A major re-assessment of the Frankish historian Flodoard of Rheims, one of the tenth century's most intriguing but neglected narrators.

An in-depth exploration of documentary forgery at the turn of the first millennium Forgery and Memory at the End of the First Millennium takes a fresh look at documentary forgery and historical memory in the Middle Ages. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, religious houses across Europe began falsifying texts to improve local documentary records on an unprecedented scale. As Levi Roach illustrates, the resulting wave of forgery signaled major shifts in society and political culture, shifts which would lay the foundations for the European ancien régime. Spanning documentary traditions across France, England, Germany and northern Italy, Roach examines five sets of falsified texts to demonstrate how forged records produced in this period gave voice to new collective identities within and beyond the Church. Above all, he indicates how this fad for falsification points to new attitudes toward past and present—a developing fascination with the signs of antiquity. These conclusions revise traditional master narratives about the development of antiquarianism in the modern era, showing that medieval forgers were every bit as sophisticated as their Renaissance successors. Medieval forgers were simply interested in different subjects—the history of the Church and their local realms, rather than the literary world of classical antiquity. A comparative history of falsified records at a crucial turning point in the Middle Ages, Forgery and Memory at the End of the First Millennium offers valuable insights into how institutions and individuals rewrote and reimagined the past.

This collection of studies investigates how people of the 10th to early 12th century experienced and represented processes of intentional change in the Church, and what the consequences are of modern scholars’ reliance on ‘reform’ to describe and interpret these processes. In 11 thematic chapters it takes stock of the current state of research and offers suggestions to deepen our understanding of the ideological, institutional, and cultural dynamics at play. Contributors are Julia Barrow, Robert F. Berkhofer III, Gordon Blennemann, Katy Cubitt, Nicolangelo D'Acunto, Anne-Marie Helvétius, Ludger Körntgen, Rutger Kramer, Brigitte Meijns, Diane Reilly, Rachel Stone, and Steven Vanderputten.

Using and Not Using the Past after the Carolingian Empire offers a new take on European history from c.900 to c.1050, examining the ‘post-Carolingian’ period in its own right and presenting it as a time of creative experimentation with new forms of authority and legitimacy. In the late eighth century, the Frankish king Charlemagne put together a new empire. Less than a century later, that empire had collapsed. The story of Europe following the end of the Carolingian empire has often been presented as a tragedy: a time of turbulence and disintegration, out of which the new, recognisably medieval kingdoms of Europe emerged. This collection offers a different perspective. Taking a transnational approach, the authors contemplate the new social and political order that emerged in tenth- and eleventh-century Europe and examine how those shaping this new order saw themselves in relation to the past. Each chapter explores how the past was used creatively by actors in the regions of the former Carolingian Empire to search for political, legal and social legitimacy in a turbulent new political order. Advancing the debates on the uses of the past in the early Middle Ages and prompting reconsideration of the narratives that have traditionally dominated modern writing on this period, Using and Not Using the Past after the Carolingian Empire is ideal for students and scholars of tenth- and eleventh-century European history.

This book argues that abbatial authority was fundamental to monastic historical writing in the period c.500-1500. Writing history was a collaborative enterprise integral to the life and identity of medieval monastic communities, but it was not an activity for which time and resources were set aside routinely. Each act of historiographical production constituted an extraordinary event, one for which singular provision had to be made, workers and materials assigned, time carved out from the monastic routine, and licence granted. This allocation of human and material resources was the responsibility and prerogative of the monastic superior. Drawing on a wide and diverse range of primary evidence gathered from across the medieval Latin West, this book is the first to investigate systematically how and why abbots and abbesses exercised their official authority and resources to lay the foundations on which their communities' historiographical traditions were built by themselves and others. It showcases them as prolific authors, patrons, commissioners, project managers, and facilitators of historical narratives who not only regularly put pen to parchment personally, but also, and perhaps more importantly, enabled others inside and outside their communities by granting them the resources and licence to write. Revealing the intrinsic relationship between abbatial authority and the writing of history in the Middle Ages with unprecedented clarity, Benjamin Pohl urges us to revisit and revise our understanding of monastic historiography, its processes, and its protagonists in ways that require some radical rethinking of the medieval historian's craft in communal and institutional contexts.

This fascinating account is the principal source for a number of momentous political developments leading up to the millennium. These include struggles among the Carolingians, the rise of the Saxon dynasty in Germany, and various Viking and Magyar raids. Academics please note that this is a title classified as having a restricted allocation of complimentary copies; complimentary copies remain readily available to adopters and to academics very likely to adopt this title in the coming academic year. When adoption possibilities are less strong and/or further in the future, academics are requested to purchase the title at an academic discount, with the proviso that University of Toronto Press will happily refund the purchase price (with or without a receipt) if the book is indeed adopted.

"A series which is a model of its kind" Edmund King This year's volume is made up of articles that were presented at the conference in Bonn, held under the auspices of the University. In this volume, Alheydis Plassmann, the Allen Brown Memorial lecturer, analyses how two contemporary commentators reported the events of their day, the contest between two grandchildren of William the Conqueror as they struggled for supremacy in England and Normandy during the 1140s. The Marjorie Chibnall Essay prize winner, Laura Bailey, examines the geographical spaces occupied by the exile in The Gesta Herewardi and Fouke le Fitz Waryn. Andrea Stieldorf compares the seals and the coins of Germany/Lotharingia in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries with those made in England, exploring the ideas embedded in the iconography of the two connected visual sources. Domesday Book forms the focus of two important new studies, one by Rory Naismith looking at the moneyers to be found in Domesday, adding substantially to the information gained on this important group of artisans, and one by Chelsea Shields-Más on the sheriffs of Edward the Confessor, giving us new insights into the key officials in the royal administration. Elisabeth van Houts examines the life of Empress Matilda before she returned to her father's court in 1125 throwing new light on Matilda's "German" years, while Laura Wangerin looks at how tenth-century Ottonian women used communication to further their political goals. Steven Vanderputten takes the challenge of thinking about religious change at the turn of the Millennium through the lens of the Life of John, Abbot of Gorze Abbey, by John of Saint-Arnoul. Benjamin Pohl looks at the role of the abbot in prompting monk-historians to embark on their historiographical tasks through the work of one individual chronicler, Andreas of Marchiennes, responsible for writing, at his abbot's behest, the Chronicon Marchianense. And Megan Welton explores the implications of honorific titles through an examination of the title dux as it was attached to two tenth-century women rulers. The volume offers a wide range of insightful essays which add considerably to our understanding of the central middle ages.

England and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages: Papal Privileges in European Perspective, c. 680-1073 provides the first dedicated, book-length study of interactions between England and the papacy throughout the early middle ages. It takes as its lens the extant English record of papal privileges: legal diplomas drawn-up on metres-long scrolls of Egyptian papyrus, acquired by pilgrim-petitioners within the city of Rome, and then brought back to Britain to negotiate local claims and conflicts. How, why, and when did English petitioners choose to invoke the distant authority of Rome in this way, and how did this compare to what was taking place elsewhere in Europe? How successful were these efforts, and how were they remembered in later centuries? By using these still-understudied papal documents to reassess what we know of the worlds of Bede, the Mercian Supremacy, the West Saxon 'Kingdom of the English', and the Norman Conquest--locating them in the process within a comparative, Europe-wide setting--this book offers important new contributions to Anglo-Saxon studies, legal and documentary history, papal history, and the study of early medieval Europe more widely. It also includes an annotated handlist of the corpus of English papal privileges up to 1073--a critical reference work for future research in the field.

Although it is fashionable among modernists to claim that globalism emerged only since ca. 1800, the opposite can well be documented through careful comparative and transdisciplinary studies, as this volume demonstrates, offering a wide range of innovative perspectives on often neglected literary, philosophical, historical, or medical documents. Texts, images, ideas, knowledge, and objects migrated throughout the world already in the pre-modern world, even if the quantitative level compared to the modern world might have been different. In fact, by means of translations and trade, for instance, global connections were established and maintained over the centuries. Archetypal motifs developed in many literatures indicate how much pre-modern people actually shared. But we also discover hard-core facts of global economic exchange, import of exotic medicine, and, on another level, intensive intellectual debates on religious issues. Literary evidence serves best to expose the extent to which contacts with people in foreign countries were imaginable, often desirable, and at times feared, of course. The pre-modern world was much more on the move and reached out to distant lands out of curiosity, economic interests, and political and military concerns. Diplomats crisscrossed the continents, and artists, poets, and craftsmen traveled widely. We can identify, for instance, both the Vikings and the Arabs as global players long before the rise of modern globalism, so this volume promises to rewrite many of our traditional notions about pre-modern worldviews, economic conditions, and the literary sharing on a global level, as perhaps best expressed by the genre of the fable.

Murder in a cathedral, horrific illnesses and deformities, narrow escapes from injury and death, a vengeful dragon, a wandering eyeball, a bawdy monk and other sinners redeemed—the accounts of miracles performed by the Virgin Mary gathered and translated in The Miracles of Mary in Twelfth-Century France provide vivid glimpses into medieval life and beliefs. Bruce L. Venarde provides fluent translations of the first five collections of Marian miracle narratives from France, written in the second quarter of the twelfth century and never before available in English. The stories recorded in these collections—by Herman of Tournai; Hugh Farsit; Haimo of Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives; John, son of Peter; and Gautier of Compiègne—offer descriptions of travel, living conditions, medical knowledge, conflict between and among lay and religious authorities, and the burgeoning cult of the Virgin Mary, which had only recently become important in Western Europe. Including notes, tables, and maps that orient and illuminate the texts, The Miracles of Mary in Twelfth-Century France makes these riveting tales available to readers seeking a view into the medieval past.