Conference report: Uses of the Past in Times of Transition. Forgetting, Using, and Discrediting the Past

From the 30th of May to the 1st of June, 2019, the Austrian Academy of Sciences hosted the final conference of the After Empire project in Vienna. The conference brought together scholars working on post-Carolingian Europe with those working on other regions experiencing their own ‘times of transition’. Like many of the speakers, several of the moderators…

Oh I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day (?): the Festive Period, the King’s Court, and Discord in West Francia and England in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries

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…

Embodying Dynasties II: cults, politics, and genealogies

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…