Leading the Way to Heaven

Pastoral Care and Salvation in the Carolingian Period

Carine van Rhijn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781351368872
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Starting from manuscripts compiled for local priests in the Carolingian period, this book investigates the way in which pastoral care took shape at the local levels of society. They show what illiterate lay people learned about their religion, but also what priests themselves knew.

The Carolingian royal dynasty, which ruled over much of Europe in the eighth and ninth century, is well-known for its success in war, patronage of learning and its ambitious style of rulership. A central theme in their plans for the future of their kingdom was to ensure God's everlasting support, and to make sure that all inhabitants – down to the last illiterate farmer – reached eternal life in heaven. This book shows how the ideal of leading everybody to salvation was a central element of Carolingian culture. The grass-roots approach shows how early medieval religion was anything but uniform, how it encompassed all spheres of daily life and how well-educated local priests did not only know how to baptise and preach, but could also advise on matters concerning health, legal procedure and even the future.

This volume is of great use to upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars interested in the ecclesiastical history of Europe in the Carolingian period.

Part I Foundations

1 Renaissance, reform or correctio? The Carolingians and the quest for salvation

DOI: 10.4324/9781315149981-3

1 Introduction

Carolingian history has traditionally been dominated by attention for its kings, their courts, the high points of their culture and their high-level politics. This has everything to do with historiographical trends, which until the second half of the twentieth century favoured great men and political history over most other subjects. It is also a direct result of the source-base with which scholars of the period often work, and the way in which these sources highlight kings and royal rulership: many of the surviving Carolingian capitularies and conciliar decrees are typically products of royal politics, while history-writing of the eighth and ninth centuries often revolves around everything that happened in connection with the ruler. The idea that more or less every enquiry into Carolingian history starts with these sources is so self-evident that those historians interested in other subjects than kings and high-level politics often use royal capitularies and histories as starting points for their enquiries. Whatever one’s theme of research, in other words, kings, court and prescriptive texts are always in there somewhere, which can create the impression of far-reaching royal agency and self-evident validity of normative texts emanating from the court for more or less every subject. Whoever wants to know how the ecclesiastical infrastructure developed in Charlemagne’s day, for instance, will start with everything that the capitularies and conciliar proceedings have on offer by way of official norms, so that other evidence can then be evaluated against that background. There are two suppositions that all too frequently underlie this approach: first, that king and court ‘managed’ from above all major structures operating within the kingdom (for instance, those concerning justice, organised religion, exploitation of land), and that changes in all of these very different spheres automatically imply courtly agency. The second one, building on the first, supposes that everything that happened in the kingdom and that did not agree with royal norms and prescriptions comes down to failure: either the arm of the court was not long or strong enough, or the political system through which it operated did not work as it should have.¹

This focus on high-level normative texts (in practice mostly royal capitularies and conciliar proceedings), combined with the traditional belief that they reflect how things were done in practice can lead to far-reaching conclusions. One good example is that of the alleged court-initiated Romanisation of the liturgy in the Carolingian kingdom, which is based on just a handful of passages in royal capitularies of the late eighth and early ninth centuries. On this very slim basis, theories have been built that made Charlemagne into an active ‘Romaniser’ of the Frankish liturgy, who wished for his kingdom to follow one, uniform, Roman liturgy that should replace all other forms. That there is, in fact, evidence for a colourful and varied liturgical landscape in the Carolingian period has therefore been read as failure: apparently the Franks were too stubborn and their ‘indigenous habits’ too strong for the king to be able to implement his intentions. This idea of active royal Romanisation was dominant until, quite recently, research of liturgical manuscripts has shown Roman threads among many different other ones combined into an intricately patterned liturgical weave, in which there was plenty of space for local variations and innovations.² This has, in turn, led to a re-evaluation of the royal prescriptions and a de-bunking of the Romanisation-thesis.³ Instead of a king ordering Romanisation and the kingdom not following up on that as it should have, we are now starting to see many members of the Carolingian clergy involved in the study, creation and performance of the liturgy, and many initiatives to compile liturgical books and ordines based on a wide range of sources (including Roman ones), but not necessarily as a direct and more or less automatic result of instructions from the court. Surely king and court had opinions about matters liturgical, and sometimes this voice was heard loudly, but all the same we should consider this voice as a member of a choir and not even as a soloist per se.⁴

1 See for instance Philippe Depreux, ‘Ambitions et limites des réformes culturelles à l’époque carolingienne’, Revue Historique 304 (2002), pp. 721–53 at p. 750 where he evaluates the disappointing reach of the Carolingian ‘renaissance’. In his view, it only reached a very limited number of people. 2 Helen Gittos, ‘Researching the history of rites’, in: eadem and Sarah Hamilton eds, Understanding medieval liturgy. Essays in interpretation (Farnham, 2016), pp. 13–38; R.N. Swanson ed., Unity and diversity in the church: papers read at the 1994 summer meeting and the 1995 winter meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, Studies in Church History 32 (Oxford, 1996); Raymond Kottje, ‘Einheit und Vielfalt des kirchlichen Lebens in der Karolingerzeit’, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 76 (1965), pp. 323–42; Arthur Westwell, ‘The dissemination and reception of the Ordines Romani in the Carolingian church, c.750–900’, PhD thesis Queens’ College, Cambridge 2017; Arthur Westwell, ‘The Ordines Romani and the Carolingian choreography of a liturgical route to Rome’, Acta ad Archaeologiam et Artium Historiam pertinentia 31 (2019), pp. 63–79. 3 For the discussion see: Yitzhak Hen, ‘Liturgische hervormingen onder Pepijn de Korte en Karel de Grote: de illusie van romanisering’, Millennium 15 (2001), pp. 97–113; idem, The patronage of liturgy in Frankish Gaul to the death of Charles the Bald (877) (Londen, 2001) and idem, ‘The Romanisation of the Frankish liturgy: ideal, reality and the rhetoric of reform’, in: Claudia Bolgia, Rosamond McKitterick en John Osborne eds, Rome across time and space: cultural transmissions and the exchange of ideas c.500–1400 (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 111–23; Carine van Rhijn, ‘Zoeken naar zuivere geloofdspraktijken. Romanisering en uniformisering van de liturgie onder Pippijn de Korte en Karel de Grote?’, Millennium 26 (2014), pp. 5–21; Westwell, ‘The dissemination’. 4 As for instance shown by Hen, The patronage.

Royal normative texts and the assumptions that often come with them have, then, been over-emphasised in past historiography, and they continue to be in some of the more traditional fields of research. This issue is all the more relevant since the interpretation of capitularies in all their different shapes and forms has changed substantially over the past couple of decades: where influential scholars such as François Louis Ganshof regarded them as royal law, more recent historians – among whom those who are working on their re-edition⁵ – have moved away from this notion. What we get to see through these texts, it is now generally believed, can be many different utterances of ‘royal will’, such as royal intentions or pre-occupations, long-term ideals, improvised ad hoc solutions, general advice and all of these are the products of specific moments and circumstances.⁶ Rather than ‘the capitularies’ as one uniform type of source, we should therefore think of them as a series of individual texts on the basis of which no easy generalisations can be made. What is more, none of the intentions or decisions expressed in capitularies would ever have a chance of becoming reality without the consent and active collaboration of many, including the episcopate. Bishops and other royal advisers no doubt had themselves a strong influence on the contents of these normative texts, which has led historians to re-consider the extent to which we actually hear the ‘voice’ of a king in any of the texts pronounced in his name.⁷

5 This enormous project is currently running under the direction of Karl Ubl at the University of Cologne, see https://capitularia.uni-koeln.de/en/ (last consulted 20.3.2019). 6 For instance by Christina Pössel, ‘Authors and recipients of Carolingian capitularies, 779–829’, in: Richard Corradini, Rob Meens, Christina Pössel and Philip Shaw eds, Texts and identities in the early middle ages, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 12 (Vienna, 2006), pp. 253–76; Jennifer Davis, Charlemagne’s practice of empire (Cambridge, 2015), esp. pp. 352–59; Rosamond McKitterick, Charlemagne. The formation of a European identity (Cambridge, 2008), esp. pp. ­214–44. Steffen Patzold has recently argued that it is important to contextualise and interpret each individual capitulary rather than generalise about all of them, “Normen im Buch. Überlegungen zu Geltungsansprüchen so genannte ‘Kapitularien’”, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 41 (2007), pp. 331–50. 7 The exceptions to the rule have been discussed by Janet L. Nelson, ‘The voice of Charlemagne’, in: Richard Gameson and Henrietta Leyser eds, Belief and culture in the middle ages: studies presented to Henry Mayr-Harting (Oxford, 2001), pp. 77–88.

Rethinking such fundamental building blocks of our understanding of Carolingian history as the royal capitularies has consequences. The emphasis on the sheer variety of functions and intentions behind high-level normative texts, for one thing, dissolves the genre as the traditional touchstone against which ‘practice’ can be measured in terms of failure or success. Another important contribution to our image of Charlemagne’s rulership in particular has recently come from Jennifer Davis and Jinty Nelson. They both argue that Charlemagne did not have an over-arching, detailed ‘plan’ or a consistent political programme that went beyond general aspirations and ideals. Instead, he was very good at reacting to the circumstances in which he found himself. At the same time, Davis notes a set of consistent goals in his otherwise often reactive policies – so what we see in his capitularies and other normative texts is a mix of reactions to specific situations and reflections of wider goals (such as the salvation of the people) that could be attained via many different roads.⁸ One consequence of this idea of a reacting ruler instead of one unfolding a master plan is that the tried and trusted idea that the Carolingian world moved and changed from the top down becomes hard to defend.⁹ As we have just seen in the example about Romanisation, the king surely had a voice and took initiatives, but he was not alone in making decisions (capitularies were, after all, often produced as a result of deliberations between the ruler and his trusted men), and neither was he the only one who initiated changes. Surely all power exercised in the Carolingian kingdom ultimately devolved from the ruler (who, in turn, got his own royal power from God), but delegated power and responsibility came with substantial individual agency for those designated to do these jobs.

This brings us to the subject of this chapter: that of the phenomenon variously labelled as Carolingian renaissance, reform or correctio. One thing all scholars of this much-debated theme have in common, no matter what they choose to call it, is that they invariably interpret it as a phenomenon that worked top-down, was initiated by king or court and was more or less passively ‘received’ by the kingdom as a whole – if it reached the more humble levels of society to begin with. A second common denominator is that it is always conceived of as a coherent and well-thought-out plan or even a programme, hatched at the court by Charlemagne and his advisors. The tacit assumption behind this seems to be much in line with more traditional scholarship, in which change, innovation or experiment observable anywhere in the kingdom was always part of a master plan thought out at the court, which found its expression in prescriptions and normative texts.

8 Davis, Charlemagne’s practice, pp. 423–7; Janet L. Nelson, King and emperor. A new life of Charlemagne (Oakland, Cal., 2019). 9 Davis introduces the useful term ‘empire of practice’ to describe the way in which Charlemagne’s politics were often not well thought-out programmes, but rather ad-hoc and opportunistic reactions to specific situations. This is a fruitful approach to the policies of other Carolingian rulers too, although there were of course many differences among them. See Davis, Charlemagne’s practice, esp. pp. 429–30.

Since research of the topic began in the early nineteenth century, scholars have noted the energy with which the Carolingians copied books, gathered knowledge, invested their resources in education (Charlemagne is the ‘father of the primary school’ in several European historiographical traditions¹⁰) and studied writings old and new. Because of the evident interest in Classical Roman literature this was initially interpreted as a renaissance, a precursor of the Italian Renaissance; later it was recognised that all these attempts were part of a wider religious-political ‘correction’ of society, while the very flexible and most frequently used label is that of reform, likewise understood as a top-down process. It is important to understand how the discussion that le...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Foundations
• 1 Renaissance, reform or correctio? The Carolingians and the quest for salvation
• 2 Manuscripts for priests
• Part II Cornerstones
• 3 The cornerstones of Christian society I: Baptism
• 4 The cornerstones of Christian society II: Mass
• 5 The cornerstones of Christian society III: Penance
• Part III Beyond pastoral care
• 6 Priests as experts
• 7 The edges of orthodoxy
• Epilogue
• Appendix 1: The Carolingian priests’ manuscripts featuring in this book
• Appendix 2: Contents of pastoral compendia
• Bibliography
• Index