In collaboration with the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, the After Empire project is pleased to announce the launch of a new website which will track ninth- to eleventh-century Catalan manuscripts, part of Prof. Dr. Matthias M. Tischler and Ekaterina Novokhatko’s research on ‘From Carolingian Periphery to European Central Region: The Written Genesis of Catalonia’. The…
From the last decades of the eighth century, the cult of the Archangel Michael spread throughout various Western regions and became a common European religious and spiritual phenomenon. Two important sanctuaries, Monte Gargano on the eastern coast of Italy and Mont Saint Michel in north-western France, invoked numerous pilgrimages at this time. A number of donations,…
Thousands of royal diplomas survive from tenth- and eleventh-century Europe, and are a vital source for medieval historians. These diplomas vary greatly in their length, style, appearance and content, depending on where they were issued, and by whom. Below is a more or less comprehensive list of the parts one might find in a royal…
The Bible in the Early Medieval Iberian World The world of the Iberian Bible is a fragmented one in a double sense. The transmission of old Bibles from late antique and Visigothic times and the production of new Bibles from the late eighth century onwards were situated in a scattered, if not fragmented Christian society…
The Hungarian riders were one of the gentes whose own history was interwoven with the history of the Latin West from the first Empire through the Empire’s demise to the rise of a new Empire. Thus they had a considerable effect on these three western periods. The Annals of Saint-Bertin are the first source to…
‘Charles’s stirrups hang down from Conrad’s saddle’. For the first ruler of the Salian dynasty, Conrad II (1024‒1039), to whom this proverb refers, Carolingian traditions mattered a great deal: Conrad reportedly visited Aachen soon after his election to take possession of Charlemagne’s throne and to emphasise his family’s Frankish roots. But the author of this…
As I noted in my earlier blog post on Ratherius of Verona’s use of the concept of ‘patria’, I am working on identity construction in the long tenth century. At the start of the project I limited my research to the works by Ratherius, but over the past year I branched out to also include…
There is a tendency amongst medieval scholars to leave the evidence of liturgical books to liturgical specialists, and scholars of the post-Carolingian world are no different in this respect. There are good reasons for this: surviving medieval liturgical manuscripts are not simply service books, compiled to support the minister in the delivery of rites, but…
As my earlier blog post laid out, I’m interested in looking at royal mausolea as sites of historical memory in the tenth and early eleventh centuries. Over the past year I’ve started to put together a database of known burial sites of as many royals as possible from the Merovingian, Carolingian, Capetian, Ottonian, Anglo-Saxon, and Lombard…
Ah, a king’s life! Deposition and imprisonment, destitution, murder, getting backtalk from lippy counts… It’s not like there’s ever a bad time to be king, but the tenth century definitely doesn’t have much of a good reputation when it comes to kingship. Medieval historians tend to like their government big and preferably royal, whether that…
