Our scene unfolds around the year 990 at Ranshofen. The Duke of Bavaria, Henry II, known as ‘the Quarrelsome’/’the Wrangler’, had summoned the most important bishops and counts of his territory. There, he issued a remarkable series of decrees. The text survives in a manuscript produced at Freising and was copied into it before 994,…
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…
For anyone dealing with medieval royal diplomatics, confirmation charters are a very common thing. Whenever a new ruler was appointed, one of his first acts was to renew charters that had once been given by his predecessors and which were now presented to him for confirmation. While through its renewal a document achieved new legal…
Henry I, known as ‘The Fowler’, was the first ruler of the new Ottonian dynasty (named after his son Otto I). His rule is often seen as a new phase in East Frankish kingship, distinct both from the members of the Carolingian dynasty whom he followed and that of his son Otto I. On 11…
When it formed the heart of the Carolingian marca Hispania just after 800, Catalonia had spent over 200 years under Visigothic rule, followed by 80 years under Arab dominion. With Catalonia’s new position as a frontier region, the counts of Barcelona attained a higher degree of political independence from France in the process of the Carolingian…
The Bohemian Duke Wenceslas has been closely associated with Christmas ever since 1853, when John Mason Neale set his ‘Good King Wenceslas’ to the tune of a medieval spring carol. Despite Neale’s effort being described as ‘ridiculous’, ‘doggerel’ and ‘poor’ by critics of the time, it has become a ubiquitous part of December for many,…
One of the prime objectives of the HERA project is to show that in the tenth century, the past and its uses gained importance in the absence of clear administrative or legal structures, as action in the present often drew authority and legitimacy from claims about the past. The ways that contemporaries chose to use…
Participants: Stefan Esders (Berlin), Sarah Greer (St Andrews), Sarah Hamilton (Exeter), Alice Hicklin (Berlin), Simon MacLean (St Andrews), Ekaterina Novokhatko (Barcelona), Lenneke van Raaij (Exeter), Matthias M. Tischler (Barcelona), Jelle Wassenaar (Vienna) Philippe Depreux (Hamburg), Sumi Shimahara (Paris), Charles West (Sheffield) This synergy event allowed scholars to investigate several important manuscripts located in Catalan archives…
In most accounts of modern German historiography, the period of the Ottonian and Salian rulers is featured as a period of national origins. The perspective adopted by the HERA project, however, is different. Since it focuses on the uses of the past, it allows us to look at this period from a different perspective. The…
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,…
