This term I have been able to add a new line to my CV by getting involved in some graduate teaching. This came about because Oxford Faculty of History offers a Master of Studies course on Medieval History, and its second term is spent on an Option course and there had been complaints, because all the options available were cultural history. So the person in charge at this point balanced all, brought all to mind etc., and naturally enough lit upon The Amazing Explanation For All Change in the Middle Ages ™!
Teaching diagram of the Feudal Transformation, by me
This is a thing that I know at least a little bit about, and so I was happy to be asked to join in. I am in fact convening the course, but that’s misleading as I am the very junior wheel on a vehicle mostly supported by much more senior and knowledgeable colleagues. We have, however—and I don’t think I’m giving anything away to the students here should they find this, alas—had to invent it fairly quickly from scratch, and the result has been a bit various. In particular, the blurb I originally supplied for the Faculty website has turned out not to relate to the classes much. It went like this:
At the beginning of the Middle Ages, European society is often characterised as late-Antique or post-Roman, heading into the supposed Dark Ages; by the end of them, it is the home of the castles, chivalry, trebuchets, Romances and fine gowns that have fuelled the imagination of many a fantasy author and game designer. Since the early 1950s, a body of scholarship has existed that locates the series of changes that took the world from the late Roman to the high medieval periods closely around the year 1000, in a more or less violent and sudden ‘transformation’. Can this have been true? If so, how much, and where? Answering this question has produced almost as many answers as scholars and involves the study of knighthood, popular culture, the economy, castles, royal politics, heresy, reform, the effects of impure LSD (ergot) and a phenomenon that some historians argue never existed, feudalism. This option reopens the questions with a number of case studies and detailed examination of sources in a variety of genres, and encompasses a strongly comparative approach to European history around the year 1000 that will equip students with a critical basis to take on a much wider historical literature.
I mean, that still looks like an awesome course (to me at least), but the talk-up is a bit misleading. I’m pretty sure, for example, that none of us teaching this had time to discuss ergotism or heresy, and I would guess probably not medievalism either, more’s the pity. Instead, we went regional, with introduction and conclusions sessions, and between them sessions on France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Byzantium and England by various people. All of these areas have their own version of the debate about whether there was a rapid change circa 1000 and if so what it changed, and they certainly need comparing, not least because so much of the literature is on France, especially when you’re confined to English-language reading, but I would still like somehow to squeeze that quart into the pint pot and get some of the broader socio-cultural themes into play across the European board. We also used a variety of different class structures: set-piece debates, individual presentations followed by discussion, source-packs for close reading in class,1, and just free discussion of preset material, and that’s just the ones I know about. That seems as if it could either be a strength, being good training and avoiding dullness, or else a whirling confusion of expectations with no clear goals week-to-week; I could see either point of view, but can’t decide between them. It may vary per student and their individual capability.
Stock picture of an Oxford seminar in a different faculty. You think History can afford chocolates? And of course I would never let people put bottles down on red baize without coasters!
We will obviously get student feedback and, equally obviously, I am consulting within the teaching group first and foremost, but since I haven’t written for a while it struck me that it might be interesting to ask the people reading this how you might go about working such a course. We have eight classes of two hours each; at the end of it they write an essay of 8,000-10,000 words, and that’s their assessment for the option. Can it be done in this scale? Should we knock stuff out, abandon the regional perspective, fix on a more limited set of teaching methods or mix it up some more? What would you advise? I make no promises about taking your advice, not least because it’s not all my call, but I’m interested in what shape it may take, if you feel like opining? If not, stay tuned, a seminar report should follow this rapidly.
1. This was me, and I didn’t feel it worked very well, not least because I didn’t have translations of the right sources ready and had to use what I had—this much I can fix, of course, and there are improvements I could also make to the instructions. Even so, I’ve yet to make this method deliver as a class. How about you?
A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe 
I will be interested too.
Can you re-post this diagram at a higher resolution? Considering the importance of schematic modes of information transmission in the Middle Ages… (sorry, I just can’t deny my art-historical nature)
The best I have, sadly, is 800×600 72dpi, due to saving over a larger version at some stupid point in the past, but that version is now linked through the image. Enjoy and acknowledge!
(Edit: <checks originating e-mail address> oh it’s you, hullo!)
Much better – thanks! I’ve left England again but will surely see you at Leeds
You’ll see me at Kalamazoo before that!
Right! I’ll be featured somewhere in the corrigenda
Well, the Early Middle Ages is all about the correctio, or so I’ve been told at the Leeds dance before now…
The evil imp in me wants to say, “You mean you actually want me to tell you how to do a job I know nothing about?” :)
Er, I guess I did say it – how’d HE get out?
This is a difficult question. I like the idea of exploring the social/cultural/economic developments but Chris Wickham taught me the value of regionalization in _Framing<_. My personal preference would still be to explore the broader issues while offering cautions that this is an overview and a few examples of how things differed over time and space. I think a good selection of case studies should be able to get that message across even without the caution.
As for the last part, exciting confusion is far better than structured tedium. Keep 'em engaged and interested. You do that and they'll learn as long as the subject matter isn't completely off base which I know you won't let happen.
I suppose it is a slightly strange position you occupy—you’ve read and know more than most of my students ever will in the field, but not had anthing like as much teaching… makes my job look kind of redundant :-) But it wasn’t just you I was asking…
The close involvement of a certain CJW, meanwhile, is indeed one reason why I think we will not be giving up a regional comparative perspective, but I think that in that case I probably need to rejig the introductory session to include some of the social agendas more explicitly; this time it was basically built around the debate in Past and Present, which is a gift, but only really about violence and castles. The equivalent one in Little and Rosenwein’s Debating the Middle Ages is wider-ranging and should maybe have been something they all read, not just one, but it’s also actually not a debate, just a group of papers. And one would also ideally want something by a millennialist like Richard Landes. At some point the reading becomes unreasonable to ask and one has to scale back down again…
Thank you. The lack of a structured, theoretical basis has and continues to bother me. Maybe “bother” is the wrong word but there have been plenty of instances where I’ve said, “This sounds really smart/stupid/right/wrong,” and someone who knows what they’re doing has said, “Well, why don’t you take a look at the evidence this way.”
For the course it sounds as if you’re doing this anyway but to me it would be easier to learn by looking at the various transformation themes in general based on the how/why/in what way they occurred and then explore how these differed in various regions. Or maybe I’m imposing my own teaching on this, “First you’ll learn the basic principles of corn production and after that we’ll look at the differences in production systems in clay vs sandy soils.” Agronomy ain’t history.
As it ran this time, the structure was roughly (1) here’s an argument! (2) here it is in France, (3) in Spain, etc. until (8) so, what do you now think of the argument? I think that now we probably need to set the argument as advance reading and have a new (1) Y’know, there were certainly some big changes going in European society weren’t there? But do these have anything to do with social organisation? And that would be where heresy and chivalry and mercantilism and reform and and and etc. all go in, before we start turning exclusively to castles, lords and peasants. Yup.
As to the more general point, you are aware that historians themselves don’t agree on any one structured or theoretical basis, right? We’re like the English language, we just steal the bits we like from other theories and run off with them before anyone can say we’re using them wrong…
1) *Not* that there’s anything wrong with cultural history!
2) Maybe those bright-eyed and bushy-tailed students in the pic brought their own?
3) I love the reading pack for close discussion of sources! Takes me back to undergrad days at Melbourne Uni… But in my opinion it does need to be built onto a contextualising lecture /or at least a pack of somehow related secondary discussion in order for people to have some handles on approaching the texts.
4) I think this approach to a seminar is nice: as long as *ultimate* goals of participation are clear, I wouldn’t have a problem with delivery being highly varied. My own spin on it would be at the exciting rather than whirling confusion end of the spectrum. :)
No, of course cultural history is grand (and assimilative!) but when it’s all that’s on the menu a rethink is arguably needed. And, it’s nice to be able to answer student demand, because the graduates actually are something like informed consumers.
The close-reading pack came with a small bibliography of secondary reading, I should make clear, so it did more or less meet that criterion. And as for the students in the picture, I strongly suspect that the super-normal diversity range depicted means it’s a staged shot, so the chocolates are essentially advertising, though I’d be happy to be wrong.
Two votes for variation now, that’s good to see, thankyou!
With regards to the original blurb, I would certainly be concerned about the cultural credentials of anyone apparently equating “ergot” with “impure LSD”. As “any fule kno”, LSD (pure or impure) is not jknown to have been synthesized until the 20th century; and the ergotamine from which it was first known to have been synthesized, while indeed itself derived from ergot, could not accurately be equated with LSD itself.
So: ahem.
(Not that, of course, the original blurb was your fault.)
That said, I think one has to get a little bit regional with this kind of topic, if only because transparently different things were going on to cause any changes in different regions. For example, we might well concede that significant changes were taking place in Scandinavia c. 1000, though the most significant change was surely the introduction of Christianity. This was, I should think, not one of the processes taking place simultaneously in, say, France or Italy … or Byzantium (though this is, perhaps, not considered “European”). I suppose it might also be possible to see pan-European currents — after all, brand new Scandinavian Christianity might be expected to reflect contemporaneous trends in Christianity from Britain and/or Germany — but I would need to know more about what was up at the regional level before being able to separate out what was local and what was “European”.
Perhaps that would be a way to go? Run with regional views for, say, at least the first part of the course and then debate whether anything “European” is going on?
Nah, it was mine, thrown together in a great hurry and apparently using ‘facts’ I learnt when drunk. I will fix that. Is it OK to blame the likely teacher? I have blamed him for so much else, after all :-)
More seriously, yes. Firstly about the head-start on Christian development Scandinavia gets by its late Christianization (on which, if you like, see here) but also on the necessity of comparison. I think that the way we currently tend is to put in a broad social class, perhaps by collapsing two of the others into each other; what was not clear there is whether it should go first or last, and I think you provide a good argument for the latter here. I don’t think there’s much scope for including Scandinavia though!
That’s a pity: I was just thinking it would be nice to make full use of the contrastive/comparative regional approach by including a more peripheral area, and thinking about processes of mimesis, parallel development and differentiation around the margins of Christian Europe. But I suppose there’s a point at which things become too diffuse, and this is probably it…
Well, it would allow us to contrast it with an area in which there is no chance of making the case for a feudal transformation because the starting point is different and the end point is, if anything, the fully-realised royal recovery position. But as far as the course is concerned we could equally well achieve that by saying “You should be aware that for somewhere like Scandinavia, by the way, this question is just irrelevant. Scandinavia’s really interesting. feel free to read something about it if you like” and the pedagogical gain for the course would be exactly the same…
No Scandinavia? So by “European” do we mean countries that currently use the euro? Oh, wait, that would exclude Britain .. but include FInland! :) So what’s “European society”, then? :) Is it defined by having a “feudal transformation”?
Well, I reckon you’re completely right, Jonathan, in that Scandinavia lies beyond the scope of most extant scholarship on the feudal transformation, and that it would pretty impractical to lever somewhere like this into the course you’re actually trying to run. But the northern periphery (among others) is still worth thinking about, precisely because it’s from the late 10th and 11th centuries — as you point out Carl — that kingdoms began to take shape. The relative importance of foreign influence and parallel development in the periphery during this period is a big deal in current Scandinavian scholarship. Recent work by people like Lars Hermanson on relationships between kings and aristocrats from the later 11th century onward, when powerful military elites were becoming highly assertive, has been pretty heavily influenced by Reynolds. There are questions about whether it’s possible to identify the importation of ‘feudal anarchy’ in 12th century Scandinavia, or if we’re simply seeing the working out of a new sort of political order. For some, the difference in ‘stating point’ between the Scandinavian kingdoms and, say, England, is not as significant as one might at first think. But it’s true that in some respects effective government was aided by the fact that kingdoms were taking shape just as the clerical elites were establishing themselves, and making textual instruments available, and money economies were bedding down. And we’re getting pretty far from the year 1000.
Well, that’s it, exactly. If I were running a course on state formation, or on medieval Europe as a colonising society, or even—to actually join the two ends up—Moore’s alleged “First European Revolution” then I would absolutely put something about Scandinavia in. I’ve been interested in that ever since I did the editing for this project. But for all the reasons I just gave Carl, it isn’t going to work for what I’m actually doing.
One of my abiding vices (one that has on occasion impacted on this blog of yours I’m afraid) is always to try and sneak in the additional example, usually ill thought-out. It’s a singularly unhelpful tendency. Hadn’t realised you were involved in the Berend/Bagge-fest too…
Only at the humblest of levels, Englishing the first returns. One of my favourite ever copy-editing stories comes from it, but I can probably only tell it in person, since the authors would be identifiable. What was your rôle?
This is thin…
I meant, ‘so that’s another thing you’vedone!’
Ah, sorry!
I would quite happily leave Britain out, but since we invented the ‘feudal pyramid’ it has to be dealt with, alas. In Finland it would be really interesting to do, actually, because there feudalism is imposed by conquerors but with a certain amount of cultural leakage across borders by of protective emulation, to the best of my limited understanding. It would still be a couple of centuries later though.
No, seriously, it’s a fair point. But the paradigm was originally French, and has been best developed in France, Spain and Italy. We only have eight weeks, there’s really only so far it can travel and still be a genuinely comparative exercise. So one good outcome would be for the students to start asking exactly these sorts of questions; and indeed, they could legitimately choose an essay title that examined them. With this much pressure on time, though, I think dedicating a class to Scandinavia just to show we have an insular/Meridional paradigm here would be overkill; Germany and Byzantium are already questioning the generalisation for us. If I could squeeze anything more in—and there were any useful literature in translation—it would be Muslim Sicily, Africa and al-Andalus. I think that comparison would actually teach more than one with Scandinavia has the potential to do.
France, Spain, and Italy …. Well, putting on my sociolinguistic hat, that translates to “areas in which Western Romance dialects/languages are spoken”. The point made by jpg about the relative similarity of English and Scandinavian “starting points” is well made, though concerning ourselves only with elite groups, we could then perhaps justify post-Conquest England (though not the rest of Britain) as somehow belonging to a Western Romance-speaking feudal sphere. But then it might be interesting to compare England with FInland after all, due to the “feudalism … imposed by conquerors” thing. :)
I think that, rather than some weird kind of linguistic determinism (I mean, are we actually heading for a Romance-makes-you-feudal proposition there?) the selection is more of places that have been deemed to have (a) late Antique political existence as units and (b) some kind of feudal system in the High Middle Ages. The original feudal transformation paradigm is supposed to explain how you get from one to the other so what we’re doing is testing it. If somewhere didn’t go from point (a) to point (b) we’re actually involved in a wider question about the existence of and nature of feudalism. Obviously we can’t escape that debate in this course, because it has set the terms and they may be wrong. But equally, that is a different question. I am not saying that a course set to compare different alleged feudalisms would not be as interesting! But the transformation paradigm can only apply to some of them, and so we’ve selected those. And then, as I say, there is the problem of a lack of translated literature. (Though, for all I know Scandinavia might be better off there than Spain, frighteningly.)
Well, I am not wishing to imply linguistic determinism, but I can’t help but think that “a late Antique political existence as units” is something which matches a former existence as parts of the Western Roman Empire. I’m not suggesting that speaking Romance makes you feudal, but perhaps having been a Roman province that was sufficiently non-overrun by howling baribariansas to remain Romance-speaking also meant you retained some vital element of Romanitas that nudged you towards feudalism (for whatever reason)? I am, of course, out of my depth here — not knowing enough about these parts of the medieval world (as I spend more time with the howling barbarians), but, anyway …
Well, there is something to what you say, in as much as the areas where it doesn’t work are mostly the non-Romance ones (England, Germany, and I guess if any of us could do Pannonia we might find it similar. Weirdly, Byzantium does kind of work if you change a few terms appropriately, and so does al-Andalus, but they both go through it earlier. That’s one of the reasons that’s what I’d like to add.) That said, and as that implies, there are some areas included in my political definition that won’t fit a purely linguistic criterion…
Paul Fouracre usually teaches this module to third-year undergraduates at Manchester: http://www.currentstudents.arts.manchester.ac.uk/ug/pdf/cuguides/hist/hist30762.pdf
This was my introduction to the feudal transformation. The course assumed little prior knowledge of the period. The ‘Duby model’ and the P&P debate were introduced at the beginning of the course and gradually bashed into our heads over the next few weeks as we loosely discussed the outlined topics with regard to the debates. Regional issues played a bigger part than the outline suggests, but as you can see the course was arranged thematically. Overall the module was excellent – lots of reading and hard-going at times, but ultimately a class which inspired some of us (or at least me) to persist with the topic.
Wow, that’s a lot broader than ours—the benefit of an eleven-week term I suppose, but still, the Crusades? It’s really more of a Central Europe survey with an argument built in, isn’t it? Very useful to see, though, thankyou. Is it accurate that there were no primary sources in the reading, however? That’s perhaps excusable at an undergraduate level, but certainly not an omission we could compass in a graduate course. If there were some, what was Paul using? (I should ask him myself, really, but this will be quicker…)
The outline does make it sound like a survey module (and I seem to remember that’s what I had expected), but the transformation debate was definitely the core of it. The primary sources were given out each week in preparation for the next; this outline was essentially just Paul’s recommended reading to guide us through it all. If I recall, some of the primary sources included some Cluny charters he (or perhaps Alex Ralston, a student of his who was working on Cluny at the time) had translated, Marmoutier charters regarding serfdom, letters of Fulbert (most notably the one to Duke William obviously), the Laudatio Parentum, Ralph Glaber, the documents translated in Head & Landes, and more which escape me at the moment.
The last couple of weeks on the twelfth century I’m sure you could do without. We looked at Guibert, Abelard, Bernard of Clairvaux, etc. just as a means of sort of looking at what generally happened in the wake of this supposed anarchy.
Ah, I know Alex, I’ve moderated him at Leeds a couple of times, I’ll ask after those translations. Thankyou. That and the rest too are all very helpful.
All right, take two on the blurb: do you pedants prefer this?
Begone, ergot and non-Roman Europe! Goodbye, fifty words and the gratuitous trebuchet! Hello, greater accuracy and clarity? And at what cost in market appeal?
I quite liked your drunken ‘facts’ in terms of market appealing strategies. I hazzard the opinion that the new blurb only sounds exciting to those who already know this is exciting… and why would they need this option? Is there a middle ground?
I liked the first one. That one told me it should be fun with ideas flying around the room and bouncing off the walls (unless it’s a nice day where you’ll probably take the class outside and teach ’em under tree). This second one sounds kind of stuffy, at least in comparison.
Leave in ergot. Heck, if you want some quotes from William Manchester about peasants running around naked and jumping in bed with the family pig, let me know and I’ll provide some. Pull the students in.
Yeah, I was afraid that might be the case, and I kind of agree. I could retain the original first sentence, which might help; I have spare words. The problem then is ‘Europe’, as Carl and JPG have been diligently pointing out. I don’t think I can retain ergot and a sensibly-sized definition, but that would at least keep the trebuchet even if I don’t think it will ever be mentioned. (If it were going to be, it would have to be as part of the state recovery and the twelfth-century crisis that Bisson sees where the recovering states suddenly drop the ball.) Hmm. Some thinking here still to do. Thankyou for feedback!
I don’t object to ergot per se, only to its description as impure LSD. :) You could easily bring back the first sentence, or some version of it, with its appeal to contemporary medievalism (regardless of whether or not that appears in the course). Imply that vigorous brainstorming and debate shall ensue. As for the “Problem of Europe” in relation to feudalism, Romans, late antiquity, etc., well, why not imply that this is something that students will actually engage with in course? See if they (eventually) find an answer. :)
Moreover, since WordPress is squishing comment threads into ever narrower columns, I will note here that, yes, I would not expect any purely linguistic criteria to guide us through political definitions. I just couldn’t help but think that the linguistic angle was in some sense diagnostic — and that a discussion of feudalism or a feudal transformation at this period, it may be premature to talk about “European” contexts.
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I’ve only taught this at undergrad level, but here’s a few ideas at how I’d approach a grad course:
1) If you’re comparing regions’ societies (as I think you must), then spell out the theoretical underpinning, probably in terms of MarxLite. A narrative can get away with leaving theoretical analysis implicit; a comparison can’t.
2) As well as spelling out your social-theoretical assumptions, spell out your anthropological ones. How do we weight the relative importance of law, violence and consensus? You need to plant a flag for Reynolds or Bisson or Althoff or whoever.
3) Prune extraneous areas like England. The FR isn’t meant to explain going from Rome to Medieval except for people like Blois: it aims to explain going from the Carolingian order to the Medieval. Pace the feudal pyramid, 1066 throws a spanner in the works since other areas don’t really have a comparable equivalent. Concentrate on comparing, say, France, Flanders, Lotharingia, Burgundy, Catalonia, Lombardy and Tuscany (that’s your six core weeks right there).
4) Prune extraneous themes. Do you really need to talk about millennialism? What are you concentrating on, social or cultural change? If you’re working on a MarxLite base, can you leave the cultural/millennial/heretical superstructure for the closing discussion?
Finally, it may be that “exciting confusion is far better than structured tedium”, as Curt said above, but that ignores the fact that confusion very often produces tedium.
I’m not sure we’re of one mind on this, I have to admit. (Plus ça change…) I think the theoretical underpinning is the transformation theory itself, which we then test against evidence. Of course we select the evidence, but there’s no way round that. It may say something for us, at least, that we had three people on the course who think that although Bois (or Bloch, whichever you meant :-) ) is too far gone Barthélemy is missing something describable, and at the end of the course none of the students agreed with us… Either way, I don’t think MarxLite will do, even if I could give an account of it. Bloch was no Marxist but it’s principally his vision that everyone else has run with on this field. And where cultural or social change is concerned, I think again the theory intertwines them and that needs examining, not least because one may be causative of the other. There are almost certainly extraneous themes in this debate, but no-one agrees which ones, and that’s part of the point of the course.
As for 1066, well, part of the debate over England in general as of course you know is how much of a change-point that was (and behind that is one about the Carolingian inspirations of the Anglo-Saxon kings, get Levi talking about Æthelred the Unready’s penitential state for example). If what we’re seeing in 1066 for this theory is a sudden moment of top-down régime change, then Flanders has 1127, Catalonia has 1018, and Lotharingia, Burgundy and Italy have so many one couldn’t even pin it to one. But having an area where the theory doesn’t work is important as it forces discussion of what the changes actually that the theory is trying to account for. So, for example, one of our classes was a discussion around the proposition, “There was a Feudal Revolution in Byzantium: we call it the land crisis of the tenth century”. You would call that extraneous, but I think we would call it interesting, whereas your suggested core zones would have Tim Reuter sighing at us from beyond the grave about our Francocentricism.
The point about confusion and tedium is well taken, though, which is why I’m trying to nail this stuff down a little bit so that the students have some idea what’s happening well in advance of being swept into it.
+1 for “the theoretical underpinning is the transformation theory itself, which we then test against evidence”, though that is, admittedly, because I have always been suspicious starting from theory, despite that seeming to be a popular approach.
“Francocentrism” … it’s all the fault of those darned Western Romance speakers! :)
Which is at least different from blaming Germans for everything as was de rigeur in the nineteenth century :-)
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Having read this post from ten years ago, I really wish they still had this Option Paper on the MSt in Medieval History course at Oxford. I did the Global Middle Ages as mine, and while that was in some respects quite eye-opening, and ended with me doing a 10,000 word comparative essay on regime-building strategies in Norman England and Sicily and Seljuk West Asia in the eleventh century that was very fun, at the same time it was very all-over the place in more ways than it said on the tin and condensing Global History from 500 – 1500 into six (note, not eight) classes and trying to create a felt like much more of a fool’s errand than doing so for the Feudal Revolution.
I second this plan for a feudal revolution paper and its description (I’d personally keep the Romans, trebuchets and LSD). I’ve sometimes dreamed of, were I to succeed in getting an academic career, in fifteen years time creating a special subject on France from 888 – 1031, featuring the Feudal Revolution quite prominently. The sources for it would of course include the last pages of the Annals of St Vaast, Flodoard’s Oeuvre, the Histories of Richer of Rheims, Adhemar of Chabannes (hopefully by that point available in complete published English translation by yours truly) and Raoul Glaber, plus the letters of Gerbert of Aurillac and Fulbert of Chartres, the Miracles of Saint Foy, the Conventum Hugonis (can’t go without that), Adalbero of Laon’s poem to King Robert the Pious (might be a bit brutal to get hypothetical students to try and interpret that) and a selection of late Carolingian royal diplomas, Cluny charters, Catalonia material and the like depending on what’s available in translation by then. At the moment its only a pipe dream and who knows where I or the world, will be in fifteen years,
I had gathered that someone at your stage was essaying the translation of Adhémar, but I hadn’t realised it was them commenting on my blog! Given the which, I would like to encourage you in that endeavour; he’s such an interestingly mad commentator on his world, even if a lot of your apparatus is going to be notes that basically say, “As far as we know this didn’t actually happen.” I also agree with you about the Conventum, as really long-term readers may remember. I may even have got some of the Catalan stuff translated and published by then, though I admit that plan is about eight or ten layers down in my mental pile right now. So I think it would be viable, all right. The question you’re likely to get anywhere but Oxford, however, is ‘why France? No-one cares about France any more. We’re global and decolonizing now’. I don’t want to discourage you, because it sounds like a good course, but that is a question you’ll need to have an answer to.
At the moment I’m progressing through Book One of Adhemar so its all Merovingians for now. Honestly its fascinating to see what someone in the eleventh century thought about the late Roman and Merovingian periods, and how relatively free of any obvious anachronism in his depiction of them is and how so much of it echoes modern scholarly debates about ethnicity, the great migrations and how violent and destructive were the fifth century invasions – I kind of get the vibe that Adhemar would get along well with Peter Heather and Bryan Ward-Perkins if he were to have a chat about the Frankish migrations and the conquest of Roman Gaul with them over a pint, but would infuriate Walter Goffart, anyone in the Toronto school and whichever scholars think the Roman kingdom of Soissons to be completely made up (I think Edward James is one of them). I think a possible question for future research might be – why was Adhemar so interested in the late Roman and Merovingian past when Carolingian and tenth century historians (with the exception of Flodoard in Historia Remensis Ecclesiae) weren’t? I’m aiming to translate the whole of book one by this summer, with notes (comparing Adhemar to Gregory of Tours, Fredegar, the Liber Historiae Francorum and the Royal Frankish Annals) and a historical introduction, and then give a stab at submitting the first volume for publication. I’ll probably get to what Adhemar as to say about the post-Carolingian period sometime in 2024 so watch this space. Translating Adhemar also has the added bonus of massively strengthening my Latin, which I managed to become a lot more confident with through translating Adalbero of Laon’s “Poem to King Robert the Pious” as part of my Masters’ thesis earlier this year – Adalbero is another interestingly mad commentator on his world, and I’m starting to think that he might have been onto something after all.
If you’d like you can check out a few of the extracts of my translation, with my own commentary, on my blog carolingiansarecool.blogspot.com
I think that potentially the biggest saving throw for the feudal revolution may actually lie in narrative sources. I certainly think they can, if carefully reassessed, be used to show, along with the growing evidence from charters, that actually the last Carolingians were more powerful and the tenth West Frankish kingdom (at least down to the Loire) more court-centred and centripetal than previously thought, with a strong tradition of assembly politics combined with the monarchy continuing to oversee provincial administration even in Aquitaine, even if most of the operation of it no longer requires royal direction/ co-ordination (sort of adapting Charles West’s arguments in “Reframing” here). The real crisis and collapse of West Frankish kingship, I’m starting to think, instead comes in the handover from Carolingian to Capetian rule and in the reign of Robert the Pious, which provided that that theory of mine can actually be made to work (and that’s a big if) would save the feudal revolution from what Rachel Stone has aptly called the “Wall-e coyote problem” – rather than the public order stumbling on, kingless through the tenth century, the mutation de l’an mil would actually coincide with the collapse of West Frankish kingship.
As for the hypothetical course and justifying it to the sceptics, well its safe to say that for now its very much just an idea floating around in my head and will remain so for many years to come. Ultimately, its impossible to know where my career or the academic climate will be in ten or fifteen years time. But assuming that I do get on the academic career ladder, what I would say to confront the sceptics is basically ‘so what if France isn’t globally relevant in either the tenth century or the twenty-first? So long as there are people out there who will find studying late Carolingian and early Capetian France interesting and enjoyable, does it really matter. And in the meantime, it sheds much light on a formative stage of our past as West Europeans, which still matters to our present societies, cultures and identities, and on the human condition, while presenting some extremely compelling challenges for historical skills and thinking.’ Obviously that kind of response may not fly well in many quarters, but I feel like if it becomes no longer acceptable to study medieval France any more because its not globally relevant, we’re headed (despite all good intentions to the contrary) towards a deeply alienating and elitist approach to history which, given that we’re living in an age of resurgent nationalism and antipathy towards intellectual elites and experts, feels like the wrong approach.
I think the second sentence of your putative response there is the one with potential, I will say. You may find that there aren’t many students interested in studying medieval France per se (unless of course you should wind up teaching in France). But a ‘where does Europe come from?’ pitch works for almost any large-scale politico-economic medieval course, to be honest. All said with the probable delay of the relevance of this and the various uncertainties on the path there taken into account, of course.
As to the rest, it sounds great (and I’ll blogroll your blog; it’s definitely the kind of thing I link, even if I can also see a few quibbles I’d start if I had time to comment on other blogs still). I had not realised that Adhémar went so far back, and it’s definitely interesting to consider what the answers to our questions looked like to him — though one might accuse him, as one or two of the other historians you mention, of getting to those answers by taking the sources basically straight, an odd foible for one himself so inventive with the record…
Thanks so much for the tip r.e. ‘where does Europe come from?’ That seems to be, for the moment, the best way to sell any undergraduate course concerning the Carolingian/ post-Carolingian age.
About Adhemar and the sources, I think he’s a really fascinating case study in medieval antiquarianism. On the one hand he did use certain sources deemed particularly authoritative, like Gregory of Tours, Fredegar and the Liber Historiae Francorum, a little too uncritically, taking a lot of their stories at face value – still the range of written sources he used is fairly notable, and much of the evidence he used is still argued over by Merovingianists to this day. At the same time, his knowledge and understanding of past eras and the documentation they provided was strong enough that he could forge a late Roman saints’ life that fooled historians down to the early twentieth century. All of this reminds me that I need to read Levi Roach’s “Forgery and Memory at the turn of the First Millennium” at some point.
I find it slightly surprising that the first Book of Adhemar of Chabannes has been generally ignored by scholars. It really is quite fascinating for considering perceptions of the distant past in the eleventh century. It seems to me that there was some quite substantial interest in what we now call the late Roman period/ the migration era/ late antiquity in the central middle ages, and they were very significant to how people at that time saw themselves and their world. Similarly, Raoul Glaber, who unlike Adhemar basically wanted to write “modern history”, begins his Histories with the tersest possible description of the Fall of Rome and the rise of the Franks. Frutolf of Michelsberg seems to have been another, very serious scholar of this period – he complained that “vulgar fables” made Attila the Hun, Ermaneric and Theodoric the Great contemporaries, when anyone who had read Jordanes’ Getica knew this wasn’t the case.
There’s an article there to be written about the tenth-century use of the historical method, isn’t there? Take that, Ranke! But I also like the combinative irony of the little-used first book of a chronicle itself being partly based on its author’s reading of another chronicle whose first book we now basically ignore (‘Fredegar’) for much the same reason—we want their present, not their sense of the past. But work like this may change that…
That’s the thing. How medieval writers perceived the past is just as important as how they perceived their present. Indeed the former can be pretty crucial to understanding the latter – for example, Edward Roberts just how much our understanding of Flodoard’s Annals, often praised for its straightforward, no nonsense, objective chronicling of the events of 919 – 966, change when we measure it up to what Flodoard wrote in the History of the Church of Rheims or The Triumphs of Christ – it becomes fairly clear that Flodoard saw his own era as much worse than the Roman, early Christian and Frankish pasts, and so might have been doing something more intentional in his portrayal of tenth century West Frankish politics as so chaotic and disjointed. Perhaps the same can hold true of Adhemar – maybe we’ll understand what he has to say about his own times better if we understand how he viewed earlier periods in Frankish history, which he no doubt measured up his own age in relation to. Why the first books of Fregedar and Adhemar get ignored is somewhat puzzling to me, to say the least, given how much they would help us understand their view of history and what they were trying to do as historians.
What’s more, the methods they used for studying the distant past are fascinating and often challenge a lot of our preconceptions about medieval historiography. While Adhemar does slightly conform to the stereotypes in taking legends as fact, he seems to have comprehensively surveyed all the written material available to him in his corner of eleventh century Aquitaine on Merovingian history, and a significant portion of the source base still used by Merovingianists today. And as his forgeries show, he was just as capable of critically examining the language and literary and documentary forms of late Roman sources as a renaissance humanist/ early modern antiquarian.
I think I’ll take up your excellent suggestion in writing an article on the historical method in the tenth and eleventh centuries. I’ve also thought of writing one provisionally titled “some central medieval views of the late Roman and post-Roman pasts (fourth to seventh centuries” – giving a nod to James Campbell’s essay “some twelfth century views of the Anglo-Saxon past”, which has some quite similar arguments and themes r.e. medieval historical method and antiquarianism, to what we’ve been discussing now.
The former of these sounds like an article; the latter, more like a doctorate! But the point that people in the Middle Ages could be as smart as us, and that we have not somehow evolved from them as smarter people, even if we may have built more tools of thought (or rather, ruthlessly selected a set that do what we want and not what they wanted), is one always worth fighting. Here, I suppose the point is that when Adhémar wanted to do what we want to do, his tools could be very similar. And when he wanted to promote a dodgy apostolic cult, perhaps unsurprisingly, he used different tools…
I think that’s exactly how I’d do it – make the former an article and the latter a doctorate. And that’s precisely the point I’d want to hammer home – medieval people were just as smart as us, not credulous fools – rather their priorities when it came to studying the past were mostly different, but sometimes they were like ours and when they were the methods and results they got were surprisingly similar to those of more modern historians.