Seminar CCXXXVI: a few steps closer to Flodoard

Trying to get back on the horse while I’m still in sight of it, here is a report on a seminar I was at on 25th March 2015, which was when Dr Ed Roberts, then of KCL and now of the University of the Basque Country, presented to the Earlier Middle Ages Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research with the title, “The Composition, Structure and Audience of Flodoard’s Annals“. Flodoard of Reims was that rarest of things, a historian of the tenth century, so you’d think I’d know a bit about him, but in actual fact because his Annals finish in 966 and don’t mention Catalonia at all, and his massive History of the Church of Reims is understandably even more local, it’s just never been urgent.¹ The result was that I learnt a lot from this, although predictably perhaps, a lot of what I learnt is what we don’t know about the Annals and their author.

One of the manuscripts of Flodoard’s Annals, Biblioteca di Vaticano MS Reg. Lat. 633, fo. 42v, from the site of a French project that was in 2011 going to do what Ed is now starting towards

The things we do know, from Flodoard’s own works or those of his successor as Reims’s historian, Richer, can be reasonably quickly set out: Flodoard was born in 893 or 894, was in school at Reims cathedral between 900 and 922, was bounced out of the chapter in 925 for refusing to support the election of Archbishop Hugh (then 5 years old), went to Rome in 936 and was recalled in 937 by Archbishop Artold. Artold had been put in place of Hugh because of the age thing, but Hugh had strong supporters which was how that had happened in the first place and in 940 Artold was deposed and Hugh resumed his throne, at which point Flodoard was arrested. His position between then and 946, when Hugh was again deposed and Artold restored, is quite unclear, but some of it seems to have been at the court of King Otto I of the Germans, who was brought in with the pope and King Louis IV of the Franks to settle the rights to the see definitively in 948. After that Flodoard returned to his chapter, wrote the History of the Church of Reims and retired in 963. He seems to have started the Annals long before that, however, in 923 probably, and carried on adding yearly entries until his death in 966, so it was a lifetime project carried on through a quite turbulent life by the standards of a comfortably-placed medieval cleric.²

The seal of the cathedral of Reims, showing a building perhaps more like the one Flodoard knew than the current one. By G. Garitan (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

These then are the things we know but there is also quite a lot which we don’t, and the obvious ones are why he wrote the Annals and who his audience was supposed to be (or even actually was). In a career like that one can see how axes could need grinding, and some of these are evident in the History, but the Annals are much more neutral, or perhaps better, more careful. Their author is hardly present in them, and six out of the seven manuscripts remove most of what biographical detail there was in the first version, as well as adding a short continuation for 976-978. Ed suggested that the very longevity of the project made it likely that Flodoard did not, in fact, know who his audience would be which was precisely why he was being so careful, which makes sense but is a little frustrating. In discussion both Alice Rio and Susan Reynolds raised the possibility that Flodoard wrote mainly for the love of doing so, which I think shows you what we were all getting from Ed’s study, a sense that this author about whom we mostly knew very little was on the cusp of being detectable as a personality in his work, but still at this point just over the threshold. There’s not much to compare him to, very little way therefore to check what he was including or leaving out, but I think that Ed did manage to convince us that there was still probably something more to be got from him, so I hope we get to see what it is that Ed finds out can be found!

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1. The stock edition of the Annals is still, I believe, Philippe Lauer (ed.), Les Annales de Flodoard, publiées d’après les manuscrits, avec une introduction et des notes (Paris 1905), online here, but there is now also Steven Fanning & Bernard S. Bachrach (transl.), The Annals of Flodoard of Reims, 919-966, Readings in Medieval Civilizations and Culture IX (Toronto 2008). As for the rest, there is Flodoard von Reims, Historia Remensis Ecclesiae, ed. Martina Stratmann, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Scriptores in folio) XXXVI (Hannover 1998), online here, and there my knowledge runs out but I’m not sure there’s much more.

2. Most of this was coming from the work of Michel Sot, Un historien et son église : Flodoard de Reims (Paris 1993), which is more or less what Ed now has to replace…