Date: Mid-10th Century Place of Production: Lotharingia(?) Description: Two scenes from Christ’s life that likely adorned a book or reliquary box (a box to hold the relics of a saint). In the left scene, Christ and his followers consume the last supper, at which Christ instituted the Eucharist. In the right scene, Christ berates the…
Pessimism is depressingly common amongst modern British commentators upon standards in contemporary education. Public discussion, as in current concerns about the introduction of mandatory multiplication table testing in English primary schools, is always about the need to improve performance, in this case numeracy. But, as early medieval scholars know only too well, the twin premises…
It is a well-known story of early medieval monastic life that the Europe-wide diffusion of the Benedictine life-style was intrinsically connected to the Carolingians’ reform of the Church. This older form of religious life imposed its dominance over other male (and female) monastic rules in the Southwestern periphery of the Carolingian Empire from the reign of…
We’re pleased to announce that our partner website in Barcelona has new materials available for those interested in monastic and manuscript studies in early medieval Catalonia! A new interactive map has been created that shows the different Benedictine monasteries in medieval Catalonia. Each location pin links to an article with further information on the history…
The long tenth century provides plenty of stories of powerful women. Sometimes, we can get to know their lives fairly well. In other cases, they only leave scarce traces in written records. Queen Bertilla (c. 855−915) is one of the latter. For that reason, she is not the best known of the women that fill…
According to the chronicler Thietmar of Merseburg (III.20–1), in July 982 Emperor Otto II stood on a beach in Calabria, the southernmost region of mainland Italy. He had just suffered a disastrous loss against the forces of the emir of Sicily, Abū’l-Qāsim, whose soldiers had decimated the troops drawn from across Otto’s empire. Accompanied by…
Given the unpredictability of politics in our own time, it shouldn’t require a great leap of imagination to realise that those who lived in the last days of the Carolingian Empire might not have realised that that’s what they were doing. But like any polity that lasts across several generations, the empire inevitably became nostalgic…
In the early middle ages, letter-writing was a difficult art to master. Letters were supposed to follow elaborate stylistic models. The language was supposed to be sophisticated and rhetorically complex. Many letters were conspicuously public documents, written to be read aloud, and not only by the recipient. But accomplished letter-writers could use their skills to…
The importance of Christmas in both Anglo-Saxon England and West Francia is clear from the fact that many events were anchored to Christmas: acts in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are described as happening ‘forty days before Christmas’ or on ‘the Easter after Christmas’, for instance, while the annalist Flodoard of Rheims strove to begin each year’s…
Where do you spend Christmas? For medieval rulers, this was a very important question, and one that had many possible answers. In the tenth century, the itinerant Ottonian rulers spent Christmas at many different places across the empire, often at major cities like Frankfurt, Pavia, Rome, Cologne and Ravenna. Celebrating Christmas was one of the…
