Abstract
In the year 811, the emperor Charlemagne wanted to ask some of the most influential religious men in Francia a few difficult questions.* These included his demand that bishops and abbots should ‘reveal truthfully to us what to leave the world means, when it is said about them. Or in what way can those who have left the world be distinguished from those who still follow the world; whether it is only that they do not bear arms nor are publicly married?’1 This question comes from the second of two overlapping texts, which are preparations for an upcoming assembly.2 In the first, the ‘Capitula tractanda cum comitibus, episcopis et abbatibus’, Charlemagne calls for a discussion of particularly wide-ranging moral and religious questions by both religious and laymen.3 Why, he wants to know, are there such frequent disputes between men? What does a Christian renounce in baptism? How ought canons to behave?4 At one point he even demands an inquiry into ‘whether we are really Christians?’5 In the second text, the ‘Capitula de causis cum episcopis et abbatibus tractandis’, probably a series of further thoughts, he poses questions specifically for the bishops and abbots, particularly about the concept of leaving the world.6
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Notes
See F. L. Ganshof (1971) ‘Charlemagne’s Programme of Imperial Government’, in his The Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy (London: Longman), pp. 55–85. Ganshof’s negative judgement on Charlemagne’s last years has been very influential: see Nelson ‘Voice’ at pp. 78–9 (who takes a far more positive view).
M. de Jong (2006) ‘Ecclesia and the Early Medieval Polity’, in S. Airlie, W. Pohl, and H. Reimitz (eds) Staat im Frühmittelalter (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften), pp. 113–32 at p. 119.
On this model, see D. Iogna-Prat (2002) Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism and Islam, 1000–1150, trans. G. R. Edwards (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), pp. 13–15.
P. Brown (1988) The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 356.
C. Leyser (2000) Authority and Asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 89.
J. McRobbie, ‘Gender and Apocalypse in Books IX and X of Gregory of Tours’ Histories’ (paper presented at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds, 9th July 2007).
J. M. H. Smith (2009) ‘Radegundis peccatrix: Authorizations of Virginity in Late Antique Gaul’, in P. Rousseau and M. Papoutsakis (eds) Transformations of Late Antiquity. Essays for Peter Brown (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 303–26.
M. de Jong (1998) ‘Imitatio Morum: The Cloister and Clerical Purity in the Carolingian World’, in M. Frassetto (ed.) Medieval Purity and Piety. Essays on Medieval Clerical Celibacy and Religious Reform (New York: Garland), pp. 49–80 at pp. 53–4.
F. Prinz (1971) Klerus und Krieg im früheren Mittelalter. Untersuchungen zur Rolle der Kirche beim Aufbau der Königsherrschaft (Stuttgart: Hiersemann), pp. 73–113.
K. Cooper (1992) ‘Insinuations of Womanly Influence: An Aspect of the Christianization of the Roman Aristocracy’, Journal of Roman Studies, 82, pp. 150–64.
M. Kuefler (2001) The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity (Chicago: Chicago University Press), especially pp. 170–8.
K. Cooper (2007) The Fall of the Roman Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 31–7, 44–53. It is difficult to show any direct continuity with the late antique tradition that Cooper describes, even though a few Carolingian manuscripts of some of the texts exist (see Cooper, Fall, pp. 44–5, 91, 117–18).
J. H. Lynch (1986) Godparents and Kinship in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 318–32.
K. Cooper and C. Leyser (2000) ‘The Gender of Grace: Impotence, Servitude and Manliness in the Fifth-century West’, Gender and History, 12, pp. 536–51 at 542–7.
C. Leyser (1998) ‘Custom, Truth and Gender in Eleventh Century Reform’, in R. N. Swanson (ed.) Gender and Christian Religion. Papers Read at the 1996 Summer Meeting and the 1997 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell), pp. 75–91 at p. 85; Leyser, Authority, pp. 155–9.
See S. Wood (2006) The Proprietary Church in the Medieval West (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 118–21.
J. L. Nelson (1983) ‘Legislation and Consensus in the Reign of Charles the Bald’, in P. Wormald (ed.) Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society: Studies Presented to J. M. Wallace-Hadrill (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 202–27 (which also discusses Charlemagne); Pössel ‘Authors’ at pp. 266–74.
R. E. Barton (2004) Lordship in the County of Maine, c. 890–1160 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer), p. 34: ‘The Carolingian model of local government was… inherently polarized between the power of the count and that of the bishop.’
T. Reuter (2005) ‘Charlemagne and the World Beyond the Rhine’, in J. Story (ed.) Charlemagne: Empire and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 183–94 gives a brief overview of efforts to incorporate these territories into the Carolingian state and of the significance of ‘ethnic’ terminology in this period. (On this, see also R. Bartlett (2001) ‘Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 31, pp. 39–56).
I. Réal (2001) Vies de saints, vie de famille: représentation et système de la parenté dans le Royaume mérovingien (481–751) d’après les sources hagiographiques (Turnhout: Brepols), pp. 284–97.
K. Heene (1997) The Legacy of Paradise: Marriage, Motherhood and Woman in Carolingian Edifying Literature (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang), pp. 248–53 gives other examples of women being described as behaving viriliter, a term which she thinks can be used in a‘sex-neutral’ way.
J. L. Nelson (1999) ‘Monks, Secular Men and Masculinity, c. 900’, in D. M. Hadley (ed.) Masculinity in Medieval Europe (London: Longman), pp. 121–42.
S. Maclean (2006) ‘Ritual, Misunderstanding, and the Contest for Meaning: Representations of the Disrupted Royal Assembly at Frankfurt (873)’, in B. Weiler and S. Maclean (eds) Representations of Power in Medieval Germany 800–1500 (Turnhout: Brepols), pp. 97–119.
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Stone, R. (2011). ‘In what way can those who have left the world be distinguished?’: Masculinity and the Difference between Carolingian Men. In: Beattie, C., Fenton, K.A. (eds) Intersections of Gender, Religion and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297562_2
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