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…
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…
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…
Any casual reader of the relevant modern historiography would rightly come away with the impression that the legacy of the Carolingian Empire was pervasive across centuries of European history. The figure of Charlemagne was particularly attractive to posterity: idolised by French rulers from the Capetians to Napoleon, and canonised by Frederick Barbarossa in 1165. How,…
Hi! I’m Alice Hicklin, the second postdoctoral researcher working on ‘After Empire’. I’m based in Berlin, where the title of our project is ‘Legal Pasts and Normative Orders’. For our contribution, we seek to assess the role of law in the tenth and early eleventh centuries. This is an important objective and area of research,…
Hello! I’m Sarah Greer, one of the postdoctoral research fellows working on After Empire: Using and Not Using the Past in the Tenth Century. One strand of my research interests is in how burial sites were used in the tenth century. More specifically, I’m interested in royal mausolea – that is, the monasteries and cathedrals…
