let him meditate with others who are present
or with his assigned teacher, reflecting on the canticles, hymns and
psalms, or on precepts of the regular life for which purpose he was
placed [in the house] to observe.

Smaragdus refers in the passage above to St Benedict’s teaching on the
admission of postulants to the house of novices after several days of
persisting at the gate. Although Benedict explains that the house of
novices is where inexperienced monks meditate, eat and sleep, he is not
entirely clear on the distinction between the newly admitted postulant
and the novices in the house, or whether the postulant is to participate
with the novices in common daily activities. Smaragdus provides addi-
tional detail in his commentary, explaining that the house of novices is in
fact where all postulants are placed during the discernment period. The
postulant, he continues, is not only to meditate, eat and sleep in this
place, but must reflect on the canticles, hymns, psalms and the precepts

Expositio in regulam

58.5, p. 292.

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of the monastic life. Smaragdus also addresses the degree of interaction
permitted between the postulant and other members of the community.
His attention to this last detail has particular resonance in the context of
ninth-century monasticism. Reformers at this time were dedicated to
routing out ambiguity in the Rule and, in this particular instance,
adopted a reading that also clarified Benedict’s original instruction:
‘Postea autem sit in cella novitiorum, ubi meditetur et manducet et
dormiat’ (‘Afterwards, let the postulant be placed in the house for novices,
where he is to reflect, eat and sleep’).

This variant specifies which duties

were expected of the postulant in the house of novices. But what is
lacking in this text is a discussion of which monks, if any, were to assist
and support him in these activities. The standard text of the Rule indi-
cates that the postulant should participate in daily activities with other
novices, even if the language is a bit vague. Smaragdus goes a step further,
explaining that the postulant may discuss appropriate readings with the
others present, but, more importantly, is to be taught by his assigned
teacher. He certainly does not want to endorse a reading that would
permit the postulant to reflect on texts without guidance, potentially
endangering the postulant and the others in the house.

Smaragdus’ discussion on the admission of brothers to the monastery

introduces a new principle that informed his practice of textual criticism.
While he most often employed the tools of orthography and grammar to
establish the authority of his codex optimus, he also took into account the
practical implications of his task. In other words, Smaragdus’ preference
for certain readings was informed as much by his concern for the daily
practice of monks as it was by his desire for clarity and authenticity.

Monastic practice

Judging from the organization and content of the commentary, it is
apparent that Smaragdus did not intend his work to be a practical guide
to life in the Carolingian monastery. The first book is concerned prima-
rily with monastic spirituality, containing straightforward exposition on
the words and phases that make up the prologue and first seven chapters
of the Rule of St Benedict. The final two books are disproportionately
much shorter than the first, but encompass the remaining sixty-five
chapters of the Rule on the administration of the Benedictine monastery.
Not only does Smaragdus provide less commentary on the day-to-day

St Gall

914 preserves this reading in the body of the text, though erasure marks on the manuscript

indicate that the scribe replaced the original inflected forms with these grammatical variants: St
Gall

914, fols 67r–67v. For these variants in the works of Smaragdus’ contemporaries, see Benedict

of Aniane, Concordia regularum

65, p. 550; Hildemar, Expositio regulae 58, p. 534.

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observance of monks, but his discussion in these books is almost entirely
derivative, consisting largely of extracts drawn from Benedict of Aniane’s
Concordia regularum. For this reason modern scholars have downplayed
the commentary as more theoretical than practical, a text that offers little
of value on the subject of ninth-century monastic life.

But just as

modern attitudes towards medieval authority have changed in recent
decades, so too must our assessment of Smaragdus’ contribution to
Carolingian monasticism. Recent studies on Smaragdus’ practice of com-
pilation have shown that he was not directed by the principles of an
earlier age, but responded to the needs of his audience through the
selection, configuration and adaptation of source material.

What is

more, by making the learning of the past applicable to the realities of
medieval life, he in fact provides us with an immediate and intimate
response to the Carolingian monastic reform. If Smaragdus had the
concerns of his audience in mind when he made decisions about his
source material, he was certainly attentive to problems arising from
textual discrepancies in his subject matter.

In his discussion on monastic dietary regulations, for instance, he

reinforces an awkward construction in the standard text to promote a
rigorous ideal of monastic observance.

‘Carnium vero quadrupedum omnino omnimodo ab omnibus
abstineatur comestia praeter omnino debiles aegrotos.’ (RB

39.11)

Quod autem dicit ‘debiles aegrotos’ non duas ut plerique arbitrantur,
sed unam tantum significat esse personam. Ergo debilis aegrotos
dicitur, qui longa vel dura aegritudine pressus est, ad debilitatem
perductus, cui reparationis causa victus est carneus adhibendus.

‘But let all abstain from eating the flesh of four-legged animals, except
sick, incapacitated [monks].’ That he [Benedict] says ‘sick’ and ‘inca-
pacitated’ does not signify two [groups of ] people, as many think, but
only one. Therefore, one is said to be sick and incapacitated if he suffers
from a protracted and severe sickness, and if he is reduced to feebleness;
such a monk must be permitted meat to assist in his recovery.

Josef Semmler argues in his consideration of the Carolingian monastic reform that Smaragdus
failed to provide any discussion that would reveal how the newly imposed practice was received
into the monastery, see ‘Una regula – una consuetudo’, p.

25. This assessment is reflected in

other studies of Carolingian monasticism, which look to Smaragdus only for his contribution
to monastic spirituality.

See, in particular, M.D. Ponesse, ‘Smaragdus of St Mihiel’, pp.

367–92; J. Heil, ‘Labourers in

the Lord’s Quarry: Carolingian Exegesis, Patristic Authority, and Theological Innovation, a
Case Study in the Representation of Jews in Commentaries on Paul’, in Celia Chazelle and
Burton Van Name Edwards (eds), The Study of the Bible in the Carolingian Era (Turnhout,

2003), pp. 75–9. V. Law, ‘The Study of Grammar’, in Carolingian Culture, pp. 100–3.

Expositio in regulam

39.11, p. 257.

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The above passage concerns a provision in the Rule that would prohibit
all but the most infirm monks from consuming meat in the monastery.
According to Smaragdus, many monks in the ninth century extended the
exception to both sick and infirm monks, as if Benedict was here referring
to two physical conditions. A variant in the manuscript tradition sup-
ports this reading with the addition of a coordinating conjunction
between the two substantives (debiles et aegrotos).

No doubt this reading

was preferred on account of its syntactical clarity. The text in Smaragdus’
commentary is awkward by comparison, and possibly redundant in so far
as one’s infirmity is understood to result from an illness. But if Smaragdus
was guided to support a reading at the expense of clarity of expression,
then for him what was surely at stake were the practical implications of
Benedict’s instruction. With the boundary between the regular and
secular clergy becoming increasingly blurred, Smaragdus and his like-
minded contemporaries wished to prevent monks from exploiting certain
ambiguities in the Rule to justify a less rigorous way of life. But unlike
most reformers, who attempted to increase the rigour of monastic prac-
tice by supplementing the Rule with customs drawn from the wealth of
monastic tradition, Smaragdus sought out the source of abuse in the
manuscript tradition, identifying points of variance and determining
which reading was most in keeping with the author’s instruction. In
other words, Smaragdus hoped to return monks to the original obser-
vance of Benedictine monasticism by looking for modern solutions in the
text of the Rule itself.

Smaragdus considers the broad interpretation of infirmitas especially

problematic, since he did not believe monks with minor aches and pains
should be permitted a more varied diet. He notes that when St Benedict
lifts dietary restrictions for sick and incapacitated monks (debiles aegro-
tos), he referred only to a single condition. A monk in this condition, he
explains, is one who is so afflicted by sickness that he cannot rise from
bed. And only in such an instance does he say that St Benedict permitted
monks to eat meat for the purpose of restoring the body.

There is no doubt that Smaragdus was a general supporter of Carol-

ingian monastic reform – on numerous occasions he can be seen rein-
forcing the strict practice imposed by reformers at Aachen in

816 – but he

was not so accepting of sweeping, inflexible customs that did not take
into account the authority of the abbot and the autonomy of the local
community. When he considers regulations in the Rule that had been
revised in the recent legislation, he often confirms the reformed practice
in principle, but makes room for the discretion of the abbot in its

Benedict of Aniane, Concordia regularum

48, p. 410; Hildemar, Expositio regulae 39, p. 439.

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implementation.

In matters pertaining directly to governance of the

monastery, Smaragdus preferred to uphold the decision-making proto-
cols set down in the Benedictine Rule over the corporate structure envi-
sioned by reformers.

This position is particularly evident in his

commentary on the third chapter of the Rule of St Benedict: the sum-
moning of the brothers for counsel.

‘Neque praesumat quisquam cum abate suo proterve aut foris mon-
asterio contendere.’ (RB

3.9) Proterve contendere est superbe et con-

tumaciter, temerarie vel praesumptive. Quam contentionem nec frater
cum fratre, nec monachus cum abate suo debet habere. Sed scidendum
est quia, cum contentionem cum additamento proterve vetuit,
amicam vel pacificam contentionem concessit. Est enim amica profic-
uaque contentio, quae frequenter inter iustos hominess pro qualitate
intervenientis causae efficitur, sicut inter beatum Benedictum et
Maurum eius discipulum pro puero Placido quondam fuisse legitur
. . . Unde et beatus Benedictus cum dixisset ‘Neque praesumat
quisquam cum abbate suo’ non dixit ‘intus aut foris’ sicut aliqui
codices habent, sed sicut in illo quem manibus suis scripsit ‘proterve
aut foris monasterium’ positum repperitur.

‘No one should presume to contend with his abbot defiantly, or
outside the monastery.’ ‘To contend defiantly’, that is ‘proudly’, ‘stub-
bornly’, ‘recklessly’, or ‘presumptuously’. This sort of contention is not
to be expressed between brothers, nor between a monk and abbot. But
one must realize that when Benedict forbade contention with the
addition of the adverb ‘defiantly’, he made an allowance for friendly or
peaceful contention. Indeed, friendly and mutually advantageous con-
tention is that which frequently arises between two men about the
nature of a case that has occurred, just as it is known to have happened
once between Benedict and his disciple, Maurus, concerning the boy
Placidus . . . Therefore, when St Benedict said ‘no one should presume
to contend with his abbot’, he did not say ‘inside or outside’ as is
contained in some manuscripts, but rather ‘defiantly or outside the
monastery’ just as it is found in the text written by his own hand.

In this passage, Smaragdus challenges a teaching in the Rule that would
prohibit monks from disagreeing with their abbot no matter what the
circumstance. Such an expectation is clearly a practical extension of

For this methodology, see M.D. Ponesse, ‘Smaragdus of St Mihiel’, pp.

378–91.

On the expectation that monks observe and follow the form of monasticism being practised at
the model monastery of Inde, near Aachen, see Ardo, Vita S. Benedicti Anianensis

36, p. 215–16.

Expositio in regulam

3.9, p. 84.

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Benedict’s teaching on humility and is made explicit in many other
chapters – in Chapter

7, for instance, Benedict states that the fourth step

of humility is to be obedient even under difficult, unfavourable, or even
unjust conditions (RB

7.35) – but Smaragdus believes that the instruction

in this passage merits another look. He is particularly interested in the
limits placed on contention, noting that when Benedict prohibits monks
from contending with their abbot ‘defiantly’ or ‘outside the monastery’,
he makes no mention of what is appropriate on the inside. It is notable
that this part of the Rule was not revised by reformers in the ninth
century, despite the obvious difficulty in the passage. Indeed, the alter-
natives separated by the coordinating conjunction aut are syntactically
equal grammatical elements, but are not analogous according to context.
Benedict of Aniane preserves the standard text of the Rule in his Con-
cordia regularum, whereas Hildemar of Civitate attempted to clarify the
passage by explaining that the preposition intus, or ‘inside’, was implicit
in the teaching.

And yet, this is the only chapter in the commentary

where Smaragdus directly refers to variants in the manuscript tradition
and indicates his preference for the text believed to have descended from
the autograph of the Rule. He indicates to the reader that Benedict did
not say ‘inside or outside’, as some manuscripts preserve, but rather wrote
‘defiantly or outside the monastery’ in his own hand. The passage estab-
lishes that Smaragdus was aware of other recensions of the Rule existing
in his day. What is more, he believed that Benedict had seen a practical
use for contention within the walls of the monastery, and thus did not
intend to impose a general prohibition on monks.

Smaragdus recalls a famous disagreement between St Benedict and his

disciple Maurus to support this understanding. According to his account,
Benedict and Maurus had argued over whose virtue had merited God’s
saving hand in the miraculous rescue of a drowning monk, named
Placidus.

Benedict attributed the miracle not to his own merits but to

the obedience of Maurus, who had promptly gone out to find Placidus at
Benedict’s command and was thus able to be the vessel of God’s divine
work. Maurus, on the other hand, objected to this explanation, saying
that he acted only on Benedict’s command and that the miracle must be

Benedict of Aniane, Concordia regularum, p.

88. Hildemar of Civate, Expositio regulae 3,

pp.

135–6.

The story is related in full in Gregory’s Dialogues II.

7, ed. A. de Vogüé, Sources Chrétiennes 260

(Paris,

1979), pp. 156–60. One day, according to the account, Benedict was in his cell and

Placidus, a young monk, went out to get a bucket of water from the lake. When Placidus set
his pail down carelessly, it fell into the lake, at which point the young monk went in after it. The
water carried him downstream and he would have been lost, had Benedict not received a vision
of the events and commanded his disciple Maurus to rescue him. Running with all haste,
Maurus chased after the young monk and unknowing crossed over the water to retrieve him
from the current. It was not until he had returned Placidus to the safety of the river bank that
he realized he had run on the surface of the water.

Matthew D. Ponesse

Early Medieval Europe

2010 18 (1)

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

attributed to his master’s holiness. It was Placidus who eventually
resolved this good-natured dispute, saying that he had seen the abbot’s
cloak on Maurus’ head when he was plucked from the water, affirming
that it was Benedict who had delivered him from great danger.

By pointing to a specific instance where disagreement between master

and disciple could be congenial and respectful, Smaragdus emphasizes
the value of contention as a means of ascertaining God’s will within the
monastic community.

The only condition, Smaragdus states, is that a

monk must at all times hold humility in his heart. Smaragdus goes on to
say that this friendly or peaceful contention is permissible for the sake of
accusing oneself, for any useful purpose, or if the matter is just.

He also

notes that Benedict did not extend this freedom to monks travelling
outside the walls of the monastery, since a student seen disagreeing with
his superior in public would be at risk of an elated soul, whereas a master
would be looked down upon by onlookers for putting up with the
presumption of his student.

Smaragdus’ teaching on the positive attributes of contention is cor-

roborated by other passages in the commentary. When Smaragdus con-
siders the sin of contention in his discussion on the Instruments of Good
Works (RB

4.66), he modifies the term with the adjective inutilis, indi-

cating that only ‘useless’ or ‘unprofitable’ contention must be avoided.

The positive uses of contention can also be inferred from Smaragdus’
Diadema monachorum, a compilation of earlier works on diverse topics of
monastic spirituality. Although there he introduces contention in the
negative context of carnal sin, he nevertheless advises monks to be mod-
erate with respect to disagreements and disputes, unlike his sources which
permit no place for contention in the mind and hearts of monks.

In order to determine how contention served a necessary purpose in

the life of the monastery, we can return to his exposition on the sum-
moning of the brothers for counsel. Here, he mentions three specific uses
that need to be considered. Contention ‘for the sake of accusing oneself ’,
accusationis sui causa, encourages monks to cultivate the virtue of humil-
ity and may serve as an example to others. This is illustrated in the

On the implications of consensus in ninth-century commentaries on the Benedictine Rule, see
B. Steidle, ‘Der Rat der Brüder nach den ältesten Regula Benedicti-Kommentaren des Abtes
Smaragdus (+ um

826) und des Magisters Hildemar (+ um 850)’, Erbe und Auftrag 53 (1977),

pp.

181–92.

Expositio in regulam

3.9, p. 84.

Expositio in regulam

66, p.143.

Diadema monachorum

90, PL 102, col. 683A. Paul’s letter to the Galatians (V.19–22) is the

source of most medieval descriptions of the carnal vices and gifts of the spirit. The vice of
contention receives no qualification in Smaragdus’ sources, or its negative attributes are further
intensified: see, for example, Cassian, Collationes V.

16 and XXIV.15; Institutiones IV.35;

Cassiodorus, In psalterium CXVIII.

115; Isidore, Sententiae XLIV.11; Julian Pomerius, De vita

contemplativa III.

Smaragdus of St Mihiel’s commentary on the Rule of St Benedict

Early Medieval Europe

2010 18 (1)

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

argument between Benedict and Maurus, where the reluctance of either
to take credit for the miracle would have provided a lesson in humility for
young Placidus. Contention ‘for any usefulness’ or ‘benefit’, pro utilitate
aliqua, may also refer to the spiritual edification of monks, but more
likely pertains to practical matters in the daily operation of the monas-
tery, where disagreements between monks at various tasks could be
expected. The third provision ‘if there is just cause,’ si res iusta exigit, is
ambiguous enough to refer to almost any circumstance that may arise
between monks, but in a legal sense evokes not the image of good-
natured disputes between monks, but scenes of contention arising from
unfairness, prejudice, inequality and discrimination, in other words,
opposition to the improper use of authority. This is not to dismiss the
priority of humility and obedience in the Benedictine Rule. Smaragdus
does not intend to give monks licence to take issue with every seemingly
unreasonable decision handed down from above, but he does offer
recourse to monks in the event that an abbot abused his position and
ignored the traditions, customs and history of the community. Such an
incident had arisen between the monks and abbot of Fulda only one year
prior to the council of Aachen in

816, and almost certainly influenced

Smaragdus’ commentary.

Smaragdus was involved in a similar altercation arising at a later date

between the abbot and monks of Moyenmoutier. The account is related
in a letter sent by Smaragdus and Bishop Rotherius of Toul to Louis the
Pious in

825, informing the emperor that upon the death of Abbot

Fortunatus of Moyenmoutier, the goods and property that had earlier
been granted to this monastery by Smaragdus were abused by the new
abbot, Isimund.

It was the ruling of Smaragdus and Rotharius that both

parties were to blame, the monks through their negligence and Isimund
through his dereliction. This judgement directly responds to the inability
of the community to arrive at consensus. Isimond either failed to consult
with his congregation before deciding to restrict their access to goods, or
he chose to dismiss their counsel in order to impose a more restrictive
practice of monasticism on the community, one that must have gone
against the instruction in the Rule and monastic tradition. In Smaragdus’
decision, he puts theory into practice, drawing on his broad understand-
ing of contention in order to mitigate the situation at Moyenmoutier.

For the original account of this dispute between the monks and abbot of Fulda, see Supplex
Liber, ed. J. Semmler, Corpus Consuetudinum Monasticarum

1, pp. 319–27. W. Jacobson provides

a detailed examination of this quarrel in ‘Die Abteikirche in Fulda von Sturmius bis Eigil.
Kunstpolitische Positionen und deren Veränderungen’, in G. Schrimpf (ed.), Kloster Fulda in
der Welt der Karolinger und Ottonen (Frankfurt am Main,

1996), pp. 106–27.

For the letters, see MGH Epistolae

3, pp. 290–2.

Matthew D. Ponesse

Early Medieval Europe

2010 18 (1)

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Smaragdus’ discussion on contention is but one of many teachings

where the learning of the past is placed in a new context, one which
extends the scope of earlier writings to encompass the complex expression
Carolingian monasticism. By upholding the reading of the standard text
of the Rule, Smaragdus was able to provide for monks a lesson in
grammar and syntax, illustrating the varying standards of Latin over time.
What is more, by looking at variants in the manuscript tradition Sma-
ragdus was able to account for abuses in the current practice of monas-
ticism. He looked to the original text of the Rule for answers to practical
problems arising in his day, providing solutions that may not have been
imagined by Benedict of Nursia in the sixth century, but ones that were
certain to be consistent with his programme of monastic life.

Ohio Dominican University

Smaragdus of St Mihiel’s commentary on the Rule of St Benedict

Early Medieval Europe

2010 18 (1)

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Book reviews

emed_292

92..133

Two Decades of Discovery. Edited by Tony Abramson. Studies in Early
Medieval Coinage

1. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. 2006. viii + 202 pp.

40. ISSN 1756 4840.

The title does not say so, but this book is mostly about sceattas, those tiny
late seventh- and early eighth-century coins that were produced in
England and parts of the continent, and which may with varying degrees
of success be attributed to series (Stuart Rigold receives much praise for
this), types, imitations of types and forgeries of types, from which it may
be possible to establish dates of issue and the place of manufacture. This,
as Michael Metcalf says in his review of two decades of achievement
(much of it, as others later say, by himself ) is the work of numismatists;
economic historians work out the consequences. Some people interested
in sceattas are not even proper numismatists, however; the third part of
this book – the first is conference papers, the second subsequent contri-
butions – lists coins sold to collectors which were selected for quality and
aesthetics rather than because they were historically significant. They are
also potential investments, and it is sobering to see that

527 were sold for

nearly £

190,000, many acquired from metal-detector users whose interest

in them was not enough to lead to responsible reporting and declaration
of find-spot. As has been said by others, how would historians feel if they
were taken into an archive only to discover that some of the most useful
manuscripts had been taken out, all evidence of their source removed,
and then sold in secrecy, so that their very existence may never be publicly
known?

Still, we can be thankful that at least a proportion of the coins (and

other finds) are being declared, as this book and others like it would not
have been possible otherwise. New evidence allows several numismatists,
among them the editor, to add new data, some of which comes from
controlled excavations, such as those in Ribe, Denmark, very usefully
summarized by Claus Feveile; the extraordinary build-up of stratified
layers would reduce anyone who studies the English wic sites to jealous
tears. Unfortunately, only the earliest phases are dated by dendrochro-
nogy, but that is enough to show that at first the ‘Wodan/Monster’ sceatta
types were in a minority, but from c.

725 are the overwhelming majority;

Early Medieval Europe

2010 18 (1) 92–133

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350

Main Street, Malden, MA

02148, USA

Feveile argues cogently that not only were they minted in Ribe, but that
the stratification shows that they went on being minted long after the
southern and midland English series had, on current views, ceased. Mark
Blackburn has aired elsewhere the case for wondering if Southumbrian
sceattas may not have been produced and in circulation for much longer
than usually allowed. Doubling the thirty-year timespan usually attrib-
uted to Secondary sceattas would still argue for a high degree of mon-
etization in the economy as well as ironing out some of the ‘peaks and
troughs’ in eighth-century trade. Unfortunately, as two of the book’s
contributors note, we do not know where the silver brought in by that
trade came from. South-western France is one possibility, but without
mint-signatures it seems that coins coming from Melle, the nearest mint
to the mines, cannot be distinguished, so that source of evidence is
closed. Presumably Roman and Byzantine plate was no longer available,
and anyway insufficient for a volume coinage, so were the Harz moun-
tains already exploited, before the vikings brought inflows from the Near
East?

Ah, the vikings – dismissed again by Richard Hodges as the main

reason for the collapse of the wics in the ninth century. Personally –
and as I am cited I can be personal – I still think that they did more
damage by undermining mercantile confidence in the

830s than they

did by their recorded raids of the

840s. But that is to stray, as Hodges

does, from the sceattas. Permitted to do this is Ian Wood, whose dis-
cussion of the iconogaphy of the crosses on Liudhard’s ‘medalet’ and on
a gold thrymsa finds Merovingian rather than directly Roman, let alone
Byzantine, influence. Attention to the iconography of the sceattas has
been one major development of the last twenty years, led by Anna
Gannon, who here looks at ‘wolf-worms’ and finds Christian, not
pagan Germanic, themes in them. The thrymsa discussed by Wood has
its ascription to King Eadbald of Kent reinforced by Philip Shaw, who
then goes on to make a more general point about standardization of
spellings being an eighth-century development, largely caused by
Bede.

This book is boldly entitled Volume

1, and it must be likely that new

finds and interpretations will justify a series. If so, I hope that the pictures
will be bigger; the coins are so small that even excellent actual-size
reproduction is too small for details to be clear, and only enlargements
such as the one accompanying Arent Pol’s demonstration that a new find
bridges a gap between gold and silver at Dorestat, will serve.

DAVID A. HINTON

University of Southampton

Book reviews

Early Medieval Europe

2010 18 (1)

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Myth, Rulership, Church and Charters: Essays in Honour of
Nicholas Brooks. Edited by Julia Barrow and Andrew Wareham.
Aldershot: Ashgate.

2008. xiv + 271 pp. + 5 b/w figures. £60.

ISBN

978 0 7546 5120 8.

Fifteen colleagues, friends, and former students honour Nicholas
Brooks’s forty years of important research on Anglo-Saxon history. The
contributions follow his four major tracks of scholarship: the origins of
the English, the power of their rulers, the growth of their church, and the
records that reveal these things. A very useful introduction by Julia
Barrow integrates the conclusions of these studies with Brooks’s own
work in these areas. After a brief piece by Chris Dyer on Brooks’s years at
Birmingham, the chapters follow in chronological order. Many of the
contributions offer gems of insight. Susan Kelly’s portrait of Reculver
Minster from its seventh-century creation raises the possibility of a
re-inhabited Reculver in the early eleventh century serving as a refuge for
Flemish monks. Margaret Gelling’s analysis of place names in a grant by
Æthelbald of Mercia in

736 concludes that the land granted to the

monastery was not virgin forest that was only then filling with pioneers,
but had already been tamed, and the Mercians in the year of the grant
were ‘infiltrators’ (p.

87). Catherine Cubitt’s Dunstan should not be

disarticulated into categories such as politician, bishop, and holy man; it
is Dunstan’s alleged power of prophecy (perhaps coloured by the cursing
practices of the Irish or Franks) that made him a particularly powerful
political player in tenth-century politics. Alicia Correa suggests that a
missal produced in England in the later eleventh century (Oslo, Rik-
sarkivet, Lat. fragm.

209, nos. 1–6, + 239, nos. 6–7) may have been

customized for an English missionary in Scandinavia (p.

183). Barbara

Crawford’s study of St Clement dedications ties one, tentatively, to
William the Conqueror’s gratitude to the water-friendly saint for the
army’s crossing of the River Aire in

1069, which allowed him to suppress

the northern rebellion before it spread.

Other contributions make greater demands on us in the future. James

Campbell raises the shade of Eben William Robertson (

1815–74), whom he

argues was ‘the most creative of historians of Anglo-Saxon England’
(p.

44). Robertson’s firsts are many: for example his discovery of small

shires headed by thegns in Northumbria and southern Scotland. He may
sound from Campbell’s account more like a character created by Jorge Luis
Borges than living flesh; nevertheless we should read his works, despite the
prose being ‘gnarled, sometimes to the point of impenetrability’ (p.

31).

Simon Keynes also has homework for us. He provides a history of the
editing of Anglo-Saxon charters from Kemble to the present steady
progress of the British Academy project. While this latter cumulative effort

Book reviews

Early Medieval Europe

2010 18 (1)

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

may convey a sense that the finish line is near, there is still, potentially,
some unmapped territory. Keynes offers several cases of the discovery of
new transcripts of known and unknown charters as evidence that we
should look harder. His experienced finger points to antiquarian collec-
tions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a place for new texts to
emerge.

Two works raise interesting points, but prove less persuasive in their

current form. Alex Burghart and Andrew Wareham ask whether there was
an agricultural revolution in pre-conquest England. They say there was
and offer more the skeleton of the case, rather than a full consideration of
the evidence. Nick Webber, who charts the changing place of the English
and England in the Norman myth of Norman identity, argues that one
can see how this role moves from being a personal to a territorial attribute
by following the changing use of ‘England’ in statements of identity.
However, to use labels like ‘Norman’ or ‘English’ as part of an argument
for what constituted the shifting definition of these labels leads to some
equivocation.

Five studies stand out for their contributions to current scholarship.

Barbara Yorke reassesses Anglo-Saxon origin stories from Gildas, reading
these against not merely late twentieth-century scepticism of the texts,
but against a backdrop of continental German and Roman tales, to which
the Anglo-Saxons probably had access, and also the ever-increasing evi-
dence of material culture. A complex origin emerges, neither wholly
history nor myth, not just Kentish or English, but combining all ele-
ments from several cultures. Pauline Stafford considers the well-known
Mercian Register, alternatively named the ‘Annals of Æthelflæd’ by
Charles Plummer. She ends up rejecting Paul Szarmach’s hypothetical
Latin Gesta as a source for this portion of the Chronicle. More striking,
however, is her suggestion that these Annals may be advancing a claim by
the Mercians (and presumably also by Alfred’s daughter) to rule all
Angelcynn – just as the A chronicle does for the West Saxons and Alfred’s
son, Edward the Elder. Jinty Nelson retracts her earlier view that the
Second Coronation Ordo was composed for Edward the Elder’s corona-
tion in

900. She now agrees with Patrick Wormald and some other

scholars’ view that this Ordo was composed for Athelstan’s coronation in

925 and was likely written by Archbishop Athelm. What prompted this
retraction is the dating by Nicholas Orchard of the Leofric Missal’s copy
of the First Ordo to not earlier than

909. Nelson infers that Archbishop

Plegmund (for whom the Missal was made) would be unlikely to have
ordered a superseded ordo to be copied into a new book if the Second
Ordo were already in use. Sarah Foot adopts a broader context for
evaluating the achievements of Æthelstan than she had employed in her
important

1996 article on the making of Angelcynn. Foot moves Æthel-

Book reviews

Early Medieval Europe

2010 18 (1)

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

stan from being merely a national leader, fulfilling an Anglocentric plan
laid out by his grandfather, to an imperial leader of Britain. She shows
that the British context of many of Æthelstan’s achievements is clear in
the sources, even in the Battle of Brunanburh, a poem she had read
narrowly as evidence for the formation of English identity. In the course
of this reappraisal of the poem, she locates in the Wirral Æthelstan’s most
celebrated battle over his British rivals, here joining the growing ranks
who identify ‘Brunanburh’ with modern Bromborough. She further con-
cludes that the poem was likely to have been composed under the
influence of Cenwald, bishop of Worcester (

929–58), an argument made

by Simon Walker, though Foot places its composition in Æthelstan’s
reign rather than, with Walker, under his immediate successor, Edmund.

Given Brooks’s focus throughout his career on the editing and inter-

pretation of Anglo-Saxon charters, it is apt that the final chapter address
a long-standing charter puzzle. Julia Barrow, herself a seasoned editor of
episcopal acta, asks why so few episcopal and abbatial charters survive
from

1066 to 1100. Changing purpose does not answer the question, as

the reasons these charters were issued were the same before and after

1066. Barrow doesn’t commit herself to any single or simple answer.
Instead, she sees beyond continuities, importations and innovations in
drafting practices, and hints that one cause might be an insecurity by
ecclesiastics that their charters might not be worth the effort. Some
monastic houses, for example, were content to record property transac-
tions in narratives rather than obtain charters. Barrow includes a valuable
list of episcopal and abbatial charters as an appendix.

The collection stands as a fine tribute to the influential contributions

of the honorand.

BRUCE O’BRIEN

University of Mary Washington

Konflikt und Anpassung. Studien zu Migration und Ethnogenese der
Vandalen. By Guido Berndt. Historische Studien

489. Husum: Mathie-

sen Verlag.

2007. 334 pp. ISBN 978 3 7868 1489 4 (hardback).

Das Reich der Vandalen und seine (Vor-) Geschichten. Edited by
Guido M. Berndt and Roland Steinacher. Österreichische Akademie der
Wissenschaften. Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters

13. Vienna:

Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

2008. 337 pp.

ISBN

978 3 7001 3822 8.

The Vandals were rather left behind in the great surge of interest in the
‘Transformation of the Roman World’ that took place from the mid-

Book reviews

Early Medieval Europe

2010 18 (1)

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

1990s. In the thirteen books eventually published as part of the European
Science Foundation project, only one article was dedicated to the group
who ruled North Africa between AD

439 and 534. Since then a number

of monographs have been devoted to the group – with more expected in
due course – but it remains true that Vandal Africa has been neglected in
comparison with the other successor states. The two books under review
here go some way towards redressing this imbalance. Guido Berndt’s
study is a single, bold attempt to untangle the meaningful origins of
‘Vandal’ identity in the murky world of the early fifth century, which
provides a compelling interpretation of a vast complex of both textual
and archaeological material. The collection of essays which Berndt edited
with Roland Steinacher, draws together papers in German (eleven),
French (two), English (two), Italian (one), and Spanish (one) originally
presented at a conference in Vienna in

2005. This volume embraces an

impressively broad chronological span, from the shadowy world of
central European prehistory to the Byzantine propaganda that followed
the defeat of the Vandals in the middle of the sixth century. If the two
books have a shared theme it is that of identity – specifically, of course
‘Vandal’ identity – but both range well beyond the narrow confines that
this might imply, and indeed are at their best when doing so.

Konflikt und Anpassung is both wide-ranging and impressively schol-

arly. Berndt’s central contention is that the invasion of North Africa in
AD

429 represented a defining moment in the evolution of the gens

Vandalorum. This was the point, he argues, at which the Vandals began
to transform from a variety of disparate and heterogeneous groups,
united only by social and military circumstances and the shared appro-
priation of an impressively ancient name, and became something like a
coherent ‘people’. This did not happen at once, of course, and Berndt
charts the growing pains of the Vandal kingdom, from the settlements
of

435 and 442, through the complex foreign policy of Geiseric, to the

exploitation of existing social and administrative systems within Africa.
He argues that the Vandal regnum, and indeed the gens itself, had essen-
tially reached its fullest form by the time that Geiseric signed the
‘eternal peace’ with the emperor Zeno in AD

474, although he does

note the further innovations that the later Hasding kings made to
Vandal identity. Berndt’s treatment of Vandal North Africa is less
exhaustive than María Elvira Gil Egea’s

1998 study África en Tiempos de

los Vándalos: Continuidad y Mutaciones de las Estructuras Socio-Políticas
Romanas, but his material is thorough and up to date, and his argu-
ment is persuasive.

Equally impressive – not least for the daunting nature of the task – is

Berndt’s treatment of ‘Vandal’ history prior to AD

429: a subject which

Gil Egea left virtually untouched, and which has been generally poorly

Book reviews

Early Medieval Europe

2010 18 (1)

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

treated in recent scholarship. Berndt is sceptical about the existence of a
meaningful ‘Vandal’ identity prior to this date, and he explains why with
impressive rigour; indeed, around half of his monograph is devoted to the
meticulous discussion of the otiose history and archaeology of the late
Roman frontier zone. Much modern scholarship has sought to effect an
unlikely marriage between the fragmentary literary sources and the more
copious material evidence – a programme that is at its most problematic
when attempting to attach ethnic labels to specific material ‘cultures’. In
the case of the Vandals, this tendency is especially unfortunate: the
ephemeral textual fragments tell us little, and one suspects that the
modern tendency to identify large groups of ‘Vandals’ in the material
cultures of the northern European La Tène owes more to the later
historical prominence of the group than to any meaningful relationship
between text and archaeology. Berndt devotes considerable space to these
problems, and exhibits an appropriate caution in his conclusions. If there
were people who called themselves ‘Vandals’ in the hothouse of the
Roman frontier zone – and there is every reason to assume that there were
– they are neither easy to spot on the ground, nor readily identifiable with
the groups who were later to occupy Gaul and Spain, and enjoy their
moment in the African sun. In this area, Berndt’s study is exceptionally
impressive.

Naturally, there are points for dispute. Like many recent scholars,

Berndt states that the Vandals were settled in Pannonia for two genera-
tions or so during the fourth century: an assumption based entirely upon
the account of Jordanes, in a passage which would seem to have been an
invention of the historian’s. More fundamental, perhaps, is Berndt’s view
that the disparate ‘Vandals’ of

406–29 were a migrating group, rather

than a small warband on the move. As is now common in studies of the
Vandals, Berndt expresses a healthy scepticism about the authority of
Victor of Vita’s statement that around

80,000 fighting men crossed from

Spain into North Africa in AD

429, and prefers a figure of around 15,000

effectives. Yet the larger number is retained as an order of magnitude for
the group as a whole during the occupation of Gaul and Spain, with the
implication that this was a genuine popular migration, rather than an
extended military campaign. This is not controversial, but it seems to me
that the movements of the Vandals and their allies – first to the Rhine
frontier, then through Gaul, across the Pyrenees and through Spain – fit
better with the actions of a small independent war band than with a
migrating group, not least because of their striking mobility during
periods of civil war. Admittedly, this is speculation, and the length of time
spent by these groups within the western empire must surely have
affected their composition, but a slightly fuller discussion of this issue
would have been welcome within this book. Nevertheless, Berndt’s

Book reviews

Early Medieval Europe

2010 18 (1)

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

volume offers a tremendously valuable addition to our knowledge of the
Vandals in a complex period of history.

Das Reich der Vandalen und seine (Vor-) Geschichten again identifies

429 as a crucial turning point in the history of the Vandals. The first

part of the collection deals with the history and archaeology of the
Vandals prior to that date, and is concluded with a discussion by Berndt
himself on the movement into North Africa and its immediate after-
math. The earlier chapters treat Vandalic prehistory with rather less
scepticism than Berndt employs in his monograph. Peter Haider and
Helmut Castritius largely focus upon the textual evidence for early
Vandal history from the classical and early medieval periods, first for
changes in the far north of Europe in the first centuries AD, and then
for the apparent institution of ‘double’ kingship among the Vandals at
the time of the Marcomannic Wars. Florian Gauss and Péter Proháska
discuss the so-called Przeworsk and Wielbark cultures, and a ‘Vandalic’
royal tomb, in an attempt to cast further light upon extra-imperial
society in the late Roman period. The later papers in the section adopt
a less confident attitude towards the recreation of early Vandal history,
and on the whole these are more successful as a result. Jörg Kleeman
discusses the possible archaeological evidence for the movement of the
Vandals during the last decades of the fourth century and first decade of
the fifth, before concluding that this cannot be traced within the gen-
erally militarized material culture of the western empire. That there were
military elites in early fifth-century Gaul who sported fashions similar to
those worn on and around the Danube frontier is not to be doubted;
that these fashionistas were Vandals is impossible to state with confi-
dence. Javier Arce, likewise, adopts a generally sceptical tone in his
discussion of the Vandal occupation of Spain. With only a handful of
textual sources upon which to rely, and most of them rather late, the
events of

409–29 can only be pieced together with the greatest care. This

may not make for an exciting narrative, but it does justice to the mate-
rial available to us, and throws the later triumphs of the Vandals into a
more impressive relief.

The second part discusses the formation of the Vandal kingdom from

429–534. There are several highlights in this section, which both

provide excellent summaries of the state of knowledge, and identify
desiderata for future research. Phillip von Rummel’s survey of the archae-
ology of North Africa emphasizes the complete absence of identifiable
‘Vandals’ from the material record, but stresses the value and interest of
what remains, not least for the continued efflorescence of society within
the new regnum. Fathi Bejaoui, likewise, has little to say on the new rulers
of Carthage per se, but does note several important new discoveries, both
epigraphic and archaeological, which further develop our knowledge of

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their state. Yves Modéran provides a typically thought-provoking study of
the interactions between the Moors and the kingdom of Carthage, and
persuasively traces the parallel evolution of the different African polities.
In his contribution, Roland Steinacher provides a wide-ranging survey of
further work on the Vandals and issues of their identity, and discusses
(amongst other things) the importance of dress, language and settlement
as markers of identity in the light of recent scholarship. The collection
closes with two broadly comparative studies, first by Gian Pietro Brogiolo
and Alexandra Chavarría Arnau on barbarian settlement in Visigothic
Spain and Lombard Italy, and then by Sebastian Brather, in a recapitu-
lation of his arguments on the difficulties and dangers of ethnic attribu-
tion within funerary archaeology.

There is a great deal of excellent work here, and the editors are to be

commended for assembling such an impressive group of contributors,
and for putting together an attractive and well-illustrated volume.
Despite the breadth of these studies, however, there are still some
important aspects of Vandal history – and more specifically questions of
Vandal identity – which remain relatively neglected. Chief among these
is, perhaps, the question of gender and social standing within the articu-
lation of ‘ethnic’ identities within North Africa in this period. Berndt
rightly comments upon the surprising absence of women from the
Hasding family tree (the only named women within the Vandal royal
family are the imperial princess Eudocia and Thrasamund’s wife
Amalafrida from Ostrogothic Italy), but the implications of this are left
unexplored. If we extend this observation further, the absence of women
becomes still more striking: a small handful of epigraphs commemorate
women with ‘Germanic’ names, but none is specifically identified as a
‘Vandal’, and no textual source ever identifies a female member of the
group. It is possible, even likely, that this is a reflection of the proclivi-
ties of our sources, but this imbalance also hints at the dangers in
assuming that ‘barbarian’ ethnicities were only ever articulated in oppo-
sition to ‘Roman’ identity in this period. Berndt, and the majority of
the contributors to Das Reich der Vandalen rightly note that social status
was at least as important as ethnic identity within the Vandal kingdom,
but the full integration of these issues remains unexplored. What if
‘Vandal’ identity was more about not being poor, female or adolescent,
rather than not being ‘Roman’? How would this affect our view of
society at the time? These are issues for further conferences, and further
volumes. As it stands, the present books offer a tremendously valuable
contribution to our developing knowledge of a frequently forgotten
group of barbarians.

A.H. MERRILLS

University of Leicester

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Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe. New Perspectives.
Edited by Lisa M. Bitel and Felice Lifshitz. The Middle Ages
Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

2008. 158 pp.,

3 b/w illustrations. $39.95; £26. ISBN-13 978 0 81222 4069 6;
ISBN-

10 0 8122 4069 3.

No volume of this type is comprehensive in its coverage of so large a
topic. The editors give an overview of what they consider are the key
themes in this field and question some of the assumptions on which
previous work has been based. The book is dedicated to Jo Ann
McNamara and, although it is not a formal Festschrift, several of the
authors acknowledge their debt to her work. The editors’ main aim is to
move away from a discourse that privileges monasticism over different
forms of religious observance and practice. The contributors seek to
explain ‘how medieval people professed Christianity, how they professed
gender, and how the two professions coincided’ (p.

10).

Particularly important are the contributions by Dyan Elliott, Jacqueline

Murray and Felice Lifschitz in which concepts of virginity and chastity are
explored. Although it is made clear that gender and biological sex are
independent and separate entities, the synergies between both gender and
sex, as well as constructions of the body, are unpacked. What emerges from
these discussions is a much more complex understanding of these terms in
their medieval context than has sometimes been the case. Elliott focuses on
Tertullian’s idea of the bride of Christ that was to have significant
implications for the position of holy women later in the Middle Ages. She
looks for the origins of a doctrine that exemplified male chastity, linking
the post-Gregorian reform celibate clergy with the angelic state. As she
clearly demonstrates, Tertullian’s ideas grew out of his attempts to under-
stand the place of virtuous humans, both men and women, in creation.

Murray draws on the entire medieval period, but uses a significant

amount of early material in order to demonstrate the mutability of
gender in relation to the possible existence of a third gender in medi-
eval society. Although she acknowledges the binary system that under-
lay much medieval thinking, she prefers to see gender as a spectrum
along which men and women moved. Like Elliott, she considers bio-
logical sex as necessary in understanding why chastity was important
for both men and women and how they experienced it. She uses
medical theory to show how mortification practices allowed holy
people to move along the gender spectrum. Men became more femi-
nine in their ability to cool the heat of their bodies and women more
masculine in their ability to raise the temperatures of theirs, reverting
to their pre-lapsarian state of being one flesh. In the following essay,
Ruth Mazo Karras adopts a slightly different approach preferring not to

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write in terms of a third gender, but of variations on the existing two.
Despite the essay’s title, ‘Thomas Aquinas’s Chastity Belt’, her discus-
sion ranges more widely, and the argument focuses on the model of
heroic chastity as a struggle of will derived from early monasticism
against a more passive virginity as a way of priests expressing mascu-
linity from the twelfth century onwards.

Lifschitz focuses on the term virgo in early medieval litanies of the saints,

tracing changes in practice as women were gradually separated from the
categories of male saints (including martyrs and confessors) and lumped
together in the category virgines. She reminds us that the medieval word
virgo does not equate to the modern term ‘virgin’, acknowledging that this
was not a sexual category, but more a pyschological one. Although virgo
helped to prevent the removal of women entirely from such litanies, it also
had a detrimental effect on men, who were excluded by it. At the centre of
Lifschitz’s argument is how this process of mutual exclusion was avoided
and gender roles negotiated. She employs two telling examples – a
decorated initial from the Sacramentary of Gellone showing Mary offici-
ating as a priest, and Aldhelm’s De virginitate – to show how men in
particular saw virginity as relevant to them and their liturgical experience.

Using hagiographical material from the early Middle Ages, Jane Tib-

betts Schulenberg’s essay on sacred space and women’s monasteries takes
a more empirical approach to the subject. Although she arrives at an
interesting conclusion, that women’s houses may well have allowed the
laity greater access to relics than male houses due to their spatial arrange-
ment, the lack of theoretical reflection sits oddly with the rest of the book.

Despite the attempt to focus on the wider experience of Christianity

beyond monasticism, the volume’s emphasis is still very much on the
experiences of monks, nuns, priests and saints. This is in part a reflection
of the sources, clearly elucidated in Bitel’s very good introduction. Nev-
ertheless, the attention to the nuances of gender and re-examination of
familiar positions is to be welcomed, giving scholars of both gender and
religion much to consider.

LEONIE HICKS

University of Southampton

Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late
Antiquity. By Kim Bowes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2008. xvi + 363 pp. £50. ISBN 978 0 52 188593 5.

This book is both important and exciting. Bowes deploys a wealth of
evidence, both textual and material, in order to examine the scope that was
available to late antique individuals for religious activity beyond the reach

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of institutionalized authority structures, and discovers that this was very
much greater than conventional accounts have allowed. A whole proces-
sion of self-confident freelancers troops through her book, and the cumu-
lative effect of these case studies (and the connections that are
unobtrusively made between them) is most impressive: Bowes suggests
illuminating comparisons between the matron Eusebia with her relic
hoard and the triple-barrelled augur Lucius Cornelius Scipio Orfitus at his
taurobolium; between the home-schooled asceticism of a Melania and the
bustling schedule of the Syrian monastic ‘superstar’ Isaac; and between the
gently self-sufficient piety of a rusticating Ausonius and the creative
renovations undertaken, across the Pyrenees, at the villa of Fortunatus.
The focus throughout upon the socially conspicuous is deliberate, for
Bowes’s elite households are centres of patronage, their dependent hinter-
lands inferred either from texts (as in a nicely unravelled episode involving
a femina clarissima, a visiting bishop and a bath attendant, pp.

80–2) or

physical remains (an outside door at the Villa Fortunatus chapel, pp.

135,

158). Different patterns of authority can sometimes become blurred here:
it is not obvious, for example, that the church cannibalized from two
ruined farmhouses at Souk el-Lhoti, to serve the two that remained (pp.

150, 165–6), is an ‘estate church’ in the same way as were (say) the founda-
tions which Melania maintained for the benefit of her importunate tenants
(p.

166). However, the central point about the diversity and creativity of lay

religious initiatives is made persuasively. It becomes almost surprising, in
fact, that this point should require argument. But not the least of Bowes’s
achievements is to show the extent to which our expectations have been
conditioned by a narrative which both privileges the activities of popes and
bishops, and quietly translates their aspirations into norms.

It sometimes seems, indeed, that Bowes herself accepts too much of the

traditional picture. The lamp proclaiming that ‘The Lord gives the law to
Valerius Severus’ is interpreted (pp.

79–81) as a gift from the bishop of

Rome to the urban prefect, but the Valerii and their friends were surely
capable of appropriating for their own purposes the language and ico-
nography of divinely inspired authority. One wonders, in fact, about
whether there has been as much ‘religious change’ even by the end of the
period as Bowes suggests. Her closing vignette, Eugippius’ account of the
translatio of Severinus (pp.

217–18), has the impresario Barbaria now

‘obliged’ to request papal permission and to invite the bishop of Naples
to oversee the ceremony (p.

223), but – quite apart from the authorial

strategies explored by Kate Cooper in a paper noted but not discussed
(p.

290 n. 4) – the text itself claims rather less than this. Gelasius’

authority, cited in connection to the saint’s removal from the north,
seems to be tamely harnessed to Barbaria’s project; Victor of Naples’s role
at the relics’ installation might similarly be seen as more decorative than

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dominant. Neither papacy nor local episcopate seems otherwise to have
cramped the style of Eugippius’ notably resourceful community.

The book positively fizzes with energy. At times this threatens to

overwhelm the reader: in three consecutive sentences Roman homes are
first in a vortex and then become successively well springs, islands and
finally whirlpools (pp.

102–3). Conversely, repetition dulls some lively

images: thus ‘hodge-podge’ (pp.

28, 150), Rolodexes (pp. 43, 92),

‘Janus-faced’ (pp.

68, 69, 71, 91, 219), and the Constantinopolitan ‘Wild

West’ (pp.

104, 120). Although beautifully produced, moreover, the book

has been carelessly edited, with too many mistakes whether in proper
names (Equitus, Promotius, Eleusis, Ganagara and Fusalla), in Latinity
(pro sacra for pro sacro, femina inlustra for femina inlustris), or in general
proof reading (‘principals’ for ‘principles’ twice (pp.

24, 65), ‘arial’ for

‘aerial’, ‘in affect’ for ‘in effect’ and ‘cannons’ for ‘canons’). But these
blemishes do not detract significantly from the value of this book, which
will provide a starting point for much fruitful discussion.

NEIL MCLYNN

Corpus Christi College, Oxford

Religion, Dynasty, and Patronage in Early Christian Rome,

300–900. Edited by Kate Cooper and Julia Hillner. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

2007. 327 pp. ISBN 9780521876414.

This book collects some of the most interesting and exciting work on
early medieval Rome currently under way. It stems from a number of
grant-supported projects and friendly collaborations based at Manchester
University over the past thirteen years, and shows that what begins small,
at the level of faculty-funded research projects or informal mentoring,
can develop into important large projects with many useful publications
(including this book, a special issue of EME

9.3 (2000), and two data-

bases available online at Manchester’s Centre for Late Antiquity), several
temporary research appointments, and a plethora of sophisticated new
research. This book, while an important landmark, is only part of the
return on the investments made in these projects and a poster child big
funding and collaborative research.

The introduction by the two editors lays out their vision of Roman

history: the laity was more influential in Rome than previously recognized,
and papal and monastic sources tend to overemphasize the role of the
clergy. Precisely the relationship between religiosity, social politics and the
mechanisms by which these were played out is the subject of these collected
essays. Among the essays two agendas are interwoven; they are relevant to
most early medieval studies, explicitly so here: property matters, and look
at your manuscripts. The collection is on the whole source-critical, using

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textual and codicological analysis to reveal new information about a
number of key texts. Kate Blair-Dixon contrasts the sixth-century Collectio
Avellana and the Liber Pontificalis as two differently constructed histories
of Rome. Hannah Jones shows the Passio S. Agnetis to be a compelling
argument for social order and familial patronage of Roman saints. Conrad
Leyser recasts the oft-quoted though very little studied text of the Passio
Iohannis et Pauli as a model for monastic behaviour in and out of Rome.
Within her extremely convincing discussion of the nature of property of
the Roman titulus, Julia Hillner takes the discussion of the Decretum
Gelasianum forward; and Marios Costambeys and Leyser provide a politi-
cal background for the Translatio Stephani in their focused discussion of
Roman monasticism (though it is difficult to see Aachen as an ‘imperial
capital’ on a par with Constantinople exactly in the period they suggest).
Some of the papers address themes through certain genres. Mark
Humphries demonstrates the continuity and change in description of
public rituals that gave shape to papal ceremony. Kristina Sessa discovers in
certain of the gesta martyrum key models for episcopal authority in bishops’
interactions with households, including healing, conversion and baptism.
Kate Cooper has amassed a number of fifth-century authors on the range
of solutions to inheritance among the wealthy devoted. Anne Kurdock
shows that the correspondence between Anicia Demetrias and Augustine,
Jerome and Pelagius attests to contested property and competition for
wealthy and ascetic patrons in the Anicia family. Each of these essays has
been written and edited to a fine level of erudition.

The work of these scholars in this volume and elsewhere is making

clear that early medieval Rome was as socially and intellectually dynamic
and textually sophisticated as the best early medieval hot spots. The
society which has been so often characterized as a monolithic theocracy
propping up its sagging tradition was in fact negotiated between conse-
crated and secular men and women, setting out patterns of observance
and patronage that were widely taken up or challenged. This book is a
major contribution to be consulted by anyone looking at Rome and its
influence in the early Middle Ages.

CAROLINE GOODSON

Birkbeck College, London

Power and Patronage in Early Medieval Italy. Local Society, Italian
Politics and the Abbey of Farfa, c.

700–900. By Marios Costambeys.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2008. xvi + 388 pp. £60.

ISBN

13 978052187037 5.

This is a much needed in-depth study of the strategically important
monastery of Farfa in central Italy, founded at the end of the seventh

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century on the political boundary between the Lombard duchy of
Spoleto and Byzantine territory around the city of Rome. The monastery
therefore, as might be expected, struggled to maintain its independence
and patrimony in the face of its most powerful neighbour, the papacy.
However, central to Costambey’s work is the idea that, in early medieval
Italy at least, behind every powerful institution, whether papal, royal or
monastic, stood aristocratic and even more humble landowners and
officials. It was they, he argued, who determined the efficacy of legal
judgements ‘on the ground’. Costambeys also analyses why so many
individuals and families donated to Farfa, and the significance of this
patronage for both the region and the Italian peninsula as a whole.

At the heart of Costambeys’s study is the Regestum of Farfa, in which

charters relevant to the monastery were copied in the twelfth century. The
legal material was, he contends, largely copied faithfully, but the contents
of the Register also reflects a process of deliberate selection as well as
losses over time, for example after the Saracen attack in the late ninth
century. He discusses the links between the language of Lombard charters
and contemporary liturgy, scribal culture and practice, and the histori-
ography of gift-giving. Chapters are dedicated to ducal patronage; the
significance of regional officials; the local origins of the monastery’s
monks, lay aristocratic society, with particular focus on the role of
women; and a case study of four elite families, followed by two chapters
on the political context in which the abbey of Farfa had to operate.

The richness of Farfa’s Register, even given undoubted omissions,

allows Costambeys to trace the progress of court cases, often over several
charters, demonstrating the difficulty of enforcing judgements in the
context of a ‘hazy’ process which could be shaped by both litigants and
judges, and where all parties may well have known each other or been
drawn from similar social circles. Certainly monastic oblates appear to
have been drawn from local families and therefore, Costambeys convinc-
ingly argues, should be seen as much as representing their families’
interests in the monastery as the monastery’s interests to those outside its
walls. In his chapter on kinship structures and the role of women in the
legal process, Costambeys shows that the legal codes – Lombard or
Roman – lagged behind actual practice in charters, and that business
partners as well as close family members were involved in joint transac-
tions, blurring the edges of kinship groups.

Looking through the prism of landowning, the closing chapters of the

monograph seek to contextualise the well-known geographical liminality
of Farfa and the complex waters it had to chart between the Carolingians,
Lombards, Byzantines and the papacy. Costambeys argues that local
landowners and the monastery were concerned as much about the ambi-
tions of the Roman aristocracy as of the papacy, both of which sought to

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extend their holdings into the Sabina, where Farfa lay. Once the Carol-
ingians had issued Farfa with its diploma of immunity, Costambeys
shows that there was an increase in donations to the monastery. He
concludes that the Sabine elite had greater opportunities to take the
initiative for political action than their contemporaries across the Alps in
Francia.

This monograph is in many ways a very traditional work of scholarship,

in that it focuses primarily on a single body of legal material from one
institution. The strength of this work is that it manages both to elucidate
what might be termed the ‘micro’ of early medieval Italian society, with its
complex kinship groups, and the ‘macro’, the ever-shifting politics of the
dying years of the Lombard dynasty and the incursions of the Caroling-
ians, the papacy and the Roman elite into the Sabine.

CLARE PILSWORTH

Manchester University

Ritual and Politics. Writing the History of a Dynastic Conflict in
Medieval Poland. By Zbigniew Dalewski. East Central and Eastern
Europe in the Middle Ages (

450–1450) 3. Leiden: Brill. 2008. 217 pp.

ISBN

9004166572, 9789004166578.

The starting point of this monograph is an account, constructed by the
anonymous twelfth-century chronicler Gallus, of the dramatic climax of
a dynastic conflict that occurred in

1111. The clash was between two dukes

of the ruling Piast dynasty – Bołesław Wrymouth, for whom Gallus
composed his Deeds of the Princes of the Poles, and Bołesław’s elder
half-brother, Zbigniew. The conflict’s culmination saw Zbigniew’s return
to Poland from exile, his blinding by Bołesław (which Gallus does not
mention directly) and the latter’s subsequent penance.

Dalewski uses Gallus’ account to elucidate the importance of ritual in

the political life of twelfth-century Poland – both on a narrative level, and
on the level of practical political action. In this undertaking Dalewski also
seeks to demonstrate the compatibility between the apparently opposing
approaches to political ritual in medieval Europe of Philippe Buc and
those he criticized in his

2001 work The Dangers of Ritual (cf. Geoffrey

Koziol’s critique, ‘The Dangers of Polemic’ printed in this journal the
following year).

In sympathy with Buc’s emphasis on the reality of the text and its

distance from the actuality of what the text may appear to describe,
Dalewski explores how Gallus uses ritual as a narrative tool to construct
a ‘correct’ sequence of events, that is, a construction that is favourable
to Bołesław. But his understanding of Gallus’ intentions encourages

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Dalewski to venture beyond this ‘reality of the text’, as it enables him
to see the text as part of a dialogue – between the ‘correct’ and ‘incor-
rect’ interpretations of ritual acts. In drawing out the various interpre-
tative schemes with which Gallus grappled to arrive at his version,
Dalewski builds on the work on ritual gestures and attitudes through-
out Europe in the early and high Middle Ages undertaken by Koziol,
Gerd Althoff, Timothy Reuter and Janet Nelson, whose various
approaches Buc sought to challenge. Dalewski follows them too in
underlining the role of ritual in the political life of the period: the
importance of ritual as a narrative tool for Gallus mirrors its impor-
tance in political action. Had it lacked practical importance, it would
have had little utility for the chronicler.

Each chapter is devoted to a particular ritual act, or the inference of

ritual, used by Gallus to construct his account. The first of these is the
adventus, and Dalewski’s point of departure here is a single sentence by
which Gallus describes Zbigniew’s return to Poland after his quarrel with
Bołesław as an impertinent enactment of an adventus regis. This sentence,
Dalewski argues, betrays less (if at all) the ceremonial details of Zbig-
niew’s arrival than the meanings Polish contemporaries associated with
the adventus regis, and its importance in communicating the monarchic
majesty of Piast dukes. Only if the rite was widely understood by con-
temporaries to convey the majesty of Poland’s ruling dynasty could
Gallus use it to construct the partial account that he does – that is, of its
inappropriate enactment by an unduly ambitious ruler. Similar conclu-
sions are drawn about the subject of Chapter

2, the humble advent – the

opposite of the monarchic advent, which Gallus implies Zbigniew should
have adopted, but did not.

The third chapter addresses the penance undertaken by Bołesław after

the blinding of his brother. While Gallus makes only general mention of
Bołesław’s sin, by contrast he sets out in some detail the duke’s penance.
Dalewski sees this emphasis as a response to at least two opposing
elements of public opinion formed in reaction to the blinding, and shows
how the chronicler used the ritual of penance to elaborate on Bołesław’s
innate humility. The account’s emphasis on the penance, it is argued,
indicates both the importance of the royal humiliatio, as well as its
vulnerability to multiple interpretations, on the level of practical political
action. The final chapter shows how Gallus portrays oath-breaking in his
chronicle more widely (and with some frequency), again as a response to
likely condemnation of Bołesław’s actions by a significant number of
contemporaries.

The common ground between Buc’s admonitions of

2001 and the

methodology of many of those he criticized has not previously gone
unnoticed. Nevertheless, Dalewski’s demonstration of how a chronicler’s

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handling of the vulnerability of ritual gestures to contradictory interpre-
tations can shed light on the rules of political action in the high Middle
Ages is a valuable contribution to the field. His work on the account was
originally published in Polish in

2005. This present volume has made

accessible to a wider audience a study that will be of considerable interest
to any historian concerned with political ritual and its representations in
this period.

SARAH LAYFIELD

University of Cambridge

Les élites et leurs espaces. Mobilité, rayonnement, domination (du
VIe au XIe siècle). Edited by Philippe Depreux, François Bougard and
Régine Le Jan. Collection Haut Moyen Âge

5. Turnhout: Brepols. 2007.

424 pp., 67 b/w ill. €60. ISBN 9782503526119.

This book, a collection of eighteen articles in French, German and Italian
resulting from a conference held in Göttingen in

2005, represents the

latest instalment in a series of volumes on early medieval elites presided
over by the editors and their collaborators in recent years. Philippe
Depreux’s introduction sets the scene by dwelling on the social scientific
heritage of the core concepts of elites and space, and emphasizing how
definitions of the latter could construct the authority and identity of the
former. Many of the contributors pick up on these terms and reflect
further on issues of definition, but this does not produce (nor, presum-
ably, was it intended to) a single methodological or interpretive frame-
work. What we get instead is a mixture of the interesting and the
unremarkable, with the central themes used as jumping-off points for
ruminations on a relatively diverse set of topics. Certain subcategories do,
however, emerge quite coherently. Only a couple of articles are concerned
with texts whose primary function was to describe and organize space.
Brigitte Englisch discusses cartography and asks how travellers knew
where they were going, while Jean-Pierre Devroey’s extremely suggestive
and interesting chapter enlivens the superficially dry Carolingian polyp-
tyques by reading them as sources for contemporary perceptions of the
world and linking them to memorial books, letters and other textual
genres. Archaeology, naturally, finds a niche: Élisabeth Lorans revisits the
continental and Anglo-Saxon emporia sites, and François Gentili and
Alain Valais contribute a detailed and useful survey of excavated aristo-
cratic residences near Paris and in the Loire valley. Several articles address
ecclesiastical definitions of space by analysing relic translations, church
foundations and texts associated with episcopal activity. Geneviève
Bührer-Thierry provides one of the volume’s highlights with a finely

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nuanced exposition of the strategies used by the early ninth-century
bishops of Freising to overlay the topography of their diocese with
reminders of episcopal authority. Using the invaluable Freising charters to
very good effect she demonstrates how the bishops gradually appropri-
ated resonant locations in the city’s hinterland, illustrating in the process
the complex interrelationships between episcopal and aristocratic power
in Carolingian Bavaria. Steffen Patzold, meanwhile, contributes a char-
acteristically acute exegesis of Hincmar’s De ecclesiis et capellis as a source
for diocesan identity, and Cristina La Rocca offers a convincing interpre-
tation of declining levels of monastic foundation in ninth-century Italy as
a function of Carolingian attitudes to hierarchy and the organization of
territory. A final category of chapters deals with the lay aristocracy and
high politics. The big picture here as sketched by Simone Collavini (on
central Italy) and Florian Mazel (on western France) emphasizes the
well-known eleventh-century shift from definitions of elite space con-
structed round churches, estates and cities to structures of lordship
founded on seigneurial castles. Yet these authors also underline the con-
sistently diffuse nature of the landholdings of the middling nobility
throughout the period from the ninth to eleventh centuries, something
that undermines the conventional view of aristocratic power as increas-
ingly concentrated and entrenched. Similar reservations are expressed
regarding the upper echelons of the secular elite in Hans-Werner Goetz’s
chapter on the rise of the east Frankish duchies, and in Thomas Zotz’s on
Alemannia. It is customary to criticize collections of essays such as this as
incoherent, and the book inevitably embodies the vices of its genre as well
as the virtues. That said, there are genuine insights here to be gleaned by
the diligent reader into the ways that early medieval ideas about the
organization of territory and topography helped create and renew social
hierarchies.

SIMON MACLEAN

University of St Andrews

Die Formierung Europas

840–1046. By Johannes Fried. Oldenbourg

Grundriss der Geschichte

6. Munich: Oldenbourg. 2008. 359 pp.

ISBN

978 3 486 49703 (paperback).

According to the publisher, each volume in the series Grundriss der
Geschichte has two goals: to provide a highly readable account of his-
torical events, compiled by an expert in the field, and to provide a
summary of the current state of scholarship. Each volume follows a
uniform pattern; an initial section gives a general overview of the time
period or theme in question, a second section discusses key debates and

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topics of research, with reference to the relevant literature; the third
part consists of thematically arranged bibliographies. The volume
reviewed here fully lives up to the goals of the series. Johannes Fried,
professor of medieval history at the University of Frankfurt am Main
has been a prominent figure in the community of German medievalists
for decades. He is also no stranger to controversy. In recent publica-
tions, Fried has attacked the foundations of current historical practice,
arguing that the study of the past needs to be completely rethought in
light of new developments in the field of neuro-science and the study
of memory. Aside from his ventures into theory and methodology,
however, much of Fried’s substantial body of work has focused on pre-
cisely the time period encompassed by this volume. In short, he is the
type of expert-in-the-field envisioned by the publisher as the ideal
author for this series.

Although Fried’s contribution to the Oldenbourg series is strongly

nuanced towards the history of medieval Germany and the Reich, that
history is not considered in isolation, but rather placed within a much
broader, conceptual framework. Germany under the later Carolingian,
Ottonian and early Salian dynasties is considered as part of an emerging
European landscape, and projected against a backdrop that is political
and institutional in its orientation, but not exclusively so. This expansive
viewpoint is evident in the general, introductory section of the book.
Here Fried considers a variety of topics that defined how people of this
emerging European society viewed their world, interacted with the super-
natural, and defined their relationships with one another. Emphasizing
the ‘otherness’ of the era, Fried notes the apparent lack of interest in the
individual or in the possibility of emotional, affective love. Europeans
inhabited a world dominated by imposing natural phenomena, but
nature itself had no aesthetic appeal. Nor were they concerned about the
preservation of the environment. Fried also considers various factors
governing social relations (e.g. marriage, kinship) and traces the gradual
formation of a new political landscape through the establishment of ties
between regions, the foundation of bishoprics, and the impact of external
invasions. A narrative overview of the political history of Germany, with
brief accounts of events in France and England, is followed by discussions
of the papacy, religiosity and intellectual life.

Following the standard format of this series, Part Two of Fried’s book

provides overviews of the literature relevant to topics laid out in section
one, with references to the bibliographies that comprise Part Three. The
overviews are useful to the extent that they not only indicate the content
of the works cited, but also place them within the context of existing or
emerging trends and ongoing debates. The bibliographies are extensive,
include works in the major scholarly languages, and appear to be rela-

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tively current. Overall, one would rightly conclude that this is a volume
to be consulted or dipped into rather than read cover to cover. But it is
no less valuable for that. In particular, readers with the requisite linguistic
skills will find that it provides an efficient way to plunge into the middle
of a new area of study or update knowledge within an already familiar
one.

DAVID A. WARNER

Rhode Island School of Design

The Military Leadership of Matilda of Canossa,

1046–1115. By David

J. Hay. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

2008. 336 pp. 2 maps

and one line drawing. £

55. ISBN 9780719073588.

Matilda of Canossa (also known as Matilda of Tuscany) ruled in northern
Italy for almost forty years, during which time she championed the
reforming papacy and twice defeated the numerically superior armies of
Henry IV of Germany. Yet little has been written about her in English.
Based on his doctoral thesis, Hay’s study of Matilda – the first specifically
devoted to her military career – is of considerable interest. In this com-
prehensive and readable account of Matilda’s long and difficult rule, Hay
introduces anglophone readership to a significant, but so far neglected,
medieval ruler.

The majority of the book is comprised of straightforward narrative

history, in which Hay lays out the different military campaigns planned
and/or fought by Matilda: guerrilla warfare and pitched battles in the
Italian wars against Henry IV; siege warfare against the nascent power of
the communes; and expeditions (often abortive) against the Normans of
southern Italy, and Muslims in both North Africa and the Middle East.
The image of Matilda that emerges from Hay’s detailed study is of a
formidable military leader, albeit one who attempted to avoid war
through diplomacy where possible, and who never took to the field
herself. Above all, Hay’s work makes clear that Matilda was an accom-
plished military strategist, who was able to outmanoeuvre Henry IV’s
imperial army through her effective intelligence network and the swift
mobilization of troops. Matilda also made good use of fortresses to
provide defensive screens; and of mercenaries where other troops were
unavailable. It is clear that Matilda was not simply a figurehead. Hay uses
diplomatic evidence to excellent effect to demonstrate the central role
Matilda played in military affairs, for example, her personal involvement
in besieging the town of Prato (

1107).

Hay’s narrative of Matilda’s military career is followed by a thematic

chapter showing how her actions were perceived by contemporaries. Hay

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discusses contemporary attitudes to women’s military authority in both
the polemical literature of the Investiture Contest and in prohibitions
against women’s authority in canon law. Of course, since few sources deal
explicitly with female military leadership, Hay is often confronted with
the problematic nature of female rule, rather than military leadership.
This chapter contains much valuable information – especially on Bonizo
of Sutri’s changing relationship with Matilda – yet it is the least satisfying
part of the book. Hay does not fully address the nature or the timing of
these highly gendered polemics. The question of audience is key: to
whom were these polemics addressed? Hay argues that they were
intended to ‘shape public opinion’ (p.

200), but how far did these works

resonate beyond a narrow circle of clerics? These works, moreover, were
both selective and functional in their misogyny. Matilda did not have a
credibility problem in general, but a specific problem brought about by
the Italian wars (most of Hay’s sources were written between

1083 and

1100). The polemics and canon sources discussed by Hay were a continu-
ation of war by other means, in which Matilda was attacked or defended
according to the author’s stance in the Investiture Conflict, rather than
any inherent attitude to women’s rule.

Hay is stronger on the history of warfare than he is on the history of

women. His study adds to the growing body of work on ‘women and
warfare’ without really engaging with it. There is little reference to other
studies of medieval military women, and Hay fails to utilize key works
that consider gendered approaches to women in narrative sources, even
those cited in the bibliography. Nor is there much comparison of Matilda
with other female military figures, except Joan of Arc (despite her evident
differences from Matilda). Yet there were many such women in eleventh-
and twelfth-century Italy: for example, Ermengarde of Tuscany, Adelaide
of Turin, Sikelgaita of Salerno and Beatrice of Tuscany. Comparison of
Matilda’s military leadership with that of, for example, Sikelgaita’s, who
prosecuted the siege of Trani in

1080, indicates that Matilda was not alone

in engaging in offensive military expeditions, as Hay suggests (pp.

11, 28

40).

Hay’s text sometimes reads more like a biography than a study of

military leadership, yet it is rich with information culled not only from
medieval sources, but also from the extensive body of English, German and
Italian secondary literature on Matilda. He is sometimes too dependent on
this secondary literature, especially I.S. Robinson, Henry IV of Germany,
and L.L. Ghirardini, Storia critica di Matilde di Canossa. Although there are
points which might have been further developed, this well-written, acces-
sible book nevertheless has much to say to a wide-ranging audience.

ALISON CREBER

King’s College, London

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The Medieval World of Isidore of Seville. Truth From Words. By
John Henderson. Cambridge: CUP.

2007. xi + 232 pp. £55. ISBN

9780521867405 (hardback).

John Henderson is a familiar figure to many classicists: a renegade cham-
pion of Lucan, Tacitus and the younger Pliny, summarizer of art and
artefact; here he turns his attention to that most familiar character of the
early medieval world, Isidore of Seville. But is Isidore really so familiar?
His Etymologiae were cited ad infinitum throughout the medieval period
and remain cited as a source of quotidian reality among medieval scholars
today and (so Henderson tells us), as the last word on obscure points of
Latinity by those studying an earlier period. But does anyone really read
Isidore’s greatest work? Henderson works here from the contention that
the Etymologiae were intended to be read as a piece – that the chapter
headings and referential stemma were more the work of his later editors
Braulio (and W.M. Lindsay) than the bishop himself. We approach
Isidore as we approach Roget’s Thesaurus: as a resource, a treasury to be
plundered not studied. But Isidore (like Roget) was originally written to
be read. With thesaurus at his side, Henderson offers his own idiosyn-
cratic tour of the great literary monument of the seventh century.

He might as well have called the book ‘Roget and Me’. Puns and word

play (and contemporary reference) are Henderson’s stock-in-trade, and
one can almost sense the delight as he turns his unique translation skills
to a text which positively resists any challenge to render it in a different
tongue. For those unfamiliar with his approach, the very first quotation
of Isidore provides a crash course:

DISCIPLINE + ART. Disciplearne got its name from learning: ergo
it can also be called science: you see, sci-earnce is short for psychal
learning, because none of us plies sciearnce without applied learn-
ing. On another line disciplearne’s the word because it does plenary
learning.

The etymo-logy of Art is Arid artillery, a combo of heartily ‘ard
dictates (sc. rules). Others bespeak the word’s importation from the
Greek ‘

〈à la arete〉’, i.e. ‘from the complete article’, the perfection they

dubbed science.

With which compare the more formal CUP translation of Barney, Lewis,
Beach and Berghof:

Discipline and art (De disciplina et arte).

1. A discipline (disciplina)

takes its name from ‘learning’ (discere), whence it can also be called

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‘knowledge’ (scientia). Now ‘know’ (scire) is named from ‘learn’
(discere), because none of us knows unless we have learned. A disci-
pline is so named another way, because ‘the full thing is learned’
(discitur plena).

2. And an art (ars, gen artis) is so called because it

consists of strict (artus) precepts and rules. Others say this word is
derived by the Greeks from the word

ret, that is ‘virtue’, as they

termed knowledge.

If Isidore sometimes sounds a little too much like Henderson for
comfort, surely this is part of the point. More significantly, at times, this
voice is clearly to be preferred. See, for example, the reproduction of
Isidore’s snakes at XII.

4.3, 39:

Snakes? As many venoms as versions, as many kills as kinds, as many
torments as pigments are theirs . . .

And, finally, as high a tally of deaths as designations.

Surely preferable to Barney et al.:

Of these animals there are as many poisons as there are kinds, as many
varieties of danger as there are of appearance, and as many causes of
pain as there are colours . . .

Finally, there are as many deaths caused by snakes as there are names
for them.

Henderson’s language, a distraction at first, eventually becomes the text,
and provides a compelling reading of the Etymologies as a whole. From
school-yard humour (‘When it’s a jar’) through brief bons mots on the
centrality of Maths to Isidore’s intellectual programme (‘cogito ergo
sums’), and the tour de forge of Vulcan’s fire, the experience of unstable
meaning is as invigorating as it is funny. Provocative in his earlier studies
of Tacitus and Lucan, Henderson’s programme is essential here to recap-
ture Isidore’s way with words.

But this surface activity should not detract from the central drive of the

study, which provides a single, coherent, dedicated reading of the Ety-
mologies as a whole. Henderson reads the text as a tour of the trivium and
quadrivium, taking the reader on an educational campaign through the
basic principles of knowledge, to the heights of heaven, through the
forgotten pagan and heretical pits of hell to the mundane world which
occupies the central section of the book. Throughout, Isidore’s glances
forward and glances back are chartered, waypoints in this voyage of

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discovery. As such, the text as a whole is shown to be organized around
a central mnemonic narrative, rather than a coherently pursued etymo-
logical epistemology.

At times, of course, the pattern falters. Henderson’s bravura tour must

stumble at the peculiar interjection of alphabetized adjectives in Book

10,

just as others’ did before his own. His argument that the incursion into
another ordering of knowledge – another epistemological form – is a
recollection of Aeneas’ Sibylline deviation at the half-way point of his
journey, is ingenious, but only works if Isidore did indeed envisage an
Etymology of twenty chapters (as he probably didn’t). Similarly, the
suggestion that the author pointedly stops at the Pyrenees in his discus-
sion of world languages in Book

9, and presents the Spanish tongues as

the climax to his peregrination, loses force thanks to the discussion of
African peoples which follows. Henderson includes these passages, of
course, but some of the order of his interpretation necessarily suffers.

But to fault the author for failing to find a definitive reading of Isidore’s

labyrinthine meditation on man, God and the words that make them is
unjust. And to suggest that his reading of the text is only his reading of the
text also misses the point. Henderson is not a medievalist, and betrays little
interest in the contortions that medieval readers might have gone through
in making sense of Isidore’s monkey puzzle. But as a salutary reminder of
what an accomplished Latinist might do with the weird texts of the early
medieval world, this stimulating book could scarcely be bettered.

A.H. MERRILLS

University of Leicester

Íslendingabók, Kristni Saga. The Book of the Icelanders. The Story
of the Conversion. Translated by Siân Grønlie. Viking Society for
Northern Research Text Series

18. London: University College London.

2006. xlvii + 97 pp. £10. ISBN 0 903521 71 7.

Ari Þorgilsson’s Íslendingabók, The Book of Icelanders, is the oldest pre-
served prose work in the Old Norse vernacular and undoubtedly a
cornerstone of historical writing on medieval Iceland. Ari’s brief history
is also unique in a European context, for it describes the settlement of
(an almost) virgin land and the establishment of a new society. The
Book of Icelanders focuses on three key aspects, namely: the foundation
and development of an Icelandic constitution with Althingi (the
General Assembly) at its centre; the conversion of the country to Chris-
tianity; and the subsequent establishment of the church. Ari also
touches on important historical landmarks such as the discovery and
settlement of Greenland in the final years of the first millennium. All

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these developments took place between the discovery of Iceland, which
Ari dates to around AD

870, and the composition of The Book of

Icelanders between

1122 and 1133. Ari composed his text on the eve of

the age of writing in Iceland and it is not known what, if any, indig-
enous works were available to him. While Ari may have known foreign
authoritative writers such as Bede and Adam of Bremen, he largely
drew his information from oral testimony. In this respect Ari relied
extensively on members of his own extended family whom he mentions
in his text.

Considering the importance of Ari’s work, it is perhaps surprising that

the last English translation was published in

1930, and has long been

unavailable. This new publication is thus a welcome addition to the
Icelandic corpus. It includes a translation of Íslendingabók, an introduc-
tion and copious endnotes. In the introduction, which runs to some forty
pages, Siân Grønlie presents a well-balanced overview of the state of
research and discusses the complexity of the Íslendingabók’s composition.
On one level the work is simply a history of Icelanders and their insti-
tutions, but on another, Ari’s intention is to place his account within the
framework of Christian or salvation history. Moreover, Ari advances an
‘official’ interpretation of the history of Iceland. He belonged to the
ruling family or clan of the period, the Haukdælir of southern Iceland,
who dominated the Icelandic church in the first half of the twelfth
century. Íslendingabók is thus shaped by its author’s background, interests
and family connections. Indeed, he even submitted a version of his tract
to the two bishops of Iceland for scrutiny. Siân Grønlie is to be com-
mended on her lucid summary and assessment of the copious scholarly
literature; she presents a balanced account and wisely refrains from
pushing any one interpretation. A good example is her treatment of Ari’s
famous assertion that Iceland had not been an uninhabited land before
the Norse settlement: ‘There were then Christians there, whom the
Northmen call papar, but they later went away, because they did not wish
to stay here with the heathens; and they left behind them Irish books and
bells and staffs. From this it could be seen that they were Irish (p.

4).’ In

a footnote of some thirty lines Grønlie explains what the papar were, the
apparent evidence for their colonies in the North Atlantic, the references
to papar in later Icelandic sources, the (rather dubious) place-name
evidence and, finally, the non-existent archaeological evidence for their
presence in Iceland. The reader is provided with ample information and
bibliographical advice to weigh up the evidence for and against Ari’s
famous claim.

The other work in this volume is Kristni saga, The Saga of the Conver-

sion, which was composed sometime during the thirteenth century. This
is another sui generis text which has to date drawn little scholarly atten-

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tion, at least in comparison to Íslendingabók. Kristni saga tells the story of
the conversion of Iceland, beginning with the endeavours of the foreign
missionaries, climaxing in the adoption of Christianity at the Althing in

999/1000, and closing with a brief account of the first Icelandic bishops
in the second half of the eleventh century. Grønlie is more assertive in
putting forward her own views on the provenance and nature of this text
than the Íslendingabók, a reflection of the relative dearth of studies on this
saga and the fact that Siân Grønlie is an established authority on the
subject. Kristni saga, she argues, was probably intended as part of a larger
project on writing the history of Iceland. In particular it is striking how
Kristni saga covers the whole of Iceland whereas Íslendingabók focuses
primarily on southern Iceland, which was where Ari’s Haukdælir had
their power base.

It would naturally have been ideal to have the Old Norse texts included

in the volume. This said, the publication is clearly aimed at the ‘interested
layman’ as well as students and scholars with little or no knowledge of the
Old Norse language. Traditionally, medieval Old Norse texts with schol-
arly apparatus have been published in Icelandic, while English transla-
tions have mostly been issued in a critically denuded form. However, in
the last decade or so this has begun to change, with the publication of
academically ambitious translations (sans original texts) of such works as
Morkinskinna, Fagrskinna and Oddr Snorrason’s saga about Ólafr Tryg-
gvason. It is impossible to teach a course on medieval Iceland without
analysing Íslendingabók and thus this new edition, modestly priced and
including Kristni saga (both an important work in its own right and an
interesting comparative text), will be greatly appreciated by teachers and
students alike.

HAKI ANTONSSON

University College London

The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies. Edited by Elizabeth
Jeffreys with John Haldon and Robin Cormack. Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press.

2008. xxx + 1021 pp. + 133 b/w in-text figures,

plans, maps and charts. £

85. ISBN 978 0 19 925246 6.

‘For the English-speaking world of the twenty-first century . . . Byzan-
tium is something of a black hole’ (p.

4) is how the editors set the stakes

in this collective introduction to the study of Byzantium, ‘that is, the
empire of East Rome’ (p.

3). The volume consists of eighty-eight chapters

of variable length and quality, which fall into four broad sections. Part

‘The Discipline’, deals with sources, chronology and dating, weights,
archaeology, art history and iconography, literary and textual criticism,

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lexicography, Greek palaeography and papyrology, imperial chrysobulls,
the archives at Mount Athos and in Venice, epigraphy, sigillography,
numismatics, prosopography, dendrochronology, brickstamps, and the
topography of Constantinople. Part

2 considers ‘The Physical World:

Landscape, Land Use, and the Environment’. Besides geographical and
political-historical surveys, there are excellent contributions on roads and
bridges; demography and population health; cities and rural settlements;
building materials and techniques, churches, military architecture, fres-
coes, and mosaics; agriculture, clothing, silk production, pottery, metal-
work, ivory, steatite, enamel and glass; book production; military
technology and warfare; ship-building and seafaring; and everyday tech-
nologies. Part

3 is broadly titled ‘Institutions and Relationships’ and

includes topics that are entirely expected (emperor and court; bureaucra-
cies and aristocracies; clergy, monks and laity; administration, army, and
revenues; church structure and administration, councils, liturgy, monas-
teries, and charitable institutions; Byzantine economy; the role of
women, families and kinship; patronage and retinues; feasting and enter-
tainment; health and hygiene), along with other chapters which deal with
literature (Elizabeth Jeffreys on rhetoric, Michael Angold and Michael
Whitby on historiography, Alice-Mary Talbot on hagiography, Mary
Cunningham on homilies, and Margaret Mullett on epistolography) and
music (Alexander Lingas). Part

3 also includes essays on justice; theology

and philosophy; art, icons, and iconoclasm; language, education, and
literacy. Part

4, ‘The World Around Byzantium’, consists of only two

chapters, James Howard-Johnston’s on the neighbours of Byzantium,
and Cyril Mango’s on the role of Byzantium in world history. The
volume literally covers every single aspect of the discipline of Byzantine
Studies. Perhaps anticipating the difficulties which readers may have in
seeing such massive coverage in its proper historiographic context, the
editors chose to include an introductory chapter, ‘Byzantine Studies as an
Academic Discipline’, which is one of the best summaries of the history
of that discipline ever written in English. The remaining chapters exhibit
two principal ways in which the history of Byzantium has metamor-
phosed over the past generation. The first is the remarkably international
and multicultural intellectual and institutional base of modern Byzantine
Studies. Of all chapters, eighteen are by scholars from outside the United
Kingdom and the United States, and of those a significant number are by
Greek scholars. The effect has been to make Byzantine Studies, in the
words of the editors, ‘an enormously lively subject’ (p.

17) with an

exponential growth coupled with an incredible openness towards new
influences, new currents, and new approaches to old problems. The
second transformation is the increasing impact which this body of schol-
arship and intellectual endeavour has had on neighbouring areas of

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research. Recent studies have provided an important stimulus to com-
parative work, ‘both in respect to cultural history as well as in terms of
political structures and the social relationships underlying them’ (p.

17).

Most of the volume’s essays are by trained historians well known and

recognized by specialists within the field. The level of scholarship and
writing throughout the volume is high. I found the most useful material
among the chapters dealing with chronology and dating (Anthony
Bryer), Greek palaeography (Nigel Wilson), book production (John
Lowden), bureaucracies and aristocracies (Jean-Claude Cheynet), liturgy
(Robert Taft), families and kingship (Ruth Macrides), patronage and
retinues (Günter Prinzing), theology (Andrew Louth), language (Geof-
frey Horrocks), and hagiography (Alice-Mary Talbot).

Many of the chapters are programmatic, attesting how far research in

those respective sub-fields has gone in the last few decades. A key feature
of this handbook is the considerable room dedicated to archaeology,
material culture and art history. Admirable though it is in that respect,
certainly this is not always a complete or even correct coverage. James
Crow draws examples from ‘British Byzantinists’ (p.

49) but chooses to

leave aside Richard Hodges’s work at Butrint in Albania, or Paul Arthur’s
at Apigliano in southern Italy or at Hierapolis (Pamukkale) in Turkey.
Crow advocates the use of archaeology to ‘illustrate the historical
narrative derived from written sources’ (p.

51), without apparently real-

izing that this approach is culture history tout court. In the chapter on
numismatics, Eurydike Georganteli attributes to John Asen II the devel-
opment of ‘Bulgaria’s legal tender (in existence since the ninth century)’,
but ignores both older and newer studies showing that no ‘native’ coinage
existed in Bulgaria before

1240. Peter Ian Kuniholm writes about the

dendrochronological research, but fails to mention Archibald Dunn’s key
study on the exploitation and control of woodland and scrubland in the
Byzantine world. Many more errors have crept into Mark Whittow’s
‘geographical survey’. The ‘Haimos Mts.’ (otherwise known as the Stara
Planina, and not as the Balkan range) are wrongly indicated on Map

(p.

221). Whittow is also wrong in making Mani a cape (p. 221), not a

peninsula in southern Peloponnesos (the cape in question is Tainaron),
and in placing the Hungarian plains (sic) north of the Balkans (p.

222).

Similarly, James Howard-Johnston has Slovaks on Map

12 (p. 942)

showing the neighbours of Byzantium between the seventh and the tenth
century. Moreover, he claims that ‘not once is the word barbaroi used of
any of the many neighboring peoples who feature in the De Administ-
rando Imperio’ (p.

947), which is simply wrong, for the term is in fact used

in Chapters

43 and 49 of that treatise, in reference to the Slavs of

Peloponnesos. Peter of Argos was bishop, not metropolitan, as Timothy
Miller claims (p.

623), for Argos was under the metropolis of Corinth.

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Nor were the ‘homelands and pastures’ of the Bulgars ‘around the Volga’,
as John Haldon would like the reader to believe (p.

257). Both John

Haldon and Catherine Holmes write of a ‘systematic Byzantine conver-
sion policy’ (p.

266) targeting the Slavs of central Greece, for which,

however, there is no evidence. Haldon’s ‘political-historical survey,

518–

800’ makes no mention of developments in the Balkans, but otherwise
lists an ‘invasion of the “Slavs” ’ in

498, which is not mentioned in any

source. Equally lacking support in the sources is Dionysios Stathakopou-
los’s idea that ‘children born during the inter-epidemic periods suc-
cumbed to renewed outbreaks and thus slowed down the demographic
replacement patterns’ (p.

311). Robert Ousterhout’s datings for Hagia

Sophia in Thessalonike (early seventh century, p.

358) and the Panagia

Church of the Monastery of St Luke in Steiris (late tenth century, p.

359)

must be regarded with extreme suspicion, as they are in fact not sup-
ported by any shred of evidence. Given the amount of translation from
Greek into Latin attributed to Anastasius Bibliothecarius, it is hard to
believe that ‘by the end of the fifth century, knowledge of Greek in Rome
had almost disappeared’, as Clarence Gallagher would have it (p.

593).

Nevertheless, this volume serves as an excellent reference work, and it

was certainly designed in that way. Instead of a complete bibliography at
the back, each chapter is followed by its own bibliography, to which some
authors have added a sub-section entitled ‘Further Reading.’ In addition,
there are two appendices (one for rulers, the other for patriarchs and
popes) and a detailed index. Most special terms are explained in the text,
but a glossary would have certainly helped the beginner who may have
picked this volume to get a start in the study of Byzantine history and
culture. The editors have succeeded in assembling a remarkably inte-
grated set of essays that is perhaps the most important introduction to
Byzantine Studies yet published.

FLORIN CURTA

University of Florida

Youth and Age in the Medieval North. Edited by Shannon
Lewis-Simpson. Leiden and Boston: Brill.

2008. ix + 310 pp.

ISBN

978 90 04 17073 5.

2005, the Leeds International Medieval Congress had ‘Youth and Age’

as its main theme, which so successfully drew fresh scholarly approaches
to the relatively new study of the life course in the medieval past that
several volumes have been published, or are in the course of being
published, based on papers delivered at that meeting.

The volume under review is one of these IMC-inspired collections of

papers, taking for its unifying theme a geographical area loosely defined

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as ‘the North’, but actually covering, with the exception of one paper on
earlier Anglo-Saxon England, the viking world up to the fourteenth
century. Contributors range from new to established scholars, and
embrace literary sources, history, and archaeology (though not art
history). The volume is arranged so that papers roughly follow human
biological development, unreflectingly starting ‘life’ with birth, and
ending with senility and decreptitude.

‘Age’ is negotiable within social contexts, and does not map directly

onto biological (how far the body has matured or degenerated) or chro-
nological age. Shannon Lewis-Simpson’s overview of viking age burial
evidence from Britain, Christina Lee’s paper on the spatial relationships
between infants and the infirm (whether infirm through disease and
deformity or through the toll of old age on the body) in Anglo-Saxon
burial contexts, and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson’s bleak equation of senility and
slave status in Icelandic society, demonstrate by detailed analysis the ways
in which cultural age is defined by a combination of factors, including
gender, wealth, social position, and physical ability, as well as chrono-
logical age.

Shades of Ariès, who famously suggested that the past lacked an ‘idea’

of childhood, still rise to be laid once more in this volume. Joanna
Skórzewska shows that the writers of Icelandic miracle stories recognized
both the independence and vulnerability of the child. Nic Percivall and
Carolyne Larrington’s insightful papers draw on modern psychological
assessments of adolescent males to demonstrate how depictions of risk-
taking, egoistical Icelandic youth correspond with modern analyses of
adolescence, while Jordi Sánchez-Martí notes that there is good documen-
tary evidence to suggest that the evaluation of stages in the Old English
life course did not privilege youth: middle age, considered to represent the
best balance between strength and the acquisition of wisdom was, he
cogently argues, pre-eminent. Also challenging long-held precepts,
Ármann Jakobsson points out that, while the idea of extreme and active
longevity in the Icelandic Middle Ages might be hard to accept given some
historical assumptions about life expectancy in the past, nonetheless the
difficult documentary sources can be read to offer examples of socially and
politically active octagenarians and nonagenarians.

Formal schooling, such an important factor in determining and

extending the period of modern childhood, is barely discussed in this
volume, which is an opportunity missed given how many of the papers
depend for their source material on the output of the literati of the
medieval north. However, aspects of the social training of children in
Iceland are covered in Anna Hansen’s thoughtful discussion of fosterage,
which, she argues, was a systemized and regulated aspect of good parent-
ing practice. Philadelphia Ricketts’s fascinating analysis of personal

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names compares Icelandic evidence with other groups to suggest that
methods of inheritance and economic transfer led to specific naming
patterns – her paper offering a positive way forward for assessing the
little-discussed role of grandparents in social, cultural and economic life
in the past. Bernadine McCreesh’s contribution compares the descrip-
tions of the youth of early Icelandic bishops with other hagiographies to
suggest that saintly childhoods were contingent on current literary prac-
tice and influences. Her paper offers a sobering reminder that literary
forms carry obligations and audience expectations which may override
any social, political, remembered or actual ‘reality’, something Yelena
Sesselja Helgadóttir Yershova’s paper on the authorship of the poetry of
Egill Skalla-Grímsson struggles to assimilate.

Lotta Mejsholm and Berit Sellevold both try to explain clusters of infant

burials in otherwise adult cemeteries, suggesting that, in the first case,
infants represent a Christian expression in a pagan cemetery, while in the
second it is suggested that an infant presence in the late phases of the
monastic cemetery is evidence for the increasing social or mortuary value
of infant bodies. I do wonder, however, whether both examples are not an
expression of the same impulse that produced infant-only cemeteries in
medieval Britain and Ireland, where prominent landmarks, including
abandoned cemeteries and monastic buildings, were re-used for infant
burial because economic or social factors relating to the death of the child
precluded burial in the parish cemetery. Better, or any, site plans would
have improved the reading of both these and Christina Lee’s paper.

Individual articles in this volume make a substantial contribution to

medieval life-course studies, but there are a few issues with the collection.
The editor or the publishing house had a responsibility to provide a
strong input, given the multi-lingual contributors, but many papers
exhibit idiosyncratic grammar and sentence structure. The lack of edito-
rial rigour has unfortunate consequences: ‘a foster child did not replete
the resources of a foster-parent’, we are told, when the opposite is surely
meant, and repeated references to ‘congenial’ impairments in skeletons
were probably not at all congenial to the congenitally affected sufferers.

SALLY CRAWFORD

University of Oxford

Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of

541–750.

Edited by Lester Little. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2007.

xvi +

380 pp. £47. ISBN 9 78052184639 4.

This is a handsome volume, clearly laid out. Lester Little, in his intro-
ductory essay, surveys the surviving evidence, principally in Latin and

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Greek, but with a nod towards the Arabic sources as well, for the pandemic
of

541–750. He argues that we can be fairly sure, unlike previous episodes

of ‘pestilence’ and ‘plague’ recorded by ancient writers, that this was
bubonic plague because of one of the distinctive symptoms of this disease,
buboes (swellings) in the groin, armpits and neck. Jo Hays, in a companion
introductory essay, uses a historiographical approach to analyse how
historians have approached the subject of epidemics. Hays argues that
although diseases are partially ‘socially constructed’ they also have a
‘pathological reality’. Modern bio-medical understandings of a particular
disease, she suggests, can aid historians in understanding how and why it
spread, declined or disappeared. Hays also highlights the role of diet, and
shows that the way the environment is being exploited can influence how
quickly and with how great an intensity diseases affect a community.

Probably because relatively few scholars are fluent in Syriac, often in

overviews of the sources for the Justinianic Plague Syriac material is
ignored. Therefore a section here on the Near East is a welcome contri-
bution to the debate on the sixth- and seventh-century pandemics.
Michael Morony looks at successive waves of the plague and responses to
it, concluding that plague accounts in Greek, Arabic, Latin and Chinese,
as well as Syriac, should be combined to give a more complete picture.
Hugh Kennedy uses archaeological evidence to revisit the issue of the
severity and impact of the plague in Syria.

In the section on the Latin west, Alain Stoclet looks at responses to the

plague in sagas and Frankish sources, arguing that the services of a
Poitiers doctor, Marileit, were sought both by Gregory of Tours and King
Chilperic in the context of plague outbreaks. Michael Kulikowski impres-
sively combines the evidence from manuscript annotations, sermons,
burials and legal codes to argue that successive plague outbreaks in the
sixth century had a profound effect on the Spanish peninsula in both
social and economic terms. John Maldicott’s contribution is a slightly
revised version of his

1997 article on plague in seventh-century England

in Past and Present, but it is still convenient to have it included here too.
Ann Dooley discusses plague terminology used in Irish sources, arguing
that in Ireland the long-term impact of the plague was minimized by the
fact that, without primogeniture, the extended family could inherit, and
high-status males could rapidly marry or remarry.

For the Byzantine east, Dionysios Stathakopoulos attempts to use as

his conceptual framework Biraben’s hypothesis that in society there are
three principal psychological reactions to major change: flight, aggression
and projection, the last being the production of artistic and literary
works, although Stathakopoulos acknowledges that little trace of the
plague remains in art. Looking further afield, Peter Sarris argues that
Ethiopia was possibly the origin of early medieval outbreaks of the

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plague. He analyses the evidence from coinage and Egyptian land leases
to suggest that tax revenues were probably declining, and the workforce
was demanding payment in coin, all pointing to economic fragility, part
of which at least can be attributed to bubonic plague outbreaks in the
sixth and seventh centuries.

In the final section Robert Sallares takes a biomolecular approach to

the Justinianic Plague. The analysis of the surviving strains of the bacte-
rium Yersinia Pestis and related types of bacteria leads him to conclude
that this was the first episode of bubonic plague, as it is not a particularly
ancient pathogen. Sallares finishes with the cheering thought that a
fourth plague pandemic remains a possibility for the future. In the
companion paper, Michael McCormick discusses both the difficulties
and the potential of the analysis of ancient DNA at potential plague
burial sites to shed further light on the causes and spread of the Justini-
anic Plague. McCormick suggests that since Y.pestis DNA mutates fre-
quently, it may be possible in the future to determine ‘differing waves of
the pandemic display[ing] differing constellations of mutations’. Both
Sallares and McCormick suggest that acquired immunity in rats may
explain the plague’s abeyance in the mid-eighth century in Europe.

The great strength of this volume lies not just in its geographical

breadth, but in the startling variety of sources and approaches it discusses.
While some of the proposed social and economic effects of the plague
may be hard to substantiate definitively, a broad consensus emerges on
the need to interrogate carefully the terminology used for diseases.
Further, it would appear that while the short-term effects of a plague
outbreak could be devastating, in the longer term societies proved
extremely resilient, adapting to altered circumstances.

CLARE PILSWORTH

Manchester University

Law and the Illicit in Medieval Europe. Edited by Ruth Mazo Karras,
Joel Kaye and E. Ann Matter. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.

2008. xviii + 315 pp. $59.95/£39. ISBN 978 0 8122 4080 1.

This collection of essays is inspired by the work of Edward Peters, who
has written on (among other things) canon law, crusading, magic and
torture. The book is framed by a stimulating introduction by Peters
himself, who asks whether a change in attitudes to both the law and illicit
behaviour took place in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, along the lines
of R.I. Moore’s formation of a ‘persecuting society’. Peters argues that
from one perspective, this was the case, as reforming churchmen
expanded traditional concepts like heresy to include new categories of

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behaviour – for example by labelling clerical marriage as ‘nicolaitism’. He
also qualifies Moore’s thesis, however, suggesting that the ‘persecuting
society’ should perhaps rather be seen as a ‘scrutinizing and self-
informing society’, in which an increased public awareness of law and a
greater sense of community within Christian society were counterbal-
anced by a greater sense of hostility to those groups which did not fit in.

These questions are picked up by some of the other contributors to the

volume, but this is not just a book on the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
In fact, many of the contributions are late medieval and so outside the
scope of this journal. Nevertheless, two of the strongest papers focus on the
earlier medieval period. R.I. Moore examines the political side of eleventh-
and early twelfth-century heresy accusations, arguing that many of these
accusations were played out in royal or princely courts and must be
understood in that context rather than being seen as examples of ‘popular’
heresy. Patrick Geary discusses torture in the Carolingian empire and
argues that it took place more often than most historians have assumed. He
also suggests that in the post-Carolingian period trial by ordeal may have
acted as a replacement for judicial torture – a neat reversal of Robert
Bartlett’s argument in Trial by Fire andWater that in the thirteenth century,
torture came to replace the ordeal. Alex Novikoff’s paper on the rhetoric of
legal and illegal conduct in the polemics of the Investiture Conflict is also
interesting, especially its discussion of religious violence, and some other
papers, notably James Brundage’s discussion of legal ethics and Ruth Mazo
Karras’s interesting study of concubinage, contain early medieval back-
ground material in what are primarily discussions of later periods.

The themes of the essays are very diverse, making it sometimes difficult

to draw connections between them, but there are also some advantages to
this diversity. One advantage is the range of source material employed. In
addition to well-known legal texts, the book offers discussions of hagiog-
raphy, Chaucer, Aristotelian natural philosophy and more, showing how
legal ideas and language permeated much of medieval learned culture.
Overall, this is a very broad collection of essays, but it contains much
interesting material.

CATHERINE RIDER

University of Exeter

The Irish Annals: Their Genesis, Evolution and History. By Daniel P.
Mc Carthy. Dublin: Four Courts Press.

2008. xvi + 416 pp. + 13 colour

plates and

55 b/w figures. €85. ISBN 978 1 84682 048 9.

The Irish Annals is the first book-length survey of the Irish chronicle
tradition (excluding Anglo-Irish chronicles) since Gearóid Mac Niocaill

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published The Medieval Irish Annals in

1975. Indeed, Mc Carthy states in

his preface that his work is a response to Mac Niocaill’s hopes that future
scholars might take up the baton of chronicle studies. The Irish Annals
consists of discussions of chronicle manuscripts, previous scholarship,
world history in Insular chronicles, and the development of surviving (and
lost) chronicles, with a particular focus on chronological apparatuses.

It is commendable that someone has finally written a broad-ranging

book on Irish chronicles, nonetheless this book is not without its faults.
Firstly, Mc Carthy’s methodology often appears flawed. For example, in
his argument against the theory of the post-

911AD independence of the

Annals of Ulster from Clonmacnoise texts (such as Chronicon Scotorum)
(p.

93; p. 104, Fig. 5), he claims the following chronicle entries (s.a.

915AD) are ‘textually cognate’ (a vague, undefined term):

Tórmach mar meinic do ghentibh do thichtain oc Loch da Chaech
beos,

indred tuath

ceall Muman huadhibh.

A great and frequent increase in the number of heathens arriving at
Loch dá Chaech, and the laity and clergy of Mumu were plundered by
them (Annals of Ulster).

Orgain Corcaighe et Lis Moir et Achaidh Bo o gentibh.
Corcach and Les Mór and Achad Bó were plundered by the heathens
(Chronicon Scotorum).

It is difficult to see how these entries may be considered related simply on
the basis of one word, the reasonably common gentibh (dative plural of
genti, ‘heathens/vikings’).

Many of Mc Carthy’s theories are also difficult to accept. For instance,

he claims that the Iona Chronicle, the text underlying surviving
chronicles, was revised in the

720s by a Northumbrian monk, Ecgberht

(d.

729AD), with the aim of increasing Roman influence over the Gaelic

church. In doing so, Ecgberht allegedly altered St Patrick’s floruit and
gave Patrick an obit at

458AD, in order to ‘construct a Romanised

account of Patrick for the reformed Iona chronicle’ (p.

143). Mc Carthy

claims that Ecgberht used the chronological apparatus of Muirchú’s Life
of Patrick as the basis of this revised chronology. A mid-fifth-century obit
for Patrick, however, was not novel. Tírechán’s Life of Patrick (which
predates Muirchú’s Life and which Mc Carthy does not mention)
claimed that Patrick died

433 years after the passion, thus c.466AD.

Furthermore, why did Ecgberht not delete Patrick’s other, later, obit
(

491AD)? Mc Carthy’s answer to the latter question, namely that Ecg-

berht sought to ‘create as much chronological confusion around Patrick
as he could’ in order to obscure Patrick’s late flourit (p.

147), is uncon-

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vincing. Similarly, Mc Carthy’s treatment of sixteenth-/seventeenth-
century stories of Columba’s surreptitious copying of a book belonging
to St Finnian, as a means of explaining the origin of the Iona Chronicle,
seems unconvincing (pp.

157–9). Although Mc Carthy acknowledges that

the chronological gap between the setting and writing down of the story
(a thousand years) is an impediment to his argument, he does not note
that his two sources explicitly claim that Columba copied a Gospel/
Psalter, not a chronicle.

Questionable methodologies and theories aside, factual inaccuracies

also detract from Mc Carthy’s arguments, as may be seen in his discussion
of possible late eleventh-century contributions to the Annals of Inisfallen
by a chronicler from the monastery of Lismore. Concerning an entry (s.a.

721AD) that anachronistically lists the five kings of Munster who were
said to have ruled Ireland after the introduction of Christianity, Mc
Carthy states: ‘since all but one of these five kings belonged to the
Eóganacht Glendamnach in whose territory Lismore lay it seems clear
that this uncharacteristically prolix eighth-century entry was the work of
the Lismore compiler, showing that he brought a polemical agenda to his
compilation’ (p.

216). Unfortunately for Mc Carthy’s argument, Lismore

was not in the territory of Eóganacht Glendamnach but in the kingdom
of Déisi Muman, while only one of the five kings mentioned (Cathal mac
Finnguini) was actually a member of the Eóganacht Glendamnach, a
dynasty which did not supply a king of Munster after the early ninth
century.

Despite these criticisms, aspects of this book are commendable. For

example, some of Mc Carthy’s theories seem quite plausible, such as
explanations for the distorted dating of phenomenological records in the
chronicles (pp.

188–9). Nonetheless, many of his theories will probably

generate scholarly disagreement, but if this engenders renewed interest in
Irish chronicling, then this may be the most important service The Irish
Annals will have to offer medieval scholarship.

DENIS CASEY

University of Cambridge

The Winchester Troper. Facsimile edition and introduction by
Susan Rankin. Early English Church Music

50. London: Stainer

and Bell.

2007. xii + 104 pp. + 104 pp. of colour plates. £95/$143.

ISBN

978 0 852 49894 2.

Scribe me prius unum psalterium aut hymnarium aut unam episto-
lariam, uel unum tropiarium . . . bene digestam et ordinatam et recte
scriptam et emendatam.

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First, write for me a psalter or hymnary or an epistolary, or a troper
. . . well laid out and arranged, and properly written and corrected.
(Ælfric Bata, Colloquia, no.

24).

The quote – answering a cheeky student who, acting the role of a scribe,
demands payment for copying out his exemplar – playfully lists the
troper among several books that presumably made special demands on
the copyist and that were well beyond the capability of an oblate. Tropers
were books created for, probably by, and of primary use to, cantors, and
are consequently varied in organization and content. The Winchester
Troper contains a tonary, a repertory of alleluias, Proper and Ordinary
tropes, sequences, and proses, and its copying posed an even more
sophisticated set of technical problems than those encountered in the
copying of other tropers, since gatherings

16–21 comprise a set of 174

melodies (organa) to be sung as a second voice embellishing chants
recorded in the earlier gatherings.

Susan Rankin’s meticulous introduction to the colour facsimile of

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS

473 demonstrates what

demands were made on the copyists, how they were met both by the
producers and subsequent users of the manuscript, and uncovers not only
the work of an extremely skilful main scribe (who writes text well and
music beautifully) but also a surprisingly large number of other scribal
hands (over fifty) capable of at least some parts of the job.

The facsimile is beautifully photographed and presented at full size.

The small size of the manuscript made it possible to print four manu-
script openings on each opening of the large-format facsimile. Moreover,
the photographs were taken while the manuscript was unbound, making
it possible to examine the several binding phases.

Section one of Susan Rankin’s introduction provides a thorough

codicological examination of the manuscript. She demonstrates that the
‘book made by the main music scribe’ was arranged by genre within
discrete gatherings and that this generic division extends to the gath-
erings devoted to organa. She dates the production of the troper (on
paleographic grounds) to the

1020s–30s (pp. 19–21). Consequently, pre-

vious work by Holschneider (and Planchart) dating the troper to

996–

1006 must now stand corrected. Rankin carefully examines the evidence
that might date the manuscript to the

1030s (based on the textual simi-

larity of two phrases of the office responsory O pastor apostolice to an
office composed by Bruno of Eguisheim, later Pope Leo IX) and help-
fully notes that this is not conclusive, since the Winchester repertory
may have provided the model for Bruno (p.

6). Rankin also examines

the relationship of CCCC

473 to Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS 775

(the later Winchester Troper, which nevertheless may represent to some

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extent an earlier state of the proper chant repertory and rubrics), and
concludes that while they are both specialized books for the cantor,
related in repertory, and both clearly originate at the Old Minster,
Winchester, the earlier troper could not have provided a direct model
for the later.

Rankin’s evidence for the Winchester origin is the troper’s develop-

ment of ritual recorded in the Regularis Concordia, the troper’s sancto-
rale, the later additions to the Easter Liturgy recorded in the troper,
which may be connected to the coronation of Edward III (the Confes-
sor) at Winchester in

1043, and several tantalizing indications that some

of the repertory may be indirectly linked to Wulfstan Cantor Sacerdos,
even though any direct connection must be rejected because of her new
dating.

Section II of the introduction provides a thorough examination

(Chapters

3–5) and a marvellously detailed index (Chapter 6) of the

fifty-two scribal hands (counting music and text scribes) found in
the troper. The index makes it possible to follow up every detail of the
palaeographic discussion, which is always based on solid observation
and convincing argumentation. This section alone should make the
facsimile of real value to anyone studying or teaching music or text
palaeography, and demonstrates the value of close study of music
palaeography for the localization and dating of Anglo-Saxon manu-
scripts. Moreover, the various additions to the manuscript demonstrate
that it was used into the last quarter of the eleventh century. The dis-
cussion of the music hands is particularly detailed and Rankin demon-
strates the competence and the care of the main scribe. Building upon
the work of Holschneider and upon her own previous work, Rankin
makes significant new contributions to the interpretation of the nota-
tion, and in discussing the organa (Section III, Chapter

9) she shows

how the notation represents not only the shape, but many details of the
pitch, of the added melody. She also examines a range of later musical
additions (mostly mid-eleventh century) that show an increasing
concern for providing details that clarify ambiguities of pitch, supplying
a means to decipher the notation with a high degree of confidence
(assuming a basic consonant interval of the fourth and a knowledge of
the chant melody). Section III also examines each repertory contained
in the troper, giving a detailed orientation to past research and a new
study of some Winchester unica, as well as calling attention to eleven
post-conquest additions to the prose repertory, and provides a set of
incipit indexes that makes the volume easy to use.

I echo the hope expressed by the series’ general editor – that a per-

forming edition of those organa that have a pitch-secure chant concor-
dance will soon follow. Nevertheless, Rankin’s introduction to this

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volume already marks a new phase in the study of late Anglo-Saxon
liturgy and music, providing a lucid orientation to the repertory of the
Old Minster, Winchester, and an essential resource for further study of its
music, texts and context.

WILLIAM FLYNN

University of Leeds

The Lost Late Antique Illustrated Terence. By David H. Wright.
Documenti e Riproduzioni

6. Vatican City: Bibliotheca apostolica

Vaticana.

2006. 235 pp. €90, ISBN 88 210 0781 2.

The Vatican manuscript of the comedies of Terence, Vat. Lat.

3868,

containing illustrations of some

141 scenes from the plays, is one of four

surviving copies of late antique illuminated manuscripts most probably
copied at the court of Louis the Pious in the second decade of the ninth
century. In this monograph Professor David Wright seeks to reconstruct
the lost exemplar of the manuscript: ‘the most ingenious and expressive
work of narrative art known from all of Late Antiquity’. He argues that
it was made at Rome around

400 AD, under the supervision of

Calliopius, who is named on fol.

1v and 92r Feliciter Calliopio Bono

Scholastico. Scholasticus could mean a teacher or a grammarian, it is not
a term obviously linked to book production, though Wright regards the
colophon as ‘a trade mark and an advertisement for the workshop’ and
suggests that Calliopius was ‘the master of the scriptorium’. The final
colophon Hrodgarius scripsit, in excellent large capitalis script, identifies
the scribe, who has not been found elsewhere. The best of the three
artists wrote the inscription Adelricus me fecit on the right-hand side of
the cornice of the aedicule on fol.

3r, though this is invisible on both the

black and white and the colour reproductions of this page in this
volume, and apparently on almost all reproductions. (I note that his
name is spelled Adalricus on p.

209.) The volume contains good black

and white photographs of all of the illustrations, and of at least one
scene from each of the other early illustrated manuscripts of Terence,
with a colour frontispiece showing the author portrait, eight colour
plates from Vat. Lat.

3868, Plates 9–11 from the Virgil manuscript Vat

Lat.

3225, and Plate 12 from the Quedlinburg Itala manuscript. Wright

gives detailed descriptions of what each figure is doing in each scene and
how this relates to the text of the play. Then each illustration is com-
pared to the other manuscript witnesses to establish the version in the
exemplar.

The copying of classical texts on parchment in codices, rather than on

papyrus rolls, was a fourth-century innovation, and the lost exemplar was

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‘something of a pioneer in the design of a sumptuously presented codex’.
Illustrations to Terence did not exist, and Wright suggests that staged
performances of Terence’s plays had ended some three centuries earlier.
So the exemplar of the Vatican manuscript contained illustrations of the
scenes which depended on the artist reading the text. Most impressive are
the full-page frontispiece with two actors flanking an author portrait, and
the full-page depictions of aedicules with masks for all of the characters
in the individual plays (of which two were lost).

The copy is the work of three artists, of whom Adelricus was the best,

though he had the smallest share of the work. The parchment is calf
rather than sheep, and it has numerous minor defects, including holes in
pages

9, 11, 19, 36, 43 (in body of figure), 53, 56 and 64. The figures are

generally shown standing on a coloured baseline: on fol.

36v there are two

figures in a garden, and in several scenes the figures stand in front of
doorways, sometimes fitted with a central curtain or a decorated grille.
Properties include a square-shaped casket (fol.

29r p. 51), a ring, birds and

fishes as food, and money bags. Cratinus the lawyer holds wax tablets on
fol.

82r and v. Many of the figures wear scarves and gesture with them.

The figures are named in capitalis script, but in several cases the names
are given to the wrong figure in a scene. Wright argues that there were
names in the exemplar, which must imply that the scribe who copied
them was singularly inept. The curious position of the prologue to the
Phormio on fol.

77v, where the figure is to the left of a block of text, is not

commented on.

The illustrations do not seem to have influenced manuscript illumi-

nation except for additional illustrated copies of Terence. The
ninth-century Reims manuscript, Paris, BNF, Lat.

7899, has a full set of

illustrations, while a Corbie copy has much cruder illustrations on the
first eleven folios and spaces for further illustrations. Wright thinks both
were copied from the lost exemplar. Adelricus was an accomplished artist,
and presumably had a career. It may not be possible to explain why the
court of Louis the Pious made such careful copies of late antique manu-
scripts, but it is important to recall that it did, and to envisage the
possible resonances of such a response to non-Christian models. Accord-
ing to Thegan’s biography Louis never raised his voice in laughter, and
when the people laughed at scurri et mimi cum coraulis he did not smile.
Paschasius Radbertus, in his memorial for Abbot Wala of Corbie,
included a substantial passage from Terence, showing that he had studied
the plays, as had Hincmar. The glosses in Vat. Lat.

3868 reveal that it was

rapidly treated as a text to be studied, rather than simply a luxury book.
Unfortunately Wright is silent on any evidence to be derived from these
glosses, which are thought to be a Carolingian composition but which
incorporate earlier material.

132

Book reviews

Early Medieval Europe

2010 18 (1)

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

The scribe Hrodgarius wrote a very distinctive capital ‘H’ with an

elongated ascender on the right slanting upwards from the crossbar to
trail over the following letter. Such a form of ‘H’ is also found in
fifth-century manuscripts and was presumably copied from the exemplar.
He used an ‘or’ ligature with a prominent ‘r’. His form of ‘a’ lacks any
upper shaft, and the upper bow of ‘g’ is generally open. The ligatures ‘ri’
and ‘ro’ occur infrequently. So far his script has proved impossible to
localize. It is worth noting that fifteen verses from the prologue to the
Heautontimoroumenos were copied onto the first leaf of Paris, BNF, Lat.

2109 in a script which E.K. Rand described as ‘decent rustic capitals’. The
manuscript, a copy of Eugippius’ Excerpta, was copied at St Amand at
the same time as Vat. Lat.

3868. So there probably was a capitalis exemplar

at St Amand which may have been the manuscript Wright is trying to
reconstruct.

Wright reconstructs an exemplar of some

220 folios, each with an

illustration of a single scene, with the text copied in rustic capitals in

lines per page. In his stylistic parallels for the date of this exemplar he
strangely makes no mention of the mosaics of Santa Maria Maggiore in
Rome, which Byvanck discussed in detail, though they show many
similar poses and gestures. The scenes on the Susanna crystal have group-
ings of figures not unlike the Terence illustrations. We are getting a clearer
sense of how Carolingian artists imitated Roman models of sacred art.
That they were equally moved by the superb quality of secular illustration
should remind us that beauty, old and new, is always powerful enough to
be loved and to transform. That the exemplar of the Vatican Terence was
so challenging to a group of artists in the

820s may be the most important

of the features that Wright has so carefully recovered for us.

DAVID GANZ

King’s College, London

Book reviews

133

Early Medieval Europe

2010 18 (1)

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Document Outline

18.1.1
18.1.2
18.1.3
18.1.4
18.1.5
18.1.6

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