This is a collection of influential and challenging essays by British medievalist Timothy Reuter, a perceptive and original thinker with extraordinary range who was equally at home in the Anglophone or German scholarly worlds. The book addresses three interconnected themes in the study of the history of the early and high Middle Ages. Firstly, historiography, the development of the modern study of the medieval past. How do our contemporary and inherited preconceptions and pre-occupations determine our view of history? Secondly, the importance of symbolic action and communication in the politics and polities of the Middle Ages. Finally, the need to avoid anachronism in our consideration of medieval politics. Throwing light both on modern mentalities and on the values and conduct of medieval people themselves, and containing articles, at time of publication, never previously been available in English, this book is essential reading for any serious scholar of medieval Europe.

Debating medieval Europe serves as an entry point for studying and teaching medieval history. Rather than simply presenting foundational knowledge or introducing sources, it provides the reader with frameworks for understanding the distinctive historiography of the period, digging beneath the historical accounts provided by other textbooks to expose the contested foundations of apparently settled narratives. It opens a space for discussion and debate, as well as providing essential context for the sometimes overwhelming abundance of specialist scholarship. Volume I addresses the early Middle Ages, covering the period c. 450–c. 1050. The chapters are organised chronologically, and cover such topics as the Carolingian Order, England and the ‘Atlantic Archipelago’, the Vikings and Ottonian Germany. It features a highly distinguished selection of medieval historians, including Paul Fouracre and Janet L. Nelson.

Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England explores English legal culture and practice across the Anglo-Saxon period, beginning with the essentially pre-Christian laws enshrined in writing by King Æthelberht of Kent in c. 600 and working forward to the Norman Conquest of 1066. It attempts to escape the traditional retrospective assumptions of legal history, focused on the late twelfth-century Common Law, and to establish a new interpretative framework for the subject, more sensitive to contemporary cultural assumptions and practical realities. The focus of the volume is on the maintenance of order: what constituted good order; what forms of wrongdoing were threatening to it; what roles kings, lords, communities, and individuals were expected to play in maintaining it; and how that worked in practice. Its core argument is that the Anglo-Saxons had a coherent, stable, and enduring legal order that lacks modern analogies: it was neither state-like nor stateless, and needs to be understood on its own terms rather than as a variant or hybrid of these models. Tom Lambert elucidates a distinctively early medieval understanding of the tension between the interests of individuals and communities, and a vision of how that tension ought to be managed that, strikingly, treats strongly libertarian and communitarian features as complementary. Potentially violent, honour-focused feuding was an integral aspect of legitimate legal practice throughout the period, but so too was fearsome punishment for forms of wrongdoing judged socially threatening. Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England charts the development of kings' involvement in law, in terms both of their authority to legislate and their ability to influence local practice, presenting a picture of increasingly ambitious and effective royal legal innovation that relied more on the cooperation of local communal assemblies than kings' sparse and patchy network of administrative officials.

This volume explores the role of bishops at the heart of thirteenth-century English politics, examining their culture and political theology. Under King John and Henry III, the bishops acted as peacemakers, supporting royal power when it was threatened, but between 1258 and 1265, led by Simon de Montfort, they became partisans, helping to overturn royal power.

Excommunication was the medieval churchâs most severe sanction, used against people at all levels of society. It was a spiritual, social, and legal penalty. Excommunication in Thirteenth-Century England offers a fresh perspective on medieval excommunication by taking a multi-dimensional approach to discussion of the sanction. Using England as a case study, Felicity Hill analyzes the intentions behind excommunication; how it was perceived and received, at both national and local level; the effects it had upon individuals and society. The study is structured thematically to argue that our understanding of excommunication should be shaped by how it was received within the community as well as the intentions of canon law and clerics. Challenging past assumptions about the inefficacy of excommunication, Hill argues that the sanction remained a useful weapon for the clerical elite: bringing into dialogue a wide range of source material allows âeffectivenessâ to be judged within a broader context. The complexity of political communication and action are revealed through public, conflicting, accepted and rejected excommunications. Excommunication could be manipulated to great effect in political conflicts and was an important means by which political events were communicated down the social strata of medieval society. Through its exploration of excommunication, the book reveals much about medieval cursing, pastoral care, fears about the afterlife, social ostracism, shame and reputation, and mass communication.

The increased interest in religion as a phenomenon and its various cultural contexts is encouraging a focus on the relationship between religion and politics. However, the political relevance of the religious and the interdependence between political and religious spheres has always been a major area of medieval research. The articles in this volume consider not only the principle inseparability of both spheres as previously established by research, but also the beginnings of a differentiation and relative autonomy of religion and politics within the framework of a comparison between Germany and the United Kingdom. This allows the identification of restrictions within the research traditions that are due to national histories and points to ways of overcoming these restrictions.

A key theme in this collection of thirteen essays is the creative tension between the Carolingian dynasty and its aristocratic followers across 250 years. The first section explores the rising dynasty's attempts to consolidate its power through war and rewards. The second section focuses on the exercise of authority through a complex system of governance and representation, and the pivotal role played by the courts of Charlemagne and his successors. In the third section, we see the Carolingian system undergoing a crisis of legitimacy, challenged by civil war, royal divorce, and aristocratic encroachment on dynastic exclusivity. These essays anatomise the dynamics of power relations in the greatest empire of the early medieval west.

Laura E. Wangerin challenges traditional views of the Ottonian Empire’s rulership. Drawing from a broad array of sources including royal and imperial diplomas, manuscript illuminations, and histories, Ottonian kingship and the administration of justice are investigated using traditional historical and comparative methodologies as well as through the application of innovative approaches such as modern systems theories. This study suggests that distinctive elements of the Ottonians’ governing apparatus, such as its decentralized structure, emphasis on the royal iter, and delegation of authority, were essential features of a highly developed political system. Kingship and Justice in the Ottonian Empire provides a welcome addition to English-language scholarship on the Ottonians, as well as to scholarship dealing with rulership and medieval legal studies. Scholars have recognized the importance of ritual and symbolic behaviors in the Ottonian political sphere, while puzzling over the apparent lack of administrative organization, a contradiction between what we know about the Ottonians as successful rulers and their traditional characterization as rulers of a disorganized polity. Trying to account for the apparent disparity between their political and military achievements, cultural and artistic efflorescence, and relative dynastic stability, which seemingly accompanied a disinterest in writing law or creating a centralized hierarchical administration, is a tension that persists in the scholarship. This book argues that far from being accidental successes or employing primitive methods of governance, the Ottonians were shrewd rulers and administrators who exploited traditional methods of conflict resolution and delegated jurisdictional authority to keep control over their vast empire. Thus, one of the important things that this book aims to accomplish is to challenge our preconceived notions of what successful government looks like.

The later twelfth and thirteenth centuries were a pivotal period for the development of European government and governance. A mentality emerged that trusted to procedures of accountability as a means of controlling officers' conduct. The mentality was not inherently new, but it became qualitatively more complex and quantitatively more widespread in this period, across European countries, and across different sorts of officer. The officers exposed to these methods were not just 'state' ones, but also seignorial, ecclasistical, and university-college officers, as well as urban-communal ones. This study surveys these officers and the practices used to regulate them in England. It places them not only within a British context but also a wide European one and explores how administration, law, politics, and norms tried to control the insolence of office. The devices for institutionalising accountability analysed here reflected an extraordinarily creative response in England, and beyond, to the problem of complex government: inquests, audits, accounts, scrutiny panels, sindication. Many of them have shaped the way in which we think about accountability today. Some remain with us. So too do their practical problems. How can one delegate control effectively? How does accountability relate to responsibility? What relationship does accountability have with justice? This study offers answers for these questions in the Middle Ages, and is the first of its kind dedicated to an examination of this important topic in this period.

Beginning shortly after Charlemagne's death in 814, the inhabitants of his historical empire looked back upon his reign and saw in it an exemplar of Christian universality - Christendom. They mapped contemporary Christendom onto the past and so, during the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, the borders of his empire grew with each retelling, almost always including the Christian East. Although the pull of Jerusalem on the West seems to have been strong during the eleventh century, it had a more limited effect on the Charlemagne legend. Instead, the legend grew during this period because of a peculiar fusion of ideas, carried forward from the ninth century but filtered through the social, cultural, and intellectual developments of the intervening years. Paradoxically, Charlemagne became less important to the Charlemagne legend. The legend became a story about the Frankish people, who believed they had held God's favour under Charlemagne and held out hope that they could one day reclaim their special place in sacred history. Indeed, popular versions of the Last Emperor legend, which spoke of a great ruler who would reunite Christendom in preparation for the last battle between good and evil, promised just this to the Franks. Ideas of empire, identity, and Christian religious violence were potent reagents. The mixture of these ideas could remind men of their Frankishness and move them, for example, to take up arms, march to the East, and reclaim their place as defenders of the faith during the First Crusade. An Empire of Memory uses the legend of Charlemagne, an often-overlooked current in early medieval thought, to look at how the contours of the relationship between East and West moved across centuries, particularly in the period leading up to the First Crusade.