Early Medieval Europe - Volume 13, Issue 2 - February 2005

From Aachen to Al-Andalus: the journey of Deacon Bodo (823–76) F  R  Sometime in the first six months of 838, Bo...

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From Aachen to Al-Andalus: the journey of Deacon Bodo (823–76) F  R 

Sometime in the first six months of 838, Bodo, a palace deacon at the court of Louis the Pious, converted to Judaism, changed his name to Eleazar and removed himself to Muslim Spain. The incident is well attested in various sources although the reasons for his abandonment of Christianity are not clearly given. In 840, a year after arriving in Spain, Bodo, now Eleazar, engaged in a debate with Álvaro of Córdoba, a Christian writer and scholar living in Muslim territory who claimed to be of Jewish ancestry. Their correspondence provides illuminating insights into the framework of cultural and religious experience of this period. Bodo’s selfimposed exile from Christian society is also an important rejection of the Carolingian cultural programme, a voice of protest that was probably more widespread than Carolingian society would have us believe. What follows is partly an analysis of the main textual sources that brings into relief personal, social and political themes seen to lie behind the theological debates of the period. There is also an attempt to uncover aspects of Bodo’s earlier life before his conversion.

Bodo at the court of New Israel (838–9) Bodo’s passage from Christianity to Judaism has been described as a shocking event, variously attributed to the influence of the Jewish party at court, the role of Jewish merchants and commercial interests, even contact with the Jewish empire of the Khazars. The story of Bodo also brings out the traditional fears of Jewish proselytism coupled with the powerful attraction that Judaism exerted on parts of the population and on some Carolingian theologians.1 But it is also the case that this dissent 1

On Jews in the Carolingian period and the importance of Judaism: B.S. Bachrach, Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe (Minneapolis, 1977); K. Scwarzfuchs, ‘France and Germany under the Carolingians’, in C. Roth (ed.), The Dark Ages. Jews in Christian Europe (London, 1966), pp. 122–42; L.B. Glick, Abraham’s Heirs. Jews and Christians in Medieval

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and rejection of Christianity may have had more to do with the role of Old Testament exegesis at the court of Louis the Pious, where a biblically centred political culture underpinned the self-presentation of Carolingian kingship. Here, at court, a veritable David ruled over New Israel: scholars such as Claudius of Turin and Hrabanus Maurus gave lectures on the Pentateuch. The theme of Frankish kingship viewed as an embodiment of New Israel and the role of Old Testament commentary has been much studied and noted, but the importance of Old Testament texts validating kingship and sovereignty has not been taken up in connection with Bodo.2 It may be more illuminating to set aside the reported scandal of the event and return to a fresh examination of the sources that mention Bodo. This perspective casts new light on aspects of Bodo’s personal and intellectual formation prior to his rejection of Christianity in 838 and on the nature of his subsequent writings. The apostasy of Deacon Bodo is recorded after troubled times at the court of Louis the Pious. Following the revolts of the 830s, the aged king conferred on his youngest son Charles a part of the kingdom. Nithard, the illegitimate son of one of Charlemagne’s daughters, and a historian who has left an important first-hand account of these years, tells us that in August 838 Louis vested Charles with the sword and the crown, the culmination of the father’s restored authority over his other

2

Europe (Syracuse, 1999); K.L. Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1992). The importance of long-distance trade and the ‘Radhanite’ merchants is covered by Bachrach; the question of the grants of charters and privileges by Stow. The subject of trade and Jews has recently been examined by M. McCormick, The Origins of the European Economy (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 688 –93. On Bodo and Khazars and much more: H. Löwe, ‘Die Apostasie des Pfalzdiakons Bodo (838) und das Judentum der Chasaren’, in G. Althoff, D. Geuenish, O. Oexle and J. Wollasch (eds), Person und Gemeinschaft im Mittelalter. Festshcrift für K.Schmidt (Sigmaringen, 1988), pp. 157–69, stresses the importance of the Jewish Khazar empire for proof and support of sovereignty for Jews in the ninth century, and argues that Bodo may have been influenced by this whilst still a court chaplain to Louis the Pious. All the works above examine aspects of conversion and proselytism at this period (see also n. 7). For the influence of earlier Visigothic legislation against Jews, see also: Solomon Katz, The Jews in the Visigothic and Frankish Kingdoms of Spain and Gaul (Cambridge, MA, 1937); Jean Juster, ‘The Legal Condition of the Jews under the Visigothic Kings’, in A.M. Rabello (ed.), A Tribute to Jean Juster ; The Israel Law Review Association 11 (1976), pp. 259 –589. J.J. Contreni, ‘Carolingian Biblical Studies’, in Carolingian Learning, Masters and Manuscripts (Aldershot, 1992), pp. 72–97; M. De Jong, ‘The Empire as ecclesia: Hrabanus Maurus and Biblical historia for Rulers’, in Y. Hen and M. Innes (eds), The Uses of the Past in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 191–226; M. Gorman, ‘Claudius of Turin and Biblical Studies under Louis the Pious’, Speculum 72 (1997), pp. 279 –329; C. Chazelle and B.V. Edwards (eds), The Study of the Bible in the Carolingian Era (Turnhout, 2003). ‘New Israel’ is a term sometimes used by several of the above studies to underline a mode of identification with Israel by the Carolingian monarchy. See also J.L. Nelson, ‘Kingship and Empire’, in R. McKitterick (ed.), Carolingian Culture: Emulation and Innovation (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 52–87, at p. 55; J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church (Oxford, 1983), pp. 226 – 41.

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sons. This had been preceded at Aachen in 837 by a ceremony where Abbot Hilduin of St-Denis and Count Gerald of Paris took an oath of allegiance to the young Charles.3 We also know from sources written many years later that Bodo may have been at St-Denis as a young cleric in 823 or at least served under Hilduin before being attached to the palace; but what had been his allegiances and the shape of his career in those intervening years? Later we shall see that Bodo had some comments to make on the subject of morals and religious belief at the court, and that he also may have had close ties to the Alemannic circle around Empress Judith that grew up after her marriage to Louis in 819. Bodo was certainly acquainted with the influential Walahfrid Strabo who had arrived in Aachen in 829 from Fulda to be tutor to the young Charles. Did the connection go back earlier? And how closely was he also linked to the young Charles? What, then, are the sources that mention Bodo and his apostasy? These remain the accounts by Prudentius in The Annals of St. Bertin (hereafter AB ) for 839 and for 847; an exchange of letters between Bodo and Álvaro of Córdoba written in 840; a poem addressed to Bodo by Strabo, of uncertain date; a letter by Lupus of Ferrières of 838; a passage written in 846 by Amolo, archbishop of Lyons, featured in his polemic against the Jews; and finally, a most important letter probably written in 876 by Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims to Charles the Bald. The principal record of the apostasy is the AB 839 entry given below: Meanwhile something very distressing happened, something to be bewailed by all the children of the Catholic Church. Rumour spread the news and the Emperor found out that the deacon Bodo, an Aleman by birth and deeply imbued from his earliest childhood in the Christian religion with the scholarship of the court clergy with sacred and secular learning, a man who only the previous year had requested permission from the Emperor and Empress to go on pilgrimage to Rome and had been granted this permission and been loaded with gifts: this man seduced by the enemy of the human race had abandoned Christianity and converted to Judaism . . . Thus he was circumcised,

3

Nithard, Histoire des fils de Louis de Pieux, ed. and tr. Ph. Lauer (Paris, 1964), I, 6, p. 26. Events covered in J.L. Nelson, Charles the Bald (London, 1992), pp. 91–7. At the time of Charles’s majority he was old enough to have had a chapel of his own, and ‘his mother’s friends became his’ (p. 93). The palace ‘chaplains’ comprised an array of duties: clerks, administrators, secretaries, and chaplains. ‘Capella’ covered all of these, and this fluidity frequently shocked reform-minded observers. See P. Depreux, Prosopographie de l’entourage de Louis Le Pieux (781–840) (Sigmaringen, 1997), p. 19: ‘La Chapelle était donc un ensemble aux contours mal definis: il faut nous accommoder de ce flou.’ What space did Bodo occupy? Was he part of Charles’s ‘chapel’ just before he left the court?



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let his hair and beard grow and adopted – or rather usurped – the name of Eleazar . . .4 Giving the fullest record, if not necessarily the first, this part of the 839 annal, close in time to the event, provides the only description of the man, and the supposed importance of what took place. The simple enumeration of detail suggests that this AB source can be better understood as a moral tale belonging, perhaps, to a wider literary background of Biblical references. The year’s entry in the annal can be read as a series of literary conventions rather than a historical narrative, and this approach furnishes a truer understanding of the first Bodo source. The entry for 839 as a whole is relatively long, the main subject the instability caused by continuing discord between Louis and his sons. Around this central topic, a number of subsidiary events are positioned: the appearance of pirates and rebels at the limits of the empire, the flooding off the coast of Frisia and the conversion of a court chaplain to Judaism. Ambassadors arrive from another land, shooting stars appear in the night sky, and a report is given of a dream by an AngloSaxon priest. The cycle of the year is taken from winter to winter: the entry begins at Christmas 838 and ends just before the next one. The record of this year is an extensive journey, the movement of a wandering medieval court throughout the empire. The narrative tracks over the territory of the kingdom, pausing at frontiers to defend them, mentioning foreign envoys that wish to cross these, and requesting safe passage. The year’s entry also gives a detailed survey of territories for a proposed division between the sons. More importantly, between Christmas 838 and Easter 839, the annalist inserts news of two incidents: Bodo’s apostasy and the flood in Frisia. Two events are presented as components that communicate a wider moral lesson to support the main story: discord between a father and his sons and ensuing disorder and disunity in the kingdom. The entire Bodo story and the flood in Frisia are exempla to develop a longer argument.5 4

5

For the English translation J.L. Nelson, The Annals of St. Bertin (Manchester, 1991), p. 42; for the Latin text Annales Bertiniani ed. F. Grat (Paris, 1964). pp. 27–8: ‘Interea lacrimabile nimiumque cunctis catholicae aeclesiae filiis ingemescendum, fama perferente, innotuit Bodonem diaconum, Alamannica gente progenitum et ab ipsis paene cunabilis in christiana religione palatinis eruditionibus divinis humanisque litteris aliquatenus inbutum qui anno praecedente Romam orationis gratia properandi licentiam ab augustis poposcerat multisque donariis muneratus impetraverat, humani generis hoste pellectum, relicta christianitate ad iudaismum sese conuertisse . . . Sicque circumcisus, capillisque ac barba crescentibus, et mutato potiusque usurpato Elezari nomine . . .’ Grat, pp. 27–8: ‘Preaterea die septimo kalendas ianuarii, die videlicet passionis beati Stephani protomartyris, tanta inundatio contra morem maritimorum aestuum per totam paene Frisiam occupavit . . .’




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Bodo’s famous first appearance, then, is a small supporting example in a larger picture: Old Testament allusions abound in the first section of this AB entry to make this case. The flood covered the land, the Father is displeased with his sons who seek his blessing. In the priest’s dream, there is a reference to the dream that Joseph explained to the Pharaoh: the years of plenty followed by the years of famine in Genesis XLI.29–30, succeeded by the fog as one of the plagues in Exodus IX– X. There is also a reference to the bold letters in the Anglo-Saxon priest’s dream that need to be read and understood, as in Daniel V where Daniel reads the writing on the wall at the Babylonian court. The narrator’s ‘we weep to say it’ when introducing and recounting the Bodo episode is linked to the line in the priest’s dream about ‘souls of the saints [who] cry out to God with incessant weeping’. In effect, the dream described is an extreme form of the ordering of detail to conform with a moral argument.6 The tone of the AB 839 passage thus reflects a developed world of Biblical interpretation and reference recycled back onto contemporary history. We may speculate that the source for the details about Bodo was news passed by word of mouth, that may have been embellished as it spread: ‘rumour spread the news’, the text tells us. What can these ancient details tell us today? That the man was educated both in sacred and secular learning, an Aleman by birth. It is curious that education should be stressed, but it is most likely that Prudentius suggests as extraordinary that this learned man renounced the Christian faith despite his intellectual formation. However, the opposite could also be suggested: that he converted precisely because he had engaged with Biblical texts so intensively, and participated in the teaching given by Hrabanus Maurus and others. As the source tells us that he has been studying since childhood, Bodo was very probably educated in an atmosphere of textual debate and investigation into Old Testament books. A topic of principal interest to Carolingian scholars, steeped as they were in the Commentaries of Jerome, was the Hebraica Veritas, the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, considered to be the most important source for establishing the text of the Latin version. The interest in this ‘original’ text leads to another related topic, namely the question of Jewish Biblical exegesis, which was considered important for an understanding of the ‘historical’ sense of the Old Testament. Such was 6

The description of Bodo: ‘quod lacrimabiliter dicimus – Christi fide, sese Iudaeum professus est’. The dream is: ‘et nisi iste animae sanctorum tam incessanter cum fletu ad Deum clamarent, iam aliquatenus finis tantorum malorum in christiano populo esset’ (Grat, pp. 28–9). Dreams are a form for communicating fear and criticism of political and moral issues. The dream in this AB annal belongs to the same genre as Strabo’s Visio Wettini. See P. Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire (Nebraska, 1994), pp. 74–5, pp. 107–10.



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the intellectual atmosphere at the court of Louis, where the king ruled over New Israel and Hrabanus Maurus was known to lecture to a sophisticated audience, able to understand the restricted code of allegory and figurative exegesis, assisted by lectores.7 It is probable that, as a gifted child, Bodo was put into preparation for holy orders at an early age, perhaps as an oblate at one of the monastic centres of the Alemannian region such as Reichenau, or possibly Fulda on the Saxon frontier, and that he absorbed this exegetical culture. In the heated atmosphere of court politics Prudentius, the court annalist, selects telling details: the man is educated, perhaps privileged, and an Aleman. The precise manner of his conversion cannot be known: some have proposed that he might have been a secret Jew before he left the court, others that he converted at a time and place on his journey south. Did he go to Rome as he told the emperor and empress, or did he head straight for the Spanish March? All this remains pure conjecture, although some have tried to suggest a passage through Ausona (Vic) in the March. Two annal sources give a date for the event, and one Reichenau annal actually pinpoints a day, month, and precise time when he is supposed to have lapsed. The source does not make clear, however, if this refers to a ceremony that took place, or the moment in which Bodo decided to become a Jew. Why should such an exact time be noted? It suggests that someone attached to Reichenau, or connected with the monastery, was in Bodo’s confidence. It is also noteworthy that this entry for 838 should have Bodo and Strabo crossing textually, for the annal also records Strabo’s appointment as abbot of Reichenau. It may be that someone from Reichenau brought the news of Bodo’s apostasy to the imperial court at Bodman in Swabia on Lake Constance (near Reichenau) in Lent 839. The AB 839 text pinpoints the arrival of the news in April of that year. The AB 839 source also makes it clear that Bodo set out for Rome sometime in 838 and reached Zaragoza in midAugust. The months leading up to August 838 were the period when Charles attained his majority and was formally invested with the crown at Quierzy and Strabo officially ceased to be his tutor, leaving to become abbot of Reichenau. As these events would have been prepared for, it suggests two things: first, that this was the end of an era for both Strabo and Bodo and may have been an additional factor in Bodo’s decision; second, it is possible that Strabo knew of the decision when 7

These lectures are treated in Gorman, ‘Claudius of Turin’ and De Jong, ‘The Empire as ecclesia’, pp. 195–207, where such biblical commentaries can sometimes be viewed as statements of political positions. The question of Hebraica Veritas is discussed in B.S. Albert, ‘Adversos Iudaeos in the Carolingian Empire’, in G. Stroumsa and J.C.B. Mohr (eds), Contra Iudaeos. Ancient and Medieval Polemics between Christian and Jews (Tübingen, 1996), pp. 119–42.




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he went to Reichenau in 838, and reporting this, was able to give such precise information with the date. The connection between the two men survives in the crossing of their comings and goings in the 838 entry of the Continuation. It may be therefore that the first news of Bodo’s apostasy came out of Alemannia and not Spain. 8 Bodo asked both the emperor and empress for permission to go on the pilgrimage to Rome. Later, when the news of his flight is known, Prudentius says this was a ‘distressing episode for [both] the Emperor and Empress’. This suggests a close connection with the royal couple; and possibly, in the case of the empress, because Bodo was an Aleman. More unusual and probably embroidered from this oral account cited earlier, is the celebrated description of Bodo’s change of appearance that captures his passage from one religion to another. In this transition, the body becomes a metaphor for the dismemberment of one identity and the reconstitution of another. Using a metonymic device, different parts of the body of a Christian – hair, beard, clothes, circumcision – are transformed to represent the whole collective body of Judaism. The episode is described in terms of organic change (hair and beard growing), cultural transformation (clothes), and bodily reshaping (circumcision). Prudentius seeks by this memorable process to make Bodo unknown even to himself and the rest of the world that he previously inhabited: Bodo has become, as it were, another species. His anatomical shape is taken to pieces and then reassembled as the representative of another collectivity: the Jewish people. Before going further with the description of Bodo, it is possible at this point to infer from the AB text that Bodo’s abandonment of Christianity is yet another example of the sinful state of the empire and of Louis’s vain efforts to hold the body politic together. The moral lesson preached by Prudentius in this text as a whole is that the body politic has fallen apart. This is represented by Bodo’s body, dismembered into fragments and reassembled as an another body alien to the well-being of the empire. The following personal and political themes in this passage are organized around the image of the body; an image which, 8

B. Blumenkranz, Juifs et Chrétiens dans le Monde Occidental 430–1096 (Paris, 1960), p. 166, suggests that he might have converted some time before; A. Cabaniss, ‘Bodo-Eleazar: A Famous Jewish Convert’, Jewish Quarterly Review 42 (1952), pp. 313–28, at p. 322, has two phases; A.J. Zuckerman, A Jewish Princedom in Feudal France (New York, 1972), p. 275, routes Bodo through Ausona (Vic) in northern Spain, a town with an important Jewish population at this period. For Ausona see Bachrach, Early Medieval Jewish Policy, pp. 69 –70. The Reichenau annals Annales Augienses, MGH SS I, p. 68, record Bodo’s apostasy and Strabo’s appointment as abbot in the same entry for 838. The Continuation also has an entry for 838 (MGH SS I, p. 49), giving the exact time of the apostasy, between eight and nine o’clock in the morning before the vigil of Ascension day, i.e. 22 May 838. The news is recorded as arriving in April 839 as Löwe, ‘Die Apostasie’, p. 158 indicates. For background to these events see Nelson, Charles the Bald, pp. 91–7.



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through analogy, becomes the connecting device between public and private: a. The body of the kingdom that is being broken up by civil war. b. The body of the king that is breaking up because of the family quarrel. c. The extremities of the body politic that are attacked by enemies. d. The English priest who leaves his body to see the sinfulness of the world. e. The body of Bodo that is broken up and reassembled as a Jew. Finally, it might be suggested that the king has lost any connection with the body of God. He is suffering, he is abused, perhaps he has had his blessing from God removed. This has been repeatedly illustrated by the contrast in the language between the person of the father confronting his sons, and the formal person of the emperor carrying out his divinely ordained ministerium. The language of Prudentius’s text describing Louis, father and emperor, sets out the human failings of the man that have weakened the office of the ruler, so that the person of the king and the role of kingship are set against each other, leading to a removal of authority from the office of emperor. This suggests a portrayal of the king’s two bodies, human by nature and divine by grace. One is mortal and corruptible; the other is beyond the person and endures unchanged. What matters for an understanding of this section of the AB text are the interconnected frames of reference set out above. Thus, the idea of the king’s two bodies is parodied by the two bodies of Bodo and Eleazar;9 Bodo’s abandonment of Christianity constitutes a violation of the proper use of the body that stems from Louis’s failures in the rule of the empire; Louis’s failures have weakened the connection between the king’s two bodies – the one natural, the other divine. The manner in which Bodo is redesignated as Eleazar is a casting out, a ritual that is performed following his self-imposed exile. Only at this one moment in the entire AB 839 is there a direct intervention of the narrator: ‘we weep to say it’, the only personal reference in the text. The most unusual aspect of Bodo’s description is that it is given at all, for on the whole, Old Testament techniques and the normal style 9

Louis’s penance at Attigny in 822, and the deposition by his sons in 833, despite restoration at Compiègne in 834, was seen by some to have removed his divine authority. See M. De Jong, ‘Power and Humility in Carolingian Society: The Public Penance of Louis the Pious’, EME 1 (1992), pp. 29–52. For a discussion of the king’s two bodies see E. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton, 1957), p. 81. Here, an acclamation of Amalar of Metz’s compares Louis the individual and the eternal kingly figure of the biblical David: ‘Divo Hludovico vita!/ Novo David perennitas!’




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of the AB text eschew detailed physical description. 10 In contrast, the passage here that recounts Bodo’s personal appearance stresses the revulsion caused by his apostasy: the Frankish man made to become a stereotype of a foreign person, the ‘other’. Each detail can be said to be the opposite of what he was: short-haired, clean-shaven, unmarried, uncircumcised, a man of peace. Now reversed, he is an aggressive proselytizer, circumcised, long-haired, who marries, and even forces his nephew to convert to Judaism. The significant word in the text is ‘usurped’, for Bodo has usurped the name of Eleazar, and metonymically through the name, a complete identity that is not rightfully his. From now on he is another: to Christians, according to this source, he is a man who has been rubbed out (Bodo) and replaced by a man he has no right to become (Eleazar). The problem of depicting a Jew is apparent: if a prophet or a patriarch were conventionally described in a pre-Christian context, this would be done in a positive manner to prefigure Christianity. In this case, Prudentius has sought to shape a negative anti-Jewish argument by dwelling on the physical details. In fact, the ‘warrior’s gear’ alluded to in the text has been identified as the dress of a nonMuslim in Arab territories. It has provoked some debate. In Prudentius’s account it would only serve to heighten Eleazar’s ‘otherness’. 11 Finally, this other person crosses a frontier that is corporeal, indicated by his changed physical appearance, and one that is also religious, implicit in his assumption of a new faith. Eleazar (the new person), located in the Spanish March just over the border in Zaragoza, has also crossed a geographical and political frontier. But this frontier, described by Prudentius, is more imaginative than geographical. It becomes a recreated world, rather than an actual territory or place, set between Christendom and Islam. On the other side of that boundary was to be found heresy, paganism, idolatry or Judaism. This is the imagined place where Bodo has gone, a move to a different reading of the same Old Testament texts. In a sense, then, Bodo has moved from one body of texts to another; he has crossed a textual frontier. Immediately a process of writing Bodo out began. That same year, 838, in a letter written by Lupus – soon to become abbot of Ferrières 10

11

E. Auerbach, Mimesis (Princton, 1968), pp. 3–23 has a famous and suggestive analysis of descriptive techniques in the Old Testament, that illuminate the influence of biblical writing on Prudentius. Such literary and textual analysis can uncover themes that are mobilized in the language and imagery, see J. Nelson, ‘A Tale of Two Princes: Politics, Text and Ideology in a Carolingian Annal’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 10 (1998), pp. 105–41. B. Blumenkranz, ‘De nouveau sur Bodo-Eleazar?’, Revue des Études Juives 113 (1953), pp. 36– 41, at p. 39; Zuckerman, A Jewish Princedom, pp. 275–7; it is unlikely that Bodo wore military dress as Cabaniss, ‘Bodo-Eleazar’, p. 322, suggests. Bodo changes clothes to become a Jew, putting on a different belt. This parodies Louis’s deposition and reinstatement, where he first removed and then replaced, his imperial vestments and cingulum.



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– Lupus excuses himself to an unidentified source for not having sent a letter of consolation. He says it was left with Bodo who never delivered the message ‘either through treachery or neglect’. As Bodo has gone, written out of the Frankish world, he has become a convenient person to blame.12 The subject of personal ‘frontiers’ appears again in 840, when Eleazar disputes with Álvaro the claim to an authentic identity. In 847 he will again appear in the AB, this time portrayed threatening the political frontier between Christendom and Islam. But for now, this new figure of Eleazar in another geographical space, lies outside the political and religious control of the Christian sovereign. Bodo has left behind, as it were, the court of New Israel, and is now captured in other sources.

Eleazar in the land of the Visigoths (840) The exchange of letters between Álvaro of Córdoba, a Christian in AlAndalus, and Eleazar is preserved in one manuscript copied in the tenth century in Visigothic minuscule. The manuscript, in the archive of the Cathedral of Córdoba, is the work of two different hands and contains other work of Álvaro’s. The letters are numbers XIV–XX of his collected correspondence, one of which is dated 840 (XVI, 6). 13 It is not 12

13

L. Levillain, Loup de Ferrières. Correspondance, 2 vols (Paris, 1927), I, 82–4, Letter 11. Lupus was another Aleman close to Bodo. To leave a letter, through an intermediary (Marcward, abbot of Prüm), for Bodo to deliver, would indicate this. This letter was written in September 838 as Levillain’s note suggests. We have here an earlier reference to Bodo’s apostasy, that precedes AB 839. Perhaps the Reichenau annal is also earlier: both these references then may come before Prudentius. Löwe, ‘Die Apostasie’, p. 160, n. 16, refers to some doubt that this is Bodo, but the phrase ‘quibus aut fraus aut negligentia detraxit effectum’ is employed. Lupus had visited the court at Frankfurt in 836, and in 837 he was invited to appear a second time. Lupus was eagerly using Alemannic links to gain advancement through Judith, and would have been close to the other Alemans, Bodo and Strabo. This is also suggested by E. Ward, ‘The Career of the Empress Judith 819–843’, Ph.D. thesis (London, 2003), pp. 230–3. Ward also emphasizes the importance of these young Alemans connected to Judith. In this same Letter 11 Lupus hopes for some preferment from Judith. It is not surprising that he is quick to distance himself from Bodo. For Álvaro: C.M. Sage, Paul Albar of Córdoba: Studies on his Life and Writings (Washington, 1943), pp. 221–3, which gives the manuscript’s history. The manuscript is: Córdoba, Archivo de la Catedral, Paulus Alvarus, Opera et alia opuscula, fols 1–164, of which 85v–121v are the letters. This manuscript is described in detail in: A. Millares Carlo, Manuscritos Visigóticos. Notas Bibliográficas (Barcelona, 1963), p. 14; A. Cabaniss, ‘Paulus Albarus of Muslim Cordova’, Church History 22 (1953), pp. 99–112; F.J. Simonet, Historia de los Mozárabes en España (Amsterdam, 1967); D. Millet Gerrard, Chrétiens Mozarabes et culture islamique dans L’Espagne des VIII-IX siècles (Paris, 1984); R. Collins, Early Medieval Spain. Unity in Diversity 400–1000, 2nd edn (London, 1995). Álvaro is also covered in general works on the Cordovan Martyrs mentioned elsewhere. All cited references to the Álvaro–Eleazar letters are to the text of the critical edition of Álvaro’s writings: J. Gil, Corpus Scriptorum Mozarabicorum, 2 vols (Madrid, 1973), I, 227–70. The letters are also in J. Madoz, Epistolario de Álvaro de Córdoba. Edición Crítica (Madrid, 1947), pp. 211–81. This also gives detailed background on the manuscript, pp. 25–6. The text can also be found in E. Florez, España Sagrada, 57 vols (Madrid, 1752), XI,




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open to doubt that these letters were written to Eleazar. Whilst the letters address their recipient as ‘Transgressor’, the salutations of the first three mention Eleazar by name. Later in the correspondence, Álvaro refers to Eleazar’s presence at the Frankish court (XVIII, 14), and to his marriage (XVIII, 16). There are also statements by Álvaro that refer to Eleazar’s activities and opinions of the court, which will be addressed later. Since the letters can be dated to 840, this ties in with the arrival of Eleazar in Arab territory. There is also another reference to him as a man of Gaul (XVI, 1). The entire correspondence consists of seven letters: four by Álvaro and three by Eleazar. Unfortunately those by Eleazar are incomplete, only some sixty lines or so survive, as someone appears to have removed folios and erased lines in the manuscript in order to destroy his comments. His arguments therefore have to be reconstructed from Álvaro’s responses that refer to statements made by Eleazar. Of course, there is no way of knowing if, in his replies, Álvaro ignored some of the better arguments that he could not deal with. Once again, as in the Frankish world, Eleazar has been ‘rubbed out’ – just as Prudentius and Lupus each attempted to do in their own way. 14 The contents of the letters have been studied, and it has been noted that the main topics fit into the conventional themes of Jewish–Christian polemics. The three main issues are: the question of the Messiah; a discussion about the True Israel (Verus Israel ); and whether Christianity is a fulfilment of the Old Testament. 15 All these matters involve the two antagonists in the standard use of biblical exegesis common to these debates, through the repeated use of figurative and allegorical examples.

14

15

81–218 and PL 121, pp. 475–514. All references to the letters above give both a letter number and a section number. When the text is quoted, the reference also includes a page number. The name ‘Eleazar’ is used in view of his changed identity, but reverts to ‘Bodo’ when discussing him in relation to Frankish sources. B. Blumenkranz, ‘De nouveau sur Bodo-Eleazar?’, pp. 35–6 suggests that new techniques of digitization could be used to reveal some of the missing text. Blumenkranz also has reconstructed a summary of Eleazar’s supposed statements in ‘Un pamphlet juif médio-latin de polémique antichrétienne’, Revue d’Histoire et de Philosophie Réligieuse 24 (1954), pp. 401–13. The most comprehensive study of the letters is Blumenkranz, Juifs et Chrétiens; also important is Zuckerman, A Jewish Kingdom, pp. 274–84. J.C. Lara Olmo, ‘La Polémica de Álvaro de Córdoba con Bodón-Eleazar’, in C. Del Valle Rodríguez (ed.), La controversia Judeo-Cristiana en España (Desde los orígenes hasta el siglo XIII) (Madrid, 1998), pp. 131–59 gives a full analysis. I have to thank Sr. Lara Olmo for making available to me a Spanish translation of the letters. For the Jewish–Christian debates as a genre see also: H. Maccoby, Judaism on Trial. Jewish– Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages (London, 1982); R. Chazan, Barcelona and Beyond. The Disputation of 1263 and its Aftermath (California, 1992); J. Cohen, Living Letters of the Law. Ideas of the Jews in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley, 1999); A.S. Abulafia, Christians and Jews in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (London, 1995). Cohen provides an excellent recent survey. Also valuable for the Carolingian period is B.S. Albert, Adversos Iudaeos (see n. 7 above).



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The letters are the only known source where Eleazar is recorded in his own words: but even these fuller statements are still dominated by silences, so his voice has to be reconstructed. Once again, the existence of this figure is filtered through a hostile Christian source, yet the picture that emerges here is more complete because there is a form, albeit limited, of dialogue. But this text is important for another reason: Eleazar is depicted by a non-Frankish source. The discourse in these letters covers issues that are outside Frankish control. The opening debate regarding the Messiah centres around a frequently cited passage of Genesis XLIX.10 that is presented by Álvaro in the opening letter (XIV, 4): ‘The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, / Nor a lawgiver from between his feet, / Until Shiloh come; / And unto him shall the gathering of the people be.’ This is the conventional Christian argument that the absence of political sovereignty of the Jews is proof that the Messiah has come, and the prophecy of this verse has been fulfilled. Álvaro lists the kings of Judah since the book of Daniel to demonstrate that the Jews had sovereigns up to the coming of Jesus, just as the Genesis passage foretold (XIV, 4,5). This debating point was traditional, but it can be inferred from Álvaro’s reply to Eleazar that the former palace deacon, well trained in Biblical studies and Jewish commentary, introduces a non-Christian argument. He proposes that the verse in Genesis refers not to the Jews’ political sovereignty (shebet meaning ‘sceptre’) but in fact to the tribe of Judah (shebet meaning ‘tribe’). Eleazar therefore argues that the Genesis verse refers to the survival of the tribe of Judah and not the sovereignty of the Jewish people. Other references in this verse link Eleazar and Strabo in an interesting way.16 The Jewish reading of this verse, responding to the 16

The use of Genesis XLIX.10 to prefigure Christ is a topic repeated by all Church Fathers and many Carolingian commentators. For a recent survey of Genesis commentary at this time see M. Fox, ‘Alcuin the Exegete: The Evidence of Quaestiones in Genesim’, in Chazelle and Edwards, The Study of the Bible, pp. 39–60. A variation on this tradition is found in Strabo’s De imagine Tetrici, where Scintilla ends her speech by prophesying the unending fecundity of the royal line: ‘The kingdom of these fathers will never lack for seed/until the King comes flashing in a cloud of fire’ (De imagine, 87–8). This links this topic with ‘the divinely sanctioned authority of the Carolingian Kings and the regeneration of their seed until Judgement day’ (P. Godman, Poets and Emperors. Frankish politics and Carolingian Poetry (Oxford, 1987), pp. 141–2). Translation of Strabo: M.W. Herren, ‘The De Imagine Tetrici of Walahfrid Strabo: Edition and Translation’, The Journal of Medieval Latin 1 (1991), pp. 118–39. Herren questions Godman’s reading in ‘Walahfrid Strabo’s De imagine Tetrici: An Interpretation’, in R. North and T. Hofstra (eds), Latin Culture and Medieval Germanic Europe (Groningen, 1992), p. 29. Following Godman, we infer that Strabo is addressing Louis’s fecundity in producing an heir at the time of the disputes about inheritance of the empire, and of course praising Judith and Charles. This is a telling use by Strabo of the same biblical verse to mention the survival of a royal line, whereas Eleazar refers to the survival of a people. The debate about a Jewish king and the Christian denial of the survival of a Jewish sovereign state into the ninth century is taken by some to refer to the Khazar empire. Álvaro says the Jews are accustomed to look for a king overseas: ‘Soliti enim erant ultra mare inquirere . . . regem




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usual Christian position, may also have come from Eleazar’s new-found Jewish colleagues in Córdoba. The argument appears to rattle Álvaro who is sarcastic about Eleazar’s rapid progress in Hebrew (XVI, 1). The opening argument of the debate draws attention to another aspect of this text that has hitherto gone unremarked: the relative status of each disputant, Christian and Jew, in the Arab territory of Al-Andalus. The question of the legal status of Jews and Christians in Spain is important for two reasons. First, Jews and other non-Muslims living under Islamic rule (while enjoying some internal autonomy in religious and most civil matters) were subject to the jurisdiction of Islamic law. Second, the status of Jews was the same as that of the Christians, both subjects of the Islamic state, albeit second-class ones. Members of the two religions were subsumed under a broader category of infidel: the dhimmis, who were ‘people of the Book’, non-Muslims recognized by the prophet Muhammad as recipients of divinely revealed scripture. The background to the letters underlines the fact that the dispute takes place in a Muslim state, outside the sovereign domain of Christendom; so Christian arguments are robbed of any supporting political authority to actually prove the case. From this perspective, the interpretation of the text changes: both disputants are disempowered and cut off from an imagined or previous secular state that could validate their faith. In terms of the position advanced by Álvaro, this is a governing irony that makes the sovereignty debate and the citation of Genesis XLIX.10 unusual. As a result, the arguments and topics – Messiah, king, church, and state – take on a different aspect. Eleazar is then led to prophesy, based on calculations in Daniel, that the date for the coming of the Messiah is known: he will arrive within twenty-seven years, some 800 years after the destruction of the Temple i.e. AD 867–8 (XVI, 7). Álvaro responds that he is happy to take up the wager that whosoever is proved wrong will pass to the other religion (XVI, 7). Conventional arguments about prophecies and historical changes, centred around Old Testament texts that can be seen to mask social and political tensions for both antagonists, are also carried on through references to arguments about the body. Not many years later, Álvaro, in another work, was to make a similar prophecy using the same text from Daniel. This time the prophecy would announce the end of Islamic power over the Christian community. The novelty of this thesis was to link biblical exegesis with Islamic history and doctrine, and vobis de transmarinis inquirere locis’ (XVI, 1), p. 234. See Löwe, ‘Die Apostasie’, pp. 166–7; also Lara Olmo, ‘La polémica’, pp. 142–7. Strabo attended classes on Genesis given by Hrabanus Maurus in the 820s, probably at Fulda. Zuckerman, A Jewish Princedom, pp. 281– 2, has a discussion on Eleazar and Genesis XLIX.10.



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equate Muhammad with a form of precursor of Antichrist by citing Daniel VII.23–5, where the fourth beast is equated to the fourth kingdom, implying that Muslim domination would end in AD 870. 17 The date of this later text of Álvaro’s (854) and the date of the Eleazar letters (840) offer a valuable clue to survival of elements of Visigothic cultural identity after the Arab conquest. The letters between Eleazar and Álvaro bridge the time of the Adoptionist dispute (785–805) and the decade of the Martyrs of Córdoba (850 –9). These texts capture an important moment in a process of cultural exchange that was going on between Goths, Franks and Arabs, set in motion by the twin rise of Arab and Carolingian power. They also show the fluid nature of ethnic and religious identities under pressure from political changes caused by military conquest. Eleazar’s presence in Spain as a Frank who had converted to Judaism was part of this wider phenomenon of adjustment and exchange. The tone of the letters sometimes hints at antagonism between the Frank from Aachen and the Goth in Córdoba, rather than between a Jew and a Christian. Behind the arguments can be detected a recent past of resurgent Franks and the diminished political status of Goths, which had contributed to the Adoptionist dispute when Charlemagne had intervened in the affairs of the Toledan church. Caught between the Caliphate and the Carolingians, Visigoths had been obliged to take on new roles in territories they had previously governed. This had created a Mozarab identity and culture in Arab-ruled areas, a world between Islam and Christianity. The ‘Martyrs of Córdoba’ would in effect contest that identity and insist on challenging the Muslim authorities. A fuller treatment of this matter is beyond the scope of this article, but Álvaro’s reaction to Eleazar and his arguments reflects this ambiguous cultural context, where Álvaro is both proud of his Christian beliefs and fearful of losing his religion and culture to increasing Arabism. 18 17

18

Álvaro’s Indiculus Luminosus (854). This unusual Latin treatment of Muhammad opens up another dimension of the use of Old Testament texts. The genre is discussed in K.B. Wolf, ‘Muhammad as Anti-Christ in Ninth-Century Córdoba’, in E.D. English and M.D. Meyerson (eds), Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Notre Dame, 2000), pp. 3–19, at pp. 9–11; also ‘Christian Views of Islam in Early Medieval Spain’, in J.V. Tolan (ed.), Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam (London, 2000), pp. 85–108. There are other Latin anti-Muhammad texts that may have influenced Álvaro. For Cordovan Martyrs: K.B. Wolf, Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain (Cambridge, 1988); J.A. Coope, The Martyrs of Córdoba. Community and Family Conflict in an Age of Mass Conversion (Lincoln, NE, 1995); E.P. Colbert, The Martyrs of Córdoba (Washington, 1962). Colbert’s is an exhaustive analysis of texts and sources. For Adoptionism from a historical and cultural perspective see R. D’Abadal, La Batalla del Adopcionismo en la Desintegración de la Iglesia Visigoda (Barcelona, 1949); a Catalan version can be found in Catalunya Carolingia (Barcelona, 1986), pp. 93–181. J.C. Cavadini, The Last Christology of the West: Adoptionism in Spain and Gaul. 785–820 (Philadelphia, 1993) discusses the theology. For the Mozarabic background see T.F. Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages (Princeton, 1979),




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The letters therefore hint at the construction of a religious and cultural identity that goes beyond the ideological certainties of a polemic. If identity is often created through confrontation with another, this interaction is at the heart of the letters that pass between Eleazar and Álvaro. There are two passages that address the issue. One contrasts the two men as representatives of a cultural group and a religion, and makes an important point about the ‘True Israel’: Which of us better deserves the name of Israelite? You who, as you say, have been converted from idolatry to the worship of the Supreme God, and are a Jew not by race but by faith, or I who am a Hebrew both by faith and race? But I am not called a Jew because a new name has been given to me which the mouth of the Lord has named. Abraham is my father, for my forbears descended from that stem: for looking for the Messiah who was to come, and receiving him when he came, they are more truly Israel than those who were expecting him but rejected him at his coming, and have not ceased to hope for him, for you are still awaiting one whom you have already rejected. The Gentiles who daily are being converted to the faith of Israel take their place in the people of God, while you have adhered to the error of the Jews. (XVIII, 5) The meaning of these lines has aroused some discussion. 19 Álvaro appears to assert that although Eleazar is now a Jew, he, Álvaro, is the real Israelite, son of the ‘True Israel’ because he has embraced Christ. He also implies that whilst a Christian by faith, the ethnic origins of his line were Jewish. In Visigothic Spain, the conversion of a family to Christianity during the previous 150 years or so would not have been surprising. This condition puts Álvaro at a double advantage over Eleazar who is neither a Jew by ethnic origin nor a member of the ‘True Israel’ by faith.20 In fact, the opposition to Eleazar may be most marked because he is a Frank. This comes out in the second reference to Álvaro’s lineage in the final lines of the last letter, when he has been goaded

19 20

pp. 165–93; R. Collins, Early Medieval Spain; R. Fletcher, Moorish Spain (London, 1994), and idem, Barbarian Conversion from Paganism to Christianity (New York, 1997); J.F. Sagan, ‘Identity and Differentiation in Ninth-Century Andalus’, Speculum 76 (2001), pp. 573–98; J. Fontaine, ‘Mozarabie Hispanique et Monde Carolingien’, Anuario de Estudios Medievales 13 (1983), pp. 17–46, provides an important article. M.R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross. The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1994) gives dhimmi legal background. See Gil, p. 249 for the Latin text. The text is given in translation by Sage, Paul Albar, p. 2. The ‘True Israel’ is a conventional topic in the tradition of the Jewish–Christian polemic. This links back indirectly to the Frankish identification with Israel; M. Garrison, ‘The Franks as the New Israel’, in Henn and Innes, The Uses of the Past, pp. 114–61, has a qualified view of this.



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into a fury by the irony and intellectual sense of superiority shown by Eleazar the Frank. In the penultimate letter, XIX, Eleazar calls him a ‘mad dog . . . a compiler, like those from whom you extracted all these things’ (XX). Eleazar questions not only Álvaro’s ability, but also the entire basis of early medieval disputation: the constant citation of the church Fathers and other commentators of biblical texts. Perhaps this is Eleazar’s final riposte to the exegetical world of Claudius of Turin, Hrabanus Maurus and others that he has challenged by his apostasy, as well as an insult to the luckless Álvaro, whose erudition is all the poorer because he has become distanced from Christian and Latin culture. Eleazar, the highly educated Frank from the court of Louis the Pious, pours scorn on the mediocre compiler in Islamic Córdoba who lacks originality and sophistication. The ‘compiler’ jibe would have touched at the heart of his insecurity, and provokes an angry reply from Álvaro who constructs a direct line for himself back to the original Goths, as celebrated by earlier Visigothic historians. Here, Álvaro champions not only the Christian Visigothic past: he eagerly assumes it with the passion of a convert. It is the war cry of a member of a disappearing Latin culture being assimilated by Islam, a man who has lost out to Franks as well as Arabs. The timeline of references back in history remembers a Visigothic empire that conquered Rome, challenged the Greeks, and now might survive the Islamic empire. The manifest destiny of the Visigoths here expressed is a preparation for the later writings and the zealotry of the Cordovan Martyrs: The Getes [Goths] despise death while praising the wound, also this: The Getan – he says – he goes with his horse . . . I am the one . . . the one who Alexander said had to be avoided, who Pyrrhus feared, and for whom Caesar trembled. Of us, Jerome said: He has a horn in his head, flee far away. And so do not talk of mad dogs and recognise yourself as a snarling fox . . . and do not say that I am compiler of ancients which is appropriate for people of great power. 21 (XX) Both Umayyads and Carolingians had eclipsed the line of the Visigothic kings and especially the authority of the Visigothic church. In this final ill-tempered letter, Álvaro attempts to reconstruct the past and resurrect a lineage that can empower the present Christians in Córdoba, who are allowed to worship but have no sovereignty. The references to Goths may be more cultural than ethnic: it is impossible to know if Álvaro was a Hispano-Roman, a Goth, or a Jew by ancestry. Visigothic 21

Gil, p. 270. The references to Goths and their history are taken from Isidore’s Historia Gothorum, Chs 2, 67, 69.




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culture and society were held to be the product of the first two. The importance of the term ‘Goth’ is the same as ‘Israel’: an appropriation of an imagined nation or kingdom that Álvaro waves as a banner at Eleazar.22 In the end, both Eleazar and Álvaro are inside one political domain that governs them, and the frontier between their two faiths, the ancient divide between Goth and Frank, is overwhelmed by this reality. Before leaving these letters, we need to look at a further set of devices in the exchange that makes use of the body image to communicate important social and historical arguments. Throughout, the polemic remains rooted in differing interpretations of the Old Testament, and in an image of Judaism that only exists up to the coming of Christ. For Álvaro, the centrality of the Old Testament is made necessary for the Christian argument, so that former Jewish texts can prefigure the coming of Christianity: post-biblical Judaism ceased when the Old Testament gave way to the New Testament. 23 Judaism is an inheritance that is closed, as was understood in the earlier description of Bodo by Prudentius, where Bodo is exiled into the unfulfilled Judaic past. The foul language used by Álvaro in Letter XVII is a response to Eleazar’s view of the bodies of Jesus and Mary, since Eleazar questions the virgin birth (XVIII, 11). This provokes an extended rhetorical exercise from Álvaro, citing examples of miracles from the Old Testament that prove a virgin birth possible. Álvaro’s traditional argument around Old Testament citations takes place on two levels. First, the Jew is incapable of seeing the virgin birth, because he has rejected the Messiah: he is unable to understand the higher spiritual dimension of any argument. Second, he is trapped in a lower plane of physical existence. This position culminates in the association of purely physical and bodily functions to the Jewish view of reality. 24 Some of the most important details on this matter concern manners and morals at the Frankish court. This arises when Eleazar sets out the main reasons for his conversion to Judaism (XVII), although as there is a large extract that has been cut out by a later hand, it can only be 22

23 24

For the attitude of Álvaro and his circle to the Visigothic past, see R. Collins, ‘Poetry in Ninth Century Spain’, Papers of the Liverpool Seminar 4 (1984), pp. 185–95; L.A. García Moreno, ‘Spanish Gothic Consciousness among the Mozarabs in Al-Andalus (VIII–Xth centuries)’, in A. Ferrero (ed.), The Visigoths. Studies in Culture and Society (Brill, 1999), pp. 303–23. J. Cohen, Living Letters, p. 65. A.S. Abulafia, ‘Bodies in the Jewish–Christian Debate’, in S. Kay and M. Rubin (eds), Framing Medieval Bodies (Manchester, 1994), pp. 123–37, addresses the use of body imagery in the polemic, and in Abulafia, Christians and Jews, develops this argument in relation to the ‘Christianisation of thought’ in the twelfth century. These arguments in the Eleazar– Álvaro letters are an early example in the tradition of the polemic. For the development of the Jewish–Christian debate in Spain see Y. Baer, Historia de los Judíos en la España Cristiana, tr. J.L. Lacave (Barcelona, 1981).



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reconstructed from Álvaro’s reply in the next letter (XVIII). The principal reason for converting is given: a rigorous and exhaustive study of the Old Testament that has led him to criticize and reject his previous faith (XVIII, 2, 16). Then Eleazar insults the figure of Christ and the virgin birth (XVIII, 11–15), and also attacks the moral and religious laxity of the Frankish court (XVI, 2; XVIII, 14). Álvaro refuses to countenance Eleazar’s court descriptions. In fact, he uses these to undermine Eleazar’s assertions about Jesus, and parade ad hominem attacks that attribute the conversion to reasons of the flesh. He ends by suggesting that Eleazar should become a Muslim, as then he could taste as many women as he wished (XVIII, 16). Álvaro cannot accept that a Jew could look at his own actions and objectively view them as wrong or immoral: a Jew is incapable of reasoning about his behaviour. One of the other observations made by Eleazar, as reported by Álvaro, is that he has seen fourteen people at the court hold different religious views (XVIII, 14). This is an important remark. It might refer to theological debate at the Carolingian court or even be a criticism of the moral laxity of the clergy. Some of these issues will be addressed later when looking at Hincmar’s letter to Charles the Bald. Eleazar’s remarks are important because they place him amidst a chorus of voices that criticize religious and moral behaviour at court, particularly that of the clergy in the 820s and 830s.25 The long letter XVIII ends with an extended peroration reminiscent of the vision of an Old Testament prophet, who curses Eleazar and all Jews for their blindness: they shall remain dispersed and damned for unnumbered years (XVIII, 23). The final argument is that Judaism cannot see beyond the material existence of Christ’s body: Eleazar is a 25

Such troubled feelings give rise to texts like Prudentius’s dream in AB 839 and Strabo’s Visio Wettini where ‘Many of the abuses which Visio Wettini denounces – from its attack on the corruption of the counts (v.482 ff ) to its censure of monastic avarice, gluttony and sodomy (v.699–784) – link this text with the reforming party led by Benedict of Aniane’ (Godman, Poets and Emperors, pp. 131–2). For this visionary poem see D. Traill, Walahfrid Strabo’s Visio Wettini: Text, Translation, and Commentary (Frankfurt, 1974). These themes are carried over in a more subtle and oblique fashion in Strabo’s De imagine Tetrici (see n. 16) that reflects rising tensions between parties at court. Note the description given by Álvaro of Bodo’s own promiscuous activities with young ladies at the court (XVI, 2): ‘ita ut passim per diversarum feminarum concubitos in templo nostro te glories dulces tibi abuere complexos’ (Gil, p. 235). This suggests that Bodo, whilst critical of these practices, would have been an unwilling (?) participant or witness. Agobard’s criticisms of religious disunity echo Bodo’s fourteen faiths, when he states that five people sitting down together would have no law in common: Liber adversus legem Gundobardi, PL 104, p. 116. His Libri Apologetici contains criticisms of Judith and the ‘games’ that were carried out with young priests (ludat pueriliter) whilst other priests (ordine sacerdotali) looked on or joined in (colludentibus), PL 104, p. 314. For this background to Judith see E. Ward, ‘Agobard and Paschasius Radbertius as Critics of the Empress Judith’, Studies in Church History 27 (1990), pp. 15–25, and idem, ‘The Career of the Empress Judith’, pp. 178–9. Eleazar’s account can be added to this chorus of voices.




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sexual animal who can only read the Law literally and not interpret it figuratively in a Christian sense: For if you wish to understand the Law as carnal, not only do you attribute limbs to God, but you affirm that He is similar to you, and whilst you refuse to say that Christ is God, you make all men eternally equal to God.26 (XVIII, 2) The letters therefore show an exchange of views about Frankish and Visigothic culture where both sides appeal to the reconstituted past of the ‘True Israel’. Eleazar, a Frank, maintains the concern of the Frankish court with a model of Israel, but he has removed it from the political power of the Carolingians to claim it back for the Jews, with an expectation of sovereignty in some future. He even offers a precise date: AD 867–8. In the same way, Álvaro claims that he has access to Israel, which he associates with the line of the lost Visigothic kingdom, that will return in the future, in AD 870. In each case, two disempowered figures, removed from their original cultures (the Frankish empire and the Visigothic kingdom) seek to reclaim a discontinued lineage through an argument that tries to prove who has the better claim to an idealized vision of Israel. In this way arguments about personal belief, political instability and cultural loss, are all brought together. And such arguments are embodied in biblical commentary and exegesis that also appeals to corporeal images to make some of the points. It is worth pointing out that this was the argument, in reverse, that Deacon Bodo was actually making from a Jewish standpoint against Christian society when he decided to reject the Christian faith. Eleazar had also suggested in his description of the Frankish court that Christians lacked sexual control. The conclusion is that whilst this argument can be ‘christianized’, and an abandonment of social forms and religious practices by the Carolingian king or his people can be proclaimed, this can only be put forward by a Christian like Prudentius in his moral discourse in AB 839. In this way, the figure of Bodo is born out of the Christian moral critique of Christian society made by Prudentius. But, equally, the figure of Eleazar is born out of this same critique of Christian society made by a Jew. Again, in AB 839, descriptions of the body, associated with integration and disintegration, control and lack of control, and purity and impurity, organize many of the social and political issues, as in the 26

Gil, p. 246: ‘Nam si legem carnalem intelligere uolueris, non solum Deo membra adscribis, uerum etiam similem tibi eum firmauis, et dum refugis Deum dicere Xpm, omnem prorsus hominem Deo probabis equum.’



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letters examined. But a disproportionate emphasis on Old Testament examples suggests that recurring images of a strong king, imperial authority and social cohesion, predominate over individual salvation and a developed Christology of Jesus as contained in the New Testament. The political imagery associated with the AB 839 annal, and the arguments in the letters, to some extent convey a Christianity of the Father rather than of the Son.27 Similar arguments critical of Judaism and the influence of the Jewish religion upon Christianity, are repeated in the polemical work of Agobard and Amolo, both Spaniards (like Prudentius), who considered that the two religions were too close for comfort. 28 Amolo’s Liber Contra Judaeos, an anti-Jewish tract, also contains a reference to Bodo that makes use of most of the descriptive features of the earlier Prudentius source, and provides a picture of Bodo seen again from a Frankish viewpoint.

Bodo at the border (846–7) The Amolo text, whilst repeating the original Prudentius details of 839, also strikes a note of political confrontation between Frankish and Islamic empires. This ideological divide reflects a changed foreign policy situation at the time. The description of Bodo’s activities, as captured in Prudentius’s AB entry for 847, has a similar political tone to Amolo’s text.29 The annal for this year appears to link three issues: 27

28

29

M. De Jong, ‘Rethinking Early Medieval Christianity: A View from the Netherlands’, EME 7 (1998), pp. 261–75, at p. 271, suggests the concentration on the Old Testament by authors of the period indicates that they saw this as the ‘authoritative text’, whereas later medieval writers turned more to the Gospels and a more developed view of Christ’s Passion. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, p. 77, proposes this with regard to throne images, but more recently, C. Chazelle, The Crucified God in the Carolingian Era (Cambridge, 2001), advocates a more complete view based on an analysis of art and texts. For Agobard see J. Cohen, Living Letters, pp. 123–45. Cohen places Agobard in the Adversos Iudaeos tradition, but helpfully clarifies the connection of Agobard’s religious and political writings. He shows how all the tracts form one vision that attacks public policy concerning (a) Jewish economic privileges, (b) the distribution of ecclesiastical properties to the magnates, and (c) the King’s actions towards his sons with regard to the succession. Cohen stresses Agobard’s understanding of contemporary Jewish customs and beliefs: his knowledge of post-biblical Judaism was noteworthy. This is also picked up by Albert, ‘Adversus Iudeos’, pp. 138–42 who says that concern with day-to-day coexistence with Judaism, and a detailed legislative agenda, has its origin in knowledge of Visigothic laws on how to restrict Jews. See also A.J. Zuckerman, ‘The Political Uses of Theology: The Conflict of Bishop Agobard and the Jews of Lyon’, in J.R. Sommerfeldt (ed.), Studies in Medieval Culture 3 (1970), pp. 23–51. Amolo’s Liber contra Iudaeos can be dated six years after the letters. As some of the material from the Eleazar letters is similar it has been proposed that Amolo had sight of a copy, and this is underlined by the fact that Bodo reappears in this text. See Zuckerman, A Jewish Princedom, p. 303. Löwe, ‘Die Apostasie’, p. 158, n. 5 proposes that Deacon Florus actually wrote this text. As Florus was the Bishop’s secretary and co-authored several letters with Agobard it is possible, but we have left Amolo as the author. Chapter 42 from Amolo’s tract




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(i)

The visit of an Arab delegation from Córdoba sent by Abd alRahman II to negotiate a treaty with Charles the Bald. (ii) The story of Bodo’s efforts to urge Christians in Spain under Islam to convert to either Islam or Judaism or be killed. (iii) A reference to a petition sent by Christians in Spain to Charles to intervene on their behalf to stop such a choice between conversion or death. There was continuing unrest on the border during these years, which led to the negotiation of the peace treaty here mentioned. Musa Ibn Musa, head of the Banu Qasi clan, was in perpetual revolt against the Caliphate, and the West Frankish king Charles the Bald took advantage by intervening in the politics of the region and seeking to ally himself with Musa. Equally, the authorities in Córdoba supported a rebellion in the Frankish border region in 847 that included the count of Gascony and Charles’s nephew Pippin. In addition, the Cordovan Martyrs became prominent with the first execution in April 850, and religious tension may have been building earlier, affecting exchanges between Franks and Arabs. This is probably responsible for the reference to Bodo urging Christians to convert or die. Despite the textual linking of these three issues, there is no evidence to suggest any actual connection between them. The AB 847 source has usually been cited to suggest that Bodo ‘attempted to persuade the amir Abd al-Rahman II to force his Christian subjects to abjure their faith, expecting that they would thereby be driven into the folds of Islam or Judaism’. 30 This AB source does not actually state that Bodo had any dealings with the authorities, or that any proclamation was made or pamphlets written. There is no surviving document that confirms a petition by Spanish Christians to the king. On the other hand, there is no reason to doubt that Eleazar may have continued some form of proselytizing activity. Another aspect of the Martyrs’ viewpoint was a conflict between radical Christians such as Álvaro, and Christian bishops who wanted to coexist with the Arab state. It is also possible that the AB 847 source reflects

30

describes Bodo-Eleazar and dwells on what he has left behind and his passing to the other state: ‘Quod enim nunquam antea gestum meminimus, seductus est ab eis diaconus palatinus, nobiliter natus, nobiliter nutritus et in ecclesiae officiis exercitatus . . . deseret palatium, deseret patriam et parentes, deseret penitus Christianorum regnum: et nunc apud Hispaniam inter Saracenos Judaeis sociatus, persuasus sit ab impiis Christum Dei filium negare, baptismi gratiam profanare, circumcisionem carnalem accipere, nomen sibi mutare, ut qui antea Bodo, nunc Eleazar appelatur’ (PL 116, p. 171). R. Collins, Early Medieval Spain, p. 201. Blumenkranz, Juifs et Chrétiens, p. 209, also advances this, and speculates the Bodo brought out pamphlets. J.L. Nelson, ‘The Franks, the Martyrology of Usuard, and the Martyrs of Córdoba’, Studies in Church History 30 (1993), pp. 67– 80, covers the political context.



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such rising tensions between moderate and radical Christians within Muslim territory. This entire subject has become part of a wider debate among some historians who see the Cordovan Martyrs as a movement that was part of an anti-Muslim rebellion supported by outside Christian powers: i.e. the West Frankish king. The full implications of this debate lie beyond the scope of this work. 31 The most important points to be made here are two: first, that the 840 letters already foreshadow a number of these matters, and second, that the description of Bodo’s activities are fragmentary and confused. They do not give any indication of any proclamation, or contact with Muslim authorities.

Bodo remembered (876) The story of Bodo usually ends here. But a letter written many years later lends a final retrospective view of Bodo’s career. Hincmar’s text, like the last line of a sonnet, provides the unexpected insight that weaves back through earlier verses, altering the meaning and the relationships that were read at the beginning of the poem. Again, as in a sonnet, there is ambiguity at the end of the journey of Deacon Bodo. In a letter to Charles the Bald in the 870s, Hincmar introduces Anastasius’s translation of the life of Dionysius the Areopagite. The text of this letter covers several other matters in an implicit fashion. The document provides a miniature recapitulation of Hincmar’s early career and its waning influence; Hincmar’s role in the promotion of the cult of St Denis; and a comment and critique on the sources of royal power with special reference to the abbey of St-Denis. Woven into this picture is a little-noted set of references to Bodo’s early career. All these events had taken place long before the letter’s composition. This letter has been commented on by others with regard to the origin and development of the cult of St Denis. Although this subject is not our main concern, it is necessary to examine briefly certain of its aspects in attempting to explain the references to Bodo. In the letter Hincmar is anxious to prove that this new translation of the life of the Areopagite was preceded by the one he worked on with Hilduin around 827. To achieve this, he fashions a chain of events and recollections that begin over half a century earlier. This story is told to confirm Hincmar’s role and authority in the first discovery and 31

Nelson, ‘The Franks’, p. 73, says that there may have been outside support; Wolf, Christian Martyrs, pp. 36–47, shows that the historiographical treatment of the Cordovan Martyrs has variously presented this episode as (a) a precursor to modern Spanish identity and nationhood, (b) a rebellion against the Muslim State, (c) a religious cult that formed the prelude to a Messianic era. Bachrach, Early Medieval Jewish Policy, pp. 114–16, examines the Jewish role in the border region at this time.




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dissemination of the cult of the most important saint associated with the royal Frankish line and the abbey of St-Denis. The abbey was favoured by Charles, who took over the position of lay abbot in 867. Hincmar seeks also to remind Charles that he was centrally involved in the future king’s success during the critical period of the 820s and early 830s, a time when Charles was born and his father Louis was under constant threat from his other sons. The close association between Charles, the abbey, and the cult of the saint is an important part of his royal authority: Hincmar tells Charles that he was instrumental in giving him that authority, and also criticizes Charles for its abuse. 32 This is a late statement by Hincmar of one of the central beliefs of his career: that royal power comes from the support of the church and prelates like himself. The subtext of this letter is therefore a strong but veiled attack on Charles, and it enlists the memory of Bodo to achieve this. 33 The story told constructs a connection to the past by introducing another document within the letter concerning the life of St Sanctinus, whom tradition holds to have been the second bishop of Meaux after St Denis. It is likely that Hincmar is citing this tradition to reinforce the Dionysian theme of his account. 34 This source not only illuminates long forgotten details of Bodo’s early career, it also illustrates how the past is recreated and recollected to suit the aims of the letter’s author. 32

33

34

G. Brown, ‘Politics and Patronage at the Abbey of St. Denis (814–98). The Rise of a Royal Patron Saint’, D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford (1989), pp. 402–4. Brown shows how Hincmar’s writings try to demonstrate that Charles’s treatment of the abbey of St-Denis brought tragedy and military defeat, by linking certain dates of these occurrences to the feast day of St Denis (9 October). He says that Hincmar was incensed by Charles’s assumption of the lay abbacy. J.L. Nelson, ‘History-Writing at the Courts of Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald’, in Rulers and Ruling Families in Early Medieval Europe (Aldershot, 1999), pp. 435– 42, at p. 442, points out that in AB 869 and 872 Hincmar denounced the king’s conduct using a ‘Dionysian code’. For the Hincmar text see PL 126, pp. 153–4. J. Devisse, Hincmar. Archevêque de Reims, 3 vols (Geneva, 1976) II, 803, 1007; and Löwe, ‘Die Apostasie’, p. 159 give background. I wish to thank Janet Nelson for clarifying difficulties with regard to the translation of the Hincmar letter, and also for making useful suggestions generally. I must also thank Matthew Innes for his insightful comments and observations. The editors of EME made most helpful editorial contributions. Hincmar is relying on the Vita Faronis, MGH SSRM V, pp. 171–203, by Hildegard of Meaux written around 865. This Life contains several points with regard to Hincmar’s letter. First, the Vita alleges that St Denis was the first bishop of Meaux and Sanctinus his successor. Therefore the booklet about St Sanctinus mentioned in the letter reinforces the Dionysian credibility of Hincmar’s story and ‘trumps’ Anastasius’s translation, as Hincmar has saved a very old document (Vita, Ch. 67, p. 182). Second, Hincmar refers in the letter to the Viking sack of Meaux and that sadly the original little book did not survive. This is a scarcely veiled criticism of Charles, as it was held that he had collaborated with the Northmen to allow the sack of Meaux, for which Hildegard attacks Charles (Vita, Chs 123–6, pp. 200–1). This criticism is perhaps carried on with a reference to the capture of Abbot Louis of St-Denis by pirates (Vita, Ch. 124, p. 200). For background to this see N. Wylie, ‘The Vita Faronis, Bishop Hildegar of Meaux, and West Frankish Politics 855–862’, BA dissertation, King’s College London (1989). I thank Neville Wylie for making this available to me. For traditions of Meaux see L. Duchesne, L’Ancienne Gaule, 2 vols (Paris, 1910), II, 476–7.



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Such has also been the case with the other sources that have been looked at. But in this example, Bodo’s memory is appropriated by Hincmar for an entirely different purpose. In 839 Prudentius textually dismembered Bodo and sent him into exile; Lupus used him as a scapegoat for the loss of a letter. Now Hincmar links him with the story of a book associated with a critique of royal power. Bodo is mentioned for reasons other than apostasy and exile. Bodo’s apparent influence and proximity to royal circles is probably used to criticize the prestige and authority of Charles’s mother and even refer to Charles’s own childhood, in the light of Bodo’s later espousal of Judaism. Hincmar takes care in this letter to Charles to set out a sequence of events leading to the survival of the Sanctinus book: a text within a text. He begins the story with Charles’s birth in Frankfurt in 823, the year in which Hucbert is made bishop of Meaux. The next sentence tells us that Bodo, a friend of Hucbert, helped to place Wandelmar, a relative of his, in Meaux to teach chant (‘quemdam clericum ipsium Bodonis propinquum nomine Wandelmarum’). According to the letter, Wandelmar had been trained by Teutgar at St-Denis. We are also told that Bodo served under Abbot Hilduin, also lord and patron of Hincmar. Hucbert had been director of the palace choir and was then charged with the reform of the choir and liturgy at Meaux. It is noteworthy that Bodo is a link in a chain of people, recognized for their standing and knowledge of music and liturgy. There is more than a suggestion that attitudes to chant were indicative of wider issues and political positions. At St-Denis two camps created uncertainty at the abbey from 817 onwards, to which was added the short exile of Hilduin in 830. Hilduin’s association after 830 with the cult of St Denis and the translation of the Dionysian texts, was part of this political struggle. The references to all these figures tied to Bodo suggest that he may have been caught up in these debates and conflicts, which survive in the 840 exchange of letters with Álvaro.35 These connections are important, for they also clarify Bodo’s Alemannic lineage as he is related to Wandelmar. But the text does not make clear that Wandelmar’s move 35

On music and chant: S. Rankin, ‘Carolingian Music’, in McKitterick (ed.), Carolingian Culture, pp. 274–316. For Hilduin’s career see P. Depreux, La prosopographie, pp. 250–6. For background see Brown, Politics and Patronage, pp. 207–329. Wandlemar trained at St-Denis under magister Teutgarius. For St-Denis background A.W. Robertson, The Service Books of the Royal Abbey of St. Denis (Oxford, 1991), pp. 34–43, and pp. 327–8 is important. This affair echoes the chorus of voices about the morals of clergy who are of no clear status and the ‘fluidity’ of the court chapel (see above nn. 1 and 25). In this struggle at St-Denis, Robertson suggests that the abbey ‘entrusted their internal Government to members of the royal house in the mid-ninth century’, p. 43. This picks up Hincmar’s criticism of royal power made in the letter. I must thank Susan Rankin for leading me to the wider background to this question on music.




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to Meaux took place in 823, nor that Bodo’s presence in the abbey can be fixed in that year. A later date for Wandelmar’s move makes more sense, because Hucbert only found upon his arrival in Meaux ‘that certain issues with regard to science and religion had been unattended’, and this would have been the reason for Wandelmar’s subsequent posting. Nevertheless, Hincmar’s letter seems artfully to tie all these happenings to Charles’s birth, even though some events happened later. Because Bodo is close to Strabo, who arrived at the court in 829 to be royal tutor to the prince, it is likely that Bodo’s influence may date from this period. Bodo’s role in Wandelmar’s appointment could have happened in the 830s. Whatever the exact date, Hincmar describes Bodo as a person with important family connections and influence. There is also no verifiable evidence of Bodo’s birth date for an accurate chronology. The only indirect reference is Strabo’s poem addressed to Bodo, written probably after 829. In this poem Bodo is described as a young boy, or younger than Strabo, who was born in 809. Recalling events for a purpose so many years later in the 870s, Hincmar has probably conflated the birth of Charles the Bald in 823 with some later acts of Bodo such as his role in Wandelmar’s appointment to Meaux. A closer analysis of Strabo’s poem suggests a relationship that dates from earlier times and may also link both Bodo and Strabo’s companion, Gottschalk.36 The fact that three sources (Prudentius, Amolo, Hincmar) stress either noble birth or Aleman background, would suggest Bodo was well placed in the Alemannic kinship system with powerful patrons. Given 36

See MGH Poet Lat II, 386. Bodo is described as ‘Pusio candidule, candide pusiole’, certainly a young boy or younger than Strabo who was born in 809. Cabaniss, ‘Bodo-Eleazar’, p. 316, says ‘Assuming a difference of no more than five years, we may suppose that Bodo was born about the time of Charlemagne’s death and the accession of Louis the Pious (814)’, but this would make him nine years old in 823. A closer reading of Strabo’s poem indicates that it may also have been referring to events well before 829, the date of Strabo’s arrival at court to become Charles’s tutor. Bodo is referred to in the title as ‘Yppodiaconum’, a sub-deacon, so is he more junior? The phraseology gives the sense of three parts to the poem: that Strabo was a mentor or tutor to Bodo; that they parted when the young Bodo left to go elsewhere; that he has gone to serve a higher patron whom he must strive to please as he is destined for high office. Could this be the emperor or Hilduin at St-Denis? It is also likely that this poem was written after 825, even if it might refer to an earlier time. This is because this is the date of Gottschalk’s much more important poem ‘Ut quid iubes, pusiole’, which is possibly set at Reichenau and features a language referring to exile. The same note of exile and departure, on a lesser scale, permeates Strabo’s poem, together with the unusual word ‘pusiole’, as mentioned by Cabaniss in ‘Bodo-Eleazar’, p. 318. The word was probably first used by Gottschalk and imitated by Strabo. When these two were together at Reichenau and Fulda they would have shared poems, ideas, and even special terms of endearment. For a discussion of this poem see P. Godman, Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance (Duckworth, 1985), pp. 40–3. Given Strabo’s later well-known interest in plants and herbs, the tree or plant mentioned in line 3 might not only be a metaphor for the growth of friendship or cultivation and education of Bodo, but an actual one they planted together at an earlier time in the gardens at Reichenau. I am grateful to David Traill for this suggestion and to David Ganz for comments on the poem.



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that Empress Judith was also of the same background, it is not impossible that Bodo’s career and advancement were associated with her. This would explain Bodo’s association with circles at the court to which Judith has been linked, and which Bodo mentions some years later in the 840 letters. It would also account for some of the scandal and distress described by Prudentius: through close association or kinship and his proximity to Strabo, Bodo was probably at the centre of Judith’s party. The Prudentius text also mentions that Bodo enjoyed the empress’s favour, and how distressed she was at his conversion. All this would have made the issue of Bodo’s apostasy even more sensitive, as it would have been seen to reflect badly on Judith’s position and her alleged activities. Hincmar’s veiled reminder to the king of these background details may not be coincidental. Bodo’s career may even have been down to Judith. The letter from Hincmar, one of the most important figures of this period, ties the memory of Bodo to her son, perhaps – given Bodo’s later apostasy – as a criticism of Charles. It stresses Bodo’s friendship with the empress and the young prince, when Charles was tutored by Bodo’s friend, Strabo, from 829 to 838. 37 The story of Bodo is dominated by a note of dissent that became so extreme it led to exile. Exile (actual or internal) links two Aleman figures – Bodo and Strabo – and also a Saxon, Gottschalk. In Strabo’s case his major poems contain an ambiguous condemnation of the morals of the court and the clergy. It is open to question how far Bodo may have been influenced by Strabo, a strong critic, but too much of a courtier to express himself openly. The years 838–9 see all three exiled or seeking exile. Strabo was removed from the abbacy of Reichenau on Louis’s death, although he later regained the post. Bodo chose apostasy to manifest his dissent from the religion and morals of the court. Gottschalk rebelled against the discipline of orthodox monasticism and fled to preach a controversial doctrine. Shortly after Bodo had carried out the same deception, Gottschalk too pretended to go on a pilgrimage to Rome in order to escape. Bodo’s scant texts and Strabo’s poems, contain prophecies and visions that communicate unease and criticism of society. In the case of the two Alemans, their dissent seems to lead back to Reichenau and Fulda, the academies that shaped Gottschalk and Strabo, and possibly 37

P.J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance. Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, 1994), pp. 11–13. The process of banishment, and the collective ‘forgetting’ of Bodo illustrates Geary’s argument, as does the later ‘remembering’ by Hincmar. Hincmar’s letter also extends the life of Bodo in a textual sense. Eleazar does not ‘vanish from recorded history’ after 847 as suggested by Cabaniss, ‘Bodo-Eleazar’, p. 328. Zuckerman, A Jewish Princedom, p. 284, adds that records of the Babylonian academies speak of a student-scholar ‘Eleazar of Ispania’ for the years 853–8. This is cited in J. Mann, Texts and Studies in Jewish History and Literature, 2 vols (New York, 1972), I, 64.




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also Bodo. It is likely that Bodo passed through one of these centres. Other texts written at Reichenau seem to carry on this note of opposition: it is perhaps the case that monastic centres were far from unquestioning in their support of the ‘royal cultural programme’. How much opposition existed, and what form did it take? Bodo’s career reveals what one study has called ‘a deep seated urge in Carolingian society to seek dimensions of religious experience beyond the acceptance of a few basic credal formulations and the observance of prescribed cult practices’. It also suggests that there may have been a more widespread incidence of Jewish proselytism.38 Given the extreme political conflicts of the period and the unease and chorus of criticism, it is not to be wondered that the Carolingian spin doctors sometimes failed to keep everyone ‘on message’. In looking closely at Bodo’s story we find more questions arise to be answered: it seems that the journey of Deacon Bodo is far from over. Department of History, Birkbeck

38

R.E. Sullivan, ‘The Context of Cultural Authority in the Carolingian Age’, in R.E. Sullivan (ed.), The Gentle Voices of Teachers. Aspects of Learning in the Carolingian Age (Columbus, OH, 1995), pp. 51–105, at pp. 71–5; P. Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming, p. 75, examines what Sullivan calls those ‘deep-seated urges’ through the dream genre. Dutton looks at Strabo’s Visio Wettini and other dream texts produced at Reichenau and sees ‘a monastic laboratory’ of dreams. On Gottschalk, D. Ganz, ‘The Debate on Predestination’, in M. Gibson and J.L. Nelson (eds), Charles the Bald: Court and Kingdom (Aldershot, 1990), pp. 283–302; D.E. Nineham, ‘Gottschalk of Orbais: Reactionary or Precursor of the Reformation?’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 40 (1989), pp. 1–18. On Jewish proselytism, there is a neglected story about the conversion of Christians to Judaism from the ninth century on. Other prominent figures are mentioned, such as the cleric Wecelin, Obadiah, and Andreas bishop of Bari. All these had to flee into exile like Bodo. An examination of genizah documents found in Cairo, and other records, suggests that there could have been as many as 15,000 such converts from Christendom arriving in Jewish communities over the following two centuries. See N. Golb, Jewish Proselytism: A Phenomenon in the Religious History of Early Mediaeval Europe (Cincinnati, OH, 1987), p. 36. Bodo’s journey from Alemannia to Babylon (if true) is also an important addition to the many examples of long-distance travel and communication in the ninth century, as featured by McCormick, The Origins, pp. 123–280. McCormick also refers to Gottschalk in the chapter entitled ‘Traders, Slaves and Exiles’, on pp. 260–1.



Æthelweardus redivivus W  J 

The tenth-century Chronicon Æthelweardi has usually been treated as nothing more than a Latin translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This article reinterprets it by postulating the chronicle’s originality and its author’s careful consideration of its composition. Both the content and the form of the Chronicon Æthelweardi are here discussed from several points of view: the question of the coming of the Anglo-Saxons to Britain; the ideological and narrative consequences of the book division and the use of time; and Æthelweard’s use of genealogy.

Introduction Since the publication of the most recent edition in 1962, the Chronicle of Æthelweard`1 has not met with sympathetic treatment and has been (as before this date), only examined in specific contexts or used for comparative studies. It seems that the disdainful opinion of William of Malmesbury, expressed in the twelfth century in his Gesta regum, that ‘it is better to be silent about Elwardus, a distinguished and outstanding man, who attempted to explain those chronicles in Latin, and whose purpose would have my approval, if his language did not disgust me’, was so enduring that it has hardly been challenged. 2 This belief, shared by Sir Frank M. Stenton in his Anglo-Saxon England, has thus long marginalized the importance of the chronicle. 3 Such contempt for Æthelweard’s language has been challenged only in the thorough editorial introduction provided by Alistair Campbell in 1962 and in a very important, but alas short, article by Michael Winterbottom. 4 Apart from these two contributions, the Chronicle of Æthelweard has remained * 1

2 3 4

This article would not have appeared without the encouragement and comments of my Masters Thesis supervisor, Professor Jacek Banaszkiewicz from the University of Warsaw. Æthelweard, The Chronicle of Æthelweard, ed. and trans. A. Campbell (London, 1962); all translations of Æthelweard’s text are taken from this edition. In the prologue to the Gesta regum. F.M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1955), p. 455. M. Winterbottom, ‘The Style of AEthelweard’, Medium Ævum 36 (1967), pp. 109–18.

Early Medieval Europe   ()  – © Blackwell Publishing Ltd ,  Garsington Road, Oxford OX DQ, UK and  Main Street, Malden, MA , USA

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without a serious treatment, discussed mainly as just another, albeit Latin, version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The present article is an attempt to fill the gap and propose new approaches to this tenth-century work. It will be argued that the chronicle is an original and interesting text in itself, still worth examining in many aspects. First, the article will deal with the composition of the account of the adventus Saxonum, and with Æthelweard’s modifications and innovations of his sources. Second, it will focus on the various narrative and chronological strategies employed by the author, such as book division and the use of genealogies. Before we start our examination of the text, however, a short introduction to the chronicle is required. Its author was the ealdorman of the south-western shires of Wessex who witnessed charters as dux between 973 (or 975) and 977. In the chronicle he states that he was the descendant of King Æthelred I (865–71), son of King Æthelwulf, and this origin connected him to the addressee of his work. Doubtlessly, as it is stated in the letter preceding the work and in the prefaces to the books, the chronicle was composed at the request of Mathilda, abbess of the monastery of Essen, who was the daughter of Liudolf, son of Otto the Great and Edith. Edith was the granddaughter of Alfred the Great, who was the younger brother of the above-mentioned Æthelred. Therefore, as stated by Æthelweard, King Æthelwulf was their first common ancestor and the author was entitled to call Mathilda his consobrina. The Chronicon Æthelweardi must have been written after 975 as this is the date of King Edgar’s death and the last event entered into the text. It appears that its origin is related to the connection between the ealdorman and the abbess. The circumstances of how this connection was established are vague, but it is likely that it took place after the year 982, when Mathilda’s brother, Duke Otto of Suabia and Bavaria died in the course of Otto II’s campaign against the Byzantines and Muslems in the south of Italy. The abbess, realizing that she was the last remaining member of the Anglo-Saxon line in the Reich, decided to turn to her English relatives for information on her family’s genealogy and history.5 This hypothesis is strengthened by the observation that high-ranking women were often responsible for the preservation of a family’s past. In 5

For the identification of Mathilda, the activity of Æthelweard, and the emergence of the chronicle see: R.L. Poole, ‘The Alpine Son-in-Law of Edward the Elder’, in R.L. Poole, Studies in Chronology and History, ed. A.L. Poole (Oxford, 1934), pp. 115–22; L. Whitbread, ‘AEthelweard and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’, EHR 74 (1959), pp. 577–89; Campbell, Chronicle of Æthelweard, pp. xii–xvi; E. van Houts, ‘Women and the Writing of History in the Early Middle Ages: The Case of Abbess Matilda of Essen and Aethelweard’, EME 1 (1992), pp. 53–68; S. Miller, ‘Æthelweard’, in M. Lapidge, J. Blair, S. Keynes and D. Scragg (eds), The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 2001), p. 18.



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the tenth century this was very common in Ottonian Germany, and it is therefore not unlikely that Mathilda would have followed suit. 6 In particular, those women who became abbesses were meant to fulfil the role of preserving the past. Because of their longevity (due to the favourable conditions in which they lived, and also because they did not face the dangers of childbirth), they were particularly suited to the transmission of memory of the family, its members, deeds, genealogy, and burial places. Abbesses were given necrologies, memorial books, and written genealogies of people for whom they were asked to pray. For instance, when only thirteen (968) Mathilda of Quedlinburg received on her grandmother’s deathbed (Queen Mathilda I, King Henry I’s widow), a roll with the names of people for whose souls she was expected to pray. Some similar necrologies and lists have survived in the form of books or codices, which were passed on in the female line for several generations to commemorate ancestors. 7 Such a practice would have been familiar to Æthelweard since it also existed in AngloSaxon England.8 From the materials at their disposal, we can see what these abbesses were required to impart. First, families wanted them to have a precise genealogy and lineage as these women were expected to pray for and remember the people of their stock. Genealogies were often traced back to legendary pagan or Christian ancestors in order to raise the importance of the house.9 Second, these abbesses wished to establish the burial places of their male kin, as memory and commemoration were less effectively linked to the abstract soul than to an actual grave in a particular abbey or church. Sometimes this information can seem to read more like a graveyard catalogue or a tomb robber’s shopping-list, than a religious and devout request for preservation from oblivion. 10 Third, the families desired an account of the deeds of these men: their heroic (even if pagan) origins, their martial acts, their dedication to God, the miracles which happened to them and on their behalf, their connections with the saints.11 6

7

8 9

10 11

P.J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance. Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, 1994), pp. 51–73, esp. pp. 66–8. E. van Houts, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe, 900 –1200 (London, 1999), pp. 67–8; Houts, ‘Women and the Writing of History’, p. 58. Houts, Memory and Gender, p. 71. A. Gransden, Historical Writing in England, 2 vols (London, 1974), I, 44–5; see also Chronicle of Æthelweard, pp. 1–2, 15, 26, 34. Houts, ‘Women and the Writing’, p. 64. E. Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, tr. R. Manheim (New York, 1965), pp. 266–7. Note the growing interest in saints’ relics both in Ottonian Germany and particularly in Anglo-Saxon England at that time, which forced kings and emperors as well as the nobility to purchase these remains: P.J. Geary, Furta sacra. Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages, rev. edn (Princeton, 1990), pp. 49–52.



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It seems that these demands stemmed not only from an interest in the past for its own sake, although such interest should not be underestimated. Knowledge of history and the family’s past were necessary for present, topical reasons. For a start, history had an obvious relation to politics – a family which could display a more ancient origin, and trace its descent further into the past, had a better justification for its rule over the country. History also created a collective self-representation, constituting a royal, noble, ecclesiastical, or abbatial identity. 12 In the case of Æthelweard there was also another dimension to this identification – a common Saxon past that connected England and the Ottonian Reich. It is obvious that Æthelweard knew this community of abbesses, authors and families well, and thoroughly understood its aims and desires. Perhaps he himself had sent his kinswoman Abbess Wulfwin of Wareham (mentioned under the year 982 in ASC ‘C’) to her nunnery, where she was responsible for the recollection and redemption of their common family.13 As we shall see from the following, his close family and cultural connections to the monastic community enabled him to fulfil its expectations while writing his chronicle. It is a truism to say that every historical work is a message, but in the case of commissioned works this statement has an additional dimension as we are able to say something about the intended readers. Æthelweard’s writing of the chronicle was a duty which he decided to perform in any way he could and to the best of his abilities.

Æthelweard’s version of the adventus Saxonum In the quest for Æthelweard’s intent in writing an account of the coming of the Saxons to Britain, his work has to be juxtaposed with its sources, namely Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (ASC ). It is obvious that Æthelweard followed the latter as his main source, but it is worth investigating why, in what way, and to what extent he decided to use Bede’s work. As is generally acknowledged, Æthelweard took his view on the adventus Saxonum from the Historia ecclesiastica (I, 12–15).14 However, he significantly abbreviated Bede’s text 12

13 14

J.L. Nelson, ‘History-Writing at the Courts of Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald’, in A. Scharer and G. Scheibelreiter (eds), Historiographie im frühen Mittelalter (Vienna and Munich, 1994), pp. 435–42, at p. 437. Whitbread, ‘AEthelweard’, p. 583. Although he used the Old English version, this is irrelevant in the present discussion as the Latin and vernacular texts contain the same information. Campbell, Chronicle of Æthelweard, p. xxxvi, esp. n. 3; E.E. Barker, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Used by Aethelweard’, Bulletin of the Institute of History Research 40 (1967), pp. 75–91, at p. 75.




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and introduced excerpts into his chronicle to follow the overall structure of the ASC. As with the ASC, Æthelweard begins with the annal of 409 reporting the Sacco di Roma by the Goths and the incapacity of the Romans to intervene in Britain. Then he draws upon Bede and follows him until reaching the date of 449, when the Saxons came to Britain for the first time. He recounts all the wars of the Saxons against the Picts and Scots, those against the Britons and finally the Saxons’ possession of Britain. All this, clearly dependent on Bede, is reported in the poetics of a timeless folk tale’s ‘once upon a time’; although a lucid chain of events is given, they are not ascribed to any particular date. Æthelweard finishes with the expulsion of the Britons from their lands ‘into certain narrow promontories’ and says that this state of affairs has lasted to his times. At this point he turns back to the ASC, using the annal of 418 (sic) reporting the concealment of treasure by the Romans living in Britain and their departure to exile in Gaul. Under the annal of 430 he relates the expedition of Bishop Palladius sent by Pope Celestinus to Ireland. Then, under the annal of 449, he again describes the coming of the Saxons, and this time the account follows only the ASC without any additions or abbreviations. 15 This apparently unskilful arrangement which confuses the dating and the order of events enabled Æthelweard to preserve two traditions of the adventus Saxonum, which in his opinion were both valid and deserved to be transmitted. Even if the Historia ecclesiastica lacked the ASC ’s status as ‘official history’, it was the best-known and authoritative history from Anglo-Saxon England.16 Æthelweard could not omit it in his composition if he wanted to elaborate on the origins of the Anglo-Saxons. Why did Æthelweard decide to expand the information about this episode in Anglo-Saxon history? There are at least three stands that need to be discussed. First, it seems that Æthelweard was deeply interested in the geography both of the Saxons’ land of origin and their distribution over Britain, whereas the scribe of the ASC remains silent

15 16

Chronicle of Æthelweard, pp. 5–10. There is an ongoing discussion whether the ASC was an official history of the house of Wessex or not. It seems that during the Edward the Elder’s rule it became a part of the official propaganda, as Æthelweard’s chronicle bears evidence that the ASC was changed in favour of Edward the Elder, who was trying to shadow Alfred the Great’s achievements. Also the deliberate dispersion of the ASC after its composition points to a motivation to make it into an English history. For this discussion see: Gransden, Historical Writing in England, pp. 34– 5; A. Gransden, ‘The Chronicles of Medieval England and Scotland: Part I’, Journal of Medieval History 16 (1990), pp. 129–50, esp. pp. 136–7; A. Scharer, ‘König Alfreds Hof und die Geschichtsschreibung. Einige Überlegungen zur Angelsachsenchronik und zu Assers De rebus gestis Aelfredi ’, in Scharer and Scheibelreiter (eds), Historiographie im frühen Mittelalter, pp. 443–58, at pp. 448 –50; A. Scharer, Herrschaft und Repräsentation. Studien zur Hofkultur König Alfreds des Großen (Vienna and Munich, 2000), pp. 57–8.



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on this.17 This interest is clearly inherited from Bede, who in describing the pattern of settlement of the invaders ‘was here reading history backwards, trying to account for the territories of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of his own day and thinking in terms of boundaries (which did not exist in the migration period)’.18 This is why Bede confuses the location of various peoples, mixing Jutes with Saxons, and erroneously identifies certain territories of settlement, for instance describing the people of the Isle of Wight as Kentishmen. 19 Such claims for the separateness of people during the migration period and the extrapolation of political units from author’s own time into the past, was common in medieval historiography, especially when dealing with the Scandinavian origin to which some continental authors ascribed their people. 20 Bede was particularly concerned with migration and movements, and he thus preferred to write about people in their new lands rather than about their prehistory. As Kenneth Harrison puts it, ‘he contented himself with demonstrating the existence of a pagan society, ready for Augustine to convert’.21 Æthelweard, however, chose to define accurately the geography of the Saxons’ land of origin, making a few significant additions to his source. He states that the Saxons were pirates along ‘the whole coastal stretch from the river Rhine to Donia, which is now called Denmark by the common people’. 22 He also claims that the old land of the Angles lay ‘between the Saxons and Jutes, and has as its capital the town known in the Saxon language as Schleswig, but by the Danes as Hedeby’.23 Referring to the land from which the Saxons originated but also giving it the name of Schleswig, he once again evokes the common origin of his and Mathilda’s people. Æthelweard’s interest in geography is also supported by his frequently adding to information drawn from the ASC, specifying the location of battles, and the burial places of saints and kings. 17

18 19

20

21 22

23

W. Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800). Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede and Paul the Deacon (Princeton, NJ, 1988), p. 93: ‘The reason to commemorate the land that one originates from is that, in theory, it is a place to which one may return if need be: Aeneas, fleeing the ruin of Troy, sought out the ancient home of the Trojans and began by finalizing the wrong one. Jordanes’s apparent design was to seal off or foreclose whatever possibilities of relocation the Goths might have thought themselves to have.’ Gransden, Historical Writing in England, pp. 23–4. B. Yorke, ‘The Jutes of Hampshire and Wight and the Origins of Wessex’, in S. Bassett (ed.), The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms (London and New York, 1989), pp. 84–96, at p. 88. S. Reynolds, ‘Medieval Origines gentium and the Community of the Realm’, History 68 (1983), pp. 375–90, esp. pp. 378–9. K. Harrison, The Framework of Anglo-Saxon History to A.D. 900 (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 19–20. Chronicle of Æthelweard, pp. 6–7: ‘in tota maritime a Rheno fluuio usque in Doniam urbem, quae nunc vulgo Danmarc nuncpatur’. Æthelweard presents Denmark as an urbs by mistake, for he positively knew that Denmark was not a city, see: Campbell, Chronicle of Æthelweard, p. xxxv, n. 3. Chronicle of Æthelweard, p. 9: ‘inter Saxones et Giotos, habens oppidum capitale, quod sermone Saxonico Slesuuic nuncpatur, secundum vero Danos, Haithaby’.




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Second, Æthelweard was deeply interested in the expanded legend of the foundation of Anglo-Saxon rule over Britain. Obviously, the arrival of Hengest and Horsa gave birth to the kingdom of Kent, not of Wessex, but Æthelweard skilfully omits this fact. Bede says: ‘Then the nation of the Angles, or Saxons, being invited by the aforesaid king, arrived in Britain with three long ships, and had a place assigned them to reside in by the king, in the eastern part of the island’. 24 Æthelweard, however, does not recount where Hengest’s and Horsa’s ships docked, merely relating briefly: ‘proiicitur ancora ponto, stant in littore puppes’ (‘the anchor is thrown ashore, the ships stand by the shore’). 25 In this respect the adventus Saxonum is the coming of all Anglo-Saxons to Britain and does not mean that only the Kentishmen should be proud of Hengest and Horsa: quite the contrary, it is meant to symbolize the whole exodus from Germania. Moreover, Æthelweard deliberately overlooked Bede’s sentence about the monument with the inscription relating to Horsa which was built for him in Kent. 26 For the ealdorman, Hengest and Horsa are the heroes of all Anglo-Saxons and cannot be treated as the monopoly of any one kingdom, as it was claimed in the royal tradition of Æthelberht’s house. 27 The phrase in which Æthelweard describes the docking of the ships – stant in littore puppes – has a clear parallel in the wording of the Aeneid, and doubtlessly Æthelweard quotes Virgil verbatim. This is the central moment of the Aeneid, ‘when Aeneas returned from the underworld and sailed his fleet to Caieta’, and for Æthelweard ‘Hengest and Horsa landed as fatefully in England as did Aeneas in Italy’. 28 The quotation from the epic strengthens the argument that Æthelweard’s intention was to present the coming of the Saxons in a more general and legendary way than had been done in the Historia ecclesiastica. The arrival of the Saxons resembles the coming of any people to a new land ready to be conquered. He frames his source to give it a more origo gentis-like touch.

24

25 26

27

28

Beda Venerabilis, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum/Kirchengeschichte des englischen Volkes, ed. and trans. G. Spitzbart, 2 vols (Darmstadt, 1982), vol. 1, I, 15, p. 58: ‘tunc Anglorum siue Saxonum gens, inuitata a rege prefato, Brittaniam tribus longis nauibus aduehitur, et in orientali parte insulae, iubente eodem rege, locum manendi’. Translation from Bede the Venerable, The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, tr. J Stevens, rev. tr. by J.A. Giles with notes by L.C. Jane (London, 1978), p. 22. Chronicle of Æthelweard, p. 7. Beda, Historia ecclesiastica, I, 15, pp. 58–60: ‘Duces fuisse perhibentur eorum primi duo fratres Hengist et Horsa, e quibus Horsa, postea occisus in bello a Brettonibus, hactenus in orientalibus Cantiae partibus monumentum habet suo nomine insigne.’ J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic Kingship in England and on the Continent (Oxford, 1971), pp. 22–3. Winterbottom, ‘The Style of AEthelweard’, p. 112.



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Furthermore, Æthelweard used the parallels between the traditions of the foundation of Kent and Wessex for his own reasons. As Barbara Yorke has noted, ‘in both, a pair of closely related kinsmen with alliterating names is said to have arrived off the coast of Britain with a small number of ships and, after a few years battling against British armies, to have established a kingdom’.29 West Saxons made an effort to link all these heroes together, and to settle upon a chronology that makes it appear that Cerdic and Cynric, the legendary founders of Wessex, arrived earlier than they did in the tradition and annals the West Saxons used in the compilation of the ASC.30 Æthelweard treated the other pairs and groups of founders similarly. Thus, in the Chronicon Æthelweardi, the links between the arrivals of Stuf and Wihtgar, Port with his two sons, and Bieda and Maegla are set so as to create an illusion of being bound into one tradition. For example, under the annal of 514 Æthelweard transcribes the information from the ASC dealing with the arrival of Stuf and Wihtgar at Cerdicesora and their battle against the Britons, but adds a new sentence: ‘And from the time when Hengest and Horsa arrived in Britain, the number of fifty-six years was almost completed.’ 31 For Æthelweard all these arrivals constituted one continous assault, which means that over at least one hundred years successive invasions of Anglo-Saxons reached Britain and advanced to conquer. However, in contrast to this tendency to portray all groups as involved in a common goal, Æthelweard also tried to distinguish those people by the place of their origin. What is more, he transcribed Bede’s differentiation of the Saxons inhabiting Britain, maintaining Bede’s division between the East Saxons, South Saxons, and West Saxons. Finally, though, he tied everything together by adding ‘ideoque Brittania nunc Anglia appellatur, assumens nomen victorum’.32 The differences which had been important for Bede were no longer of such consideration for Æthelweard, at least in the chronicle written for Mathilda. For him Anglia (read: England, not heptarchic Anglia) was a unified island and this unity he projected back into the fifth and sixth centuries. 33 Æthelweard’s 29

30

31

32

33

Yorke, ‘The Jutes of Hampshire’, p. 84. On the duplication of the founders in West Saxon history see also: G.H Wheeler, ‘The Genealogy of the Early West Saxon Kings’, EHR 36 (1921), pp. 161–71; D.N. Dumville, ‘The West Saxon Genealogical Regnal List and the Chronology of Early Wessex’, Peritia 4 (1985), pp. 21–66. Yorke, ‘The Jutes of Hampshire’, pp. 85–6, 95–6. Note that Wessex in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has at least four different beginnings (494, 495, 500, and 519): Wheeler, ‘Genealogy of the Early West Saxon Kings’, p. 169. Chronicle of Æthelweard, p. 12: ‘Impletusque est numerus fere quinquaginta sex annorum, ex quo Hengest et Horsa Brittaniam aduenere.’ Chronicle of Æthelweard, p. 9: ‘in this way Britannia was now known as Anglia, as it took of the name of the victors’. Compare with Anton Scharer’s notes on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: Scharer, Herrschaft und Repräsentation, pp. 55–7.




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purposefulness is even more striking if we observe that he was the first of the Anglo-Saxon historians who used the term Anglia.34 With his chronicle he proposed a completely new definition and name for the Anglo-Saxon world – a political unity called Anglia after ‘the name of the victors’. The readers of his chronicle in Germany may probably have deduced that the island had been unified only under the hegemony of Wessex, since the text treated no other kingdom seriously. The third of Æthelweard’s reasons for expanding the narrative of the coming of the Saxons requires us to examine his approach towards the Britons. Æthelweard transcribed this section from Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica, and in turn Bede was deeply indebted to Gildas. Gildas, a Briton himself, saw the Saxon invasion and the Britons’ defeat as God’s punishment for his people’s depravation and demoralization, the tyranny of their princes, and their life of luxury, though he praised the British past under Roman government. 35 Gildas’s De Excidio Britanniae was thought to be an admonition for his contemporaries – writing in the sixth century he could still believe in the revival of the Britons after the victory at mons Badonicus. Bede adopted Gildas’s account, but with a few important modifications used it for a different purpose. According to Bede, the Britons were punished because they had sinned by not bringing Christianity to the Saxons: ‘they hoarded the Word of God and tried to keep it from the pagan English’.36 For him ‘the duty of the Christian hero is not simply to fight and pray for his society but to educate it’. 37 Further, in the debate surrounding the reckoning of Easter, the British sided with the Irish; a position for which Bede despised them. 38 Because of his more or less personal attitude towards the Britons, Bede’s stance towards the AngloSaxons changed from that of Gildas. In Walter Goffart’s view: ‘By accepting Gildas’ testimony on the sinfulness of the Britons, he made possible a depiction of the Saxons not simply as virtuous heathens . . . but, from his eighth century vantage point, as the new Israel, chosen by God to replace the sin-stained Britons in the promised land of Britain.’ 39 Being 34

35 36 37

38

N. Kersken, Geschichtsschreibung im Europa der ‘nationes’. Nationalgeschichtliche Gesamtdarstellungen im Mittelalter (Cologne, 1995), pp. 353–4. Even though the Chronicon Æthelweardi had so poor a reception in later historiography, the widespread use of Anglia originated with this work. Gransden, Historical Writing in England, pp. 1–4. Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History, p. 313; see also pp. 302–3. R.W. Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Medieval Britain. From Gildas to Geoffrey of Monmouth (New York and London, 1966), p. 83. Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History, pp. 251–4. Goffart states that Bede polarized his vision of the past on purpose, making the reckoning of Easter a reason to present the Britons in a dim light: ‘The paradoxical result is that the attention paid in the H.E. to the problem of Easter is in inverse proportion to the importance that Bede probably ascribed to it’, Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History, pp. 326–7.



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an Anglo-Saxon himself who lived in a relatively peaceful country (the first Viking raid occurred fifty years after Bede’s death), where the Anglo-Saxons were the only power, he could allow himself to show contempt for the Britons. Quoting Gildas on the Saxon adventus, Bede adds, ‘which, as the event still more evidently showed, appears to have been done by the appointment of our Lord Himself, that evil might fall upon them for their wicked deeds’. He could thus condemn ‘the cowardice of the Britons’ and glorify ‘the most powerful nations of Germany – Saxons, Angles, and Jutes’ who reached and conquered Britain. 40 It seems that Æthelweard softened Bede’s view of the Britons, for there is no trace of scorn or abhorrence in his words. The only negative epithet is expressed when he speaks about the secret mission of the Saxons sent back to Germany bringing news of the ‘fruitfulness of the land and the inactivity of the timid people’. Vortigern is not Gildas’s ‘superbus tyrranus’ but, as in the Historia ecclesiastica, he is solely portrayed as ‘rex super omnes [Brettones]’. Initially, the Saxons are depicted as ‘vile people’. However they had some virtues, so the Britons ‘for seeing the cleverness of the new arrivals’ 41 decided to break the treaty and fight against them. As Æthelweard does not introduce any divine plan into his history, the battle between the Saxons and the Britons is merely a fight which takes place as a result of the shift of power. However, there is a consequence of this encounter which is of great weight – the name of the island is changed. Brittania becomes Anglia, taking its name from the conquerors: winner takes all. 42 Æthelweard’s neutral attitude towards the Britons – in contrast with that of his source, Bede – might be due to the fact that in tenth-century England the Britons were a marginal people, even for an ealdorman of the south-western shires.

Book division in Æthelweard’s chronicle ‘A book needs chapter division to make it readable.’ 43 A chronicle needs book division to make it comprehensible. Book division is more 39

40

41

42 43

Hanning, The Vision of History, p. 70. Compare Widukind of Corvey’s account of the Wahlvolk : B. Schneidmüller, ‘Widukind von Corvey, Richer von Reims und der Wandel politischen Bewusstsein im 10. Jahrhundert’, in C. Brühl and B. Schneidmüller, Beiträge zur Reichs- und Nationsbildung in Deutschland und Frankreich, Historische Zeitschrift 24 (Munich, 1997), pp. 83–102, at pp. 92–3. ‘Quod Domini nutu dispositum esse constat, ut veniret contra inprobos malum, sicut euidentius rerum exitus probauit’; ‘segnitia Brettonum’; ‘populis fortioribus de tribus Germaniae, id est Saxonibus, Anglis, Iutis’, Beda, Historia ecclesiastica, I, 14–15, p. 58. Chronicle of Æthelweard, pp. 7–8: ‘foecundiam terrae et paudidi inertiam populi’; ‘spurci populi’; ‘videntes namque astutiam novi populi’. Kersken, Geschichtsschreibung im Europa, pp. 354–6. B. Smalley, Historians in the Middle Ages (London, 1974), p. 29.




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fundamental than simple datings as it divides the past into periods, corralling the chaos of events into understandable chunks. There is hardly any division of the past in which an ideology is not implicit, whether secular or religious, individual or collective, military or civil, national or local. For example, Gildas divided his De excidio into two parts; the first historical and the second strictly contemporary. The first recounted the events which had led to the present situation. The second was designed to admonish the Britons, especially the five British princes, for their life of luxury and depravation.44 Bede’s five books were planned to evoke the idea of the Pentateuch and the five languages of Britain. 45 He focussed on the transition from paganism to Christianity – for him, the critical and decisive moment of every national history. 46 It is no wonder that he makes the baptism of the Anglo-Saxons the central element of his history, breaking the narrative at this point just as the AngloSaxons break with their pagan past. Thanks to the miracle performed by St Augustine, the blind man begins to see and his soul is opened to Christ. In Bede’s text this healing prefigures the baptism of the AngloSaxons, and works simultaneously on a national and individual level. 47 To divide up the past is to mark its significance for the future. Æthelweard’s chronicle is divided into four books each preceded by a preface. Elisabeth van Houts assumes that its layout was copied from Widukind of Corvey’s Res gestae Saxonicae because this work is similarly divided into prefaced books. It seems that she did not consider another rather obvious idea behind Æthelweard’s division. The second book begins with the arrival of St Augustine and the baptism of the Kentishmen. The third opens with the first Viking raid on Lindisfarne. It ends with the death of Æthelwulf and the reference to Ecgbyrht. The fourth book opens with the reigns of Æthelwulf ’s sons and the building of the power of the house of Wessex. The author’s deliberateness is shown by the fact that in order to divide his history he breaks the ASC entries: 593, 785, and 855. Parts of them are placed in the two neighbouring books. In the prefaces Æthelweard also gives a clear idea of his division of the past. In the prologue to the second book he writes: Since we have directed our pen through digressions of many kinds from the [original] state of all, and since passing over matters, upon which the knowledge of many people touched, we leave to the wise reader a more profound selection from [the facts of ] history divine 44 45 46 47

Gransden, Historical Writing in England, pp. 2–3. Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History, p. 249. Smalley, Historians in the Middle Ages, p. 55. Hanning, The Vision of History, pp. 78, 80 –1.



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and secular, now it furthermore behoves us to direct our pen to the qualities of our own race.48 According to him, the first book was meant to present the origins of the world and the origin of the situation of the people of Britain – the conquest of the island by the Anglo-Saxons 49 and the position of the Britons. The second book was designed to depict the history of his people and to characterize them. In the preface to the fourth book he writes: ‘it is now our task to direct our pen to the fourth [book], in which the presence of profit is greater, and [in which] the origin of those descended from our family is indicated more clearly’. 50 Here the chronicle reaches its climax as Æthelweard’s primary task is to set forth the common descent. This last book is planned to describe the dynastic history of the house of Wessex. Let us return to the dates and events separating the books in the chronicle. In Norbert Kersken’s words: ‘As the key-dates [Æthelweard] chose the beginning of the Christianization, the beginning of the invasion of the Danes, and the death of king Æthelwulf.’ 51 As just noted, the idea behind the division is obvious: Æthelweard juxtaposed AngloSaxon national history; the dynastic tradition of Wessex; and his and Mathilda’s common genealogy and family history, coming to focus on Æthelwulf, their first common ancestor. 52 These observations weaken van Houts’s parallels between Æthelweard and Widukind of Corvey, since the latter ‘chose the coming of the people into the history as the starting-point’.53 The first of the books of the Res gestae Saxonicae ends with the death of Henry, the second begins with Otto the Great’s election in Aachen and ends with the death of Queen Edith, whereas Otto I’s reign crosses the borders of book division. The third book concludes with the election of Otto II and the death of the leonine Otto the Great. Widukind was aiming at a combination of origo gentis and res gestae,54 and although there is some correspondence between Res 48

49

50

51 52 53

54

Chronicle of Æthelweard, p. 15: ‘Quoniam per multimodos etiam anfractus duximus stilum ab ipso generalissimo statu, ac transilentes ea in quibus multorum adhaesit notitia, excerpta ab historia tam diuina quam uulgari altiora prudenti lectori linquimus, ad nostri etiam generis proprietatem nunc calamum dirigere oportet.’ Compare: ‘dilucidius explicare oportet . . . Quin etiam de priscorum aduentu parentum a Germania in Brittanniam’: Chronicle of Æthelweard, p. 1. Chronicle of Æthelweard, p. 34: ‘nunc instat ad quartum flectere pennam, in quo et emolumenti magis pollet praesentia, et origo prosapiae generis nostri indicator apertius’. Kersken, Geschichtsschreibung im Europa, p. 168. Kersken, Geschichtsschreibung im Europa, pp. 168–9. Compare Chronicle of Æthelweard, p. 38. H. Beumann, Widukind von Korvei. Untersuchungen zur Geschichtsschreibung und Ideengeschichte des 10. Jahrhunderts (Weimar, 1950), p. 49. S. Bagge, Kings, Politics, and the Right Order of the World in German Historiography c.950–1150 (Leiden, Boston and Cologne, 2002), pp. 26–9.




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gestae Saxonicae and the Chronicon Æthelweardi, it should be examined more subtly and carefully.55 For example, the latter’s narrative is not broken at the coming of his people, although Æthelweard also perceived this moment as crucial. Of course, in support of van Houts’s thesis, he does – like Widukind – also finish his work with the death of the ruler; but such an easy paralleling will not help us understand the modes of writing of either author. To repeat, the deliberate nature of the structure of Æthelweard’s narrative cannot be doubted.

Time and dating in Æthelweard’s chronicle It is generally agreed that authors emphasize particular dates to draw attention to what they regard as decisive moments in the past. In the case of Æthelweard, although he dates the coming of Hengest and Horsa to Britain, it is impossible to say if he identifies this with the beginnings of Kent.56 He also dates the coming of Cerdic and Cynric, 57 and as with the previous dating he perceives this as part of the arrival of the Saxons in general, not distinguishing the separate peoples. The annal of 871, where Æthelweard gives an account of the Vikings’ attack, is very instructive: ‘and as I may say, all the nobler youth of the barbarians fell there, so that neither before nor after has such a slaughter been heard of since the race of the Saxons won Britain in war’. 58 Saxons are the Saxons – there is no need to stress their separateness. Only once, under the annal of 634, are the West Saxons mentioned separately, and the number of years given that have elapsed since their arrival. 59 Æthelweard dates the coming of the Vikings as well, 60 together with their first wintering in Britain.61 He makes significant links and associations between the coming of the Vikings and the arrival of the Saxons, as under the annal of 871 mentioned above or the annal of 787. The coming of St Augustine and the baptism of the Saxons are also important moments in Anglo-Saxon history, and they are treated as marking points.62 There are a few datings concerned with Rome but they are of minor importance as most, if not all, are transcribed from Bede.

55 56 57 58

59

60 61 62

Kersken, Geschichtsschreibung im Europa, pp. 169, 819 and n. 350 on this page. Under the annals of 514, 787, and 800. Under the annals of 500, 688, and 800. Chronicle of Æthelweard, p. 37: ‘et ut dicam tota purior illic cecidit barbarorum iuuentus, ut nec ante nec post tanta ruina audita est ex quo gens Britanniam obtinuerat bello Saxonum’. Æthelweard gives this as 120 years, though of course he is wrong: it should be 140 as he previously dates 494 as the year of their coming. Chronicle of Æthelweard, p. 19. Under the annals of 787 and 871. Under the annals of 880 and 890. Under the annals of 606 and 800.



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King Ecgbyrht merits separate mention, as he appears under the annals of 800, 871, and 900. Of particular note is a unique dating which stresses his distinctive position. Under the annal of 800, after the description of Ecgbyrht’s accession and his battle against the men of Wiltshire near Kempsford, Æthelweard writes: [Calculated] from the time when King Ecgbyrht began his reign, the years completed since the beginning of the world were by number 6000 except for 5, and since the Lord’s incarnation 800, and from the arrival of Hengest and Horsa in Britain 350; from the reign of Cerdic, who was King Ecgbryht’s tenth ancestor, 300 years elapsed (reckoned from when he conquered the western area of Britain), and from the arrival of Augustine who was sent by blessed Pope Gregory with baptism to the nation of the English, 204. 63 This passus is exceptional; it appears that this moment must have been decisive for the ealdorman since it is chronologically marked with such exactness. To establish the beginning of Ecgbyrht’s reign, Æthelweard recalls the most important moments of Anglo-Saxon and world history, i.e. the Creation, the Incarnation of Christ, the coming of Hengest and Horsa to Britain, the reign of Cerdic over the western part of the island, and the baptism of the Anglo-Saxons and the mission of St Augustine. Furthermore, Æthelweard ties this moment and the beginning of West Saxon history together with a genealogical link – Cerdic was regis Ecgbyrhtes genitor decimus. It also shows Æthelweard’s preoccupation with the flow of time and his tendency to set the clearest possible dating, which is essential as he uses these chronological references as stepping stones through his narrative. Finally, it demonstrates Æthelweard’s skill in synchronizing different datings and producing new ones when they are mostly absent from his sources. The choice of the marking points was up to him and it can be assumed that he distinguished these moments as decisive in Anglo-Saxon history, or in history in general. Only by dint of dating can the events mean anything and not appear as random happenings. Thus the chronological structure determines which episodes are to be taken note of. 64 63

64

Chronicle of Æthelweard, p. 28: ‘Ex quo etiam ceperat regnum rex Ecgbyrht impleti sunt anni ab origine mundi numero sex millia DCM excepto annis quinqe, et ab incarnatione dominica anni octigenti DCCC, et ab adventu in Brittaniam Hengest et Horsa trecenti et quinquaginta anni CCCL, et a principatu Cerdic ex quo subiugauit Brittaniae partem occidentalem, qui fuit Ecgbyrhtes regis genitor decimus, transacti sunt anni trecenti CCC, et ab adventu Augustini misso a beato papa Gregorio cum baptismo ad gentem Anglorum ducenti anni CC et quatuor.’ H.-W. Goetz, ‘Von der res gesta zur narratio rerum gestarum. Anmerkungen zu Methoden und Hilfswissenschaften des mittelalterlichen Geschichtsschreibers’, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 67 (1989), pp. 695–713, at p. 704.




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Next we need to consider the manner in which the flow of time is treated in the chronicle, for in this Æthelweard departed from his sources, particularly in the way he used time to construct the narrative. In exploring how the entries in Æthelweard’s text are time-based and sequentially related to each other, we should turn first to the AngloSaxon Chronicle. This work hardly offers any connections between the year entries, since it is more a collection of annals than a chronicle. The events in the ASC are related one to another in a paratactic way, with words such as ‘and’ and ‘then’, just to establish a sequence. 65 Its authors do make a few links (in the late ninth-century annals), mostly based on the phrases ‘as it was said before’, or ‘and after that’; but these instances are very rare and their importance should not be overestimated. The structure of the ASC does not turn the annals into a chronicle or history.66 Æthelweard, with his chronicle, makes a step towards a coherent narrative by trying to connect the year entries taken from the ASC. It should be mentioned that Æthelweard does not adopt the structure of AD dating in full. He modifies it and uses the so-called ‘stepping stone’ method, in which ‘the number of years between a series of events is given (“in the next year”, “two years later”, and so on)’. 67 This method, which is not easy for the reader to follow, requires the writer to produce marking points from time to time, where a detailed date is given. It enables the author to link the entries in a completely new way. In the ASC, the events which were described in separate annals could hardly be linked at all. Even if the information in two distinct entries dealt with the same person or incident, it was divided by the date standing in between. In the Chronicle of Æthelweard a date remains to intersect the events, but it is introduced into the sentence. From Eric Barker’s edition of the burnt manuscript it appears that the original text was not interrupted with paragraphs as it is both in the sixteenth-century edition and in Campbell’s edition.68 Consequently, it is most probable that the text of the chronicle was plain and continuous, and that the dates 65

66

67 68

S. Fleischman, ‘On the Representation of History and Fiction in the Middle Ages’, History and Theory 22 (1983), pp. 278–310, at p. 292. It is also worth recalling Northorp Frye’s words from The Anatomy of Criticism. Four Essays (New Jersey, 1973), p. 15: ‘History began as chronicle; but the difference between the old chronicler and the modern historian is that to the chronicler the events he recorded were also the “structure” of his history, whereas the historian sees these events as historical phenomena, to be connected within a conceptual framework not only broader but different in shape from them.’ C. Cecily, ‘The Narrative Model of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle before the Conquest’, in P. Clemoes and K. Hughes (eds), England before the Conquest. Studies in Primary Sources Presented to Dorothy Whitelock (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 215–35, at pp. 223–4. Gransden, Historical Writing in England, pp. 7, 44. E.E. Barker, ‘The Cottonian Fragments of Aethelweard’s Chronicle’, Bulletin of the Institute of History Research 24 (1951), pp. 46–62, at pp. 56–62.



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were smoothly introduced into the narration. This means that the course of the narrative is more fluent than it appears from the modern editions. Æthelweard often brings to the reader’s mind the events or persons which were described under previous years – for example: ‘After approximately eight years, the same leaders took arms against the Britons, and there was a great slaughter on that day.’ 69 By contrast, in the ASC the names of the leaders are given in both annals. 70 The change of the name or a place to a pronoun or a recollection of an aforementioned event was the first step towards the development of a simple narrative and Æthelweard very often arranges his narration in this manner. 71 The next step in narrative development was to break the division caused by the annalistic structure of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The ‘stepping stone’ method is a little vague since it does not provide absolute dates but only the temporal distance between events, but it does enable the writer to incorporate dating within sentences. It also allows a description of one person or an affair within the compass of a few years – for example: ‘After a period of five years, Cynewulf, king of the Mercians, died; his successor was Ceowulf, and after a period of two years the kingdom was taken from him.’ 72 Even if he enters only one date into a sentence (he rarely includes more than one date in a single sentence), Æthelweard’s way of dealing with time is closer to a literary rather than annalistic manner. He looks for linguistic variety, 73 using different phrases for the lapse of time – for example, ‘Denique septimo anno’; ‘Quarto impleto etiam anno’; ‘Ergo post quiquennium’; ‘Ast annis sex circiter impletis’; ‘Scilicet post annum’; ‘Anno igitur transacto facta’; ‘Porro post annum’. In comparison to the continental annalistic or quasi-annalistic sources, Æthelweard’s profusion of temporal phrases is impressive.74 It is important to remember that for him, these phrases were not random chronological marks, as in the examples quoted by Hans-Werner Goetz, but a narrative device, which allowed him to build snippets of information into units of more extensive narration. 69

70

71

72

73 74

Under the annal of 465 referring to the annal of 457, Chronicle of Æthelweard, p. 10: ‘Circiter annos octo ipsi [Hengest and Æsc] idem arma mouerunt contra Brittanos, fuitque ualida caedes in die illa.’ Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 457, 465 A: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, translated with an introduction by G.N. Garmonsway (London, 1953, rev. 1960), p. 12 (trans.). For example in the pair of annals of: 477 and 485; 494 and 500; 501 and 508; 534 and 538; 538 and 540; 552 and 556; 565 and 568; 648 and 652; 682 and 688; 731 and 733; 750 and 752; 827 and 828; 860 and 864; 865 and 866; 867 and 868; 877 and 878; 884 and 885. Chronicle of Æthelweard, p. 28: ‘Post quinquennium autem Cynulf obiit rex Myrciorum, cuius successor Ceolf, et post biennium ab eo regnum arripitur.’ Compare with the ASC: ASC 819 (=821), 821 (=823) A, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Garmonsway, p. 60 (trans.). Winterbottom, ‘The Style of AEthelweard’, pp. 115–16 and n. 28. H.-W. Goetz, ‘Historiographisches Zeitbewußtsein im frühen Mittelalter. Zum Umgang mit der Zeit in der karolingischen Geschichtsschreibung’, in Scharer and Scheibelreiter (eds), Historiographie im frühen Mittelalter, pp. 158–78, at pp. 172, 177.




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There is one more strategy in Æthelweard’s narrative technique worth investigating, as it says something about his method of control over his chronological and historical material. Mathilda’s commission must have caused difficulties for the ealdorman as he had to deal with large, continuous parts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. In order to systematize it he introduced the book division. Frank Kermode compared the creation of a plot to a clock’s ticking. ‘Although every sound generated by a clock is the same, we can swear that they sound differently as tick and tock, where tick is a humble genesis, tock is a feeble apocalypse; and tick-tock is in any case not much of a plot.’75 Every action, no matter if it is the opening and closing of a door or the sweeping events of a thousand-page novel, is stretched between a beginning and an ending. In the case of the Chronicon Æthelweardi we see this both on the level of the smallest narrative confined to a single entry, and on the level of the larger overarching stories, as for example the end of the pagan period in Anglo-Saxon England and the coming of St Augustine. All these stories call for both their opening and ending, and Æthelweard provides this through the device of his book divisions. In a way, his text is ticking all the time, even in the parts where no event is reported. Everything in Æthelweard’s chronicle needs a tick: ‘Incipit liber primus’; ‘Incipit liber secundus’; ‘En hic inchoat liber’; ‘Incipit prologus libri secundii’; ‘Prologus IIII libri incipit’; ‘Incipiunt capitula libri quarti’; and so on. It needs a tock as well, as in: ‘Explicit liber primus’; ‘Explicit liber secundus’; ‘IIIs liber finit’; and ‘Explicit prologus’.76 Æthelweard seems to be incredibly concerned with beginnings and endings, and determined to set the boundaries for events or time. He tends to divide the material into controllable ticktock pieces, a way of organization that extrapolates to other parts of his chronicle. For example, although Æthelweard ends his work with the death of King Edgar, he finds it necessary to stress this ending again: ‘The fourth book of Fabius Æthelweard (i.e. noble quaestor) ends happily.’77 Similarly, the final ending – ‘May God who is praised in Trinity and in undivided power, preserve you under the shadow of his wings, and your companions with you. Amen’ – he gives twice. 78 The first time 75

76

77

78

F. Kermode, The Sense of an Ending. Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue (Oxford, 2000), p. 45, see also pp. 43–9. Note that Widukind of Corvey also delineates his material in almost identical phrases, for example: ‘Ad dominam Mathildam imperatoris filiam libri primi incipit prephatio’; ‘incipiunt capitula’; ‘explicit prephatio’; ‘incipit liber secundus’, Widukind of Corvey, Res gestae saxonicae, ed. A. Bauer and R. Rau, Quellen zur Geschichte der Sächsischen Kaiserzeit (Darmstadt, 1971), pp. 16, 18, 84. Chronicle of Æthelweard, p. 56: ‘Fabii quaestoris patricii Etheluuerdi foelicitur explicit liber quartus.’ Chronicle of Æthelweard, p. 34: ‘Qui autem in trinitate laudatur et unapotentia deus, conseruet te sub umbra alarum suarum, tecumque socias tuas. Amen.’



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he finishes the storyline of the chronicle; the second time he bids Mathilda farewell and finishes the course of the narrative built into the prefaces. In a way there are at least two plots in the Chronicle of Æthelweard – one at the level of the narrated history, and one in the meta-commentaries in which some events are foretold or remarked. Thus, he has to end each of the stories separately.

The use of genealogy in Æthelweard’s narrative As discussed above, Æthelweard was preoccupied with genealogies. In fact, he intended to present his and Mathilda’s common family history against the background of his people’s history. Having dealt with time and sequence as components of the chronicle’s narrative, we shall now explore the last device which enabled Æthelweard to break with the episodic character of his sources. Æthelweard established a thread or an axis, around which events could be aligned; and the axis was genealogy. Gabrielle M. Spiegel’s observations on the characteristic features of twelfth-century French aristocratic genealogies may usefully be applied to the chronicle, albeit with some reservations. Naturally, the main idea of genealogy is to constitute continuity; in Spiegel’s words, ‘genealogy, as an underlying model of historical narrative affected not only the message but also the form and literary modalities of medieval chronicles’. To begin with, genealogy turned history into ‘a series of biographies, linked by the principle of hereditary succession’ which lasted through time and, simultaneously, bore evidence of legal permanence. 79 It supplied a narrative grid which allowed the chronicler to substitute dynastic time for annalistic reckoning. 80 The twelfth-century lignage was – both etymologically and as a narrative form – a line around which the episodes were organized, and which allowed the reader to comprehend history as the genealogy of events. In fact, it secularized history, basing it on biology and releasing it, to some extent, from theology. In a way, genealogy reversed the order in which history was generated – time was human and therefore it could be historicized. 81 As applied to narrative, genealogy enabled writing to rise above the discontinuity of events and triggered a new type of junction, a historical matrix which allowed chroniclers to place their material within a new framework. Procreation and heredity supplied the assumptive, though 79

80 81

G.M. Spiegel, ‘History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages’, Speculum 65 (1990), pp. 59–86, at p. 79. H.-W. Goetz, ‘Von der res gesta zur narratio rerum gestarum’, pp. 706 –7. G.M. Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore and London, 1997), pp. 107–9.




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silent, link, and the chronicler had only to fill in the time-span of a given member of the dynasty. Hence, even if there was no explicit relationship between events, ‘there is no reason to assume that a medieval reader could not have made the necessary connections in his own mind’.82 To a certain extent, this is also true for Æthelweard’s chronicle. Naturally, its author does not abandon calendar time, but in the titles of the chapters he gives an alternative representation. The second, third and the fourth books are provided with the chapter titles which were surely written by Æthelweard and not specified by Henry Savile, the work’s earliest editor. Only six chapter titles out of thirty-two (all in the table of contents of the second book) are about something other than the reign of a king and his warfare.83 Only three do not contain the name of any king. Typical chapter headings are: ‘De actibus Æthelredi regis Merciorum’; ‘De Cenulf regimine, bello quoque, et actibus eius’; ‘De principatu Athulf et de actibus eius’; ’De regimine Eaduuerdi regis et de bello eius’; ‘De principatu Eadgari regis’. 84 In one instance, only a name is given: ‘De Æthelheard rege’.85 If we had only the chapter headings to go on, the chronicle would appear to be some kind of medieval Parallel Lives or, echoing Suetonius’s Lives of Caesars, an Anglo-Saxon collection of biographies of kings. It is striking that such a continuous, undifferentiated text as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, was read by the ealdorman from the genealogical– regnal angle. Hence, again, it can be concluded that for Æthelweard the descent of kings was one of the most interesting aspects and a highlight of the past. Royal succession constituted an uninterrupted line of descent, which was also a backbone of history, a thread on which events were strung like beads. Æthelweard’s narrative benefited from this as the disjunction of the annals was overcome and a unifying meaning provided.

Conclusion There are many features of the Chronicle of Æthelweard which still need examination and comparison with contemporary sources. Earlier research now looks incomplete in the light of the new questions which can be asked of this text. The past practice of using the chronicle only 82 83

84 85

Spiegel, The Past as Text, pp. 109–10. These are, for example: ‘De aduentu Augustini a Gregorio missi papa beato’; ‘De fide Orientalium Saxonum et de transitu Gregorii papae beati’; ‘De principatu Cinigels regis belloque eius, aduentu quoque Byrini episcopi, et baptismo regis ipsius, fideque Orientalium Saxonum, atque Cuthrid baptismo’; Chronicle of Æthelweard, pp. 15–16. Chronicle of Æthelweard, pp. 16, 26, 34. Chronicle of Æthelweard, p. 16.



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as a supplementary narrative neglected its originality and frustrated efforts to read it on different levels: as a people’s history, a genealogical record, and the voice of ‘phantoms of remembrance’. Æthelweard’s distinctive intent and the deliberateness of his narrative strategies are undeniable, and this should be the basis of future research. Department of History, Stockholm University



The early Irish Stowe Missal’s destination and function S  M 

In 1929 the great James Kenney argued that the early Irish Stowe Missal must have been produced as a private service-book which a priest could easily carry around with him, but in recent decades scholars have claimed, either explicitly or implicitly, a different purpose for it. The codicological arguments proposed by Kenney are nevertheless still valid and this paper will argue that close linguistic examination of the manuscript’s liturgical contents supports the theory that the Stowe Missal was an itinerarium, a book for a travelling cleric. As one of very few surviving liturgical manuscripts from Ireland and the most complete, the Stowe Missal has long been the focal point for scholars interested in early Irish liturgy. 1 This dependence on a single volume, however, creates the risk of applying the knowledge gained from the Stowe Missal to the whole of Irish Christendom. 2 It is therefore important to employ due care in determining the volume’s function and use. Notwithstanding these obvious caveats, the last century witnessed many theories about the Missal’s destiny and purpose leading to the present, rather awkward, consensus seemingly based on Willibrord Godel’s claim that it was made for private use, most probably within a monastery. His reasoning is based primarily on the perceived absence

*

1

2

This essay is partly based on research done for my M.A. thesis, ‘ “Huisque in calicem”: Liturgy and Society in the Early Medieval Irish Stowe Missal’ (2003), for the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Utrecht University. I am very much indebted to my supervisors Prof. Dr Koen Goudriaan and Dr Bart Jaski for their help and guidance throughout this project. I would furthermore like to thank Dr Sarah Hamilton and the anonymous EME reader for their critical proof-reading of the text and their many helpful suggestions. Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, D. II. 3 (1238). For an edition, see G.F. Warner (ed.), The Stowe Missal, HBS 31–32 (London, 1906 and 1916). Or even a ‘Celtic rite’; cf. M.J. Hatchett, ‘The Eucharistic Rite of the Stowe Missal’, in J.N. Alexander (ed.), Time and Community: In Honour of Thomas J. Talley (Washington, 1990), pp. 153–70.

Early Medieval Europe   () – © Blackwell Publishing Ltd ,  Garsington Road, Oxford OX DQ, UK and  Main Street, Malden, MA , USA

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of diaconal assistance in the mass service, although the baptismal rite makes explicit mention of a deacon.3 Godel’s observation, however, was built on rather slight evidence, particularly when compared to the line of reasoning James Kenney employed in his analysis of the Stowe Missal in his monumental work of 1929, from which he concluded it was an itinerarium, a private servicebook for a travelling priest.4 Moreover, the later reaffirmations and restatements of Godel’s view seem to be based mainly on scholars’ desires to harmonize the evidence from the Stowe volume with prevailing views about the character of Irish worship and liturgy, and also with archaeological findings. In this essay I will return to the evidence of the manuscript itself, and by doing so will further substantiate Kenney’s case, bolstering it with new linguistic evidence from the liturgical contents.

Material aspects Taken out of its beautifully ornamented cumhdach, or shrine (now in the Irish National Museum), the book that is labelled D. II. 3 (1238) in the Royal Irish Academy’s library appears very modest. Measuring only 145 × 110 mm, it is much smaller than its closest continental counterparts, including the Bobbio Missal.5 It contains sixty-seven folios of coarse parchment, of which the first eleven are dedicated to excerpts from the Gospel of John and the last three feature an Irish tract on the mass, also recorded in the Leabhar Breac (‘the speckled book’), and three spells, all by different scribes to those who copied the missal, and added to it at an unknown date. The liturgical portion of the manuscript includes an ordo for Sunday Mass (fols 12r–38r), and ordines for Baptism (fols 46v–60r) and the Visitation of the Sick, including the administration of Extreme Unction and the last Communion (fols 60r– 65r). Separating the missal proper from the ordo for Baptism are various 3

4

5

W. Godel, ‘Irish Prayer in the Early Middle Ages’, Milltown Studies 4 (1979), pp. 60–99, at pp. 65–6. His observation is repeated by P. Ní Chatháin, ‘The Liturgical Background of Derrynavlan Altar Service’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquities of Ireland 110 (1980), pp. 127–48, at p. 139; and J. Stevenson in the introduction to F.E. Warren (ed.), The Liturgy and Ritual of the Celtic Church, 2nd edn with introduction by Jane Stevenson (Woodbridge, 1987), p. lxi. For the diaconal assistance in the baptismal rite, cf. Stowe Missal, fols 57v–58r; cf. J.W. Hunwicke, ‘Kerry and Stowe Revisited’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 102C (2002), pp. 1–19, there p. 3. J.F. Kenney, The Sources for the Early History of Ireland; I Ecclesiastical. An Introduction and Guide (New York, 1927), no. 555. Cf. also F. Cabrol, in Dictionaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie XI, 2 (1934), pp. 1440–1; F.J. Byrne, ‘The Stowe Missal’, in Great Books of Ireland, Thomas Davis Lectures 1964 (Dublin, 1967), pp. 38–50, at p. 46. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Lat. 13246 (180 × 90 mm.); E.A. Lowe (ed.), Codices Latini Antiquiores: A Palaeographical Guide to Latin Manuscripts Prior to the Ninth Century, 11 vols (Oxford, 1934–72), V, no. 653; K. Gamber (ed.), Codices liturgici latini antiquiores, Spicilegii Friburgensis subsidia 1, 2nd edn (Freiburg, 1968), no. 220.



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prayers to be used in ‘a mass for the apostles and martyrs and saints’, ‘a mass for living penitents’, and one for ‘several dead’ (fols 38r–46r). Palaeographical evidence, together with the mention of Máel Ruain, the founder of Tallaght (d. 792), in the list of saints, suggests a date of composition for the original portion of the missal in the last decade of the eighth or the first quarter of the ninth century. Seemingly not much later, a certain scribe identifying himself as Móel Cáich made extensive alterations to the order of the Sunday Mass, deleting folios, adding new leaves, inserting texts in margins and on blank folios, and erasing original portions of the text and writing over them. Although his script is very distinct from that of the original scribe, George F. Warner in his edition of the missal contested that Móel Cáich’s alterations were made relatively soon after the initial composition and that the difference in handwriting (and, I suggest, in liturgical preference) was to be attributed to a change in locality, rather than a lapse of time. 6 This relocation of the Stowe Missal is to an extent corroborated by the difference in the geographical provenance of the saints featured in the litanies of both scribes. Although both lists contain saints from all over Ireland, the earliest of the litanies, placed in the canon, has a distinct predilection for Leinster saints, while Móel Cáich’s list of saints, at the onset of the mass, seems to show a preference for saints from the middle of the island. Furthermore, the inscriptions on the cumhdach indicate that in the fourteenth century the missal was situated in the monastery of Lorrha (Co. Tipperary). If we interpret the mention of the well-known abbot, Máel Ruain, as an indication of a Tallaght provenance, the cumhdach inscriptions act as an additional witness to the removal of the manuscript from Tallaght at some stage. However, it is important to remember that the evidence for a Tallaght origin amounts to no more than the inclusion in the litany of the name of one abbot–saint of high reputation, especially celebrated by followers of the eighth-century Célí Dé reform movement.7 Kenney’s case for the Stowe Missal as a vade mecum, a book for a travelling priest or missionary, is mainly based on the material aspects of the manuscript. With regards to the dimensions of the volume, Kenney quotes the Reverend Batholomew MacCarthy who remarked that the Stowe Missal was the smallest volume ever to pass under the title of ‘missal’.8 It is modest not only in size but also in its decoration, which is very sober, with the exception of the last page of St John’s gospel, containing a depiction of the evangelist himself, and the first 6 7

8

Warner (ed.), Stowe Missal, p. xxxvi. Kenney, no. 555; P. Ó Riain, ‘The Shrine of the Stowe Missal, Redated’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy C 10 (1991), pp. 285–95, at pp. 294–5. Kenney, no. 555.



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page of the missal, which features a large adorned capital ‘P’ for the litany peccavimus domine and a border made out of the figure of a cat and some swans. It seems that the original missal, considering its size and sober decoration, could have been completed within a week to ten days, and can therefore be regarded as a relatively inexpensive book and one that was meant to be portable.9 Móel Cáich’s subsequent emendations to the original text, labelled ‘inconsiderate’ by Kenney, suggest that this was a book whose principal purpose was a functional one. 10 The unkind nature of these revisions suggests that the missal was not regarded as an authoritative liturgy by the ecclesiastical centre which produced them. Similarly, if it had been viewed as a model text, one would expect more attention to have been paid to its decoration. In truth, the revision by Móel Cáich points not to the adherence to authority, but rather to a desire to have a liturgy that answered to the users’ demands. In an essay on the typology of liturgical sources, Niels Rasmussen put forward two criteria for determining the destination and function of a liturgical volume. He maintained that only from external form and liturgical content one can deduce the purpose of liturgical books of the Stowe Missal.11 In this system of classification the material aspects, as described above, display a convenience and modesty that points to a priestly book, rather than a volume containing an authoritative ritual for an episcopal church or ecclesiastical centre such as a monastery. With regard to the liturgical evidence, Rasmussen, citing a late eighthor early ninth-century Frankish manuscript which combines canon law with liturgy, now in Brussels (Bibliothèque Royale, 10127–10144), suggested it was important to consider the degree to which the rituals included in a codex were comprehensive in their coverage. In this respect, the Stowe Missal shares a quality with the Brussels manuscript described by Rasmussen as containing practically all the rituals a priest would need in order to exercise his duties. Lacking only the liturgy for a wedding ceremony (again, like the Brussels manuscript), a rite for which we have no early medieval Irish evidence whatsoever, the Stowe Missal enabled its user to preside over a Sunday Mass, to design and perform votive services, to baptize catechumens and to administer the last rites to the sick. Furthermore, certain elements of the rituals recorded in the missal support the theory of its use by priests, such as the seemingly fixed lections. Perhaps because a lectionary would have 9

10 11

T. O’Neill commented on the duration of the missal’s completion at the Roscrea Conference on ‘The Stowe Missal and Other Treasures from Lorrha’, Roscrea, May 2002. Kenney, no. 555. N.K. Rasmussen, ‘Célébration épiscopale et celebration presbytérale: un essai de typologie’, Segni et riti nella chiesa altomedievale occidentale, Settimane 33 (Spoleto, 1987), pp. 581–603.




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been too bulky to carry easily, the missal proper supplied suitable lessons for every mass, focussing on the forthcoming sacrament and the reference to the Eucharistic service in the story of the Last Supper. 12 Their presence in the text can also be understood, as it was by Godel, as revealing the absence of any other cleric to read the lessons. With regard to the Stowe Missal’s baptismal order, Marc Schneiders remarked that this is the earliest evidence in early medieval Europe for all the baptismal ceremonies being performed in one session. Whereas other contemporary liturgical books describe the rites according to ancient Christian practice, as being spread out over a number of Sundays in Lent, it is believed that in rural areas actual practice was more likely to conform to the Stowe Missal’s arrangement. 13 This integration of all the catechumenical and baptismal rites into a day-long ceremony is in itself a strong pointer to a rural environment for the Stowe Missal, suggesting one in which it was not practical to extend baptism over several weeks (possibly because the priest might not be there every Sunday). Again this ‘revolutionary’ adjustment shows the Irish scribe’s prioritizing utility over tradition. In a paper on the knowledge of canon law among rural Frankish priests, Yitzhak Hen makes use of the evidence available in small handbooks, filled with liturgical and other religious material, one of which is the aforementioned Brussels manuscript. Hen offers two more characteristics to be added to Rasmussen’s double yardstick in determining the typology of different liturgical books. 14 Firstly, he observes that a combination of liturgical books in a single volume, as is the case with the Brussels manuscript, which combines a sacramentary with a lectionary, alludes to a presbyterial destination. It is hard to judge the Stowe Missal against this criterion but one could argue that the interweaving of lections into the missal proper, as well as the inclusion of a very broad range of hymns, psalms and antiphons to be sung at communion time, removed the need for a lectionary, psalter or antiphonary, just as the combining of a lectionary with a sacramentary in the Brussels manuscript did. Hen’s second addition to Rasmussen’s criteria is the combination of various religious genres in one volume. Although the added extracts 12 13

14

Stowe Missal, fols 15r–v (I Corinthians XI.26–32); (Móel Cáich) fol. 18r ( John VI.51–7). M. Schneiders, ‘The Origins of the Early Irish Liturgy’, in P. Ní Chatháin and M. Richter (eds), Irland und Europa im früheren Mittelalter: Bildung und Literatur / Ireland and Europe in the Early Middle Ages: Learning and Literature (Stuttgart, 1996), pp. 76–98, at pp. 82–3, n. 34. Y. Hen, ‘Liturgical Handbook for the Use of a Rural Priest (Brussels, BR 100127–100144)’, in M. Mostert (ed.), Organising the Written Word: Scripts, Manuscripts and Texts, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 2 (Turnhout, in press); cf. also idem, ‘Canon Law among Rural Priests: The Evidence of Two Carolingian Manuscripts from around 800’, Journal of Theological Sciences 50 (1999), pp. 117–34, at p. 129.



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from John’s Gospel and the Irish tract are (palaeographically) very distinct from the liturgical contents, it seems probable that they are more or less contemporary with the missal and were added at an early stage. 15 Hence, it is fair to suppose that from an early stage, if not from the outset, the liturgical material was meant to be accompanied by biblical as well as doctrinal material. The Stowe Missal seems to have supplied its presbyterial user not only with the obvious practical support for the performance of his liturgical duties, but also with inspirational reading from the Scriptures and contemporary theology, possibly in order to assist him with the design of lessons and sermons. If, therefore, this paper has made any headway thus far, it has displayed the many ways in which the line of reasoning employed by Kenney is still valid. In fact, Kenney’s arguments are bolstered when the Missal is judged according to the fourfold model developed by Rasmussen and Hen for defining the typology of liturgical books, which leaves little doubt that the early Irish Stowe Missal had a presbyterial destination. In the following pages I would like to argue that, in addition, there are several indicators in its liturgical text which also suggest it was composed for a pastoral purpose.

Evidence in the liturgy The study of liturgical texts and their phrasings for information about social realities is usually carefully avoided. In a literary genre in which evolutionary tradition and authority seems to play such an important role, it often seems that individual liturgical textbooks cannot reveal anything more than precarious evidence on ritualistic practice or theology. In the volumes littered with age-old formulae it appears to be impossible and dangerous to determine their relevance to a specific time and place. Rasmussen clearly states that it is impossible to deduce the different forms of celebration from the liturgical texts themselves. 16 Recent studies, however, have shown historians confidently digging through liturgy in search of clues about historical mentalities and outlooks towards (ritual) religion and ideas. 17 Éric Palazzo regards the 15 16

17

Kenney, no. 555; Warner (ed.), Stowe Missal, p. xliii. ‘Saisir les différentes formes de célébrations dans la période créative de la liturgie romaine est quasi-impossible à partir de l’observation de nos textes’; Rasmussen, ‘Célébration épiscopale’, p. 583. Cf. also the warning in E. Bishop, Liturgica Historica (Oxford, 1918), p. 298. Cf. E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars. Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven and London, 1992); J. Bossy, ‘Essai de sociography de la mess, 1200–1700’, Annales Économie, Sociétés, Civilisations 36 (1981), pp. 44–70; Y. Hen, Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul (Leiden, New York and Cologne 1995); F. Paxton, Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca and London, 1990); É. Palazzo, Liturgie et société au Moyen Age (Aubier, 2000).




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anthropology at the basis of this academic exercise as clear-cut in the introduction to his book on liturgy and society when he observes that for a ritual to be effective it has to answer to social reality. 18 This implies that at the time of composition, in order for the liturgical material to be effective it must have been relevant to the particular religious setting for which the material was collected. This must even be true for the older formulae with perhaps outdated terminology. In the Stowe Missal, the Deprecation of Saint Martin, complete with references to non-existent authorities, is a prime example of such a case (cf. below). The Irish Stowe Missal in particular provides us with some exceptional opportunities for such new liturgical research. Móel Cáich’s revision shows the interest that was taken to ensure the liturgical content conformed with (local) standards and practical realities, and he himself had few scruples about altering the wording of particular prayers. The changes and additions made by him can therefore be safely assumed to have had relevance at the time of composition. 19 Móel Cáich’s selfawarded freedom also helps to cast light by implication on the older formulae in the missal. As noted above, his seems to be a book in which usefulness prevailed over authority and tradition and he does not strike us as a scribe who would hesitate to amend or supplement an older formula to enhance its relevance. This holds especially true for the original scribe’s unique addition in the Hanc igitur. There is no reason to assume Móel Cáich was not aware of the fact that this was a section added to the original prayer, giving him even greater permission to alter or cancel it. His choice, then, to conserve the enhanced formulae unchanged seems to have been a real choice, and reveals that these formulae had at least some relevance even at the time of Móel Cáich’s efforts. It is thus with confidence, that we can examine the unique liturgical insertions by the scribes and the older formulae retained in the Stowe Missal for clues to the religious and social setting in which, and for which, the missal was created. The most extensive of the unique additions is made in the Memento for the living, which is written in Móel Cáich’s hand. The Memento vivorum is introduced by one of the very few rubrics in the Stowe Missal, stating that it is at this point that the names of the living are recited. This in itself may indicate it was used in a small monastic or lay community, since it could have proven to be rather impractical and time-consuming to recite all the names of the living in large ecclesiastical centres such as Armagh, Kildare or Tallaght. 20 18 19 20

Palazzo, Liturgie et société, p. 13. Hunwicke deduced their Irishness from linguistic evidence, ‘Kerry and Stowe’, p. 11. On the impracticality of the recitation of the names of the living in Merovingian Gaul, cf. Hen, Merovingian Gaul, p. 49.



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The Memento commences with ‘thy male servants ( famuli ) [names inserted here] and thy female servants ( famulae) and all who are standing around’. The word famulus also features in the baptismal rite, in which it is employed for the catechumen. It seems we can therefore deduce that the word signifies the devout, (soon to be) baptized Christian, while the people standing around may have had a looser attachment to the church or were still to be converted. At any rate, the original opening of the Memento seems to have aimed at being all-inclusive. The Memento continues with the statement that these people offer this sacrifice of praise ‘for themselves and all of their (loved ones), and for the redemption of their souls’, at which point Móel Cáich adds more objects of prayer: Pro stratu21 seniorum suorum et ministrorum omnium puritate pro intigritate uirginum et continentia uiduarum pro aeris temperie et fructum22 fecunditate terrarum pro pacis redetu et fine discriminum pro incolimitate regum et pace populorum ac reditu captiuorum pro uotís adstantium pro memoria martirym pro remisione pecatorum nóstrorum et actuum emendatione eorum ac requie defunctorum et prosperitate iteneris nostri . . . For the position of their seniors and the purity of all leaders, for the chastity of the virgins and the modesty of the widows, for mild weather and fertility of fruits of the lands, for the return of peace and an end to differences, for the well-being of the kings and the peace of the peoples and the return of the captives, for the wishes of those standing here, for the remembrance of the martyrs, for the remission of our sins and the correction of their acts, and (for) the rest of the dead and the success of our journey . . . This part of the insertion is especially concerned with resolving worldly and spiritual cares. The whole of the supplement is unique and cannot be traced back to a liturgical precedent. However, the first lines share much of its subject matter and its terminology with a non-liturgical text of Irish origin, Pseudo-Cyprianus’s De Duodecim Abusivis Saeculi. In a section explaining how a good king will bring prosperity to his people, this seventh-century text (which itself seems to borrow from the vernacular tradition of instructive manuals for rulers, such as the Audacht Morainn) uses the words pax populorum est . . . temperies aeris . . . terrae fecunditas, ‘the peace of the people is . . . moderation of the weather . . . 21 22

For statu?; cf. Warner, Stowe Missal, p. 11, n. 2. For fructuum.




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fruitfulness of the land’.23 This section itself has found its way into the eighth-century collection of canonical law, the Collectio Canonum Hibernensis, which features a quote from this passage, where it is attributed to Saint Patrick.24 The author responsible for the first part of the insertion into the Memento vivorum made a distinct effort to incorporate a section addressing the common worries and desires of the praying people ‘standing around’, and went so far as to borrow from non-liturgical material. The composer found the desired terminology in the deeply embedded Irish tradition confronting kings and ecclesiastical authorities with their responsibilities. While arguably not out of place in a prayer addressing the King of Kings, it remains a peculiar addition to a liturgical text. It is telling that the prayers to God reflected general desires well known and shared by the common people, featuring in vernacular as well as canonical traditions. The insertion continues, directing the prayer to the well-being or memory of fellow Christians or loved ones. . . . pro domino papa episcopo et omnibus episcopís et prespeterís et omni aeclesiastico ordine pro imperio romano et omnibus regibus christianís pro fratribus et sororibus nostrís pro fratribus in uia directís pro fratribus quos de caliginosís mundi huius tenebrís dominus arcisire25 dignatus est uti eos in aeterna summae lucis quietae pietás diuina suscipiat pro fratribus qui uarís dolorum generibus adflinguntur uti eos diuina pietás curare dignetur pro spé salutis et incolimitatis suae tibi reddunt uota sua eterno deo uiuo et uero. . . . for the lord bishop, the pope, and for all bishops and priests and for the whole ecclesiastical order, for the Roman empire and all Christian kings, for our brothers and sisters, for (our) straight brothers on the road, for (our) brothers whom the Lord deemed worthy to call from the dusky darkness of this world, so that the divine love receives them in the eternal quiet of the highest light for ever, for (our) brothers who have been beaten by various kinds of sadness, so that the divine love deems them worthy to heal, for the hope of 23

24

25

Pseudo-Cyprianus, De duodecim abusivis saeculi, ed. S. Hellman, Pseudo-Cyprianus De XII Abusivis Saeculi, Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristliche Literatur 34 (Leipzig, 1909), p. 53; Kenney, no. 109; M. Lapidge and R. Sharpe (eds), Bibliography of Celtic-Latin Literature (Dublin, 1985), no. B339; Audacht Morainn, ed. F. Kelly (Dublin, 1976). A later Hiberno-Latin homiliarium used the Ps.-Cyprianus text as well, cf. Lapidge and Sharpe, Bibliography, no. B565. Collectio Canonum Hibernensis, ed. Heinrich Wasserschleben, Die irische Kanonensammlung (Leipzig, 1885; repr. Aalen, 1966), c. 25:4 (pp. 77–8). For arcessire.



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salvation [and for their safety they render their prayers to thee, eternal, living and true God.]26 Apparently regarding the original Memento as insufficiently inclusive or personal, Móel Cáich endeavoured to include and address all the people who ought to feature in a prayer for the well-being of the living. One remarkable result of his aim to be all-inclusive is that the dead feature twice in the supplement to the Memento vivorum. It seems, furthermore, that the reference to the Roman empire was not regarded as irrelevant, suggesting that this description was meant to stand for the Roman Catholic lands. This is possibly also the way the reference to the emperors and Roman armies in a prayer read earlier in the mass, St Martin’s Deprecation, was read by the ninth-century Irish clerics. 27 The threefold description of ‘our brothers’, expresses the desire to describe certain people with specific concerns. Although the insertion testifies to Móel Cáich’s apparent mission to develop a more personal and broader Memento vivorum, both in respects to secular and clerical affairs, several elements remain puzzling. His juggling of the first and third person plural possessive pronouns in the first part demands attention. While he could be simply confused by the use of the subject ‘they’ in the original prayer, which seems uncommon and is not found elsewhere in the Stowe Missal’s mass, the proximity of the words pecatorum nóstrorum and actuum emendatione eorum seems to belie this. Could it be that the first person plural refers to the celebrating priest (and his company), while the third person plural is reserved for the lay Christians present (as the first line of the Memento indicates)?28 If so, it appears that the composer of the addition used it to cater for the celebrant’s more personal entreaties. The subsequent plea for the ‘success of our journey’ also suggests that the celebrant is a travelling cleric, inserting a plea for his own onward expedition. 29 The reference to ‘our’ brothers and sisters, words that are not used in the rest of the mass, may indicate a more exclusive, clerical, group of people than simply fellow-Christians. Is it possible that the brothers in the subsequent lines make up the ecclesiastical community this travelling priest belonged to, or even fellow itinerant clerics? The three 26 27 28

29

Stowe Missal, (Móel Cáich) fols 24v–25r. The part between brackets is not unique. The text of this ancient intercessory prayer will be considered in more detail below. Hunwicke noted that the insertions in the Memento vivorum as well as the Prayer for the Departed (Memento etiam) have the appearance of having been uttered by a minister other than the celebrant. Regarding the first, however, he does not explain his analysis: ‘Kerry and Stowe’, p. 9, cf. p. 3. Hunwicke ignores the change in personal pronouns and regards the whole community as itinerant. He admits, however, that the Hanc igitur seems to point to a stable community: ‘Kerry and Stowe’, p. 14.




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descriptions seem to fit this category very well, as it mentions them being on the road and the dangers they could face while travelling, such as unexpected death away from the community (in which case ignorance about their passing makes the incorporation of the deceased in the Memento for the living less inappropriate), and physical and emotional hardship. Thus, looked at closely, the wording of Móel Cáich’s addition to the Memento vivorum seems to paint a clear and comprehensive picture of the social background in which it was used. This setting focusses on including all people, appealing to them by addressing common desires, borrowed from vernacular and non-liturgical material, and making a distinction between the congregation and its itinerant clergy. Not much later in the canon the original scribe recorded two unique passages in the Stowe Missal’s Hanc igitur. The prayer reads, with the inserted sections between brackets: Hanc igitur oblationem seruitutis nostrae sed et cunctae familiae tuae [quam tibi offerimus in honorem domini nostri iesu chrsti et in commemorationem beatorum martirum tuorum in hac aeclesiae 30 quam famulus tuus ad honorem nominis gloriae tuae aedificauit] Quessumus domine ut placatus suscipias [Eumque adque omnem populum ab idulorum cultura eripias et ad té deum uerum patrem omnipotentem conuertas:] . . . We beseech thee, Lord, kindly to accept this offer of our servitude but also of all thy servants, [which we offer thee, in honour of Our Lord Jesus Christ and in commemoration of thy blessed martyrs in this church that thy servant in honour of thy glorious name has built, and (we beseech thee to) snatch him and all the people from the worship of idols and to convert (them) to thee, God, the true almighty Father.] . . .31 The original scribe chose this prayer to record an insertion designed to address the builder of the church. Although the grammar is somewhat confusing, it appears that this includes a plea to snatch him from idolatry. Whereas Godel interpreted the passage referring to the servant establishing a church, I think rightly, as characteristic of the Irish missionary church, the later plea contradicts his identification of the servant in question as ‘most probably the founding abbot’. 32 It is highly 30 31 32

For aeclesia. Stowe Missal, fols 27r–27v. Brackets indicate added sections. Godel, ‘Irish Prayer’, p. 69; cf. Ní Chatháin, ‘Derrynavlan Altar Service’, p. 139.



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unlikely that the founding abbot, often later on revered as a saint, would need to be snatched from paganism. J.W. Hunwicke has suggested that the servant mentioned here could be the local landowner who donated land or a building to a priest or anchorite for a church. Many small churches were private and proprietary churches owned by an ecclesiastical branch of a local aristocratic family. 33 Hunwicke seems to imply that in the early days of Christianity there was always the danger of a landlord reverting to paganism, especially in times of hardship. 34 The plea in the Hanc igitur thus addresses this worry, alongside a more neutral mention of the landlord together with the relics of the martyrs. The fact that this plea extends to all the people hints that the prayer was intended to be used in areas in which Christianity was not yet conclusively established and unquestioned. The environment of the Stowe Missal seems to have been one in which those attending mass were predominantly laymen and -women, still at risk of reverting to paganism, as opposed to larger monastic centres where the congregation comprised both the regular clergy and their lay supporters. Whilst the possibility of lapsing into paganism is a topos, and one which was always in the minds of liturgists, this particular plea reveals a strong personal focus and as such the danger seems more imminent and real. This concern as late as the ninth century about returning to heathenism could be seen in the light of Colmán Etchingham’s theory that, while routine pastoral care was prescribed to society as a whole, in practice there was only a small body of recipients. 35 In such a pastoral reality, the return to pagan beliefs and practices under rural Christians was a real and present possibility. Alongside the explicit and unique elements in the Hanc igitur and the Memento vivorum, the more familiar formulae in the Stowe Missal’s mass service also hint at the lay make-up of the audience. The abovementioned prayers both share a focus on the spiritual well-being of all of the people, either by snatching them from idolatry or imposing peace between them. Here, the word populus clearly retains its traditional meaning of ‘common folk’ or even ‘the lay population of a Christian community’.36 The Augustinian oration, in what seems to be the priest’s 33

34 35

36

D. Ó Corráin, ‘The Early Irish Churches: Some Aspects of Organisation’, in D. Ó Corráin (ed.), Irish Antiquity: Essays and Studies Presented to Professor M.J. O’Kelly (Dublin, 1994), pp. 327–41, at pp. 337–8. Hunwicke, ‘Kerry and Stowe’, pp. 10–11, 13. C. Etchingham, ‘The Early Irish Church: Some Observations on Pastoral Care and Dues’, Ériu 42 (1991), pp. 99–118, at p. 99; idem, Church Organisation in Ireland: AD 650 to 1000 (Maynooth, 2002), pp. 239–89. Although there might have been many practical obstacles to universal pastoral care, I do not agree with Etchingham’s rigid division between manaig (‘monk’ or ‘tenant of church-lands’) and non-manaig. Lexicon Latinitatis Medii Aevi (Turnhout, 1975), col. 703; J.F. Niermeyer and C. Van de Kieft, Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon minus, rev. by J.W.J. Burgers (Leiden, 2002), cols 1060–1.




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preparation prayer, makes it clear that the common folk are actually present when the celebrant prays ‘ut pro peccatís meís possim intercedere et adstantes populi peccatorum ueniam promiriri’, ‘that I may be able to intervene for my sins and earn pardon for the sins of the people here standing’.37 Without exception, those expected to attend include both men and women. This is shown to be the case in the unique insertions discussed above, as well as the original Gelasian part of the Memento for the living (famulorum tuorum . . . famularum tuarumque).38 The same is the case in the prayers Hás oblationes et sincera and Grata sit tibi, with the latter even mentioning boys and girls. 39 Before the Gospel, the Stowe Missal gives us the Deprecatio S. Martini, an intercessory of great antiquity, which seems to have been moved by the original scribe from its more usual place after the Gospel. Hunwicke suggests that this may have been done to make sure the catechumens and penitents, originally excluded from the missa fidelium, would still have a chance to hear, and participate in, this very clear and illustrative prayer.40 The rubric introducing the Deprecation makes it clear that it is said pro populo and participation, in the form of the answer oramus, seems to have been shared by omnes. St Martin’s Deprecation features several sets of persons, after which the congregation voices its answer, ‘we pray (for this)’. The inhabitants of the place where the mass is celebrated, that is presumably the audience, are explicitly mentioned and it is the sentence in which they feature that testifies to their lay nature. While the first set prayed for comprises the men of God, with the celebrant taking precedence for helping those present earn their salvation, the second stanza mentions hoc loco et inhabitantibus in eo, ‘this place and the inhabitants of it’, together with the devout emperors and the whole of the Roman army. The persons mentioned hereafter are all of a specific devout disposition, such as virgins, widows, penitents and almsgivers or those in particular circumstances such as travellers and seamen. 41 Although the mention of the Roman emperors (plural, so it cannot be referring to Charlemagne) and the Roman army appears to suggest this prayer should be dismissed as irrelevant to ninth-century Ireland, we should note that none of the scribes chose to alter or amend the text. The scribes of the Stowe Missal thus found it perfectly acceptable that the inhabitants of the place where the ritual was celebrated were not included in the list of secular clergy, nor in that of the virgins, widows or orphans. Instead, they were 37 38 39 40 41

Stowe Missal, fol. 13r. Stowe Missal, (Móel Cáich) fols 24v–25v. Stowe Missal, (Móel Cáich) fols 21r–22r. Hunwicke, ‘Kerry and Stowe’, p. 7. Stowe Missal, (Móel Cáich) fols 16v–17r.



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included with the secular rulers and warriors. Monastic clergy seeking to find their place in the Deprecation would probably identify themselves with the virgines, the word that mirrors the Irish óg, ‘young, perfect, virginal’. The inhabitants, or congregation, seem to be as secular (or lay for that matter) as the emperors and their army. Save for being included under the general labels of ‘virgins’ or ‘all clerics’, monastic clerics are notably absent from the Stowe Missal’s prayers. The only exception is an addition by Móel Cáich in the Te igitur, in which the priest asks for blessing over the gifts of the church, for the defence of the pope, and for all who practise the orthodox and apostolic faith, at which point is added et abbate nostro -n- episcopo.42 The double dignity of the senior member mentioned here suggests it was left up to the celebrant to choose which was appropriate, as it was not customary for an abbot to be also a bishop, even when his predecessor had held these two offices.43 The incorporation by Móel Cáich of a cleric with a double dignity would for that reason quickly become out of date or, in the case of the missal’s removal to other bishoprics, irrelevant. Except for mentions of the celebrant or his direct superiors, there is never a sense of ‘our’ clergy. Instead the clergymen and -women are alluded to only in general and world-encompassing terms, negating the thesis that the missal was intended for use in a principally clerical environment or in front of a chiefly clerical audience.

The Stowe Missal as a vade mecum The evidence presented here therefore supports, rather than belies, Kenney’s conjecture. While the Stowe Missal’s material characteristics, its soberness in size and ornamentation and the inclusiveness of its liturgical contents all point to a travelling clergyman as the intended user, the wording of the formulae, especially the unique elements addressing personal and worldly cares, suggests it was intended for use in a small, probably newly converted community. There even seem to be explicit allusions to the wandering circumstances of the celebrant. The hypothesis put forward in this essay removes many of the awkward problems scholars have previously encountered. When Warner, with reservations, proposed the use of the missal as an authoritative liturgy for the Céli Dé stronghold of Tallaght, he did so on the grounds of the explicit mention of its founder Mael Ruain.44 While there is no compelling 42 43 44

Stowe Missal, (Móel Cáich) fols 24r–24v. Warner, Stowe Missal, p. xxxiii. Warner, Stowe Missal, p. xxxvii.




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reason to deny Tallaght a role in the missal’s composition, its revision, which Warner himself thought was the result of a change in locality, as well its material aspects, appear to contradict Warner’s view of it as being regarded as authoritative. The apparent absence of a deacon in the Stowe Missal’s mass service was interpreted by Godel as pointing to a private, monastic use.45 We have seen, however, that the baptismal rite of the Stowe Missal specifically features diaconal duties and Hunwicke subsequently assumed there was also a place for a minister of the third order in the Sunday mass. In fact, he found signs of a distinct separation of the deacon’s task outside the church building while the celebrant continued the missa fidelium inside, a thesis for which he found corroboration in archaeological evidence. 46 Yet, it was another purported witness to the early Irish liturgy, the so-called Irish Palimpsest Sacramentary of Munich, and the desire to reconcile the evidence of that manuscript with the Stowe Missal that caused most confusion. The Munich manuscript is a truly unique witness to the early Gallican liturgy.47 While the date and place of its composition are very difficult to determine, palaeographic evidence seems to suggest that it was probably copied in Northumbria by someone trained in the Irish tradition in or around the third quarter of the seventh century, which makes it at least a century older than the Stowe Missal.48 The two books differ greatly: the Munich manuscript conforms to the style of contemporary continental sacramentaries with proper texts for feasts, while the Stowe Missal lacks any texts for specific dates on the calendar. This difference has puzzled many scholars studying early Irish Christianity and has led to various attempts to unify the two manuscripts into one theory of ‘Irish liturgy’. Klaus Gamber chose to regard the Munich Palimpsest Sacramentary as an anomaly, dismissing it as a witness to a purely Irish liturgical tradition.49 Marc Schneiders, however, was preoccupied with reconciling the liturgy of the Stowe Missal with that of the Munich sacramentary. Schneiders theorized that the Stowe Missal was designed to be accompanied by a book containing the specific texts for feasts, such as the Munich Palimpsest, a theory which he stated meant that ‘we no longer have to explain why there are two types of liturgy in Ireland, that 45 46 47

48

49

Godel, ‘Irish Prayer’. Hunwicke, ‘Kerry and Stowe’. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14429, fols 1–61, 64–71 and 73–82. Edited in A. Dold and L. Eizenhöfer (eds), Das irische Palimpsestsakramentar im Clm 14429 der Staatsbibliothek München, Texte und Arbeiten 53–54 (Beuron, 1964). Y. Hen, ‘Rome, Anglo-Saxon England and the Formation of the Frankish Liturgy’, Revue Bénédictine 112 (2002), pp. 301–22, at pp. 312–13. Gamber quoted by L. Eizenhöfer, ‘Zu dem irischen Palimpsestsakramentar in Clm 14429’, Sacris Erudiri 17 (1966), pp. 355–64, at pp. 358–9.



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represented by the Stowe Missal and that found in the Munich Palimpsest, nor should we wonder about the limited number of prayers available in the Stowe Missal; they were to be supplemented by a book of the type of the palimpsest sacramentary’. 50 John Hennig suggested a similar relationship between the Martyrology of Tallaght and the Stowe Missal.51 These theories involving a supplement to the Stowe Missal suppose its use in a stationary community and are designed to resolve the ‘problem’ of the missal’s limited contents. Both, however, disregard the material aspects of the Stowe Missal in this respect. It is quite unclear why a volume, whose design suggests it was always intended to be small, and portable, was to be accompanied by another book. Moreover, the five formulae incorporated in the ‘mass for the apostles and martyrs and saints’ show that there was no immediate need for a supplement, as these seem to have been purposely devised to provide a priest with instruments to celebrate any feast of the sanctoral cycle. I would, moreover, like to maintain that there have never been enough grounds for the comparison of the two volumes and for the subsequent confusion. It is, firstly, extremely doubtful whether the Munich sacramentary was indeed composed on Irish soil, while, second and more importantly, there has never been a reason to suppose uniformity in Irish religious celebration to begin with. I therefore object to such attempts to compare these two disparate books; instead the evidence really only demonstrates that the early medieval liturgy came in various shapes and forms. Even with so little Irish evidence, it is safe to assume that early Irish liturgy was just as much subject to evolution, deviation and variation as other ‘liturgies’. The profound disparity between the two liturgical volumes must be considered to be a pointer to a difference in the intended use of liturgical manuscripts. The Munich Palimpsest Sacramentary displays liturgy in its richest, de luxe, form; while the material and liturgical evidence presented in this essay compels us to view the Stowe Missal’s soberness and simple usefulness as belonging to the missionary and pastoral side of Irish Christendom. Accepting the existence of this distinction will allow us to learn more about the place of liturgy in people’s lives. Utrecht University Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam 50 51

M. Schneiders, ‘The Origins of the Irish Liturgy’, quote on p. 83. J. Hennig, ‘The Function of the Martyrology of Tallaght’, Mediaeval Studies 26 (1964), pp. 315–28, at pp. 320–4; cf. P. Ó Riain, ‘The Tallaght Martyrologies, Redated’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 20 (1990), pp. 21–38, at p. 38.



Review article: Rethinking early medieval mortuary archaeology H  W 

Caring for Body and Soul. Burial and the Afterlife in the Merovingian World. By Bonnie Effros. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2002. xiii + 255 pp., including illustrations. ISBN 0 271 02196 9. Merovingian Mortuary Archaeology and the Making of the Early Middle Ages. By Bonnie Effros. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2003. xviii + 272 pp., including illustrations. ISBN 0 520 23244 5.

Introduction The study of early medieval mortuary practices across Europe has developed as an important focus of research for both archaeologists and historians. Since the nineteenth century, graves have been seen as a source of evidence for Europe’s barbarians; the Germanic founders of the nation states that supplanted the Roman Empire. Graves were regarded in terms of race and religion. Out of these perspectives, social and economic interpretations of early medieval cemeteries were developed through the last century. However, in the last three decades, the role of graves as symbolic and ideological in character has been emphasized together with a critique of traditional approaches. Bonnie Effros’s two books on Merovingian mortuary practices encapsulate many of the current themes and debates in this field. Her studies move the debate away from traditional approaches to funerary data centring on barbarian migration, kingdom formation and conversion to Christianity, and instead draw on a range of research over the last two decades to set a new agenda. Rather than an index for ethnic groups and religious beliefs, mortuary practices are seen as a means of generating and transforming early medieval society, as rituals laden with symbolism, and as connected to the promotion and legitimization of ideologies and social power. Regarding mortuary practices as socio-political display also moves attention beyond the Early Medieval Europe   () – © Blackwell Publishing Ltd ,  Garsington Road, Oxford OX DQ, UK and  Main Street, Malden, MA , USA

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traditional focus upon ‘grave-goods’ to engage in the significance of cemetery organization, monumentality and landscape. From this perspective, Effros is able to address the changing socio-political and religious significance of death and remembrance in Merovingian Gaul between the fifth and eighth centuries AD, charting both continuities and change. First let us review Effros’s books and their key arguments.

A review of the volumes Body and Soul draws together a diverse range of written sources to explore beliefs and practices surrounding death in the Merovingian world, including the significance of portable artefacts (Ch. 1), the roles of the clergy and elite families in the regulation and provision of gravegoods and cemetery organization (Ch. 2), the use of gravestones and sarcophagi (Ch. 3) and mortuary topography (Ch. 4). Building on these insights, she next charts the evidence for the development of Christian liturgy surrounding death and commemoration towards the end of the Merovingian era (Ch. 5). Finally, (Ch. 6) Effros sums up her thesis, arguing that the emergence of furnished burial rites and the subsequent gradual shift from grave-goods to the liturgical commemoration of the dead from the sixth through to the eighth century AD was not directly connected to barbarian migrations and their subsequent conversion to Christianity. Instead mortuary practices can be understood in terms of ideology and the shifting interactions of secular elites and the clergy. Whereas Body and Soul assembles historical data to understand both ideas and practices surrounding death, Merovingian Mortuary Archaeology addresses the archaeological evidence. In contrast to Body and Soul, this book is more of a critique of previous and current approaches rather than the promotion of a single new interpretation informed by a systematic analysis of burial data. Effros charts the origins and development of racial and religious interpretations of Merovingian graves in the context of emerging nationalist discourses in France and Germany (Chs 1 and 2). Developing upon this critique, the book explores new socio-political and symbolic interpretations by discussing grave-goods, burial rites, cemetery organization, monuments, topography and location using a series of well-known Merovingian cemetery excavations as case studies (Chs 3 and 4). Effros is not alone in her critique of nineteenth-century concepts that continue to pervade early medieval archaeology and history, 1 and her 1

G. Halsall, ‘Burial, Ritual and Merovingian Society’, in J. Hill and M. Swan (eds), The Community, the Family and the Saint: Patterns of Power in Early Medieval Europe (Turnhout, 1998); B. Young, ‘Paganisme, christianisation et rites funéraires mérovingiens’, Archaeologie Medievale 7 (1977), pp. 5–81.



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books need to be read together to appreciate their strength. Moreover, Effros is inconsistent in her approaches to the written and material sources, showing more confidence in making positive interpretations from the written sources than the archaeological evidence. 2 However, together the books present a powerful and convincing thesis and the basis for the development of new perspectives in the study of early medieval mortuary practices. The rest of this review focusses on three themes central to Effros’s work that need further consideration if we are to build on the successes of these volumes.

The history of early medieval mortuary archaeology In Anglo-American archaeology at least, histories of archaeological thought and practice have tended to be dominated by prehistorians writing about prehistory and proto-history. 3 Consequently, the history of early medieval archaeology including its discoveries, theories and their socio-political environment have tended to be underplayed or ignored. In early medieval studies, most assessments have focussed on historical, literary and philological work. 4 This situation has only recently been remedied for other historical periods, 5 and alleviated by some promising studies of the origins and development of early medieval archaeology, the best of these have identified the need for a critical appraisal of the socio-political context of the discipline in the light of racial theories and nationalism.6 However, to date there have been no sustained and detailed assessments that attempt to pull apart the theoretical agenda and biases of early medieval archaeologists, nor a consideration of how such biases are interpreted in academic and public contexts. Given this situation, Effros’s critique of antiquarian and archaeological perspectives (mainly in France) and their interaction with the socio-political climates of their day is an original and invaluable addition to the literature. She demonstrates clearly that the interpretations of early medieval graves were not ‘common sense’ but predicated 2

3

4

5

6

Effros sees herself as ‘a historian, albeit one very familiar with the archaeological record’ (Mortuary Archaeology, p. 3). B. Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought (Cambridge, 1989) pp. 110–206; S. James, The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Myth? (London, 2000). A. Frantzen and J.D. Niles, ‘Introduction: Anglo-Saxonism and Medievalism’, in J.D. Niles and A. Frantzen (eds), Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Gainsville, 1997), pp. 1–14. R. Hingley, Roman Officers and English Gentlemen (London, 2000); C. Gerrard, Medieval Archaeology (London, 2003); A. Andrén, Between Artifacts and Texts: Historical Archaeology in Global Perspective (New York, 1998). E.g. C. Hills, The Origins of the English (London, 2003), pp. 21–39; S. Lucy, The Anglo-Saxon Way of Death (Stroud, 2000), pp. 5–15, 155–73.



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on nationalistic and racial conceptions popular in nineteenth-century Europe, of early medieval ‘tribes’ as discrete biological entities. Effros’s study provides the basis for a critical and self-reflexive approach to the interpretation of early medieval written and archaeological sources. If the socio-political climate had a profound impact upon the practice and theory of archaeology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, then it would be profitable for future work to explore the differences in the interpretation and social context of cemetery excavations and publications between nations and regions. 7 (For instance, elsewhere Effros effectively compares and contrasts attitudes to Merovingian grave-finds between France and America. 8) Consequently, contrasts in interpretations of early medieval graves between the Continent, Britain and Scandinavia might reveal interesting patterns.9 Without these comparisons, there remains the danger of regarding European studies of the early medieval past as either ‘nationalist’, ‘colonialist’ or ‘imperialist’10 without pursuing precisely why, how and in what ways socio-political and religious agendas influenced archaeological theory and practice in particular times and places. Developments along these lines will inevitably lead to more textured histories of early medieval archaeology. A related line of enquiry might identify how scholars in different regions and countries developed their interpretations through interaction with work undertaken in other parts of Europe. For instance, mid-nineteenth-century analyses of furnished early medieval graves from southern and eastern England were sustained by comparisons and contrasts with Merovingian, north German and Scandinavian archaeological discoveries. 11 Similarly, since many antiquarians and archaeologists engaged with numerous periods, it would be useful to examine how racial and religious interpretations of early medieval graves were developed through explicit contrasts with the graves of pre-Roman, Roman and later medieval times. For example, in Victorian Britain, archaeologists such as Richard Neville, Charles Roach Smith and Thomas Wright recognized graves in terms of chronology, religion and race, and in turn used these burials in narratives of racial and national origins by contrasting them with their detailed 7

8

9 10

11

Effros expresses the aim of contrasting German and French scholarship in her study, and incorporates some useful comparisons, Mortuary Archaeology, pp. 3, 43, 53–4, 56. See also B. Effros, ‘Memories of the Early Medieval Past. Grave Artefacts in NineteenthCentury France and Early Twentieth-Century America’, in H. Williams (ed.), Archaeologies of Remembrance. Death and Memory in Past Societies (New York, 2003), pp. 255–80. Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, p. 3. B. Trigger, ‘Alternative Archaeologies: Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist’, Man 19:3 (1984), pp. 355–70. E.g. D. Kidd, ‘Charles Roach Smith and the Abbe Cochet’, Centenaire de L’Abbe Cochet – 1975. Actes du Colloque International D’Archaeologie (Rouen, 1978), pp. 63–77.



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archaeological and historical knowledge of Roman funerary traditions. 12 Thus, the unacknowledged tension between ‘barbarian’ and ‘civilized’ underpinned interpretations of early medieval graves. Another key issue in studying the origins and development of early medieval archaeology is the extent to which archaeologists were passive recipients of racial and religious theories generated by contemporary academics focussing on written sources, who were in turn influenced by contemporary social and political debates. This has tended to be the assumption of some recent studies and seems to be implicit in Effros’s account. However, in line with recent archaeological emphasis on the ‘active’ and ‘meaningful’ role of material culture in past and present society,13 it becomes important to consider the ways and means by which archaeological discoveries directly served in the construction of nineteenthand twentieth-century racial discourses. This might have taken place in many ways: through the public performance of excavation; the circulation of finds among antiquarians and archaeologists; the display of these finds in museums and collections; and their description, illustration and interpretation in scholarly and popular publications. 14 It also is worth considering whether nineteenth-century archaeologists and antiquarians were as deferential to established historical and philological paradigms as they are often perceived to have been. For instance, this author has argued elsewhere that in mid-nineteenth-century England, some scholars rejected the role of archaeology as the ‘handmaiden’ of history and philology. Instead they regarded it as a more reliable and pivotal means of discovering the origins of races and nations than the fragmented historical and linguistic evidence. 15 Moreover, one wonders the extent to which the frequent discoveries of early medieval graves provided material legitimization and implicit underpinning to the racial histories developed by nineteenth-century historians, rather than the other way around. It is certainly interesting to note that, for England, the most extreme Victorian racial histories of English origins such as those by Edward Freeman, Edwin Guest and Richard Green were written during and after, rather than before, the heyday of Anglo-Saxon cemetery excavations between 1840 and 1860. Consequently, even when 12

13 14

15

E.g. C. Roach-Smith, ‘Discovery of Anglo-Saxon Remains at Northfleet, Kent’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 3 (1848), pp. 235–340. I. Hodder, Reading the Past (Cambridge, 1986). E.g. E. Arwill-Nordblah, ‘Re-Arranging History. The Contested Bones of the Oseberg Grave’, in Y. Hamilakis, M. Pluciennik and S. Tarlow (eds), Thinking through the Body, Archaeologies of Corporeality (New York, 2002), pp. 201–16. L. Peltz and M. Myrone, ‘Introduction: “Mine are the Subjects Rejected by the Historian”: Antiquarianism, History and the Making of Modern Culture’, in M. Myrone and L. Peltz (eds), Producing the Past. Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice 1700 –1850 (Aldershot, 1999), pp. 1–13, at p. 5.



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they avoided discussing archaeological evidence directly, they must have been fully aware of the papers in antiquarian and archaeological journals in which graves were interpreted as the material ‘proof ’ of the Teutonic origins of the English. It would be interesting to see if a similarly active role for archaeology in the development of racial and nationalist discourses can be established for the Continent. As with most recent authors who have addressed these themes (this writer included), Effros fails to extend the same critical approach to contemporary researchers and her own work. Recent archaeologists have asserted and explored the bias of contemporary politics and ideology upon theory and practice and the necessity of recognizing its impact on archaeological interpretation. 16 Yet an implicit premise of Effros’s is that the modern hermenuetic (particularly concerning historical researches) is somehow exempt from the same critical examination of its contexts and agendas. Consequently, although she criticizes quite recent ethnic and religious interpretations of graves by archaeologists, 17 Effros refrains from applying the same critical approach to recent historical approaches that emphasize the role of mortuary practices as social display and ritual performance.18 Moreover, one is left wondering how Effros’s own personal, academic and social identity, together with the context of her work within North American museums and universities and her involvement in European Science Foundation sponsored research projects, may have influenced aspects of her own scholarly interpretations.19 (Elsewhere in her work, Effros is explicit in recognizing the positive value of her cultural background in giving her insights into the social and religious significance of food and drink in Merovingian Gaul.20) Similarly, are those fellow archaeologists that she singles out for qualified praise such as Dierkens 21 and Halsall22 equally free from biases caused by their social, political and academic environment? It is certainly notable that many of these writers are as adamant in rejecting the potential for ethnic interpretations of graves as previous generations were dogged in their defence.23 Also, that Effros (and others) wholeheartedly rejects any possibility of pagan practices in Merovingian Gaul and embraces the ubiquity of Christian ideology in understanding 16

17 18 19

20 21 22 23

E.g. H. Härke, ‘Archaeologists and Migrations: A Question of Attitude?’, Current Anthropology 39 (1998), pp. 19–45; L. Meskell (ed.), Archaeology Under Fire (London, 1998). Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, pp. 106–8. Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, pp. 109–18. Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, pp. xiii–xvi. In the first sentence of Mortuary Archaeology, Effros situates her study as filling a gap in the historical bias in the work of early medieval American scholars (p. 1). Effros, Food and Drink, pp. xv–xviii. Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, pp. 111–16. Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, pp. 109–10, 171–3. E.g. Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, p. 121.



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both historical and archaeological evidence, seems to be as much a product of racial and religious interpretations as those she critiques, because she creates a polemic to them. 24 My point is not to denigrate Effros’s work or to suggest that it can be reduced to contemporary academic ‘fashions’, but to make the point that all archaeological and historical writing is structured by its present – and past – social and political context. Such a recognition would appear to this author to be an inevitable development of Effros’s own critical assessment. 25 The question is, then, whether archaeologists and historians of early medieval Europe are working in a socio-political and academic climate that both tolerates and actively supports a self-reflexive critical appraisal; or alternatively, would any individuals or groups of scholars participating in such an appraisal quickly find themselves castigated by their peers, and their careers in jeopardy?26 This leads us to Effros’s treatment of ethnicity in early medieval Europe.27 There are two strands to the argument employed in recent works and used to reject more traditional approaches. The first concerns the nature of funerary ritual. The argument is that artefacts and mortuary practices cannot be used to identify the migrations of peoples and their cultural identities in a direct and simplistic way. This is because Merovingian funerary ritual incorporates a complex mixture of Roman and Germanic traditions.28 Moreover, the mortuary variability found in Merovingian cemeteries relates to the age, gender and status of the deceased and mourners, as well as to local, regional and chronological variations in mortuary practices; all this needs to be considered before an ethnic ascription is made.29 Also, it is argued that, as a ritualized display, mortuary practices are symbolic and ideological statements of aspired identities in which ethnic realities might be masked, distorted and transformed.30 The second strand of argument concerns the definition of ethnicity. It is proposed that the kinds of barbarian ethnicities revealed in historical sources constitute a complex, shifting and contingent form of elite political identity, rather than necessarily being predicated on coherent tribal groups linked to language and 24 25

26

27 28 29 30

Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, p. 5. T. Dickinson, ‘Review Article: What’s New in Early Medieval Burial Archaeology?’, EME 11 (2002), pp. 71–87, at p. 75. See discussion in H. Härke, ‘The German Experience’, in H. Härke (ed.), Archaeology, Ideology and Society. The German Experience (Wissenschaften, 2000), pp. 11–39, at pp. 21–31. Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, pp. 100–10, 147–54. E.g. Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, pp. 144–6. Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, pp. 127–33. E.g. G. Halsall, ‘The Origins of the Reinhengräberzivilisation: Forty Years On’, in J. Drinkwater and H. Elton (eds), Fifth-Century Gaul: A Crisis of Identity? (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 196–206.



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biological origins.31 In this sense, as the Roman world re-orientates itself around new institutions and practices employed in sustaining political power, ethnicity is a ‘situational construct’ and a ‘strategy of distinction’32 used to create new identities from individuals and groups of various geographical and cultural origins. Certainly this reviewer is in complete agreement with the first strand of the argument. It is also refreshing that Effros is as critical of attempts to identify Gallo-Roman continuity from bone and artefact data as Frankish immigration.33 In both contexts, Effros sees ethnicity as problematic in its traditional conceptualization as biologically determined tribal identity. However, the second strand focusses on the critique of the traditional conception of ethnicity as based on ‘blood-based bands of warriors’. 34 Effros does not go further to consider the possibility that mortuary material culture had an active role in constituting ethnicity in a situational and ideological way.35 Effros’s reluctance to develop this approach may be because of her focus on the evidence of historical accounts, but a number of archaeologists have taken their cue from similar historical interpretations by considering material culture and mortuary practices as implicated in the construction and reproduction of ethnicities as ideological constructs. For example, a number of authors have proposed that ‘style’ was an integral part of invented identities and myths of origin, an argument promoted by Charlotte Behr in relation to gold bracteates in Kentish contexts,36 and by Lotte Hedeager concerning the selective use of animal art in early medieval Europe. 37 Tania Dickinson has also discussed the geometric and animal art on early Anglo-Saxon saucer brooches in terms of multivocal claims to status, ethnicity and origins. 38 Similarly, the weapon burial rite has been argued by Heinrich Härke as constituting a myth of Germanic origins in early Anglo-Saxon England. 39 31

32

33 34 35 36 37

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39

P.J. Geary, ‘Ethnic Identity as a Situational Construct in the Early Middle Ages’, Mitteilungen der Anthropolischen Gesellschaft in Wien 113 (1983), pp. 15–26. W. Pohl, ‘Telling the Difference: Signs of Ethnic Identity’, in W. Pohl and H. Reimitz (eds), Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of Ethnic Communities, 300–700 (Leiden, 1998), pp. 17–69. Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, pp. 148–50. Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, p. 6. Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, pp. 104–6. C. Behr, ‘The Origins of Kingship in Early Medieval Kent’, EME 9:2 (2000), pp. 25–52. L. Hedeager, ‘Cosmological Endurance: Pagan Identities in Early Christian Europe, European Journal of Archaeology 1:3, pp. 381–96. T. Dickinson, ‘Material Culture as Social Expression: The Case of Saxon Saucer Brooches with Running Spiral Decoration’, in H-J. Haßler (ed.), Studien zur Sachsenforchung 7 (Hildesheim, 1991), pp. 39–70; T. Dickinson, ‘Early Saxon Saucer Brooches: A Preliminary Overview’, in W. Filmer-Sankey (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 6 (Oxford, 1993), pp. 11–45. H. Härke, ‘Material Culture as Myth: Weapons in Anglo-Saxon Graves’, in C. Kjeld Jensen and K. Høilund Nielsen (eds), Burial and Society: The Chronological and Social Analysis of Archaeological Burial Data (Aarhus, 1997), pp. 119–28.



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Monuments and ritual practices such as cremation, ship-burial and mound burial at Sutton Hoo have been perceived by Martin Carver as ideological statements asserting political independence and allegiances, which could equally have had an overtly ethnic component to them. 40 These studies therefore consider material culture in terms of social and political group identities; not as created from static, pure linguistic and racial tribes, but as ideology developed through the complex interaction of Romans and barbarians. However, rather than seeing the ideological and meaningful role of material culture and mortuary practices as simply ‘fictive’, it might be useful to consider them as serving in constituting social memories that can contain both real and imagined connections to the past; that can be referenced, reproduced, transformed and reinvented in relation to contemporary social and political strategies.41 Taking this perspective might provide the possibility of resurrecting the concept of ethnicity and other forms of communal identity as being constituted and negotiated through early medieval death rituals. Such a view would regard material culture and ritual practice as neither the creation of illusions nor the direct and objective reflection of past realities, but instead as consciously created statements and mediations of social memory. A final issue concerns that of migration; a subject distinct, albeit related, to that of ethnicity. The debate over the extent, scale and character of early medieval migrations has moved a great deal in recent years, and Effros asserts a clear emphasis against the use of archaeological evidence to recognize ancient population movements. However, whether rightly or wrongly, the debate is still very much open, and in Anglo-Saxon archaeology at least, despite a polite compromise between protagonists interspersed with the occasional accusation of racism, there remains a continuing disagreement about the scale, character and importance of migration in explaining social change in sub-Roman north-west Europe.42 Therefore, while migration is not a single and coherent explanation for the social and political changes evident in the archaeological record of Merovingian Gaul, there remains the need for a more open acceptance that population movements can, in some instances, be identified in the archaeological record, and in some instances, such movements might have had profound social, political 40

41

42

M. Carver, ‘Why That? Why There? Why Then? The Politics of Early Medieval Monumentality’, in H. Hamerow and A. MacGregor (eds), Image and Power in the Archaeology of Early Medieval Britain (Oxford, 2001), pp. 1–22. H. Williams, ‘Death, Memory and Time: A Consideration of the Mortuary Practices at Sutton Hoo’, in C. Humphrey and W.M. Ormrod (eds), Time in the Medieval World (Woodbridge, 2001), pp. 35–72. E.g. Hills, Origins of the English.



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and economic impacts upon both the place of origin and the destination of the migrating groups. Such migrations may also influence the performance of mortuary practices as a means of either overtly remembering or deliberately forgetting places of origin and cultural traditions. In summary, Effros provides a critique of traditional interpretations of early medieval graves in terms of race and religion, but there remains considerable potential to appraise the socio-political biases affecting current and ongoing archaeological research. There is also the need to explicitly theorize – rather than reject – the potential roles of material culture and mortuary practices in the construction, negotiation and reproduction of ethnicity in early medieval Europe.

Material culture in the funerary context The second of Effros’s major themes, the social and symbolic interpretation of the material culture deployed in graves, is an issue discussed in both Body and Soul and Merovingian Mortuary Archaeology.43 It is certainly true to say that grave-goods have been the traditional mainstay of early medieval archaeology, but the last thirty years has seen the development of explicitly social approaches towards portable artefacts in graves. As Heinrich Härke has recently observed, these approaches have tended to focus on variability in the provision of grave-goods, and continental and Anglo-American traditions have developed with little mutual interaction.44 Building on such work, Effros argues that artefacts were interred in graves as a means of symbolic communication and visual expression with socio-political significance. 45 Moreover, objects were not simply about individual identity, but the relationship of an individual to a wider community. However, despite explicitly and somewhat misleadingly referencing Lewis Binford’s work as the basis of her approach, 46 Effros departs from a purely social reading of the provision of grave-goods in favour of a symbolic one. Rather than seeing artefacts buried with the dead as a direct reflection of the deceased’s social identity when alive, and in turn, the variability in grave-goods provision as an index of social organization, Effros’s study builds on early ‘post-processual’ approaches inspired 43

44

45 46

See also B. Effros, ‘Symbolic Expressions of Sanctity: Gertrude of Nivelles in the Context of Merovingian Mortuary Custom’, Viator 27 (1996), pp. 1–10. H. Härke, ‘Social Analysis of Mortuary Evidence in German Protohistoric Archaeology’, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 19 (2000), pp. 369–84. Effros also recognizes the lack of interaction between British and continental scholarship (Mortuary Archaeology, p. 3). Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, pp. 124–7. Effros, Body and Soul, p. 33; see also B. Effros, ‘De partibus Saxoniae and the Regulation of Mortuary Custom: A Carolingian Campaign of Christianization or the Suppression of Saxon Identity?’, Review Belge De Philologie et D’Histoire 75 (1997), pp. 267–86, at p. 272.



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by structuralism and Marxism, such as is found in the work of EllenJane Pader.47 Consequently, grave-goods are regarded as an idealized expression of aspired identity constructed by mourners, and holding the power to generate and reproduce social relations and identities. The originality of Effros’s perspective derives from the use of both historical and archaeological evidence. Equally valuable is the way her study moves beyond the traditional archaeological bias towards brooches and weaponry, to discuss a wider range of materials and objects placed with the dead. Her discussions of the symbolic role of clothing and amulets are particularly worthy of note. To this reviewer, however, Effros’s account raises as many exciting new questions as it answers. While material culture conveys meanings in the mortuary context, we need to think more carefully about what might be meant and how. For instance, it seems important to see beyond objects as simple signs relating to single concepts, identities and ideas, and instead consider chains of signification involving complex metaphorical associations linking objects and social practices. 48 For instance, Effros has shown in a recent parallel study concerning feasting and drinking in Merovingian Gaul, that the functions and social practices of objects (in the case of glass, wooden, metal and ceramic vessels, as containers of food and drink) inform their significance in the grave. 49 Objects might also manage the transformation of the deceased’s corporeality. For instance, shroud pins may symbolize aspects of the deceased’s identity, but might more profitably be regarded as objects associated with preparing the body for burial. Similarly, early medieval brooches are often considered as displaying personal and group identities during life and death, but for mourners they equally formed part of the ‘composition’ of the body and the management of its appearance. Effros discusses the religious symbolism of Goldblattkreuze (gold-plate crosses sewn onto clothing in some graves). These objects may have been valued for iconographic significance linked to their colour, shape and material, as well as the mortuary context in which they were used. 50 Yet perhaps they also gained importance from the fact that they were sewn onto the clothing of the corpse. In other words, the act of sewing may have been as significant as the presence of the object and its meanings. Moreover, it seems misplaced to this writer to dismiss the 47

48 49

50

E.J. Pader, Symbolism, Social Relations and the Interpretation of Mortuary Remains (Oxford, 1982). C. Tilley, Metaphor and Material Culture (Oxford, 1999). Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, pp. 139–41; see also A. Woolf and R. Eldridge, ‘Sharing a Drink with Marcel Mauss: The Uses and Abuses of Alcohol in Early Medieval Europe’, Journal of European Archaeology 2:2 (1994), pp. 327–40. Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, p. 112.



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possibility that artefacts could have explicit religious, mythical and cosmological associations as well as social symbolism. 51 As well as symbolic and metaphorical associations, material culture can have biographies which, like the personal and group biographies of people, can convey meanings and significance into the mortuary context.52 This issue of biography has yet to be fully addressed in archaeological studies53 and Effros is right to admit that it is something that is difficult for archaeologists to see.54 Despite this, the inclusion of exotic and ancient objects in graves55 provides an area where archaeologists have begun to recognize the way material culture has been used for its biographical or mythical qualities. Yet the biographical role of artefacts can be explored further still. For instance, objects may be placed with the dead, not because of their great antiquity, but because of their involvement in the lifecycle; thus evoking the progress of the person through stages in their individual and social development, rather than reflecting a static identity.56 Similarly, objects might be placed in the grave to articulate the biographical change occurring in the funeral itself, as the subject is transformed from living person to dead ancestor. 57 We might also need to consider the significance of objects deployed in graves in relation to other forms of temporality: objects linked to the sacred, artefacts associated with community social practices such as feasting, and those connected to daily activities including practices of bodily management.58 Objects not only helped to make memorable events and recall the past in various ways, they can also evoke the future; the aspired identity of the deceased in death which in the Christian cosmology of early medieval Europe might include an identity anticipated in Heaven once Salvation has been achieved. Such ‘prospective memories’ are likely to have motivated the placing of the reliquary and cross in St Cuthbert’s tomb in late seventh-century Northumbria. 59 51

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54 55

56 57

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A. Andrén, ‘Doors to Other Worlds: Scandanavian Death Rituals in Gotlandic Perspectives’, Journal of World Archaeology 1 (1993), pp. 33–56. Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, p. 8. C. Gosden and Y. Marshall, ‘The Cultural Biography of Objects’, World Archaeology 31:2 (1999), pp. 169–78. Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, p. 93. Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, p. 138; e.g. F. Theuws, ‘Maastricht as a Centre of Power in the Early Middle Ages’, in M. de Jong and F. Theuws with C. van Rhijn (eds), Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages (Leiden, 2001), pp. 200–5. N. Stoodley, The Spindle and the Spear (Oxford, 1999). H. Williams, ‘Material Culture as Memory: Combs and Cremation in Early Medieval Britain’, EME 12 (2003), pp. 89–128. A. Jones, ‘Technologies of Remembrance. Memory, Materiality and Identity in Early Bronze Age Scotland’, in Williams (ed.), Archaeologies of Remembrance, pp. 65–88. E. Coatsworth, ‘The Pectoral Cross and the Portable Altar from the Tomb of St Cuthbert’, in G. Bonner, D. Rollason and C. Stancliffe (eds), St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community (Woodbridge, 1989), pp. 287–302. See also V. Thompson, Dying and Death in Later AngloSaxon England (Boydell, 2004).



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In all these ways portable objects are linked to social memories intended to connect with the past and sometimes with the future. These memories took many different forms, ranging from personal histories, the history of family groups and communities, mythical histories, and allusions to sacred history of the church, and the Bible. Artefacts could mediate between the living and the recently dead, but could also connect with a range of other biographies and histories, both recollected and imagined. A further issue concerns the ‘agency’ inherent in artefacts; in other words, how objects, as extensions of people and as mediators with the dead and the sacred, can convey social power and influence actions and beliefs. This is particularly important when considering the roles of supposed religious and ‘magical’ art and artefacts in graves. 60 Though the apotropaic qualities of ‘amulets’ are discussed by Effros, 61 the possibility that the abstract decoration, form and location of artefacts in graves served less to communicate identities to the living than as a means of managing death pollution and interactions between the living, the dead and the supernatural, requires further conceptualization. 62 Consequently, rather than just seeing artefacts as ‘symbolic’ of identities, it would surely be profitable to develop metaphorical, biographical and mnemonic approaches to grave-goods, as well as exploring their agency in affecting and influencing beliefs and practices surrounding death. This leads us on to consider the qualities of artefacts in graves that are thought to have symbolic, metaphorical, biographical and mnemonic agency. Effros points out that the symbolism and significance of objects in defining social and religious identities goes beyond their form and decoration. Certainly iconographic representations on early medieval artefacts (such as crosses) have received the most attention, but there are a range of other decorative features that may have conveyed meanings.63 Thus, the colour of objects might be significant. For example, Effros briefly mentions historical accounts in which the whiteness of shrouds evokes the chastity and purity of a deceased religious, but to this author’s knowledge this topic remains undeveloped in the study of early medieval artefacts in general.64 The evidence is certainly available 60 61 62

63

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See A. Gell, Art and Agency (Oxford, 1998). Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, pp. 138–9. Such an approach might equally explain practices like the posthumous manipulation of the dead body, fire rituals and the ‘ritual’ deposits of ash, snail shells and other materials in graves (Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, pp. 163–71) as well as the protective role of grave structures (Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, pp. 177–88); Effros, Body and Soul, pp. 62–75. E.g. J.D. Richards, The Significance of Form and Decoration of Anglo-Saxon Cremation Urns, BAR British Series 166 (Oxford, 1987). Effros, Body and Soul, pp. 22, 35; A. Jones and G. MacGregor Colouring the Past: The Significance of Colour in Archaeological Research (Oxford, 2002); C.R. Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Art: A New Perspective (Manchester, 1982), pp. 24–43.



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to pursue a study of colour in early medieval graves. For example, we are familiar with the deployment of white quartz in graves from early medieval western and northern Britain. 65 Effros also observes that the brilliance of many early artefacts has often been noted, a departure from the classical aesthetic that led some antiquarians to dismiss the childlike mentality of Europe’s barbarians and their desire for shiny things. 66 However, as in the account of barbarian swords described by Cassiodorus,67 the lustre or luminosity of high-status artefacts, both from sacred and secular contexts, might have held as much significance as their form and decoration. Thus there is room for a renewed consideration of the colour and lustre of grave-goods, if we are to understand better their role in commemorating the dead. For those attending an early medieval funeral, however, vision was only one means of communicating the identity of the deceased and their transformation. Consequently, one wonders if there is the potential to develop a multi-sensory approach to early medieval mortuary practices?68 For instance, in many cultures, smell can have a powerful role in mediating relations between the living and the deceased. 69 The aromas of death – the decomposition of the corpse and materials, and also the use of spices, perfumes and oils to manage and obscure these corporeal engagements – can be approached both through historical and archaeological evidence. For example, the importance of sweet smells in articulating the sanctity conferred on the body’s resistance to decomposition is a well-known example deriving from written sources. Occasionally spices, flowers and herbs referred to in historical accounts are found in early medieval graves.70 Similarly we might reappraise the role of taste in constructing identities and memories, as for example adding a further dimension to understanding the importance of food and drink in early medieval mortuary contexts. 71 Equally, the sounds of funerals and their impact on mourners also requires consideration. While the music, wailing and songs that may have been performed cannot be reconstructed, and few musical and sonorous artefacts are 65

66

67

68 69

70 71

E.g. W.J. Britnell, ‘Capel Maelog, Llandrindod Wells, Powys: Excavations 1984–1987’, Medieval Archaeology 34 (1990), pp. 27–96, at p. 36. B. Effros, ‘Memories of the Early Medieval Past’, in Williams (ed.), Archaeologies of Remembrance, pp. 255–80, at pp. 273–4. Quoted in F. Theuws and M. Alkemade, ‘A Kind of Mirror for Men: Sword Depositions in Late Antique Northern Gaul’, in Theuws and Nelson (eds), Rituals of Power, pp. 401–76, at p. 401. E.g. Hamilakis, Pluciennik and Tarlow (eds), Thinking through the Body. S. Kus, ‘Toward an Archaeology of Body and Soul’, in J-C. Gardin and C.S. Peebles (eds), Representations in Archaeology (Indianapolis, 1992), pp. 168–77. Effros, Body and Soul, pp. 71–5. Y. Hamilakis, ‘The Past as Oral History: Towards an Archaeology of the Senses’, in Hamilakis, Pluciennik and Tarlow (eds), Thinking through the Body, pp. 121–36.



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found in graves, we can at least consider the changing acoustics of funerary rituals that accompanied the gradual transference from field cemeteries to the architectural environments provided by churches. One wonders whether the acoustics of indoor liturgical rituals were as important as their visual qualities in commemorating the dead in new ways.72 A further line of enquiry might be to explore the haptic qualities of early medieval objects; usually intended to be touched and handled, as well as viewed. Often their surfaces do not only carry many colours and patterns, they simultaneously incorporate a variety of textures that were integral to their meaning in the mortuary ritual. 73 Much of these issues concern the central tenet of recent studies: that mortuary practices are a public forum for ritual display. However, the very significance of many objects placed in graves comes not so much from their display, but from the fact that they are viewed for a short time before being taken out of sight and consigned to the grave. Consequently, in addition to the sensory experience of objects, we need also to consider their concealment as an important aspect of their significance in mortuary practices, a fact that has received surprisingly little attention.74 In this way we can regard portable artefacts as involved in ‘scene-making’ with a rich range of allusions to be interpreted and remembered by mourners once taken out of sight and into memory. 75 From here we need to consider the relationship between objects and personhood. Effros discusses the ways material culture reflects ‘individual’ identities, and in places relies on theories developed by Lewis Binford in the 1970s in which artefacts are seen as symbols of social ‘roles’. However, anthropological conceptions of dividuality have recently come centre stage in archaeological discussions of identity, personhood and cosmology.76 Issues of relevance include the breaking down of culture/nature divisions to focus on indigenous conceptualizations of the social person as ‘dividual’ – made up of a body and also objects and substances that during life and death are exchanged and 72

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See A. Watson and D. Keating, ‘Architecture and Sound: An Acoustic Analysis of Megalithic Monuments in Prehistoric Britain’, Antiquity 73 (1999), pp. 325–36. V. Cummings, ‘Experiencing Texture and Transformation in the British Neolithic, Oxford Journal of Archaeology 21:3 (2002), pp. 249–61; G. MacGregor, ‘Making Sense of the Past in the Present: A Sensory Analysis of Carved Stone Balls’, World Archaeology 31 (1999), pp. 258–71. E.g. M. Nieke, ‘Penannular and Related Brooches: Secular Ornament or Symbols in Action?’, in R.M. Spearman and J. Higgitt (eds), The Age of Migrating Ideas. Early Medieval Art in Northern Britain and Ireland (Edinburgh, 1993), pp. 128–34; H. Williams, ‘Death, Memory and Time’. M. Carver, ‘Burial as Poetry: The Context of Treasure in Anglo-Saxon Graves’, in E. Tyler (ed.), Treasure in the Medieval West (Woodbridge, 2001), pp. 25–48; G. Halsall, ‘Burial Writes: Graves, “Texts” and Time in Early Merovingian Northern Gaul’, in J. Jarnut and M. Wemhoff (eds), Erinnerungskultur im Bestattungsritual. Archäologisch-Historisches Forum (Munich, 2003), pp. 61–74. C. Fowler, The Archaeology of Personhood (London, 2004).



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transformed. Bazelmans has recently and cogently addressed these issues in the early medieval context, discussing how artefacts may operate as more than symbols, becoming instead ‘indexes’, natural signs and extensions of the social person in death. This idea is not only relevant to the ritual exchange of objects between people (as Bazelmans has convincingly discussed in relation to the poem Beowulf ),77 but also the burial of objects with the dead. Historical accounts illustrate this clearly. Effros discusses the case of Gertrude of Nivelle who was buried in a hair shirt rather than in funerary attire befitting her status. 78 As well as being a deliberate statement of humility as Effros suggests, we should note that the hair shirt had been the possession of a holy woman. Similarly, Effros notes that Eligius of Noyon’s burial costume was selected by Queen Balthild. 79 Could these be examples of more than the ‘dead not burying themselves’; might they instead show us individuals buried with artefacts that say less about their identity than about their relationship with others? Certainly, similar examples of mourners dressing the dead from more recent centuries have been interpreted by Sarah Tarlow as attempts to connect the identities of the living and the deceased.80 This should lead us to interrogate our view of objects as ‘storing’ identities when ‘fixed’ to individuals, and consider that in the exchange of artefacts between bodies they might instead mediate and distribute personhood. The desirability of such an approach would become clearer if we question the imposition onto the early medieval period of concepts of individuality and the commodification of objects that are unique to Western modernity. The rewards for developing approaches to the symbolic and mnemonic roles of artefacts deriving from their form, decoration, multisensory characteristics, biographies and materiality are manifold, and certainly include an invigorated appreciation of the significance of furnished burial rites. Pursuing this might help us to understand local, regional and chronological variations in new ways that challenge the assumption of many (including Effros), that churches and other aboveground monuments gradually replaced grave-goods because the latter were ‘temporary’ and ‘less effective’ means of commemoration. It might instead be suggested that the rich display of portable artefacts was very effective in commemoration, but that the media of commemoration changed to suit new types of audience. We must indeed be wary of the 77

78 79 80

J. Bazelmans, ‘Beyond Power: Ceremonial Exchanges in Beowulf ’, in Theuws and Nelson (eds), Rituals of Power, pp. 311–75. Effros, Body and Soul, pp. 35–6. Effros, Body and Soul, p. 39. S. Tarlow, ‘The Aesthetic Corpse in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in Hamilakis, Pluciennik and Tarlow (eds), Thinking through the Body, pp. 85–98.



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further imposition of prioritizing ‘Roman’ forms of seemingly permanent memorials to the dead over rituals in which artefacts are exchanged, transformed and buried, in the same way that we should be wary of incautiously applying racial labels to early medieval material culture. 81

Landscape and cemetery organization As well as addressing the role of grave-goods and burial rites, Effros dedicates a substantial chapter of Merovingian Mortuary Archaeology to the study of cemetery organization and location; exploring issues such as monument reuse, the range of grave structures employed (e.g. sarcophagi),82 and the gradual development of church burial out of a desire to be interred ad sanctos.83 Meanwhile, in Body and Soul Effros addresses traditions of stone monuments and the reuse of graves and grave-goods in Merovingian cemeteries. 84 Although some topics such as barrow burial are notable by their limited coverage, 85 Effros’s focus on space and landscape, incorporating both the potentials and the limitations of the evidence, develops a debate that has tended to be under investigated. Indeed, one of the most disabling aspects of traditional approaches to early medieval graves has been an obsession with the grave as a sealed archaeological context and an inability to conceptualize the grave as one element of a complex spatial and temporal network of ritual actions that constituted the early medieval funeral. In turn, the significance of cemeteries as places of repeated ritual action have failed to be theorized adequately. Once again rejecting ethnic and religious interpretations, 86 Effros draws on cross-cultural theories of cemetery organization and location developed by the ‘New Archaeology’ of the 1960s and 1970s, such as those by Lewis Binford and Arthur Saxe. 87 From this perspective, she argues that formal disposal areas functioned to articulate group identity. This is a valuable starting point that allows us to consider the cemetery as far from a universal phenomenon, and in fact as a culturally and socially specific choice by mourners connected to both ideas and practices surrounding death. Effros is able to use this argument as a broad basis from which to explore the significance of space, place and landscape. 81 82 83 84 85

86 87

Jones, ‘Technologies of Remembrance’. Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, pp. 177–88. Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, pp. 211–17. Effros, Body and Soul, pp. 49–70. Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, pp. 199–200; Effros does not address the ongoing debate on the meaning of barrow burial; e.g. R. Van de Noort, ‘The Context of Early Medieval Barrows in Western Europe’, Antiquity 67 (1993), pp. 66–73. Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, pp. 194–6, 205. M. Parker Pearson, The Archaeology of Death and Burial (Stroud, 1999), pp. 124–41.



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Central to her argument is that church burial was slow to emerge in early medieval Europe, and that from the fifth century through to the eighth and ninth centuries a range of topographical locations might be selected for the interment of the dead. Moreover, the move from field cemetery to church burial had little directly to do with conversion, but with changing degrees of control of the clergy over burial and patterns of social-political power.88 However, there is equally a danger in applying cross-cultural rules for the significance of burial location. Certainly cemeteries were likely to be important for defining the identities of the living as places where their relatives, ancestors and leaders resided in death, but the significance of cemeteries as places can vary considerably. Indeed, this generalized approach to the connections between burial location and claims over territory and identity have been critiqued and qualified by a range of anthropological and archaeological studies. These have shown that social, political and cosmological factors can influence the choices of burial sites in different ways in different cultures. 89 An important issue concerns the practice in early medieval cemeteries of reusing both Roman and prehistoric monuments, a topic that Effros has addressed in detail.90 She suggests possible elite Christian views towards ancient monuments, but this does not rule out the existence of a range of other motivations and attitudes in Merovingian society. As in England, future work needs to identify the frequency and characteristics of monument reuse in more detail in order to reveal different responses between regions and over time. As well as general surveys of the data, more detailed contextual analyses of specific localities and regions may assist, together with computer-assisted G.I.S. (Geographical 88

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For Britain, see H. Gittos, ‘Creating the Sacred: Anglo-Saxon Rites for Consecrating Cemeteries’, in S. Lucy and A. Reynolds (eds), Burial in Early Medieval England and Wales (London, 2002), pp. 195–208; D. Hadley, ‘Burial Practices in Northern England in the Later Anglo-Saxon Period’, in Lucy and Reynolds (eds), Burial in Early Medieval England and Wales, pp. 209–228. V. Cummings, A. Jones and A. Watson, ‘Divided Places: Phenomenology and Asymmetry in the Monuments of the Black Mountains, Southeast Wales’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 12:1 (2002), pp. 57–70; M. Parker Pearson, ‘The Powerful Dead: Archaeological Relationships between the Living and the Dead’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 3 (1993), pp. 203–29; C. Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape (Oxford, 1994). Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, pp. 192–3; B. Effros, ‘Monuments and Memory: Repossessing Ancient Remains in Early Medieval Gaul’, in de Jong and Theuws with van Rhijn (eds), Topographies of Power, pp. 93–118. Effros is addressing an increasing body of archaeological literature exploring the roles of the past in the early Middle Ages: R. Bradley, ‘Time Regained: The Creation of Continuity’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 140 (1987), pp. 1–17; S. Semple, ‘A Fear of the Past: The Place of the Prehistoric Burial Mound in the Ideology of Middle and Later Anglo-Saxon England’, World Archaeology 30:1 (1998), pp. 109–27; H. Williams, ‘Ancient Landscapes and the Dead’, Medieval Archaeology 41 (1997), pp. 1–32; H. Williams, ‘Monuments and the Past in Early Anglo-Saxon England’, World Archaeology 30:1 (1998), pp. 90–108.



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Information Systems) studies of the proximity of prehistoric and Roman monuments to early medieval cemeteries. 91 There may also be the potential for combining later land charters and place name studies with archaeological analyses of mortuary topography. 92 Furthermore, recent work on the relationship of burial sites and cult centres in Merovingian urban topography93 needs to be augmented by detailed studies of factors other than monument reuse that affected burial location, including the identification of relationships between burial sites and such features as natural topography, routeways, settlements and boundaries.94 The aim should be to reconstruct not simply the locations of cemeteries, but their broader socio-political and sacred geography. 95 Alongside these methodological issues are theoretical ones concerning how we conceptualize the role of cemeteries in early medieval societies. A range of studies including Effros’s have addressed the fact that in the early Middle Ages, there was not a simple and immediate shift from pagan ‘field cemeteries’ to churchyard burial. Instead, as Effros argues, we see a complex pattern of burial location, reusing Roman and prehistoric monuments and increasingly gravitating towards churches and the relics of the saints. Moreover, Effros discusses the involvement of elite secular families in the ordering of funerals and the increasing control of the clergy over funerary practices in terms of power and politics, rather than as a passive process of ‘conversion’. 96 Härke has also recently explored the various ways in which cemeteries may have been implicated in the power relations of the living. 97 However, to this 91

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Lucy, Early Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries of East Yorkshire; S. Semple, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes to the Past: A Landscape Perspective, D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford (2003). D. Petts, ‘Cemeteries and Boundaries in Western Britain’, in Lucy and Reynolds (eds), Burial in Early Medieval England and Wales, pp. 24–46; A. Reynolds, ‘Burials, Boundaries and Charters in Anglo-Saxon England: A Reassessment’, in Lucy and Reynolds (eds), Burial in Early Medieval England and Wales, pp. 171–94; Semple, ‘A Fear of the Past’. M. Innes, ‘People, Places and Power in Carolingian Society’, in de Jong and Theuws with van Rhijn (eds), Topographies of Power, pp. 397–438; Theuws, ‘Maastricht as a Centre of Power’; I. Wood, ‘Topographies of Holy Power in Sixth-Century Gaul’, in de Jong and Theuws with van Rhijn (eds), Topographies of Power, pp. 137–54. H. Williams, ‘Placing the Dead: Investigating the Location of Wealthy Barrow Burials in Seventh Century England’, in M. Rundkvist (ed.), Grave Matters. Eight Studies of First Millennium AD Burials in Crimea, England and Southern Scandinavia (Oxford, 1999), pp. 57–86; H. Williams, ‘Cemeteries as Central Places – Place and Identity in Migration Period Easter England’, in B. Hårdh and L. Larsson (eds), Central Places in the Migration and Merovingian Periods (Lund, 2002), pp. 341–62. L. Hedeager, ‘Asgard Reconstructed? Gudme – A “Central Place” in the North’, in de Jong and Theuws with van Rhijn (eds), Topographies of Power, pp. 467–508; L. Hedeager, ‘Scandinavian “Central Places” in a Cosmological Setting’, in Hårdh and Larsson (eds), Central Places in the Migration and Merovingian Periods, pp. 3–18. B. Effros, ‘Beyond Cemetery Walls: Early Medieval Funerary Topography and Christian Salvation’, EME 6:1 (1997), pp. 1–23. H. Härke, ‘Cemeteries as Places of Power’, in de Jong and Theuws with van Rhijn (eds), Topographies of Power, pp. 9–30.



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author, this sharp division between ‘families of the deceased’ and ‘clergy’ detracts from considering the potential complexities and range of social groups that might have become involved in late antique and early medieval funerals, influencing their participation in discourses of power.98 By their nature as public rituals, funerals may not have been easily ‘controlled’ by individuals or groups, but instead involved complex negotiations of power mediated by the exchange of resources, artefacts, obligations and ritual observances. These more dispersed power relations might involve different age, gender, status and ethnic groups, as well as the deceased’s family and ritual specialists. There is also the danger of reducing funerary practices to considerations of elite strategies, rather than bearing in mind the potential for lower-status groups to influence, challenge, resist and subvert the dominant discourse. However, we must in turn resist reducing the significance of cemeteries to a simple question of power, thus ignoring a range of other issues such as memory, cosmology and identity. This leads us to consider the role of cemetery space and location in the construction of social memory. A central theme in this regard is the concept of ‘founder’ burials. However, this is an ascription that Effros could easily have added to her list of traditional concepts that are ripe for critique and reappraisal. The model of founder burials has a powerful appeal because it illustrates the potential importance of wealthy deposition of grave-goods in forging links to place, and promoting social memories as secular versions of the cult of saints. Effros convincingly employs this concept in discussing Childeric’s grave, as a means of constructing a social cohesion and a politics of memory at a time of dynastic upheaval and political instability. 99 Yet in her case studies, she admits that the wealthiest burials do not always occur in the earliest stages of a cemetery.100 From a British perspective, there are increasingly few convincing cases of ‘founder burials’, and even the wealthy barrow burials appear to be very late in the sequence of graves at the rich barrow cemeteries at Snape and Sutton Hoo. 101 Therefore, as it stands, this author cannot help but wonder whether ‘founder’ burials represent a hangover from early twentieth-century discussions of graves as pagan 98

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See now H. Geake, ‘The Control of Burial Practice in Middle Anglo-Saxon England’, in M. Carver, The Cross Goes North. Processes of Conversion in Northern Europe, AD 300–1300 , (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 259–71. Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, p. 129. E.g. G. Halsall, ‘Childeric’s Grave, Clovis’ Succession, and the Origins of the Merovingian Kingdom’, in R.W. Mathisen and D. Shanzer (eds), Society and Culture in Late Antique Gaul (Aldershot, 2001), pp. 116–33. For example, the apogee of funerary display occurred in graves of the second half of the seventh century at Köln-Müngersdorf; Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, p. 139. M. Carver, Sutton Hoo. Burial Ground of Kings? (London, 1998), pp. 107–36; W. FilmerSankey and T. Pestell, Snape Anglo-Saxon Cemetery: Excavations and Surveys 1824–1992 (Suffolk, 2001), pp. 262–6.



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temples, as misleading as ethnic and religious labels. 102 Perhaps future studies might focus less on single wealthy burials (whether secular elites or the tombs of saints) in creating memories, and more on the repeated ‘citations’ of burial made in relation to rural and urban topography through ritual performances, in which links between the dead and place are constructed through the repeated augmentation of burials to the cemetery. Referencing and reusing earlier graves on a micro-cemeterial level may have been a more significant means of constructing ‘genealogical’ references to the past.103 From this perspective, is it possible to consider the orderly structure of many row-grave cemeteries (and the occasional breakdown of this order with the reuse of graves and intercutting) less in functional terms of regular cemetery management, and more in terms of strategies of remembering? Could, in some circumstances at least, referencing and reuse of sarcophagi and graves have occurred not because of space limitations, but as deliberate attempts to connect with the known individuals buried within? Once again, this author would suggest that a central issue in understanding funerary practices concerns the changing use of landscape and space in remembering and forgetting the dead. We need to focus less on the evolution of churchyard burial in isolation, 104 a recent obsession of early medieval archaeology and history, and more on the complex connections between cemeteries and the wider landscape, both sacred and profane. It is only by the creation and discussion of explicit theories of space, place and landscape in early medieval mortuary archaeology that we can hope to interpret the patterns in cemetery location and organization that are increasingly recognized in the archaeological record.

Concluding remarks This review has deliberately avoided discussions of many areas where Merovingian mortuary archaeology could develop further in terms of archaeological method. For instance, many of the cemeteries studied by Effros are quite old, and improvements in archaeological field survey, excavation and post-excavation techniques as well as scientific analysis are likely to provide data of a higher quality as well as new types of data. To select some examples, it will be interesting to see the increasing application of Geographical Information Systems in the recording, 102 103

104

Effros, Mortuary Archaeology, pp. 73, 192. Such an approach may, for example, be profitable in addressing both the spatial organization of cemeteries like Köln-Müngersdorf and Frénouville, see K. Mizoguchi, ‘Time in the Reproduction of Mortuary Practices’, World Archaeology 25:2 (1993), pp. 223–35. E.g. E. Zadora-Rio, ‘The Making of Churchyards and Parish Territories in the EarlyMedieval Landscape of France and England in the 7th–12th Centuries: A Reconsideration’, Medieval Archaeology 47, pp. 1–20.



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publication and analysis of Merovingian cemetery data and their landscape context.105 Also noteworthy will be the increasing use of bone chemistry, which has the potential to inform us about the socioeconomic status and environment in which early medieval populations lived, and may on occasions allow the identification of immigrant groups and individuals.106 There is also great potential for more systematic chronological analysis in Merovingian archaeology, including the application of high-precision radio-carbon dating and correspondence analysis that is increasingly seen in Britain and Scandinavia. 107 Instead, this review has focussed upon three theoretical issues concerning how we study and interpret early medieval mortuary practices. Certainly the strengths of Effros’s interdisciplinary use of both historical and archaeological data are to be commended, as are her ability to grasp a vast primary and secondary literature addressing both sets of data. Moreover, Effros is clearly to be thanked for consolidating the agenda of the last twenty years that has shifted the debate over the interpretation of early medieval mortuary practices away from an obsessive focus on migration and religion. Yet, Effros retains a perspective in which a fully developed theorised approach to early medieval mortuary practices is restricted by the desire for archaeological remains to conform to historical agendas and theories, approaches in which the material remains appear to have a secondary place. The three major themes discussed above encapsulate the strengths of Effros’s books and the potential they identify for writing new and exciting interpretations of early medieval mortuary practices, developing away from traditional narratives of barbarian invasion, kingdom formation and conversion, towards interdisciplinary discussions of power, ideology and social identity. It is hoped that a critical appraisal of past and existing scholarship will develop in a more self-reflexive manner in which we identify and explore the socio-political context of our own work as well as those of previous generations viewed from hindsight. Discussions of ‘grave-goods’ need to build on the explicitly theorized approach adopted by Effros to explore the symbolic, metaphorical, biographical and mnemonic roles of artefacts in the commemoration of the dead, taking into account their form and decoration and also their multi-sensory qualities. Finally, studies of cemetery organization and landscape require more rigorous methodologies and theories in order to 105

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E.g. C. Haughton and D. Powlesland, West Heslerton: The Anglian Cemetery Volumes 1 & 2, (London, 1999). E.g. G. Speed and P. Walton Rogers, ‘A Burial of a Viking Woman at Adwick-le-Street, South Yorkshire’, Medieval Archaeology 48, pp. 51–90. J. Hines, ‘Lies, Damned Lies, and the Curriculum Vitae: Reflections on Statistics and the Populations of Early Anglo-Saxon Inhumation Cemeteries’, in Lucy and Reynolds (eds), Burial in Early Medieval England and Wales, pp. 88–102.



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develop and expand upon our appreciation of the role of cemeteries within the physical, socio-political and ideological landscapes of early medieval Europe. To this writer, the key theme linking these aspects is the need to theorize and conceptualize the complex relationships between material culture, social memory and identity in the early medieval period, and how these relationships change over time and between communities and regions. The same theme of social memory is central to understanding how archaeological and historical sources are used and abused in the present. A focus on the role of social memories in constructing identities, mediated through portable objects, dead bodies, graves, cemeteries, monuments and landscapes, as well as by the spoken and written word, might allow us to create a compromise between studies of mortuary practices that regard graves as direct evidence for migrations, beliefs and social roles, and those that see them as ideology, symbol and performance. Effros sets strong foundations for such an approach but there is, in this reviewer’s opinion, much to be done to develop upon the foundations laid in these two important volumes. Such a development requires early medieval historians and archaeologists to work in an interdisciplinary fashion as Effros advocates, but it also requires us to look beyond the early medieval period to studies of mortuary practices in anthropology and sociology as well as archaeology and history, to consider new ways of thinking about death and burial in early medieval Europe. Department of Archaeology, University of Exeter



Book reviews

The Making of Feudal Agricultures? Edited by Miquel Barceló and François Sigaut. Transformation of the Roman World 14. Leiden and Boston: Brill. 2004. ix + 321 pp. + 29 b/w figures. EUR 94. ISBN 90 04 11722 9. ISSN 1386 4165. Recent discussions of dark age economics, like the papers in EME 12:3, have been dominated by ‘demand side’ interpretations focussed on the functions of trade. The Making of Feudal Agricultures? instead reminds us of how vital the agrarian base and the production of goods was to post-classical economies. It aims at animating a debate on the early medieval economy like the one Finley ignited around ‘the ancient economy’. The volume contains six chapters about the role of rural technologies in the ‘transformation of the Roman World’ (p. viii). First François Sigaut describes cultivation techniques from Roman to high medieval times, stressing continuities in southern Europe and some changes, due to new ways of ploughing, in the north. Next comes a meandering treatment of agricultural tools in France; Pascal Reigniez deploys much information from Roman texts, without considering their medieval transmission, and describes the Merovingian period as a black hole and the Carolingian use of metal equipment as a ‘mutation technologique’ (p. 100). Catherine Rommelaere and Georges Raepsaet follow with a brief excursus on the switch, especially between Rhine and Loire rivers, to horse power by the tenth century. Then comes Georges Comet’s list of grain types, their characteristics, and their diffusion in continental western Europe. The tiny map (p. 178) is essential to understanding Aline Durand and Philippe Leveau’s analysis of landscape change in south-western France, which rejects the possibility of explanatory models for what happened between ancient and medieval times: though ‘the notion of inheritance’ (from Roman times) receives sanction, it is a micro-regional kaleidoscope, dazzling in its dynamic variety, that prevails. Dulcis in fundo, Miquel Barceló flays the historiography of water milling, beginning with Marc Bloch; he reiterates that hydraulic mills saturated the Roman empire, despite slavery, and argues Early Medieval Europe   () – © Blackwell Publishing Ltd ,  Garsington Road, Oxford OX DQ, UK and  Main Street, Malden, MA , USA

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that in Iberia Islamic peasants deployed a sophisticated kind of horizontalwheeled mill as part of their general management of the waterscape, independent of lordship. Partly because so many of the chapters focus on Francia, there is a considerable overlap between them, as on both grain cultivation and water milling. Yet The Making of Feudal Agricultures? is above all too heterogeneous, dispersive, and unsystematic in the way it addresses rural technologies: certain methods and machines enjoy disproportionate attention, no one attempts to fit specific tools in a ‘technological horizon’ (although Barceló recognizes the problem, p. 265), and the social contexts of techniques get uneven coverage (more on tools’ gendering would be useful). The findings of a multilingual book are anyways difficult to juxtapose: to what plant in Comet’s or Sigaut’s French syntheses did ‘buckwheat’ (p. 212) correspond? Bilingualism also has disorienting effects on the index, where ‘wheat’, ‘froment’, and ‘frumentum’ have distinct entries, without cross-references. More consistent use of scientific names might have eased comparisons across chapters. So would have greater chronological specificity, though most authors had to rely heavily on archaeological evidence and its less absolute chronologies. Considering how poor the technological evidence from continental Europe still is, any more or less firm conclusions, like the significance of the Carolingian moment in French and, perhaps, west European, life and work, are actually remarkable findings. But the question mark in the title signals how tenuous is our scholarly grasp of early medieval agricultural techniques. Durand and Leveau’s chapter suggests a way forward; they eschew generalizations and overarching synthesis in favour of meticulous examination of a limited region, stressing how the ongoing dialectic between ecologies and economy produced diverse techniques within it. When other European regions’ land use is reconstructed like this, we shall better understand the post-classical rural world. University of Michigan

PAOLO SQUATRITI

Political Assemblies in the Earlier Middle Ages. Edited by P.S. Barnwell and Marco Mostert. Turnhout: Brepols. 2003. ix + 213 pp. £60 hardback. ISBN 2 503 51341 7. The study of political assemblies is territory traditionally frequented by medievalists interested in institutional or constitutional history. However, in accordance with the thrust of recent scholarship, the essays in this collection highlight the great potential of the topic to develop a Early Medieval Europe   ()


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more sophisticated and complicated picture of early medieval politics, in which political assemblies are characterized less as passive institutions than as platforms for debate and tests of strength. Informed by such approaches, this book provides an extremely useful series of surveys of the role of political (in particular royal and civic) assemblies in particular eras and kingdoms. Paul Barnwell surveys the evidence for royal assemblies from barbarian Europe, providing a useful catalogue and concise discussion of Frankish, Visigothic and Lombard assemblies from the sixth to the eighth centuries. Stuart Airlie’s chapter on royal assemblies in early medieval Germany blends a characteristically deft analysis of the late Carolingian and Ottonian material with astute reflections on modern approaches to early medieval politics; while Charles Insley teases out a sophisticated discussion of late Anglo-Saxon politics from the superficially unpromising charter evidence. János Bak and Pavel Lukin analyse the role of consensus in the political and civic assemblies of early medieval central and eastern Europe; Judith Everard charts the evolution of aristocratic assemblies in Brittany after 1066, arguing for a major shift in character under Henry II; Adam Kosto discusses the different types of assembly encountered in Catalonia and Aragon between 900 and 1200, interpreting them in the light of Visigothic precedents; and Edward Coleman contributes a study of the nature of representative assemblies in early communal Italy and their formalization in the twelfth century. Two of the articles focus less on assemblies per se than on places and rituals: Stefan Brink’s discussion of legal assemblies in early Scandinavia, and Elizabeth Fitzpatrick’s of ecclesiastical influence on royal inauguration ceremonies in Ireland. Only A. Demyttenaere’s rich exegesis of Galbert of Bruges’s account of the murder of Charles the Good seems slightly out of place here, both in its specificity and its length (over twice as long as most of the other essays). The editors succeed in their stated intention to provide a range of material for comparison. The volume provides a concise and up-to-date overview of its theme. Because most of the articles are structured as broad surveys rather than as case studies, the book retains a commendable thematic cohesion, particularly for those interested in royal or urban history. As with any such collection, there are inevitable gaps. The volume’s chronological centre of gravity is the tenth to twelfth centuries, and is thus loaded very much towards the later end of the early medieval period. The absence (caused by a late withdrawal) of a chapter on west Francia from the ninth century onwards is particularly regrettable. Nevertheless, this is a volume which will serve both as useful reference work and as a solid platform for further research. University of St Andrews © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 

SIMON MACLEAN Early Medieval Europe   ()

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Word, Image and Experience: Dynamics of Miracle and SelfPerception in Sixth-Century Gaul. By Giselle de Nie. Variorum Collected Studies Series. Aldershot: Ashgate Press. 2003. xiv + 374 pages. Index. £57.50. ISBN 0 86078 933 0. This new addition to Ashgate’s Variorum series unites seventeen of Giselle de Nie’s articles – spanning three decades, several published here in English for the first time – on the miracle stories of sixth-century Gaul. The concise but useful introduction outlines de Nie’s debt to anthropological studies of modern oral societies, psychology and even theoretical physics. De Nie’s key assertion, which underpins all her work, is that ‘meditional visualizations can have a physical effect’; that is, that cures in late antique Gaul could have been effected by meditating on an image such as a burning candle – either seen or evoked textually. Article six discusses in more detail the models de Nie draws on, principally from the work of Geertz, Assagioli, Arnheim and Singer. It is this controversial methodology that distinguishes de Nie’s work from the historical–critical method of Krusch and Delehaye, or the more social– historical orientated studies of Benedicta Ward or Raymond Van Dam. In contrast, however, the source material at the heart of de Nie’s work is the conventional starting point for virtually all studies on late antique Gaul, namely the works of Gregory of Tours and the poet Venantius Fortunatus. As de Nie points out, this is principally because they are the only two writers for whom a ‘substantial corpus of writings has survived’. However, arguably some of the strongest articles in this collection are those that move a little outside of de Nie’s ‘comfort zone’ to consider Conciliar decrees (I) or issues of gender and the concept of mysterium (XIII). Further, a broader source base would have reduced the inevitable overlap in material (not to mention methodology) between the articles in this collection. The articles themselves are grouped not chronologically but under the headings of four themes: Self-perception: a permeable vessel; Symbolic action: miracle – or magic?; Iconic alchemy: the dynamic of images; The miracle in language. This thematic approach does draw out well both the central preoccupations of de Nie’s work and the principal strengths and limitations of her methodology. The third strand, ‘Iconic alchemy: the dynamic of images’, arguably forms the core of de Nie’s work. As with Section One, de Nie’s close attention to the imagery used in Gregory’s and Fortunatus’s work helps illuminate their concepts of spiritual reality. Many of the anthropological and pyschological models de Nie draws on, however, were formulated with seen objects in mind, not imagery in texts. Early Medieval Europe   ()


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To a certain extent this problem is addressed in the final group of articles on the miracle in language, and de Nie does refer to reception theory and, in a limited way, to literary theory, although greater use might have been made of this. It becomes clear in this section that de Nie conceives of miracle stories being read in church in a liturgical context, and that the reading out of these narratives containing ‘iconic imagery’ could produce physical and pyschological transformation. What could be explored further is whether the models de Nie employs would work as well when one considers monastic and lay private devotional reading. The great value of de Nie’s work lies, however, in probing the very areas that many historians seek to avoid – namely the imagination, the actual nature of miracles and a spiritual rather than a sensory reality – and in opening historians’ own minds to a broad range of anthropological and pyschological models; even if not all wish to follow her path up to its very end point. University of Manchester

CLARE PILSWORTH

Images of Salvation: The Story of the Bible through Medieval Art . Edited by Miriam Gill and Jane Hawkes. A Christianity and Culture Resource, General Editor Dee Dyas. Christianity and Culture, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York and St John’s College, Nottingham. CD-ROM £15.00. The culture of the Middle Ages was saturated with the Bible, an aspect of the period that can often pose problems for modern students unfamiliar with the text. Modern technologies have, however, done much to close the gap between the present and the biblical and medieval past, as this CD-ROM amply demonstrates. Bringing together 180 images from medieval stained glass, sculpture and illuminated manuscripts, it sets out to introduce its users to 44 themes drawn from the pages of the Bible. These themes, grouped under Old Testament and New Testament headings, cover a somewhat miscellaneous albeit captivating and illuminating range of topics: under the Old Testament, for example, there are sections devoted to expected personages such as Noah, Abraham, and Solomon but also to the Fall of the Angels, the Jesse Tree, and Typology, subjects likely to be less known to beginners and perhaps even intermediates. The New Testament section is the same, as theme-pages devoted to John the Baptist, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection stand alongside those on Parables, the Book of Revelation, and the Trinity. The main page of the program invites users to explore the CDROM’s contents by browsing from the list of forty-four themes or by © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 


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searching for specific topics. Either option leads to subsequent themepages that together form the core of the CD. The treatment of each theme begins with a page designed to orient the user to the larger background issues at stake. Each of these pages is divided into two columns, the left side containing a bulleted list of key themes and a discussion of the necessary doctrinal background, the right side a series of thumbnail images and an analysis of the biblical sources and commentary from patristic and medieval commentators. Throughout, the Bible references on these pages are presented in the form of links that, when activated, launch a pop-up window containing the relevant English translation from both the Douay-Rheims or Good News versions, allowing for direct study of the biblical text. Meanwhile, clicking the thumbnail images atop the right-hand column launches a further set of pages whose purpose is to provide art historical commentary on the images in question. These art historical pages also follow a standard format: the top of the page presents each image in an enlarged format (clicking it makes it even larger) alongside a handy summary of key theological points and visual elements, while the space beneath provides the art historical commentary. Within the commentary itself, smaller close-up versions of the image are embedded, helpfully prompting the user to study specific details that otherwise might be easy to overlook. The number of images used to elucidate the topic at hand varies from theme to theme; some contain only a single image, but the majority contain several. As cases in point, the Creation and the Nativity pages each showcase six images, the selections in both cases spanning a range of centuries (roughly the tenth through the fifteenth) and featuring various media: psalters, benedictionals, books of hours, bestiaries, and stained glass. Throughout, the quality of the images is excellent, the commentary insightful and accessible, and the collective pages of the whole attractive and easy to navigate. A glossary and bibliography round out the CD’s contents. Images of Salvation magnificently accomplishes what it sets out to do: present in an accessible and interesting manner the Christian story as it was represented in and interpreted by the art and literature of the Middle Ages. Competitively priced and well suited to both personal and public use (the images can be printed onto slides or projected via PowerPoint), it is a resource I would recommend to experts in various professional fields as well as to students or anyone who wishes to know more about the Bible and one era in world history profoundly affected by it. University of Michigan – Dearborn Early Medieval Europe   ()

SCOTT DEGREGORIO © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 

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Early Anglo-Saxon Belt Buckles (Late Fifth to Early Eighth Centuries A.D.): Their Classification and Context. By Sonja Marzinzik. British Archaeological Reports British Series 357. Oxford: Archaeopress. xxii + 483 pp. £45. ISBN 1 84171 544 1. The artefacts from early medieval graves have long been a focus of archaeological study. It is surprising, however, that despite detailed studies of brooches, beads and weapons in recent decades and despite the ubiquitous occurrence of dress accessories in graves, belt buckles have largely escaped such archaeological scrutiny. This ground-breaking study seeks to rectify this discrepancy by providing the first systematic analysis of Anglo-Saxon belt buckles. As the publication (with only minor amendments) of Sonja Marzinzik’s D.Phil. thesis (University of Oxford, 2001) the volume is heavy on detail and restricted in its opening and concluding discussions, but remains a coherent and structured work. Marzinzik begins by briefly reviewing recent theories on material culture in early medieval archaeology and draws upon written references to both the utilitarian and symbolic importance of belt buckles as elements of dress and as artefacts of value in and of themselves (Chs 1 and 2). In her review of previous research she identifies the lack of coherent typology and chronology; the attention to only the more elaborate buckles; and the lack of assessment of continental material that could assist in identifying imported objects and help to clarify the dating of belt buckles and the graves in which they are found (Ch. 3). The main body of Marzinzik’s thesis is the production of a typology and chronology for Anglo-Saxon belt buckles from a database of 1379 artefacts (Chs 4 and 5), followed by an assessment of their distributions in terms of patterns of trade, exchange and socio-political interactions (Ch. 6). Marzinzik proceeds with a contextual and social analysis, recognizing the important role of belt buckles in mortuary costume (Ch. 7) and in the signalling of age, gender and status identities, particularly in association with adult male burials (Ch. 8). Finally, she reviews the limited evidence for modes of production, exchange and cultural connections, and here develops some interesting arguments. For instance, Marzinzik rejects the suggestion that Anglo-Saxon belt buckles demonstrate continuity from late Roman examplars and critiques Helen Geake’s recent model for a direct Byzantine influence on Anglo-Saxon female dress of the seventh and early eighth centuries, arguing instead that ‘final phase’ dress accessories were a selective adoption of Frankish dress (Ch. 9). Despite the thesis format in which tables and illustrations are separated from the text, this is a well-written and well-presented volume. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 


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Marzinzik is to be commended for her grasp of the data, her chronological analysis and the assessment of continental parallels, which are all placed clearly, if only briefly, within a solid theoretical context. Her thesis will inevitably provide an invaluable resource for future research into early medieval artefacts, whether specialists agree with the precise details of her typology or not. Although in her acknowledgements Marzinzik recognizes that she has moved on to other periods, I do hope that she will return to her thesis to develop and synthesize her arguments into an article in order to reach the broader audience of students and scholars that her research deserves. Department of Archaeology, University of Exeter


HOWARD WILLIAMS


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