I seem to be writing another book

Not right now, I admit; right now I am doggedly trying to clear any research time at all between the marking, lecture preparation, training and rewriting a long-running module of my predecessor’s to cope with the kind of limits of digitisation I was writing about here the other day, and when I get that time there’s a review, an article and a final version of a conference paper that need sending off first, but nonetheless, since November last year I have been contracted to produce my next monograph and it’s about time I mentioned it here. It will (probably) be called Managing Change: Borrell II of Barcelona (945-993) and his times and I’m due to send the final manuscript to Palgrave MacMillan at the end of June 2016. I thought I should say something about why I think it’s worth writing, how I got it to contract stage and what will be in it, so here goes.

Count-Marquis Borrell II of Barcelona, Girona, Osona (945-993) and Urgell (947-993), as pictured in the Rotlle genealògic del Monestir de Poblet, c. 1400 (from Wikimedia Commons)

At one level this book is getting written because of professional necessity, but at another one it’s because its seeds have been kicking round my head for years, the unwritten extension of one of the chapters of my doctoral thesis.¹ You all know I have many thoughts about Count-Marquis Borrell II of Barcelona (and also Girona, Osona and Urgell). At the latter stages of my write-up process I was as far down my rabbit hole as to occasionally imagine a small avatar of him in my head shouting ineffectually at me to get on with it. I’ve been wanting to get this written ever since then but other things have kept seeming like more immediately useful ideas. Then, a few months after I’d started making a decent attempt to bring the blog up to date by blogging every morning, as I have described before:

“then Christmas happened and in that time someone heard me saying that if I was going to get another job after this one I probably needed to heed one academic’s advice and get myself a second book. That someone pointed out that I had been going on about the one I’d write for ages, and would probably be both happier and more successful if I actually got on with it, and they were right, of course, but really the only time I could free up for that was the time I was using for blogging.”

So with that grimly accepted there arose the question of what to write. I envisaged, and still envisage, this book as a semi-biographical study, because there is basically almost nothing written specifically about Borrell even in Catalan, so it seemed important to get the basics down, but then there would be thematic chapters picking up on the various aspects of his rule I think make interesting points of comparison.² It seemed clear that I should start with the biographical part, to get that in order and also to demonstrate to a reader that there was a story here that could be told, but that meant getting the evidence into a state of arrangement I’d never yet managed. I have a database with all Borrell’s charters atomised in it, but there’s more that could be done, and once I’d done it I was surprised how much narrative evidence also had to be slotted in, either from Richer of Reims or from Arabic sources and all very bitty but still more than I’d realised and quite informative, to which one could add Gerbert’s letters and so on. I arranged all these into a conspectus of datable or near-datable nuggets of information, and by the end of it there were 218 different incidents of Borrell’s career on record, much more than we have for most tenth- or eleventh-century persons even at élite level.

Archivo de la Corona d’Aragón, Cancilleria, Pergamins Seniofredo 39 (reduced-quality version), with Borrell’s alleged signature lower centre

Moreover, the very effort of getting them in order made coincidences and significances apparent that I’d never noticed before; two or three things happening in Manresa suddenly at the same time, an absence of appearance in Osona until much later than I’d realised, a gap in the evidence for Girona that I’d already noticed and tentatively blamed on Count-Bishop Miró Bonfill of Besalú and Girona actually being more endemic, and so on. I think the most obvious of these was that Borrell got married in the immediate aftermath of his brother, Miró III Count-Marquis of Barcelona (they shared) dying in 966, even though he was probably thirty-five already by then (and there’s no sign that Miró was married either). I’m still puzzling over that lack of attention to the succession, but in any case, it’s clear that plans then changed. So that sort of thing emerged from the close attention to chronology and made this feel a lot like research.

But the biography can be written, so I wrote it, and then after also spending some time making a list of all Borrell’s relatives documentable alive during his lifetime because keeping them straight in my head was proving impossible—and there’s sixty-four of them, which is also a fairly unusual source-base I think, though I doubt he knew even half of them himself—I also had stubs of three other chapters, one of which, on the conceptualisation of comital power, I dressed up for presentation and tentatively sent off to Palgrave with the biographical chapter, the conspectus and a proper actual proposal. I find it hard to say why I decided so quickly on Palgrave: they make nice-looking books, they shift copies and I want this book to make some sales, their academic standards are high enough to be credible, they don’t have the ugly copyright agreements of some companies, but one could say the same of other publishers. So far it has been a good choice, though; they acknowledged, sent out for review very quickly and the reviewer’s comments were, well… it would be fair to say that the reviewer saw in my proposal the potential for a whole other book, one which I’d like to write but it would take me years. I may yet, but I managed to convince Palgrave that with enough deliberate comparison built in, this book would do as a necessary stepping stone to the great new synthetic history of power and government in tenth-century Europe.³

I actually do think, though, that if such a book is to be written—and I think we need one, I do think the tenth century is a crucial period of formation in the mess of post-Roman Europe, in which the dust from the Carolingians’ attempt to renew Rome one last time settles in definitive ways that are hugely diverse because of the chaotic state of post-imperial disunification, and that if we can understand the tenth century better we will understand everything that follows from it better as a result—Borrell’s reign is an excellent place to start. Consider: he lived at the very end of the Carolingian rule of which he was the notional servant, and which he initially tried his best to ignore without actually disclaiming it.⁴ Big things were afoot; the Carolingians were finishing, the Ottonians were running into trouble, the Caliphate of al-Andalus was entering its dangerous red giant phase whose early end no-one could have foreseen, elsewhere in Europe the Vikings were back; everywhere or almost everywhere structures of government, finance, and even religion were in flux and proving unequal to the strains of the times. He was, indeed, caught up in and possibly held back the governmental privatisation process that we sometimes call the ‘feudal transformation’. All these things worked out different in Catalonia because of what Borrell did, the not-so-great man (because I don’t necessarily see him as a success) atop the big waves of historical change trying as best he could to make sure he and his family and (to a lesser degree, but a real one) his people came out of the curve more or less as they’d started or better. And we have more than two hundred documents of him busy at these things. Of course, as I admit up front in the book, that is to say that we know what he was doing on some of less than one half percent of the days he was alive, but that’s still surprisingly much for the tenth century. Something can be done here, and I’m now contracted to do it.

Not a perfect map—is there such a thing?—but it makes the point: things with names we still have are on this map but they are not yet what and where we expect them

So at the moment, this is the way the chapter plan looks.

0. Preface and Introduction

Why the book needs to be written, the lack of a decent study of him and the outdated mistakes about his rule that still circulate, the above justification and how I’m proceeding

1. Biography

A chronological narrative of his life and career marking its big changes

2. Ancestry, Rivals and Descendants

His family and the ways in which they impinged on his life

3. The Opening World

His contacts abroad in an era when Catalonia was freshly expanding them⁵

4. Money and the Economy

Covering the fisc and the currency reform for which I’ve argued⁶

5. Managing Manpower

Reprising my doctoral work here slightly, the ways in which Borrell deployed patronage and upon whom

6. Piety and Patronage

A prince over the Church or a pawn of his bishops? A little from column A, a little from column B…

7. Administration and Reform

Principally with respect to the law and judges, since that’s what we can see, but also land management

8. Theories of Rule

How the counts and others who held power here thought of that and how it was expressed

9. Conclusion

I think I’ll have a better idea what this will be once I’ve written the rest!

I’m happy to talk about it more in comments, and equally happy in a strange kind of way to be nagged to get on with it; I’d like to be sure there’s an audience, after all. It will get done either way, though, and some day you’ll be able to buy it. Whether it’ll still look like this then, only the next year or so will tell, however!

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1. Jonathan Jarrett, ‘Pathways of Power in late-Carolingian Catalonia’, unpublished doctoral thesis (University of London 2005), pp. 221-253, rev. as J. Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia 880-1010: pathways of power (Woodbridge 2010), pp. 141-166.

2. The basic reference is still Prosper de Bofarull, Los Condes de Barcelona vindicados, y cronología y genealogía de los Reyes de España considerados como soberianos independientes de su Marca (Barcelona 1836, repr. 1990), 2 vols, I, online here, last modified 23 July 2008 as of 14 January 2015, pp. 64-81; to it, as far as I know, the only specific studies of Borrell that can be added are Miquel Coll i Alentorn, “Dos comtes de Barcelona germans, Miró i Borrell” in Marie Grau & Olivier Poisson (edd.), Études Roussillonnaises offertes à Pierre Ponsich : Mélanges d’archéologie, d’histoire et d’histoire de l’art du Roussillon et de la Cerdagne (Perpignan 1987), pp. 145-162; Cebrià Baraut, “La data i el lloc de la mort del comte Borrell II de Barcelona-Urgell” in Urgellia Vol. 10 (Montserrat 1990), pp. 469-472; and Michel Zimmermann, “Hugues Capet et Borrell: Á propos de l’«indépendance» de la Catalogne” in Xavier Barral i Altet, Dominique Iogna-Prat, Anscari M. Mundó, Josep María Salrach & Zimmermann (edd.), Catalunya i França Meridional al’Entorn de l’Any Mil: la Catalogne et la France méridionale autour de l’an mil. Colloque International D. N. R. S. [sic]/Generalitat de Catalunya «Hugues Capet 987-1987. La France de l’An Mil», Barcelona 2 – 5 juliol 1987, Actes de Congresos 2 (Barcelona 1991), pp. 59-64, which is not a whole lot of pages despite the length of the footnote.

3. I don’t know who this reviewer was but I have an idea. If they know who they were, and happen to be reading, once this is out I want to talk to you about the next one sir or madam…

4. See J. Jarrett, “Caliph, King or Grandfather: strategies of legitimization on the Spanish March in the reign of Lothar III” in The Mediaeval Journal Vol. 1.2 (Turnhout 2012 for 2011), pp. 1-22.

5. Here still basically following Ramon d’Abadal i de Vinyals, Com Catalunya s’obrí al món mil anys enrera, Episodis de l’història 3 (Barcelona 1960, repr. 1987).

6. See J. Jarrett, “Currency change in pre-millennial Catalonia: coinage, counts and economics” in Numismatic Chronicle Vol. 169 (London 2010 for 2009), pp. 217-243.

Leeds 2014 Report III: priests, charters and finally Hungarians

The church of Santa Maria de Manresa, where as I argue below we can probably be fairly sure some local priests were based in the tenth century, even if not in this actual building. “Seu de Manresa” by Josep Renalias – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Sticking determinedly to the reduction of my backlog alongside the notices of what I’m currently up to, here’s the third section of my report on the International Medieval Congress 2014 (or Leeds, to habitués, an ambiguity I am now going to have to get used to disentangling). This covers the Wednesday, 9th July, which was also the day I was presenting. Partly out of grace and mostly out of interest, I spent much of that day in the sessions of the strand in which I was doing that, so there is a heavy concentration here on priests, which was what I had to talk about at that point, but kind of ineluctably I broke out for some charters at some point and, also ineluctably, I was talking about my priests from charters, so this is quite a traditional Jarrett post in a lot of ways, getting down into what people did away from political centres and how we can know about it.

1011. The Clergy in Western Europe, 700-1200, I: education, training and liturgy

• Carine van Rhijn, “More Than Pastoral Care Alone: local priests and their communities in the Carolingian period”.
• Bernard Gowers, “Clerical Apprenticeship and Clerical Education, 10th & 11th Centuries”.
• Helen Gittos, “The Use of English in Medieval Liturgy”.

This was about as stimulating an early morning session as they get, and for me especially because of Carine van Rhijn’s paper. She had been going through many manuscripts probably used in Carolingian-period schoolrooms and working out what the people who used them cared about knowing how to do, and the answers were illuminating: calculating the date of Easter, yes, carrying out a correctly-worded Mass, yes, the right dates of saints’ feasts, yes too, but also yes to odd notes of Biblical history, the signs of the Zodiac, ‘Egyptian days of ill omen’, the correct prayers to say before a judicial ordeal but also before a haircut, prayers to say over sick animals or for good harvests… As she said, this was a very broad model of pastoral care, in which people might go to a priest about almost anything, and as Sarah Foot pointed out in discussion, they might also have been going to or previously have been going to other people, of whom such sources would tell us nothing except that this was how the Church competed. Bernard then talked about the different ways in which the training of priests was carried out, distinguishing two overlapping processes, the in-house socialisation of a future priest by living with a senior relative, a kind of life-shadowing apprenticeship, as opposed to a more scholarly style of education in which texts and literary knowledge were the primary focus; some people, like Raoul Glaber, evidently got more of the latter than the former… And lastly Helen Gittos argued that there was much more spoken English in the liturgy of Anglo-Saxon England than our texts and preconceptions would immediately suggest, especially for things like responses from the congregation, though my notes suggest that I was anxious about the lack of evidence from the actual Anglo-Saxon period she had available to demonstrate this. Still, I went for coffee with a great deal to think about.

Now, that thread continued into the next session, but I was presented with the chance to hear three experts talking a problem that bothers me a great deal in my work, that of whether we can deduce from charters issued by kings what those kings wanted to do in the areas concerned, or whether what we mainly learn from this is what recipients of such documents wanted the king to do for them.¹ Accordingly I deserted the priests for an hour-and-a-half to go to this:

1124. Empire and Regesta, II: Carolingian diplomas and their recipients as sources for royal acceptance

You see how I couldn’t not. This was the running order:

• Tobie Walther, “Regesta regni Aquitaniae: recipients and beneficiaries in the diplomas of Pippin I and Pippin II of Aquitaine”.
• Irmgard Fees, “The Diplomas of Charles the Bald: the problem of lay recipients”.
• Horst Lößlein, “Royal Diplomas as ‘Performatives’? The Recipients of Diplomas of Charles III the Simple”.

Dr Walther had an interesting case study to work with here, because of Aquitaine having been ruled by its own subordinate kings between 817 and 848, if somewhat intermittently towards the end of that, so that questions about attachment and royal policy could have different answers here from elsewhere. The paper didn’t really draw any conclusions, however, and the presentation of the data was hampered by not considering that documents to lay recipients would have survived less well than those to churches; I’m not sure I believe, therefore, that King Pippin I focused his patronage mainly on monasteries, just that that is what we still have evidenced dotted between the numerous forgeries in this area.² Professor Fees engaged more closely with the question of whether or not we have a clear picture of whom it was got most gifts from kings from such documents, and with Geoffrey Koziol’s new book, by pointing out that even what we have preserves a fragmentary secondary history of laymen getting the gifts they then made to churches, and that we can therefore say what kings gave to churches much more securely than that they gave less to laymen. I would have told you we knew that but it’s always worth having someone put actual data behind these statements.




The object of desire, a precept of immunity from King Charles the Simple to the canons of Paris, 911


Lastly Herr Lößlein engaged with another part of Geoff’s argument, that the point of issuing such diplomas was partly so that the king could stage a big performance around it. Some of the texts clearly allow for that being possible but others are much more basic and functional, argued Herr Lößlein. From this he more or less reconstructed the argument of Mark Mersiowsky cited above, that Charles the Simple at last (and for Mersiowsky at least, also his predecessors) granted only where people wanted him to grant, rather than in areas where he was trying to intervene; we don’t see how he or anyone established such relationships from royal grants, because those relationships have to have existed first.

I found this rather frustrating, overall. When I first read Mersiowsky’s chapter during my doctoral study it seemed like someone clearly stating what should have been obvious, and I would find the various reactions to Geoff’s provocative counter-arguments more enlightening if they showed more awareness that Geoff had in fact been writing against something.³ For my part, it seems clear from Catalonia that people sought royal charters when it was easy or immediately profitable for them to do so. Both Professor Fees and Dr Lößlein noted that the south-west of the kingdom gets a really substantial proportion of their chosen king’s grants at certain times of their reigns, for Charles the Bald in 844 and for Charles the Simple in 899. It seems obvious to me that this is because Charles the Bald spent a good part of 844 besieging Toulouse and everybody from Catalonia realised that there would never be a better chance to meet the king so went off to get their diplomas renewed, and because in 899 Charles the Bald was holding a council to which the Bishop of Girona and Archbishop of Narbonne had both gone, presumably with a sheaf of requests from their peers and clients. That didn’t happen again later, so the charters peak there, but it’s not because of Charles’s preferences. In short, the key factor here was not royal choice but royal accessibility, married with the beneficiaries’ local circumstances. I hope that some day soon we can stop reinventing this wheel… Anyway, then, after lunch, it was showtime. Obviously I had to go my own session, but I probably would have done anyway given the first speaker…

1211. The Clergy in Western Europe, 700-1200, III: local clergy and parish clergy

• Wendy Davies, “Local Priests, Books and Things in Northern Iberia, 800-1000”.
• Jonathan Jarrett, “Counting Clergy: the distribution of priestly presence around a 10th-century Catalan town”.
• Grégory Combalbert, “Did Donations of Churches to Religious Houses Have Consequences for the Parish Clergy? Parish Priests, Ecclesiastical Advowson, and Lay Lords in Normandy, Late 11th-Early 13th Centuries”.

Wendy was interesting as ever: she was basically presenting the numbers from the northern Iberian documents she now knows so well on books, books given to churches, books recorded in wills and really any books mentioned at all. From this which she was able to deduce that probably most local churches had a small set (median 4·5…) of liturgical volumes: an antiphonary, a Psalter, a hymnal, an ordinary and the peculiar Iberian phenomenon known as the Liber commicus, not a comic book but a kind of liturgical pick’n’mix (we also see the word as ‘conmixtus’, mixed-together) of the working bits of the Hispanic liturgy, still very much in use in these areas apparently.⁴ To get anything less immediately practical for a working church you had to go to a bigger monastery, many of which had libraries of tens of volumes. Wendy also noted that an average book seemed to be valued at between 2 or 3 solidi, which I note mainly because as I’ve shown cows also sold for about that price in these areas at this time, and yet almost any book would have meant the slaughter of several animals, perhaps sheep but perhaps cows, so that it almost seems like separating it from its owner and putting words on it involved a considerable depreciation of the value of that animal hide…



One of my slides, showing the breakdown of priestly activity in the charters from the Manresa area in the tenth century. This is why I like dense data…

I, meanwhile, was presenting something like some preliminary conclusions from my Manresa project about which you’ve heard so many different bits. What I started out doing that project for was to try and work out if we could see the organisation of pastoral care around tenth-cenury Manresa from its unusually rich record of land charters, given how many priests turn up in them. This involved me in wrestling with the fact that almost all of the evidence is from the nearby monastery of Sant Benet de Bages, not from the mother church of Manresa itself, but I think I am able to show that other factors turn up alongside the monastery’s interests, even if priests tend to show up more than any other clergy. This seems to have been because people who wanted charters written preferred priests to do it, though plenty of others also did and therefore could. The monastery’s priests do show up more often than others, but not by much, and the areas with the most monastic property are not necessarily those where most priests are recorded. Using all this I argued that there were two sorts of structure here, an established and very localised priesthood mainly visible on the inwards side of the city, where churches had been going for longer, and then another body of priests who appeared all around the city, including towards the frontier in the east and south-east, where there were at this time rather fewer churches, and who therefore were probably based in the city, in something like a temporary minster system which was expected to move towards local establishment when practical.



The observable sequence of priests at the church of Castellterç. Sant Fruitós de Bages, from my paper

I think this was the first time I’ve ever given an academic paper I hadn’t written out beforehand. I usually have a text somewhere, even if I don’t necessarily refer to it, but this time there had been no time and I just had a thickly-commented printout of my slides. I’m not sure it went any the worse for it, but I do wish I had written down something about what questions I got. Anyway, last but not least was Dr Combalbert, who was asking, basically, was giving a local church to a monastery a way to ‘reform’ it, in terms of the standard of life and worldliness of its clergy? His conclusion was that it wasn’t, not least because the new onwers didn’t necessarily get to replace priests in these places; even where they had the right to appoint a new one (which is what the word ‘advowson’ means, in case you were wondering) they had to wait for the old one to die first, and there were very often arrangements in place that, even if they didn’t ensure that the priesthood in the church proceeded in heredity (though they sometimes did), made very sure that the donor or local lord retained his ability to have his voice heard in naming the candidates from whom the monks chose the new priest. Such lords also usually kept most of the income, and if they didn’t, the monasteries very often did anyway. I suppose the priest would never have been used to having it, either way…

Then there was tea and then the final session of the day, which was a man down but the remaining two still justified it for me.

1318. Visions of Community, III: shadows or empire – 10th- and 11th-century reactions

• Bernhard Zeller, “Changes in Documentary Practice in the late 9th and early 10th century: the evidence of royal charters – the case of St Gallen”.
• Maximilian Diesenberger, “Worrying about Hungarians in the Early 10th Century: an exegetical challenge”.

Bernhard was telling us a tale of decline, at least in numerical terms: over the period he was looking at, the monastery of St Gallen, which preserves one of our largest caches of original early medieval charters in Europe north of the Pyrenees, did so less and less. Of the documents they did preserve, too, more and more were royal. This was probably partly because as the Carolingian kingdoms broke down the kings most relevant to St Gallen were also closer to it and more reliant on it, but also, it seems, because the monks were getting non-royal charters made less and less. They had the sort of rights over their area by this stage that might have meant they simply didn’t need them, but they never seem to have used charters in court much and a lot of the gifts they received were so hedged about with conditions as not really to convey anything, so Bernhard mainly thought that they just preferred to get grants from the kings now it was so much more possible.



The entry of the Magyars into the Carpathian basin, from the Chronicum Pictum, 1360

In a rather different type of assessment of reaction to crisis, Dr Diesenberger took us through some bishops’ letters showing that the tenth century at large was wrestling with how properly to understand the increasingly severe attacks of the Hungarians in terms consonant with everything being ordained by God. Most of all, did these bow-wielding horsemen from the East herald the Apocalypse? The bishops’ letters argue otherwise, but this probably shows that someone else was arguing for. After my year’s teaching this stuff I had by now become pretty clear that there’s always someone out there preaching the Apocalypse, in the Middle Ages and now, and that the question is how many people care, but what Dr Diesenberger also took from it was that the bishops knew that the kings were becoming unable to help: what was really needed was not prayer or penance but a better means of guaranteeing troop numbers, thought Bishop Salomon of Constance for example, but the overall community that could orchestrate such a response was broken, and the Church was the larger whole that remained for people to hang their identity on. This was very interesting indeed, and if Dr Diesenberger had only not said that the Hungarians didn’t attack Western Francia after 926 I’d have had no quarrels at all.⁵

Anyway, after that there was wine in the sunshine laid on by the city of Leeds, and after that dinner somewhere out of the way seemed like a good way to decompress. That took longer than I expected, and when we got back the dance was under way. Last year the dance had been in the refectory, but apparently people had complained that this made it feel like a school disco so this year it had been moved into the club run by Leeds University Students Union. What this meant, from my consumer’s point of view, was that it was cramped into a far smaller darker dance floor where there was no room to move, that there was only expensive bottled lager or alcopops available to drink, and that it was much louder, and while I like loud music as much or more than the next man, the whole place seemed unpleasantly like a hot dark gladiatorial arena with a nineties soundtrack and nothing made me wish to stay there rather than go to bed. So I did not dance, and was duly mocked for it next day by those who had noted my absence, but I’m still not sure I regret my choice. I was, in any case, in much better shape than I would otherwise have been for the final day, and I’ll tell you about that after another couple of posts on other things!

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1. You can probably see immediately how this is an issue for someone studying the area of the Carolingian kingdoms perhaps most durably attached to one in name and yet also most beyond the reach of its kings, as I do, but you can find the problem also expressed for the core in Mark Mersiowsky, “Towards a Reappraisal of Carolingian Sovereign Charters” in Karl Heidecker (ed.), Charters and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Society, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 5 (Turnhout 2000), pp. 15-25, to which the field is now avidly contrasting Geoffrey Koziol, The Politics of Memory and Identity in Carolingian Royal Diplomas: the West Frankish kingdom (840-987), Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 19 (Turnhout 2012).

2.. The documents in question are all printed in Léon Levillain (ed.), Receuil des Actes de Pepin I et Pepin II, rois d’Aquitaine (814-848), ed. Maurice Prou (Paris 1926), but Herr Walther argued that one of the documents Levillain had thought was false may not have been while five more he had as genuine probably weren’t.

3. It’s not like Geoff doesn’t cite Mersiowsky (first at Koziol, Politics of Memory, pp. 28 n. 32), but I’ve yet to hear anyone else going round this particular circle do so.

4. As Wendy duly pointed out, this is very like what Michel Zimmermann found doing the same sort of enquiry for Catalonia, despite the supposed Frankish influence there, but he finds a lectionary much more common than the ordinary and increasingly replacing the commicus: M. Zimmermann, Écrire et lire en Catalogne (IXe-XIIe siècles), Biblioteca de la Casa de Velázquez 23 (Madrid 2003), 2 vols, I, pp. 523-607, here esp. pp. 523-525. There’s a subtle but quite large point hidden in this about exactly how much difference the Carolingian takeover in Catalonia actually made to how people worshipped there, and I haven’t done enough on it, but what I have done with charters would fit with this in suggesting that it was a slow percolation of change rather than a top-down imposition, probably done by introducing new training methods at certain centres. Of course, that would only get at the people being trained by what Bernard Gowers had earlier separated as ‘education’, not those who learned by ‘apprenticeship’, so change would be slower in areas where structures like those delineated by Dr Combalbert in Normandy were stronger. I didn’t see these links between the sessions’ papers this clearly at the time so it’s a benefit to me to write them up, thankfully…

^5. I find while checking references just now that there is a very neat, paragraphs-long summary of this correspondence in Karl Leyser, “Ritual, Ceremony and Gesture: the case of Ottonian Germany”, in Leyser, Communications and Power in medieval Europe: the Carolingian and Ottonian centuries, ed. Timothy Reuter (London 1994), pp. 189-213 at pp. 192-194. As for my gripe, it is mainly that there is good evidence for a Hungarian attack that made it all the way to Spain in 942, but also one on Provence in 937, and while the former is only known through Arabic sources that I can at least understand Latinist historians not knowing about, the latter is not. References for anyone working on the Hungarians who does not wish me to point this out to them in seminar questions would include: G. Fasoli, “Points de vue sur les incursions hongroises en Europe au Xe siècle” in Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale Vol. 2 (Toulouse 1959), pp. 17-36; Josep Millàs Vallicrosa, “Sobre las incursiones húngaras en la Cataluña condal” in Homenaje a Johannes Vincke para el 11 de Mayo 1962. Festschrift für Johannes Vincke zum 11. Mai 1962 (Madrid 1962-1964), 2 vols, I, pp. 73-80; with great care, Albert Benet i Clarà, “La incursió d’hongaresos a Catalunya l’any 942” in Quaderns d’Estudis Medievals Vol. 3 (Barcelona 1981), pp. 568-573 and “La batalla de Balltarga. Epilèg a la incursió d’hungaresos a Catalunya” in Quaderns d’Estudis Medievals Vol. 4 (Barcelona 1982), pp. 639-640; and Jonathan Jarrett, “Centurions, Alcalas and Christiani perversi: Organisation of Society in the pre-Catalan ‘Terra de Ningú'” in †Alan Deyermond & Martin Ryan (edd.), Early Medieval Spain: a symposium, Papers of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar 63 (London 2010), pp. 97-127 at pp. 115-119, which collects these references.

What would a late-Carolingian bishop read? The will of Riculf of Elna

One of the awkward things about working on Catalonia is that not many people immediately know where it is, and it’s hard to explain, not least because it wasn’t a unit in the period that I’m interested in but a bunch of loosely-associated counties, some of which later became parts of other things. Such union as there was was sort of expressed in who came to Church councils in Barcelona, and there there was a kind of core of always-included bishops and a scattering of more peripheral ones (including the ephemeral per-county ones that occasionally got created). But one of those core areas was definitely the bishopric of Elna, which is now in France (Elne) in its county of Roussillon (Cat. Rosselló) but was usually ruled from Empúries which is now in Spain. It must be included, but it isn’t where Catalunya now is. I’m too used to reading about the place as Elna not to spell it ‘en català’ (as I will below), but that’s not what they speak there now. And so on.

I don’t think that its being on the north side of the Pyrenees makes Roussillon distinctly more Frankish and less Gothic, since it was still in Gothic Septimania and so on, but there are some differences there that I can’t yet put my finger on, as I have always worked further out on the frontier and it may just in any case that documentary survival back here is poorer. Elna’s cartulary was lost in the early part of the twentieth century, though there is a sort-of-edition of it, and other major ecclesiastical centres of the area, most obviously the fantastic half-ruin of Sant Pere de Rodes, have suffered even worse.¹ So rather than the fairly thick picture we get in certain areas of the frontier, about which I have written, what one gets from Roussillon tends to be snapshots.² But they’re often exceptionally interesting snapshots, and this is one such.

Southern belltower of Santa Eulàlia d'Elna, from Wikimedia Commons

If we ever wrote the book I’ve suggested before now about Interesting Bishops of the Tenth Century, I don’t think Riculf I of Elna (885-915) would make it in. This might be not least because half of his episcopate belonged to the ninth century, but it’s also because we don’t know a great deal about him. For the most part his documentary trace shows him pursuing his cathedral’s rights in its property, getting defences of that property from the kings.³ (It is concessions of rights over Hispani to the bishops of Elna that principally show that the Frankish kings gave up on trying to protect such ‘king’s freemen’ after, say, 865.⁴) This is not really a fair picture of him, we might suspect; the lack of early narrative material from Catalonia largely dooms almost all its historical figures to this kind of picture as landowners only, because land records are the only ones we have. He does seem to have been strenuous in that line, but at the very end of his life there is a clear hint that he could have been seen in other lights too, and this is a bequest from his will to his cathedral.⁵

The treasures of the cathedral of Elna that I can easily find images of are all architectural and too late to relate to Riculf at all, but some of them so gorgeous as not to be missed, like this bit of ornament from the cathedral cloister

We don’t have all of this, even in its current state, but it was a big old bequest, and by no means all of it is land, although a lot is and it includes mills suggesting that he had no problem with monopolising control of his city’s food supply. Quite a lot of it, also, is what we can happily call treasure, including a lot of ecclesiastical vestments some of which, I noted with joy when I first read this text, actually had bells on, and a lot of precious metalwork (chalices and patens but also other stuff). But, most interestingly I think, and here my McKitterickian training is going to show big-time, it also includes a 28-volume library. This is not a small individual collection by any standards, and represented a substantial investment in parchment and, presumably given the rest of his stuff, ornament. Of course we can’t automatically assume he read everything he owned—this blogger is emphatically no stranger to the aspirational book purchase—but he did at least choose to own them, and some of them are really unusual and interesting choices. Mostly when books turn up in wills here they were liturgical works, either books of the Bible (most common of all) or service books or ordines, and very occasionally some Patristics. Riculf was a different kind of reader. His bequest (which may not have been everything he owned) contained very little liturgical stuff (and the cathedral presumably had its operational requirement of that already) but did number the following:

• several collections of exegesis and Patristic material, in which the author most represented appears to be Gregory the Great
• a copy of Augustine’s Contra Hæreses
• two other texts by Augustine on Genesis
• a “Rabanum“, presumably a collection of Hraban Maur‘s stuff, though if a single text I wonder about the De institutione clericorum or the Martyrology (probably more likely) given the other stuff below
• a “Smaragdum“, and again one wonders what (and indeed which Smaragdus)
• two books of canons, unspecified
• two books of prayers (or orationes anyway)
• a ‘best martyrology’ (better than Hraban’s? There are copies of Ado’s Martyrology at Vic and Girona that appear to have been imported with Carolingian rule in the area, it’s possible that Elna had one too, but if so it probably wouldn’t have been Riculf’s property)
• several books of the Bible including a Song of Solomon
• two lawbooks, one ‘Roman’ and one ‘Gothic’, the latter presumably being the Forum Iudicum but who knows about the other?

and then, most interestingly of all, a series of apparently loose-bound stuff, quaderni, that look like working manuals:

• two quires on consecrating churches
• two quires on visiting the sick
• one on ecclesiastical ordinations
• and one ‘Medicinal’

There are loads of interesting things about this I could point out, but let me just say one or two of them before making my take-away point, and you can say the rest yourselves if you like. Firstly, Riculf was at least a bit current with the scholarship of his day: Hraban was his teacher’s generation (whoever that teacher might have been! And wouldn’t I like to know?) and not that long dead, and Smaragdus (as long as it was the Carolingian-era one) at least within a long living memory. There are older scholars here but he was not afraid to get new work (though Hraban’s careful avoidance of obvious novelty might have been the safest choice of new work possible). Secondly, he seems to have had views about these texts that imply quality judgements: a ‘best’ martyrology, note. Best for what? Presumably selection of saints, if only we knew which saints he was interested in, but it’s not blind respect for the written word. And thirdly there are the working texts, that show two things. Firstly, that he was seemingly genuinely concerned about the pastoral work of his job, including not just visiting the sick like a good Christian but also, perhaps, trying to treat them (the Medicinal), and also getting more churches up and running and training priests to minister in them. This is what we don’t get from the land-grants: ‘Yes, I will determinedly reduce your independence if you have cleared woodland in space that I consider belongs to the cathedral until you have to admit you owe me renders, tithes and first-fruits, BUT, if you break your leg growing them, I will ALSO turn up and try and splint it for you in your jerry-built hut while your concerned wife stands by, and if there are a lot of people here I will eventually build you a church to go to for Mass, too’. Secondly, it is clear that when he needed to do something one of Riculf’s responses was to get written instructions on how, and in a form that he might carry with him on circuit, too.

Manuscript illumination of Gregory the Great giving a copy of one of his works to Bishop Leander of Seville; I don't know the manuscript and it's the Moralia in Iob not the Cura Pastoralis, but hey, picture!

All of which takes me to the big point, which is: this man was a Carolingian Renaissance prelate. He not only had lots of books, and some by noted scholars of the Carolingian courts, but a lot of the books he had were instructions and authorities: canons, laws, even the martryology (or martyrologies) and of course the quires. When in doubt, he consulted texts, and he apparently had good sources of them even though one at least had been written only a generation or two before and in Germany. He was, therefore, connected in a range of ways to the wider intellectual world, and that connection partly drove a sense of responsibility in his office (want to bet one of the Gregory texts was the Cura pastoralis?) which he bolstered with yet more words. Now, other bishops of Riculf’s era and area had more conventional libraries, though even those have their practical aspects.⁶ He may have been the last of his kind for a while, and the generation of a century on were getting their books from all kinds of places including, we might note, Córdoba.⁷ All the same, texts like this, and the priests’ examinations that Carine van Rhijn has found in the Netherlands, and other such ephemera of a working, if patchy, organisation, make me want some kind of equivalent to the famous XKCD t-shirt about Science. It wouldn’t be quite as defiant, but some slogan like, “The Carolingian Renaissance! It worked! here and there” is definitely what I have in mind.

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1. The cartulary edition, such as it is, is Raymond de Lacvivier (ed.), “Inventaire sommaire des documents copiés dans le « cartulaire de l’église d’Elne » par Fossa” in Ruscino: Revue d’histoire et d’archéologie du Roussillon et des autres pays catalans Vol. 3 (Perpignan 1913), repr. separatim (Prades 1914). Most of the documents are now in the Catalunya Carolíngia of course but not all, because that’s not finished yet, and otherwise such full texts as there are are scattered over about five or six older editions that I don’t have space or will to detail here; ask if you need more.

2. When I say ‘I have written’, I mean of course the book, which I don’t seem to have plugged for several posts now so it must be about time. The most detailed picture of frontier society I give in it is probably the section of Gurb, J. Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled in frontier Catalonia 880-1010: pathways of power (London 2010), pp. 100-128.

3. The documents I know of in which he appears, not quite the same list as that of Joan Vilaseca’s linked above, are, in publication order: Pierre de Marca, Marca Hispanica sive Limes Hispanicus, hoc est geographica & historica descriptio cataloniæ, ruscinonis, & circumiacentium populorum, ed. Étienne Baluze (Paris 1688; Barcelona 1972; 1989), ap. LVIII; Claude Devic & J. Vaissete, Histoire Générale de Languedoc avec les Notes et les Pièces Justificatives. Édition accompagnée de dissertations et actes nouvelles, contenant le recueil des inscriptions de la province antiques et du moyen âge, des planches, des cartes géographiques et des âvues des monuments, rev. E. Mabille, E. Barry, E. Roschach & Auguste Molinier & ed. M. E. Dulaurier, Vol. V (Toulouse 1875; Osnabrück 1973), Preuves : chartes et diplômes 28, 32, 40 & 42 & Preuves : Catalogues et Inventaires Elna XXI, XXII, XXVI, XXIX, XXX, XXXIV, XXXV & XXXIX; Ramon d’Abadal i de Vinyals (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia II: els diplomes carolingis a Catalunya, Memòries de la Secció Històrico-Arqueològica II & III (Barcelona 1926-1952), Elna III & IV & Particulars XXI; J. Morera Sabater, “Un conato de secesión eclesiástica en la marca hispánica en el siglo IX” in Anales del Instituto de Estudios Gerundenses Vol. 15 (Girona 1962), pp. 293-315, ap. I; Cebrià Baraut (ed.), “Els documents, dels segles IX i X, conservats a l’Arxiu Capitular de la Seu d’Urgell” in Urgellia: anuari d’estudis històrics dels antics comtats de Cerdanya, Urgell i Pallars, d’Andorra i la Vall d’Aran Vol. 2 (Montserrat 1979), pp. 78-143, doc. no. 35; and Eduard Junyent i Subira (ed.), El Diplomatari de la Catedral de Vic, segles IX i X, ed. Ramon Ordeig i Mata (Vic 1980-1996), doc. no. 62. Almost all of these will by now be printed in Pierre Ponsich (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia VI: Els comtats de Rosselló, Conflent, Vallespir i Fenollet, ed. Ramon Ordeig i Mata, Memòries de la secció històrico-arqueològica LXX (Barcelona 2006), but I just haven’t yet had time to inventory that’s contents, and now it’s Easter and the libraries are shut so you’ll have to make do.

4. See J. Jarrett, “Settling the Kings’ Lands: aprisio in Catalonia in perspective” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 18 (Oxford 2010), pp. 320-342 esp. pp. 328-330, there citing esp. Aymat Catafau, “Les Hispani et l’aprision en Roussillon et Vallespir” in Frontières 2 (Perpignan 1992), pp. 7-20, which talks especially about Riculf’s area and actions.

5. Devic & Vaissete, Histoire générale de Languedoc V, Preuves : chartes et diplomômes no. 42. Again, it’s presumably in Ponsich, but currently I can’t get at that, for which reason you are also going to have to make do with my notes and not the actual text. I imagine that by the time someone wants to check with me about that I’ll be able to verify again.

6. I’ve written about this here before, as linked there, but if you wanted a real scholarly take, there is Antoni Pladevall i Font, “Entorn de l’estada de Gerbert a Catalunya (967-970): l’existència de biblioteques privades perdudes” in Immaculada Ollich i Castanyer (ed.), Actes del Congrès Internacional Gerbert d’Orlhac i el seu Temps: Catalunya i Europa a la Fi del 1r Mil·lenni, Vic-Ripoll, 10-13 de Novembre de 1999 (Vic 1999), pp. 651-661, with French résumé pp. 661-662, Provençal résumé p. 662 & English abstract p. 663.

7. As long as you’ve managed to get the book anyway, you could then see on this J. Cassinet, “Gerbert et l’introduction de la numération décimale arabo-indienne en Occident chrétien: le liber abaci” in Ollich, Actes del Congrès Internacional Gerbert d’Orlhac, pp. 725-726, or else Miquel del Sants Gros i Pujol, “Els textos d’ensenyament en l’escola catedràlia de Vic al segle XI” in Federico Udina i Martorell (ed.), Symposium Internacional sobre els Orígens de Catalunya (segles VIII-XI) (Barcelona 1991-1992), II pp. 19-26.

Seminary LXVI: chopping up Augustine with David Ganz

I have been buried in conference writing and too busy to write much else lately, for which I apologise. Let me now, at least, get the last of the queued-up reports on other people’s papers done before I descend into the maelstrom of Leeds and the write-ups that will require… This paper was David Ganz‘s appearance at the last Earlier Middle Ages seminar at the Institute of Historical Research for the academic year, on the 26th May (yes, that was a while ago, you’re right, sorry) and his title was: “Chopping up Augustine: reading and fragmenting in the early Middle Ages”.

St Augustine refuting a heretic, New York, Morgan Pierpont Library, MS 92b (a C13th Book of Hours), fo. 112r

What David was asking about was the practice of reading by excerpting, compilation of authors’ most pithy remarks into effectively new works, without regard to the context that we (rightly) think of as crucial to understanding the source. Many a medieval user of these texts was, however, less concerned with understanding Augustine (or whomever) and more concerned with understanding the greater Truth they were all studying, and therefore most interested in the points where the writer they were using seemed to have got closest to it or was most helpful in breaking it open. The result is a vast number of manuscripts of such ‘best of’ compilations: the Liber scintillarum of Defensor of Ligugé, for example, is known in some 350 manuscripts (not a typo), which is surely more than almost any single original Patristic or medieval work. “Here you have what you want to find”, says Defensor in the preface (albeit this is only preserved in manuscripts of the eleventh-century and later, so may not be his), and it seems to have been an accurate assessment. This is, then, a widespread practice, but is relatively unstudied largely because we don’t work like that nowadays. David had a long array of early modern and Renaissance sages (none of whom, I confess, I had ever heard of before) who defended this style of ‘broken learning’ because it provoked enquiry more easily, but it’s still not how we usually play the game of scholarship now.¹

Defensor of Ligugé, Liber Scintillarum (Book of Sparks) in a C11th¹ copy, London, British Library, Royal MS 7 C.iv, fo. 62v

Augustine was naturally a popular target for this approach, though not the most popular: Defensor used half again as much by Gregory the Great and twice as much as that from Isidore of Seville, whose style of work rather lends itself to excerpting I guess. Defensor was rigorous about naming his sources, and the oldest manuscripts (C8th²) have flashy rubrication indicating where the excerpted author changes (see below), but later excerpters, many of whom used Defensor, were less bothered about this. The truth was the thing, not exactly which authority it came from. Peregrinus, writing c. 780, does name his sources and they include not just Augustine, Gregory, Isidore and other Fathers but also Virgil and even Pelagius! Defensor tells us that he was selecting deliberately for the simple (which would, I’d have thought, exclude more Augustine than it admits…) so that the reader could take away the nugget of truth and meditate on it. That’s the purpose of works like these, another thing that we don’t do so much any more perhaps: to provide a kernel for prolonged and sustained reflection. That may of course be because this type of reading would exist most happily in a monastic context, and that’s not where scholarship largely takes place now. Even when we get to take time off and think, and how rare that is, we’re not thinking about just one paragraph. In this respect, I think personally, vive la différence, but the fact that this is how many of our authors are trained is probably something to bear in mind.

Hraban Maur presenting his Liber de Sancti Crucis to Archbishop Otgar of Mainz, encouraged by Alcuin: Vienna, Codex Vindobonensis 652

One last point was possibly the most interesting to me: the manuscript survival of this material is quite early, and all the texts that refer to the practice of excerpting and contemplation like this are also early. David therefore wondered if it might not have been principally a Merovingian practice, and whether that in turn might explain the relative rarity of the copying of entire books that early. It is usually assumed that the Carolingian Renaissance mainly represented an increase in quantity of intellectual endeavour, because there was more patronage being put behind it; David however showed here at least one reason to suspect a change in the quality of that endeavour too, which is something that could mean a lot more when it’s fully worked out. However, there are a lot of grey areas around this, and for a lot of them, as David said in questions, the only ethical response is, “We don’t have the evidence, and sometimes we have the integrity to say so.”

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1. There may be a teaching point here: how would it work to take four or five scholars on a debated subject, take a paragraph from each and/or from the sources under debate, hand them to students as a worksheet and say, “how can these people all be talking about the same thing? Discuss”? This is even sort of the model I begin my forthcoming paper on aprisio with, though it was nothing like as conscious as that. It might be worth trying, rather than immediately giving them the full articles or books to read.

Swallows and Amazon

By way of some lightweight diversion while I build up the strength for another of those posts and try to direct the course of my future employment, here is a small meme that I found, almost simultaneously, on Got Medieval and The Mixed-Up Bloggings of Annie Em, in which we expose the earliest parts of our Amazon buying history for the amusement of the audience.

Now, I have a complicated relationship history with Amazon. I used to work for a couple of online booksellers, successively, neither of whom would list through it because the margins were so low and the form in which one’s stock was presented so anonymous. They figured that their best means of attracting customers was to look distinctive and interesting and that Amazon prevented that. So I was more impressionable then and also Amazon had not then become the smooth-wheeled engine of delivery efficiency they now aim to be (by terrifying their marketplace retailers with feedback statistics that they themselves aren’t subject to), and I therefore also avoided Amazon. This was actually fairly easy, because I had no money to spare for books and I had access to a legal deposit library, and although Amazon also sold music they didn’t usually have the stuff I was interested in, whereas a couple of online sellers I knew well, had drunk with at gigs etc., did. So I bought from them and thumbed my nose at the would-be retail giant.

When I broke this resolve, according to my Amazon history, it turns out to have been because of a momentuous event, the remaster and reissue of the first four Blue Öyster Cult studio albums. BÖC were for a long time my absolute favourite band, and I had played my cassettes of these albums pretty much to death. Now they were out, with bonus tracks, and I snapped them up as cheaply as I could, which was via Amazon. So my first two Amazon purchases were BÖC’s Secret Treaties and Agents of Fortune. That was 2001 and then apparently I didn’t use Amazon for about four years. Why? Reader, I was skint. In fact I’d been close to skint in 2001, but those albums were important. After that, however, my funding expired, and I was trying to help raise a child and stay housed on a mix of teaching money and child tax credits, so I stopped buying music, and didn’t start buying books.

I seem to have started again about as soon as I had a steady pay-cheque, in late 2005. Okay, I’ve already given the answer the meme wants, but my impression was that it was really about books, so let’s get as far as the books. I don’t really use Amazon for books, because academic books I get cheaper at conferences and fiction I tend to pick up from charity shops or giveaway groups. So it turns out that unless my history is lying I’ve bought a total of four books from Amazon in my entire life, and the first of those was Paul Edward Dutton’s Charlemagne’s Mustache, very proper for an early medievalist except that it was a present for someone else and I’ve still never read it. So what was the first book I bought from Amazon for me? Well, that was an impulse buy of Marc Dubin’s Rough Guide to the Pyrenees, because I was anticipating getting out to Spain again soon and having to do so on my own and therefore needing some planning help. And deadlines, deadlines, deadlines and commitments have repeatedly put paid to this plan again and again by determining that I must stay in the country to teach or to wait for news of applications or leave the country for conferences and there really hasn’t been a space in which I could have gone. So I haven’t read that either. I don’t really make a good Amazon customer.

Three sorts of priest, part I: the promised evidence for priests and their books on the Spanish March

It’s a new series! Albeit a short one. This starts from where I promised, a little while back as a reaction to some of Celia Chazelle’s suggestions about the probable lack of training and book-learning of some priests in the farflung parts of Carolingian-era Europe, some evidence to the contrary. My particular corner of Europe is fairly farflung, after all, and almost all the textual evidence from it is land charters, so you could be forgiven for thinking it was difficult to say much about pastoral care. And it is, especially liturgy, most of our evidence for the liturgy comes from the kingdoms next door where the Carolingian Renaissance wasn’t carried out, and if one’s interested in liturgy, which I’m not really (post about that upcoming somewhen, too), then this must be quite annoying as this ought to be a locus classicus for testing the Carolingian cultural effect, and it won’t let one look.¹

In fact, where one can say something to the point of Professor Chazelle’s conjectures, it’s not because of the Carolingians but because of the Visigoths. It is laid down in the Visigothic Code, the Forum Iudicum yet, already, by the ‘glorious Flavius Reccensvinthus, king’, as follows:

As soon as a bishop has been consecrated, he shall straightway proceed to make an inventory of the property of his church in the presence of five freeborn witnesses; and to this inventory the said witnesses shall affix their signatures. After the death of a bishop, and as soon as his successor has been consecrated, the latter shall require a second inventory of the church property to be made; and if it should appear that said property had, in any way, been diminished, then the heirs of said bishop, or those to whom his estate was bequeathed by will, shall make up the deficiency.²

I don’t suppose this was actually done everywhere, but it was done at least twice at Vic d’Osona.³ And, because books are very expensive when you’re killing a sheep for every eight pages or so, they are listed too. So, circa. 970, after the murder of Bishop Ató (not Archbishop, no matter what you may have heard), Fruià his successor appears to have done this and the books are inventoried too, after their papal and royal precepts. The interesting thing is that the books weren’t at the cathedral, in some cases. Fruià himself had a volume of canones on loan, and a woman called Riquilda had a copy of Kings, so there’s an interesting thing for other reasons. More relevantly for the post, there were several small clusters out at other churches. At Castellar, far out at the west end of Manresa in Segarra, out in the wilds, someone had an antiphonary, a lectionary and a missal. Valldaneu, which I can’t place, had an antiphonary and a missal, and out at Artés in Manresa, there was an antiphonary, a missal and a volume of dispositos (any ideas? I’m guessing a penitential). This is interesting because that’s most of what you’d want as a mass priest; I’d expect a Psalter, too, and I’m surprised that none are mentioned, but maybe the priests had their own.

Churches in Artés, Manresa, seen from above, from Wikimedia Commons

Also, these are development areas: Vic got hold of Artés only in 938, when 50-odd people from there were made to swear to the bishop’s lordship.⁴ We don’t even securely know of a church out there before the eleventh-century Santa Maria; you can see from the picture that it’s a bit busier now, but here we can see that Vic had a kind of mission station out there, and one at Castellar too. Part of the development that the cathedral was putting into these areas was supplying the textual necessities for cult. It may well be that they didn’t intend these books to stay there, were hoping that the new churches’ resources would eventually permit them to buy their own copies, but for then, the cathedral’s chosen hot-spots were getting their start-up costs met centrally. Likewise, one of Vic’s richest priests, a guy called Guifré Brunicard, had borrowed a lectionary; I rather suspect that he, too, was spreading the good word in some of the places he’d managed to buy and which, via his two nephews, the cathedral would eventually also come to own.⁵

This still doesn’t tell you what the priests in question knew, where they’d been taught (though as Ató was a learned man and one of the teachers of Gerbert of Rheims, a cathedral school doesn’t seem a difficult thing to envision) or what liturgy they used, what hymns they sang, and how fierce they were about superstition, or whatever; it doesn’t tell us, either, how Christian or not their `flocks’ were; but it does show that someone in these wild areas was interested to ensure that people got the law and Mass right.⁶ Obviously this is not a typical area, but where is? And obviously also, this is not the whole of the March: this is three or four places in two counties with hundreds of churches, so there must be other possibilities. Part 2 and part 3 will try and explore some of those, but this is enough for now, and the post I originally wanted to write.

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1. On this replacement the chapter and verse (no pun intended) is now Rose Walker, The change from the Mozarabic to the Roman liturgy in Spain at the end of the eleventh century (London 1995); Rose is also one of the few people who can interest me in this stuff, but I still haven’t read it I’m afraid.

2. Karl Zeumer (ed.), Leges Visigothorum, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Leges Nationum Germanicum) I (Hannover 1902, repr. 2005), transl. S. P. Scott as The Visigothic Code (Boston 1922), Book V Chapter 1 Title II.

3. Eduard Junyent (ed.), Diplomatari de la Catedral de Vic, segles IX-X, ed. Ramon Ordeig i Mata (Vic 1980-1996), doc. nos 303 & 413, following discussion of 413 which is also illus. ibid. làmina 92.

4. Ibid., doc. no. 182. On Vic’s development and its management of its lands, you can of course see Paul H. Freedman, The Diocese of Vic: tradition and regeneration in medieval Catalonia (New Brunswick 1983); online at http://libro.uca.edu/vic/vic.htm, last modified 16^th August 2000 as of 22^nd November 2003.

5. His will, made before departure on pilgrimage from which, seemingly, he did not return, is Junyent, Diplomatari, doc. no. 479.

6. On Ató and his tuition of Gerbert, one can see firstly Ramon Ordeig i Mata, “Ató, bisbe i arquebisbe de Vic (957-971), antic arxiprest-ardiaca de Girona” in Studia Vicensia Vol. 1 (Vic 1989), pp. 61-97, and secondly J. M. Masnou, “L’escola de la catedral de Vic al segle XI” in Immaculada Ollich i Castanyer (ed.), Actes del Congrés Internacional Gerbert d’Orlhac i el seu Temps: Catalunya i Europa a la Fi del 1r Mil·lenni, Vic-Ripoll, 10-13 de Novembre de 1999 (Vic 1999), pp. 621-633.

A library with pedigrees

A package came for me the other day that turned out to be a copy of Ramon d’Abadal i de Vinyals’s Els Primers Comtes Catalans, which is pretty much the starting book for what I work on, an attempt to sort the national myths from the actual evidence for early Catalonia. I’d browsed for it on ABE Books on a whim and found a copy for sale in the UK. I was so pleased to score it—and it’s a nice copy too, dust-jacket has one chip and that’s all, tight, VG+, yes I did use to work in the trade since you ask—that I never thought to wonder why there was a copy for sale in the UK.

Cover of Ramon d'Abadal i de Vinyals's Els Primers Comtes Catalans

The last two trips I’ve made to Exeter have been for conferences, I mentioned one here and the other one was before the blog, and on both occasions Professor Richard Hitchcock has been selling no-longer-wanted parts of his library, as I guess he settles down to working only on what he intends to continue with. I’ve never had the money to buy the few things he was offering that touched my period, much to my chagrin. So it’s kind of amusing to find his signature in the flyleaf of my new book.

I can add this to the few volumes of Philip Grierson‘s, the couple of presents from Rosamond McKitterick and Matthew Innes and the long ton of Jinty Nelson’s cast-offs that make up a good chunk of my library. Mind you, this is not the most extreme case I know of: Matthew still has a copy of Braunfels’s Karl der Große Bd I. that he got from Rosamond, who’d been given it by Philip (who was in it). I really need to have books to give to these people to link the ends of this loop up, sadly not possible to Philip but otherwise it would be neat. I wonder if any of what I amass will be of worth to my students in the inevitable end, and if any of it will have passed to me by such means like these. How many generations can we pass books through?

A Jarrett bookcase

One thing leads from another

Do you ever have this problem where what you’re reading for one reason turns out to be mostly relevant for another? This is where I am currently. I should primarily be working on the book – well, actually, I could take a minute or two away from that at the moment as my editor is reviewing the whole body text prior to advising me where best to cut – but the book on the stack I picked up to give some archaeological background in the vague section about hardly-visible frontier communities, which became when fully realised the Queen Mary paper that is somewhere in a print queue even now… where was I? Oh, yes—you see what I mean by the title—that book is now telling me more about peasant resistance to lordship, which has more to do with a future project about legitimate authority.

Don't mess with that one, he's got a billhook...

Well, if not that I should be working on the extra reading needed for any of the three papers I’ve had accepted that need revisions. But you know that van Engen volume that’s generated me so many posts? I originally got that out of the library for an article about the making and use of charters that, you’ll have noticed, hasn’t featured in any of my numerous reactions to the book’s material. And the book I’m mainly reading for the one on land clearance and frontier resettlement has actually dropped me into a really good article by Josep María Salrach which is going to underpin my paper for the Haskins Society conference, which is instead about the sense in which Carolingian royal power operated and was respected in Catalonia in the later Carolingian period. This keeps happening. Every time I try and focus on something I find I’m working on something else by the time I finish the reading…

I could try and draw some serious point about how this is inevitable because the Middle Ages is a holistic category in which all phenomena interact, so Carolingian royal power does affect land clearance and vice versa… and I could even sustain it, because some of these peasants clearing land are later referred to in charters by which they sell it as “first men on the royal land”, supporting their tenure by reference to the king’s claim to waste lands, an authority which can’t reach them and is therefore untoppable, but which is strengthened by this reference in the minds of the audience as long as that claim is worth making.¹ You see? But actually what’s happening is that I’m getting sidetracked and if these papers are ever coming out, I need to, if not read less, at least read the things I actually picked up the book for first and leave the others for future days…

Now actually this weekend has gone on various birthdays and weddings and last-minute changes of plan to see more friends and play more old board games and this is not a bad thing, but really it hasn’t solved this problem very much. It has however by the great kindness of a dear friend solved my long-ago-mentioned computer problems and much of today has gone on taking advantage of this to get the new machine set up. Well, I’m typing on it now and it has pretty much all my data on it, and this generally heralds an awful lot less wasted time on computers pretty soon. Whether that means I get more or less done and you get more or less to read though, will be revealed in due course.

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1. For example in Federico Udina Martorell (ed.), El Archivo Condal de Barcelona en los siglos IX-X: estudio crítico de sus fondos, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas: Escuela de Estudios Medievales, Textos XVIII, Publicaciones de la Sección de Barcelona no. 15 (Madrid 1951), doc. no. 114 or 116, discussed Jonathan Jarrett, “Pathways of Power in late-Carolingian Catalonia”, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of London 2005, p. 87.

This month I have partly been reading…

While I tinker with horrible legacy Word files listing people who turn up in various Catalan charters on the one hand, do my actual job by way of finishing images of unofficial 18th-century token coins on the other, and assimilate various other things that we’re not talking about here any more, I also find time for a bit of reading. I have to, because over the last year and a bit, I have amassed a ridiculous to-read pile. It started with my starting to clear house and thus becoming a member of various give-away groups on the Internets—and some of them were giving away books. It continued with my finally redeeming the prize I won from Blackwells for my EME paper (which they would give me only in the form of their books, but that’s OK, they have a few.) Then I went to Leeds, and for the first time did so with a salary, and the bookfairs of the International Medieval Congress are dangerous to a young man in such a condition, who must inevitably be in want of a library. And finally I was allowed to take home quite a lot from the shelves of the about-to-be-vacated office of the person at KCL whose courses I was teaching last year, I mean, really quite a lot. My to-read pile is now arguably larger than my entire other book holdings, and I have a teaching library of some standard, most of which I haven’t actually read…

Now because as we know Life Gets in the Way, even before all that lot arrived I had books in the pile from 2006. That was clearly getting silly, and so I pulled open a hole in my schedule and found more idle reading time. The main rule is `no notes, just read’, because I’d almost forgotten how to read for fun. So even though a lot of the pile is academic, I’m trying to read it for leisure. And recently that has led me to the following two books, Robin Lane Fox’s The Classical World: an epic history from Homer to Hadrian (Harmondsworth: Penguin 2005) and Pierre Bauduin (ed.), Les fondations scandinaves en Occident et les débuts du duché de Normandie : Colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle (25-29 septembre 2002) (Caen: CRAHM 2005). The latter I’m still getting through, though interesting stuff already, but the former I can speak on now.

The Fox book was deliberately aimed at the popular market, I’m sure, and I’m not sure I’d like to meet the author given what he seems to think that market wants, but there is no question that as a work of narrative history it’s a tour de force. (Even Peter Heather thinks so, if you don’t believe me.) The conceit of the book, which is that it’s a history to explain Hadrian’s world to him, gets a little annoying, but nonetheless in six hundred pages you get from pre-Classical Greece to late Classical Rome and finish with some sense of how it ties together. (Not that history does always do that, of course, but moving on.) The front cover, as has been mentioned, manages to call this epic three times, once in the title and twice in the review quotes, but really it’s not, it’s better done than that. We have relatively little narrative detail for Ancient Greece, and rather more for Middle Rome; correspondingly, the Greek sections of the book have more chapters about society and lifestyle (always including sex; classicists are allowed to do this, medievalists not, as we have observed) and the Roman ones fewer. The pace therefore varies rather, and sometimes, as with Alexander the Great most of all, it is too short: the boy emperor is dealt with in about twenty pages and leaves very little explained (though now we know more anyway). Fox clearly also thought this was unjust as I see he has now published a full-length work on Alexander alone, so I admire his restraint.

Only one thing irks me about the book, really, aside from the author’s delight in smut, which is at least being true to his sources. That thing is one that the ‘epic’ review quote denies, by saying that Fox tells the story “without moralising”. Yeah right. We are repeatedly told how great Athenian democracy was, slavery not withstanding, and contemporary moral perspectives are given on most of the lead characters. Fox likes rogues, dislikes prudes and those who disdain others for failings they possess, and tells us his views quite forthrightly. One can only assume that the quoted reviewer missed this simply because he agreed. Fox doesn’t do this by way of approval or censure, mind, just pointing out the difference, but I still notice it every time. It shouldn’t hinder you from reading an excellent book, though you will find it hard to follow up the references (these are sparing but effective) as he uses some system of short titles for the primary sources that isn’t expanded anywhere! argh. It is not perhaps an introduction for scholars; but for what happened in what order and who such and such a person was, and where in the story they all fit, not at all bad, not at all bad.

Added in passing II

Firstly, whereas before it was not, now the schedule for this term’s Earlier Middle Ages Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research is up on the web. Happily for me, this is the same day as my KCL teaching, so I should be able to make it to most of them, and hopefully report back here having so done. It will not escape the alert that the first has already happened, and I will therefore so note it when I have time.

Secondly, in trying not to let my previous reading pile go entirely unattended while I try and put together lectures, one recent late night found me briefly picking up John Keegan’s A History of Warfare. Now I’ve been enjoying this, but I have to say, his coverage of the early Middle Ages, in about six pages, is pretty impressively useless. You could read it and be left with the impression that between 476 and the First Crusade all warfare in Western Europe except for some Reconquista campaigns in Spain was internecine quarrels between local knights. It is just about mentioned that the Carolingians raised armies, but what use they put them to, such as for example and e. g. putting together and briefly holding the largest empire in Europe between the Romans and the Habsburgs at their peak (which may not even be fair on the Carolingians), you would never guess from this.

This is a pity, but despite the fact that I gather this is not the only problem critical readers have had with the book, it’s very readable and gives a first orientation in many areas about which I knew very little. (And it was free :-)) But as with so many wide-ranging books like this (I guess the last was the inspiring and fascinating but rather deterministic Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond) the few places where it touches my own field leave me aware that in following up its references (of which, let it be said, there are a fair few) I shall want to be checking for more up-to-date work in pretty much every case…

(To be fair on Diamond, my reaction there was generally more along the lines of “Hmm. I’d want to read the site report myself before I was sure about that.” I’m pretty sure that what he is saying is not sixty years out of date as Keegan’s ideas of the early middle ages seem to be. Perhaps Keegan just hasn’t been reading articles in the right places…)