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Unauthorised miracles in mid-ninth-century Dijon and the Carolingian church reforms

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 36; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.jmedhist.2010.09.006

1873-1279

Charles West,

Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies

Abstract In the early 840s, Archbishop Amolo of Lyons wrote to one of his suffragan bishops about extraordinary miracles reportedly taking place at Dijon in the wake of the arrival of mysterious new relics. Re-examining the complex interaction of these relics with pre-existing social and political processes in the region and locally, this article also explores other aspects of Amolo’s letter which have been less discussed, notably its manuscript transmission and the insights it offers into structures of religious organisation. Finally, it argues that the way issues treated together in the letter tend to be separated or even opposed in the historiography points to the need for renewed, critically reflexive attention to the specificities of the Carolingian church reforms. Keywords: RelicsParishDijonCarolingian churchAmolo Acknowledgements I am grateful to the audiences at conferences in Leeds, Cambridge and Sheffield, where earlier drafts of this paper were read; to Miriam Czock, Tom Faulkner, Emma Hunter, Matthew Innes, Simon Loseby, Rosamond McKitterick, Mark Stephenson, and Rachel Stone for their comments and suggestions; to the anonymous reviewers of this journal; and to the 2008–9 class of HST 2018, whose interest in Amolo’s letter encouraged me to investigate further. Notes 1 Letter of Amolo to Theobald, ed. E. Dümmler, in: Epistolae Karolini Aevi 3 (Monumenta Germaniae Historica [hereafter MGH] Epistolae (in quarto) 5, Berlin, 1899), 363–8. A full English translation is available on the internet at ; accessed 20 September 2010. 2 On the fundamental Christian ambivalence towards miracles, see M. van Uytfanghe, ‘La Controverse biblique et patristique autour du miracle, et ses répercussions sur l’hagiographie dans l’antiquité tardive et le haut moyen âge latin’ in: Hagiographie, cultures et sociétés, IVe–XIIe siècles, actes du colloque organisé à Nanterre et à Paris 12–5 mai 1979 (Paris 1981), 205–33. S. Justice, ‘Did the middle ages believe in their miracles?’, Representations, 103 (2008), 1–29, discusses the methodological problems involved in studying the miraculous. P.-A. Sigal, L’Homme et le miracle dans la France médiévale (XIe–XIIe siècles) (Paris, 1985) is a concrete study, including a typology of miracles, though the book is firmly focused on the post-Carolingian age. 3 Agobard, ‘De quorundam inlusione signorum’, ed. E. Dümmler, in: Epistolae Karolini Aevi 3, 206–10, alternatively in: Agobardi Lugdunensis opera omnia, ed. L. van Acker (Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis [hereafter CCCM] 52, Turnhout, 1981), 237–43. 4 It is tempting to associate the relics with those of Apollinaris of Ravenna, later housed in a church two miles outside of Dijon which belonged to St-Bénigne, and whose miracles were recorded by an eleventh- or twelfth-century St-Bénigne monk: ‘Miracula sancti Apollinaris in territorio Divionensi Burgundia’ (Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina, no. 627), in: Acta sanctorum quotquot toto orbe coluntur, ed. Jean Bollandus and others, 67 vols (Antwerp, 1643–present; new edn Paris and Brussels, 1868–1925), 5 July, 352–8. This tradition claims they were brought by a Merovingian queen, but the first miracles are early tenth-century, and there is no earlier reference to the cult. 5 Flodoard, Historia Remensis ecclesiae [hereafter HRE], ed. M. Stratmann (MGH Scriptores 36, Hanover, 1998), records a lost letter of Hincmar of Rheims to the bishop of Troyes on a similar theme, 316. For Bishop Erchanbert of Freising’s decision to arrange a three-day fast as a means of testing newly-arrived relics in the late 830s, see his letter, ed. E. Dümmler, in: Epistolae Karolini Aevi 3, 338. 6 The exemplary use of Amolo’s letter is in P. Geary, Furta sacra. Thefts of relics in the central middle ages (Princeton, 1978), 31, where it introduces the chapter on the Carolingians. The letter is mentioned, too, in J. Smith, ‘The problem of female sanctity in Carolingian Europe c.780–920’, Past and Present, 146 (1995), 3–37 (35). It is also touched on in M. Rouche, ‘Miracles, maladies et psychologie de la foi à l’époque carolingienne en Francie’, in: Hagiographie, cultures et sociétés, 319–37. 7 On the popularity of relics in general, see J. Smith, ‘“Emending evil ways and praising God’s omnipotence”: Einhard and the uses of Roman martyrs’, in: Conversion in late antiquity and the middle ages. Seeing and believing, ed. K. Mills and A. Grafton (Rochester, 2003), 189–223. On Roman relics in particular, see J. Smith ‘Old saints, new relics’, in: Early medieval Rome and the Christian west. Essays in honour of Donald Bullough, ed. J. Smith (Leiden, 2000), 317–39. More generally, see also H. Röckelein, ‘Über Hagio-Geo-Graphien: Mirakel in Translationsberichten des 8. und 9. Jahrhunderts’, in: Mirakel im Mittelalter. Konzeptionen, Erscheinungsformen, Deutungen, ed. M. Heinzelmann, K. Herbers and D.R. Bauer (Beiträge zur Hagiographie 3, Stuttgart, 2002), 166–79; J. McCulloh, ‘From antiquity to the middle ages: continuity and change in papal relic policy from the sixth to eighth Century’, in: Pietas. Festschrift für Bernhard Kötting, ed. E. Dassmann and K. Frank (Münster, 1980), 313–24; and most recently, the work of G. Heydemann, for example ‘Text und Translation. Strategien zur Mobilisierung spiritueller Ressourcen im Frankenreich Ludwigs des Frommen’, in: Zwischen Niederschrift und Wiederschrift. Frühmittelalterliche Hagiographie und Historiographie im Spannungsfeld von Kompendienüberlieferung und Editionstechnik, ed. R. Corradini, M. Diesenberger and M. Niederkorn-Bruck (Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 15, Vienna, 2009), 291–326. 8 An argument made forcefully in Geary, Furta sacra, and expanded on in Smith, ‘The problem of female sanctity’, especially at 4: ‘The Carolingian era forms an interlude in the history of sainthood, for no charismatic ascetics, healers, prophets or visionaries made their mark on a church whose bishops were implacably hostile to any such form of religious expression.’ The rarity of holy men in the Carolingian world was noted in P.Riché, ‘Les Carolingiens en quête de sainteté’, in: Les Fonctions des saints dans le monde occidental (Collection de l’École française de Rome 149, Rome, 1991), 217–24. A. Vauchez, Sainthood in the later middle ages (Cambridge, 2005), offers an overarching introduction to the general field. 9 Nor for that matter has its author, who is altogether a rather obscure figure, though Lupus of Ferrières corresponded with him, and he was friends with Eberhard of Friuli. For what is known, see J. Heil, ‘Agobard, Amolo, das Kirchengut und die Juden von Lyon’, Francia, 25 (1998), 39–76. 10 M. Innes, ‘Carolingian government’, in: Charlemagne: empire and society, ed. J. Story (Manchester, 2005), 71–88. The framework for much recent research was set out by The settlement of disputes in early medieval Europe, ed. W. Davies and P. Fouracre (Cambridge, 1992). For more recent discussion, see Staat im frühen Mittelalter, ed. W. Pohl, H. Reimitz and S. Airlie (Vienna, 2006), particularly S. Airlie’s ‘The aristocracy in the service of the state’, 93–112, and the essays collected in Der frühmittelalterliche Staat — Europäische Perspektiven, ed. W. Pohl and V. Wiesner (Vienna, 2009). 11 Nithard. Histoire des fils de Louis le Pieux, ed. and trans. P. Lauer (Paris, 1926), 87–9. 12 See for example J. Nelson, Charles the Bald (London, 1992), 60, note 46. 13 The early charters of St-Bénigne can be found in: Chartes et documents de Saint-Bénigne de Dijon. Prieurés et dépendences des origines à 1300, ed. G. Chevrier and M. Chaume, 2 vols (Dijon, 1986), vol. 1. See here nos 51–7, 84–90. It should however be noted that there are problems in dating some of the charters in question, which are dated only by the years of ‘King Charles’; these uncertainties should be resolved by Karl Heidecker’s forthcoming work on the cartulary (personal communication). 14 For work on local communities using church archives, see M. Innes, State and society in the early middle ages (Cambridge, 2000). 15 R. Harris, ‘Possession on the borders: the “Mal de Morzine” in nineteenth-century France’, Journal of Modern History, 69 (1997), 451–78, on the convulsions of a couple of hundred women in a nearby region, though a millennium later, and their connections with contemporary politics and social developments. My thanks to David Hopkin for the reference. For the Stellinga, see E. Goldberg, ‘Popular revolt, dynastic politics, and aristocratic factionalism in the early middle ages: the Saxon Stellinga reconsidered’, Speculum, 70 (1995), 467–501. 16 Jonas of Orléans, De cultu imaginum, in: Patrologia Latina, ed. J-P. Migne, 221 vols (1844–65), vol. 106, 305–88. See T. Noble, Images, iconoclasm and the Carolingians (Philadelphia, 2009), 295. 17 For Lyons’ struggle to assert its authority over Langres in the late ninth century, see R. Folz, ‘L’Évêché de Langres dans les rivalités politiques de la fin du IXe siècle’, in: Aux origines d’une seigneurie ecclésiastique. Langres et ses évêques, VIIIe–XIe siècles (Langres, 1986), 115–32. 18 Hugh of Flavigny, Chronicon, ed. G. Pertz (MGH Scriptores 8, Hannover, 1848), 288-502, here at 321 (claiming the ‘primatum aecclesiarum’ in Gallia). Amolo also claimed that Lyons’ archbishops were standing Roman legates (‘vices Romanorum pontificum’), but the details cannot now be ascertained clearly from Hugh’s abbreviated report. For the development of metropolitan authority in general, see now M. Schrör, Metropolitangewalt und papstgeschichtliche Wende (Husum, 2009). 19 Gregory of Tours, Gloria martyrum, c. 50, in: Gregorii Turonensis opera, ed. B. Krusch (MGH Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum 1:2, Hannover, 1885), 522–4. Amolo’s silence on the incident is interesting, since both he and Theobald would probably have known this widely-disseminated text, though I have not been able to identify a manuscript explicitly connected to Lyons or Langres. Lyons’ Carolingian manuscript collection is now mostly digitised, at ; accessed 7 April 2010. 20 J. van Straeten, ‘Actes des martyrs d’Aurelien en Bourgogne’, Analecta Bollandiana, 79 (1961), 115–45, provides an edition. For a recent introduction to passiones, see G. Phillipart and M. Trigalet, ‘Latin hagiography before the ninth century: a synoptic view’, in: The long morning of medieval Europe, ed. J. Davis and M. McCormick (Aldershot, 2008), 111–30. C. Bouchard, ‘Episcopal gesta and the creation of a useful past in ninth-century Auxerre’, Speculum, 84 (2009), 1–35, suggests that Bishop Gregory of Langres was the first to put together the acta of the martyred Burgundian saints. 21 I. Wood, ‘Topographies of holy power in sixth-century Gaul’, in: Topographies of power in the early middle ages, ed. M. de Jong, F. Theuws and C. van Rhijn (The Transformation of the Roman World 6, Leiden, 2001), 137–53. On the move to Dijon, see S. Loseby, ‘Urban failures in late antique Gaul’, in: Towns in decline, 100–1600, ed. T. Slater (Aldershot, 2000), 72–95. 22 Gregory of Tours’ Glory of the martyrs, trans. R. Van Dam (Liverpool, 1998), 75, note 60. 23 The Gelasius text Amolo cites was included in a number of canon law collections, but he uses it in a variant form which could point to a Pseudo-Isidorian source. This would in no way be surprising, given, for example, the proven presence of Benedict Levita in the region (see note 37 below). In general, see J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish church, (Oxford, 1983), e.g. 171: ‘The Carolingian church was above all to be an episcopal church.’ 24 Their passio is integrated into Bénigne’s in the most common version: see above, note 20. 25 ‘Immo, ut nonnulli affirmant, tantummodo in feminis’: Dümmler, 363. 26 By comparison, Hincmar noted that there were about 40 nuns in the important convent of Avenay, near Rheims (Flodoard, HRE, 349). For women’s interest in relics, see J. Smith, ‘Women at the tomb: access to relic shrines in the early middle ages’, in: The world of Gregory of Tours, ed. K. Mitchell and I. Wood (Leiden, 2002), 163–80, and J. Nelson, ‘Les Femmes et l’évangelisation au IXe siècle’, Revue du Nord, 69 (1986), 471–83. For a recent summary of Carolingian women in general, see V. Garver, Women and aristocratic culture in the Carolingian world, (Ithaca, NY, 2009), though she does not discuss this incident. 27 Chartes, ed. Chaume and Chevrier, passim. 28 St-Bénigne passed under the patronage of the dukes of Burgundy in the tenth century, but there is no indication for any predatory aristocratic involvement with the community before at least the very end of the ninth century. For the dukes of Burgundy, see M.Chaume, Les Origines du duché de Bourgogne, 2 vols (Dijon, 1925). 29 For other examples of religious communities arranging translations, see Sigal, L’Homme, 176–82. Bishops were supposed to be involved in these translations, but this obligation was not always followed; Vauchez, Sainthood, 19–20. For cases relatively close in time and space to this one, compare the translations of Helen to Hautvillers around 841 (Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina, no. 3773), and of Daria and Chrysanthus to Prüm’s cell at Münstereifel around 844 (Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina, no. 1793). For a suggestive later case of monks using relics to win a measure of independence, see D. Defries, ‘The making of a minor saint in Drogo of Saint-Winnoc’s Historia translationis Lewinnae’, Early Medieval Europe, 16:4 (2008), 423–44. 30 For Theobald’s interventionist approach, Chartes, ed. Chaume and Chevrier, nos 54–66, 86–98. 31 See W. Störmer, ‘Bischöfe von Langres aus Alemannien und Bayern — Beobachtungen zur monastischen und politischen Geschichte im ostrheinischen Raum des 8. und frühen 9. Jahrhunderts’, in: Aux origines d’une seigneurie ecclésiastique, 43–77. 32 Carolingian interest in supporting bishops’ authority over monasteries can be gleaned from the capitularies of Benedict Levita I, 29; I, 257 and III, 18 (all passages widely available in other canon law collections). Benedict Levita’s text is now most easily accessed via ; accessed 7 April 2010, which houses old editions as well as a new edition in progress. 33 This account of Alberic’s reforms is based on G. Oexle, Forschungen zu monastischen und geistlichen Gemeinschaften im westfränkischen Bereich (Munich, 1978), particularly 64–81 on the necrological lists relating to Langres; and 163–82 on Alberic’s reforms in the light of these lists, including his promotion of Bèze, signs of a concomitant marginalisation of St-Bénigne, and the demonstrable movement of personnel. 34 Oexle, Forschungen, justifiably describes the St-Bénigne community as having been ‘umgruppiert’ as a result of the transfers. 35 For Werden, S. Wood, The proprietary church in the medieval West (Oxford, 2006), 255–6. The difficulties of St-Denis’ relationship with its bishop are reflected in the Gesta Dagoberti, ed. B. Krusch, in: Fredegarii et aliorum chronica. Vitae sanctorum (MGH Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum 2, Hannover, 1888), 396–425, and the context is discussed in Oexle, Forschungen, 112–19, with a concentration on the earlier ninth century up to 832. For Nantua, see the charter of Lothar I, Die Urkunden Lothars I und Lothars II, ed. T.Schieffer (MGH Diplomatum Karolinum 3, Berlin, 1926), no. 121, 278–9. St-Médard, Moyenmoutier and Fulda all complained about their abbots in the ninth century too, showing that communities could often act independently of their titular heads: see in general, though on a slightly later period, S. Patzold, Konflikte im Kloster. Studien zu Auseinandersetzungen in monastischen Gemeinschaften des ottonisch-salischen Reichs (Historische Studien 463, Husum, 2000). 36 The bishops’ return to Langres was consolidated by a string of royal charters, for example those of Charles the Fat, Die Urkunden Karls III, ed. P. Kehr (MGH Diplomata regum Germaniae ex stirpe Karolinorum 2, Berlin, 1937), nos 129, 147, and 152–4. The precise date at which the bishops decided to move back is however uncertain: Oexle, Forschungen, 165–70, prefers a very early date (around 815) for the intention to return, and puts the actual ‘Verlagerung des Schwerpunkts des geistlichen Lebens’ at around 830, in contrast to older historiographical preferences for a still more gradual shift. 37 Capitula Episcoporum 2, ed. P. Brommer (MGH Leges, Capitula Episcoporum, Hanover, 1995), 180–241, at 180, writing ‘propter quorundam minus adquiescentium desidiam et querulam contra pastoralem sollicitudinem inproborum insolentiam’. Bishop Isaac of Langres’ capitularies are a reworking of Benedict Levita faithful enough to assist with editing the latter: see G.Schmitz, ‘Die Capitula des Isaak von Langres’, ; accessed 7 April 2010. 38 Compare the difficulties caused by sharpened distinctions between different forms of religious community at St Martin, Tours: Oexle, Forschungen, 120–33. For the return of some members, see Oexle, Forschungen, 181. 39 ‘[I]n suae regionis finibus’: Dümmler, 363. Geary, Furta sacra, includes a discussion of the Italian relic trade. 40 Oexle, Forschungen, 174–5. 41 A genre whose standards were set by Einhard, Translatio SS Marcellini et Petri, ed. G Waitz (MGH, Scriptores 15, Hanover, 1888), 238–64. 42 On the importance of the manuscript context for reading hagiography, see P. Geary, ‘Saints, scholars and society: the elusive goal’, in his Living with the dead (Princeton, 1994), 9–29 (18–20). C. Pilsworth, ‘Miracles, missionaries and manuscripts in eighth-century southern Germany’, in: Signs, wonders and miracles, ed. K. Cooper and J. Gregory (Studies in Church History 41, Woodbridge, 2005), 67–76, offers a sharply focused case study on hagiographical material. 43 Description in H. Martin, Catalogue des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, 2 vols (Paris, 1885–9), vol. 1, 55–6. 44 I would like to thank Dr Tessa Webber for her helpful comments, and Bruno Blasselle, the Directeur of the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, for his advice on the manuscript’s codicology. 45 This is from the council of Troyes 1107: see U. Blumenthal, The early councils of Pope Paschal II, 1100–1110 (Toronto, 1978), 74–90. 46 Dümmler thought it ninth-century, van Acker early tenth-century, while R. McKitterick and D. Ganz have advised that a mid-ninth-century date is by no means out of the question (personal communication), and this seems confirmed by my preliminary comparisons with other Lyons manuscripts of this date (see note 19 above). 47 It seems to have passed, like much other Troyes material, through the hands of the seventeenth-century Troyes antiquarian Nicolas Camuzat. 48 H. Fuhrmann, ‘Eine im Original erhaltene Propagandaschrift des Erzbischofs Gunther von Köln (865)’, Archiv für Diplomatik, 4 (1958), 1–51. The booklet in question, Cologne, Erzbischöfliche Diözesan- und Dombibliothek, Cod. 117, f. 93–97v, can be viewed at ; accessed 7 April 2010). 49 For a recent state of the art review of original Carolingian letters, see M. Mersiowky, ‘Preserved by destruction: Carolingian original letters and Clm 6333’, in: Early medieval palimpsests, ed. G. Declercq (Turnhout, 2007), 73–98, though Amolo’s letter is not discussed. 50 It is revealing that the useful rough translation of the letter put up by Thomas Head in 1997 omits its material on the parish, translating only around a third of the overall text to stress similar themes to those centred by the historiography: ; accessed 7 April 2010. C. Treffort, L’Église carolingienne et la mort. Christianisme, rites funéraires et pratiques commémoratives (Lyons, 1996) briefly discusses the parochial relevance of Amolo’s letter, 166. 51 For general comments, see Wallace-Hadrill, Frankish church, 279–82, and P. Depreux and C. Treffort, ‘La Paroisse dans le De ecclesiis et capellis d’Hincmar de Reims. L’Énonciation d’une norme à partir de la pratique’, Médiévales, 48 (2005), 141–8. For sound observations mixed with surely unwarranted hesitations, see La Paroisse. Genèse d’une forme territoriale, ed. E. Zadora-Rio and D. Iogna-Prat, a special edition of Médiévales, 49 (2005); and for a manuscript-based approach to the question, see Y. Hen, ‘Educating the clergy: canon law and liturgy in a Carolingian handbook from the time of Charles the Bald‘, in: De Sion exibit lex et verbum domini de Hierusalem. Essays on medieval law, liturgy and literature in honour of Amnon Linder, ed. Y. Hen (Turnhout, 2001), 43–58. 52 See in general Wood, Proprietary church, 66–74. 53 P. Fouracre, ‘The origins of the Carolingian attempt to regulate the cult of saints’, in: The cult of saints in late antiquity and the middle ages, ed. P. Hayward and J. Howard-Johnston (Oxford, 1999), 143–65 (164). On Carolingian sermons, see most recently J. McCune, ‘Rethinking the Pseudo-Eligius sermon collection’, Early Medieval Europe, 16 (2008), 445–76. 54 Capitularia regum francorum, ed. A. Boretius, 2 vols (MGH Leges Sectio 2, Hannover 1897), vol. 2, no. 267, 291–2, from Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS lat. 4626, in which a missus apparently at Dijon lays responsibility on each priest to keep lists in his parrochia of all wrong-doers. Benedict Levita includes a considerable amount of material on the parish, for example at I, 49–50; II, 166; II, 180; III, 198 and III, 316 (all of which refer to the parish, not the diocese). Bishop Isaac’s capitularies were based on Benedict Levita: see note 37 above. 55 ‘Quando istiusmodi sanitates sanctorum oratio apud Deum optinuit, quibus simplices et innocentes puellae in sanctuario Dei incolumes reddantur, sed si de salute sua gaudium parentibus facere voluerint, continuo [. . .] ad domos eorundem parentum suorum redire prohibentur? Quando autem martyres sancti ita coniugatas quasque fideles [. . .] sanitati restituerunt, ut eas a maritis seiungerent, et ne ad virorum suorum domos reverti possent, repentine cladis animadversione percuterent?’: Dümmler, 365. 56 For the arguments linking Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 3851 to Langres, and by implication the early evidence for the so-called Sendgericht the manuscript preserves, see W. Hartmann, Kirche und Kirchenrecht um 900. Die Bedeutung der spätkarolingischen Zeit für Tradition und Innovation im kirchlichen Recht (Hannover, 2008), at 254, with note 65. 57 For a useful recent summary of the ‘fully developed’ parish system, see J. Arnold, Belief and unbelief in medieval Europe (London, 2005), 108–17 and J. Van Engen, ‘Conclusion: Christendom, c.1100’, in: Early medieval Christianities, c.600–c.1100, ed. T. Noble and J. Smith (Cambridge History of Christianity 3, Cambridge, 2008), 630–1, though the latter in particular stresses that the development was not completed until the central or even later middle ages. 58 J. Darwin, After Tamerlane. The global history of empire (London, 2007), 30–1. More specifically, see the attention rightly given to the parish in J. Van Engen, ‘The Christian middle ages as an historiographical problem’, American Historical Review, 91 (1986), 519–52. 59 See Smith, ‘Emending’, 190 and note 5 and passim, for an argument rejecting an a priori distinction between relics and legislative/organisational reform, at least in relation to Carolingian reform. As examples of institutional work on the Carolingians, see Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish church; or, even more clearly, the traditions of German legal scholarship embodied in W.Hartmann’s Kirche und Kirchenrecht. For an analogous view to Geary’s Furta sacra, compare B.-S. Albert, Le Pélérinage à l’époque carolingienne (Louvain, 1999). 60 J. Van Engen, ‘The future of medieval church history’, Church History, 71 (2002), 492–522 for a discussion of recent historiographical trends. 61 For a polemical critique of this single-minded pursuit of cultural vibrancy, see B.Ward-Perkins, The fall of Rome and the end of civilization (Oxford, 2005). For the notion that Christianity’s ideological work was essentially complete by the end of late antiquity, see P. Brown, ‘A life of learning’, American Council of Learned Societies Occasional paper, 55 (2003), unpaginated: ‘As far as I was concerned, what had really mattered in the history of Christianity had happened in the centuries which preceded the middle ages.’ 62 On the Merovingian roots of this movement, see C. Leyser, ‘Uses of the desert in the sixth-century west’, Church History and Religious Culture, 86 (2006) 113–34: ‘all are fundamentally agreed that the dramatic charisma of a Simeon the Stylite was out of place in the increasingly dour corporate landscape of Frankish Gaul, its church dominated by aristocratic bishops and monasteries’, 114. Leyser complicates the issue by arguing that bishops also exploited ideas of the desert, but does not bring the conceptual opposition itself into question. 63 P. Brown, The rise of western Christendom. Triumph and diversity, 200–1000 AD (Oxford, 1995), 440 (for ‘managerial’), 450 (for Carolingian reformers as ‘experts’), and 455 (‘the first technocrats of Europe’). Similar phrases are used by R.W. Southern, Western church and society (London, 1971), 173–4. 64 See though C. Rapp, ‘Saints and holy men’, in: Constantine to c.600, ed. A. Casiday and F. Norris (Cambridge History of Christianity 2, Cambridge, 2007), 548–66, for a nuancing of the distinction between relics and holy men, taking up the point made forcefully in: Charisma and society, ed. S. Elm and N. Janowitz, a special issue of Journal of Early Christian Studies, 6 (1998), 343–9, that holy men should be considered primarily as literary constructs, and calling for ‘a ‘retextualisation’ of the holy man’ (349). 65 For the classic exposition, see Brown, Rise, 422–3. A subtle and influential reworking of Brown’s approach, explicitly tackling the Carolingian period along the broad lines outlined above, is offered by Fouracre, ‘The origins’. 66 See however for a continued engagement with the concept S. Tada, ‘The creation of a religious centre: Christianisation in the diocese of Liège in the Carolingian period’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 54 (2003), 209–27, and more broadly M. Dunn, The Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons, c.597–c.700. Discourses of life, death and afterlife (London, 2009). For an example of its specific use in framing approaches to sanctity and relics, see Vauchez, Sainthood, where relics are portrayed as a means of bringing those ‘incapable of understanding dogmas and theological discourses’ (16) into Christianity. For a recent critique of the concept of Christianisation along similar lines to mine, see K. Bowes, ‘“Christianization” and the rural home’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 15:2 (2007), 143–70; and compare Van Engen, ‘Future’, particularly at 496. On the older confessional models from which Christianisation emerged, see Van Engen, ‘Christian middle ages’, and M. Miller, ‘New religious movements and reform’, in: A companion to the medieval world, ed. C. Lansing and E. English (Oxford, 2009), 211–30. 67 Though it should also be noted that the field remains diverse, see note 86 below. 68 L. Coon, ‘Collecting the desert in the Carolingian west’, Church History and Religious Culture, 86 (2006), 135–62, arguing that Carolingian ‘dynasts’ sought single-mindedly to appropriate and transcend the charismatic lure of the desert through carefully regulated monastic practice and the ‘imperialistic venture’ of collecting relics, as a means of serving political ambitions; compare Smith, ‘Saints and their cults’, discussing the Carolingian attempt to ‘stifle’ the holy man (589). 69 Which is not to deny the importance of correctio, or for that matter the advantages which conceptualising the Carolingian movement as one of ‘correction’ rather than ‘reform’ may have. See Smith, ‘Emending’’ for an outline of the issue. 70 Compare J. Nelson, ‘Society, theodicy and the origins of heresy’, Studies in Church History, 9 (1972), 65–77; and see Southern, Western church, for a classic description of western Europe 700–1050 as ‘the primitive age’, 29–30. 71 Brown, Rise, characterises the Carolingian reform as drawing ‘on a remarkable convergence of aims, which betrayed a hardening of the will to rule, and to rule “correctly”, on the part of an entire diffuse governing class’, 440, and as ‘a movement of control from on top’, 451. Compare Fouracre, ‘The origins’, 145 and passim for similar arguments. 72 On the Carolingian reform’s supposed negative impact on women, see H. Scheck, Reform and resistance: formations of female subjectivity in early medieval ecclesiastical culture (New York, 2008), building on arguments sketched out by Wemple; and L. Coon, ‘Somatic styles of the early middle ages’, Gender & History, 20 (2008), 463–86 (for a more positive approach, see J. Smith, ‘Gender and ideology in the early middle ages’, in: Gender and Christian religion, ed. R.N. Swanson (Studies in Church History 34, Woodbridge, 1998), 51–73); compare the justly influential but decidedly gloomy article by S. Airlie, ‘Private bodies and the body politic in the divorce case of Lothar II’, Past and Present, 161 (1998), 3–38. On Boniface, see now M. Innes, ‘“Immune from heresy”. Defining the boundaries of Carolingian Christianity’, in: Frankland: the Franks and the world of the early middle ages. Essays in honour of Dame Jinty Nelson, ed. P. Fouracre and D. Ganz (Manchester, 2007), 101–25. On Gottschalk, Eriugena, and Amalarius, see G. Brown, ‘The Carolingian renaissance’, in: Carolingian culture. Emulation and innovation, ed. R. McKitterick (Cambridge, 1994), 1–51 (41). 73 For an exposition along the lines of prematurity, see J. Le Goff, L’Europe, est-elle née au moyen âge? (Paris, 2003), 47–59. An introductio