What to remember from the 2018 International Medieval Congress?

Although I feel that it probably is a sign that I am catching up on my blogged past, I have to admit that I face the fact that the next thing in my blog pile is the International Medieval Congress of three-and-a-half years ago with a certain unwillingness. I mean, I’ve spent much of the last two years either trying to stay off or being told I can’t go onto the campus where it happened, for a start, so there is definitely a sense that this is deep past which doesn’t have so much to do with time as experience. But I’ve done all the rest and the format for them seems pretty well worked out now, and so I will give it a go.

Postcard advertisement from the IMC website

This was, I am reminded as I fish the programme off the shelf, the 25th International Medieval Congress, and the programme is the fattest of all the ones on that shelf. I can’t actually work out how many sessions there were: it says that there were 392 sessions on the conference theme of Memory, 9 keynote lectures and 394 further sessions, plus 4 lectures, so I think it’s 799, but firstly I’m not sure if that was everything and secondly, that was the programme as initially published, not the result of all the subsequent changes you find in the also-thick booklet of changes when you register. And in any case, however many sessions there are, you still can’t go to more than 17 because that’s how many slots there are in the programme, which is massively parallel, and most delegates won’t manage that because of their feeble needs for food and sleep or because of wisely placing socialising with people you otherwise never see over more direct forms of academic engagement. I do like, however, how this means that it’s probably mathematically possible for more paths through the Congress to exist than there are attendees, since there were this year 2,545 attendees and, if my GCSE maths does not fail me, 1 x 53 x 1 x 54 x 54 x 13 = 2,009,124 possible combinations of sessions just on the Monday not including any of the receptions. How would we know if it got too big? Anyway, this just means that what I have done the last few times, just listing my own path and then offering a few remarks where things still stand out for me, seems like the best approach still, because I can’t give an impression of 2 million plus possible other Congress experiences in one blog post, now can I? So mine is below the cut, day by day with brief commentary on each day to lighten the data dump. As ever, I’m happy to try and answer questions about the papers if people have them, but I will try and stay short unless you do. Here we go!

Liturgy, coins and buried saints in 870s Barcelona: Bishop Frodoí of Barcelona reexamined

I’m sorry as usual about the gap between posts here; my excuse this time, apart from the treadmill of lecture preparation (which is actually teaching me stuff and making me think, as subsequent blog will eventually show), is that this post actually required research, because not least I know that one of the regular readers has written around this topic and I wanted to make sure I knew what they’d said before I charged in. The background to this post is a conversation at the Ecclesiastical History Society conference in 2014, when people were encouraging me to come to next year’s meeting, whose theme was translation. Someone making the point that for the Ecclesiastical History Society that could as well include the ‘translation’ of saints’ relics from one site to another got me thinking about Saint Eulalie of Barcelona, and from there I was tempted to try and intervene in the messy but inescapable historiographical circle that seems to orbit her early medieval cult. In the end, I never did offer the paper, but I did a bit of reading around it and realised all the problems afresh, consulted some of the primary evidence and wanted to express my uncertainty about what people have written. That meant I had to read more of it and now, here we are and I’ve written what’s nearly a paper anyway. But let me explain the problem.

“Crypt of Santa Eulalia” by Bernard Gagnon – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.

Saint Eulalie, to whom the cathedral of Barcelona is jointly dedicated and where her remains are held to rest in the very snazzy Gothic sarcophagus above, was supposedly martyred under the auspices of the Roman Emperor Diocletian, as are a great many martyrs whose stories are only known from much later. After suffering various and eventually lethal tortures her body was laid to rest in Santa Maria de les Arenes, which was subsequently rebuilt into the rather lovely Santa Maria del Mar, on which more in a future post. According to the narrative of Eulalie’s own translatio, her remains were hidden in 713 when the city was about to fall to the Muslims, and only recovered at some point before 878 (perhaps 877), when Bishop Frodoí of Barcelona and the visiting Archbishop Sigebod of Narbonne made a determined search which came up with nothing, and then Frodoí made a return visit and was divinely guided to the spot where her body was. She was duly moved to the bishop’s cathedral of Santa Creu, with a certain amount of difficulty eventually overcome, and now the cathedral is Santes Creu i Eulàlia.¹ So far so conventional, right?

Interior of the cloister of Santes Creu & Eulàlia de Barcelona

Now, the earliest manuscript of the translatio is fourteenth-century, and the ninth and tenth centuries are periods that just don’t generate saints’ lives from Catalonia as far as we know, so it is likely that this was written up rather later than the events, but there is some reason to believe at least the chronology of the story.² Sigebod and Frodoí were contemporaries and a royal precept for Frodoí of 878 mentions the saint’s remains at the cathedral, the first text to do so.³ Frodoí had been bishop of Barcelona since at least 862 but Sigebod archbishop only since 873 so if that detail’s right the window is actually quite tight. The problem is Frodoí, and the translatio is tied into this problem. Now, if you can find anything to read about Bishop Frodoí of Barcelona (attested 862-890), it will probably say three things:

1. he was a Frank appointed by Charles the Bald;
2. that he found the body of Saint Eulalie;
3. and that he oversaw the change of the liturgy in Barcelona from the old Hispanic rite of worship to the Gallo-Roman one favoured by the Franks.

It will, indeed, usually link all these things: he was appointed to deal with the liturgical independence, so needed to be a Frank, and this was so unpopular that we find him poking round Santa Maria de las Arenes looking for some way to increase his standing and show God’s backing for his plans.⁴

Diner de transició supposedly of Bishop Teodoric of Barcelona (904-922), according at least to Martí Hervera S. L. in 5 July 2011, but they have the supposed tomb the wrong way up and didn’t sell it, so what did they know?

The other thing that whatever you’re reading may also say is that Frodoí was responsible for the beginning of independent minting in Barcelona. This also winds up being connected, because the reason that the particular coin type in question is assigned to him is that it may (or may not) show the tomb of Saint Eulalie.⁵ There at least we have the coins, and we also have a concession to his see of the right from King Louis II (877-879), though many such concessions exist that we can’t show were ever used.⁶ But for the first three points, and particularly the first and third, evidence is really very hard to find, and without them the basic interpretation of the second, in its fourteenth-century post facto write-up, becomes very shaky indeed. There is one key piece of evidence that is usually dragged into this, the records of a council at Attigny in 874 at which Frodoí and his see were most of the business dealt with, but if you look at it without these preconceptions it’s not at all clear to me that it supports this case, as I’ll show below.⁷ Instead, all of the suppositions cling to each other for mutual support but lack a solid footing. I started into this post because I’d just re-read the Attigny record and realised this afresh, but if I want you to believe my scepticism I need to tackle points (1) and (3) first, and I might as well also set out my stall about the coinage as I go.

Lacking a more relevant image. I searched for the palace of Attigny and it turns out firstly that something survives called that, and secondly it was built in the sixteenth century but looks weirdly like whoever built it knew the Lorsch Torhalle. Doesn’t it? I guess, with no knowledge, that this is a rebuild of a palace gatehouse from before people could remember… “Palais de Charlemagne d’Attigny” by Adri08 – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.

So, was he Frankish? The only evidence for this that is ever adduced is his name, which is basically unparalleled in Catalonia. “On devine dejà par son nom qu’il était originaire d’une région germanique de l’empire”, wrote Anscarí Mundó without citation in 1971, for example.⁸ This is a dangerous thing to say from a local context; it may not look like a local name, sure, but that doesn’t tell you where it is from. But these days, we can check this thanks to the Nomen et Gens project. As it happens, they lump the name in under Chrodoin and have no cases of it spelt with an initial F. They have 65 cases of it spelt otherwise, but almost all of them are from Wissembourg, only two not and those two are someone acting as a scribe for a royal charter at the same sort of time, end of the seventh and beginning of the eighth centuries. The Wissembourg occurrences also feature a number of scribal appearances as notarius and so on, and so there is at least a starting possibility that these are in fact all the same guy.⁹ Even if not, it’s obviously not a common name anywhere as far as we can tell except maybe the modern Saarland two centuries before our bishop comes to notice, and he spells and pronounces it differently. So I’m calling suspicion on that conclusion; we obviously can’t say where Frodoí was from, we can’t even say where his name was from but if we could that wouldn’t prove anything, and while he did have dealings with Charles the Bald and his son Louis the Stammerer, so might any bishop of their kingdom have during the messy civil war of the era, in which Barcelona, famously (at least for old readers here) and unlike more ‘Germanic’ areas closer to the court, stayed loyal to the kings. So while I don’t say that Frodoí wasn’t a Frankish reformer, the evidence is weak apart unless we allow the liturgical change to be part of it.

Then, because I want to do the liturgy last, the coinage. This is pinned to Frodoí by the so-called tomb of Saint Eulalie—but if that’s what that symbol really is it would also work for any bishop of Barcelona after him (like Teodoric above). King Charles the Bald (840-877) had reformed the coinage of the West in 864 and this seems not to have been carried out in Catalonia, suggesting to some that they were already doing their own thing, but that still doesn’t mean that they had to start their own at the reform date; perhaps they just weren’t minting at Barcelona in 864 and when they resumed, perhaps in the 890s, Charles’s specifications were a dead letter.¹⁰ So the reasons to suppose they’re Frodoí’s are basically his association with Saint Eulalie, which his successors would have shared, and that assuming that that is what that coin shows, and that otherwise Barcelona would have had no coin in production, which is just horror vacui. Furthermore, if these coins are Frodoí’s, it messes somewhat with point 1, because they show him ignoring royal instructions rather than carrying them out despite opposition, and this from a man who would visit the Carolingian court at least twice more thereafter. So I do think, on balance, that they are more likely to be later.¹¹

A different shot of the crypt, this one chosen because you can just see the supposed original tomb in it, because it is stashed at the back of the crypt, here just visible between the pillars of the Gothic one in which the saint now resides. the crypt is kept locked and this is as good a camera angle as one can get on it, I know having tried. It’s really frustrating. This photo is by vinpet942 on Panoramio and used under their Creative Commons license.

So the translatio and the liturgical change are the crucial diad that anchors the rest of this, and you’ve seen what the evidence for the translatio is: a fourteenth-century copy of a text maybe little earlier (since it regards the cult as well established) which has some details in it that look right but could have come from the 878 charter. It’s not implausible but it’s not a lot and it certainly doesn’t mention liturgical reform. So what’s the evidence for that? Well, all too often it is just that Frodoí was a Frankish royal appointment and therefore must have danced to the conformist tunes of the Carolingian cultural project, but as we’ve seen the evidence for that is non-existent, if those coins are his he seems to have been willing to ignore royal legislation when it suited him and anyway we no longer believe so fervently in uniformity as a goal of the Carolingian project anyway.¹² One other thing that has been linked is an apparent rebuild of part of the old cathedral of Barcelona at around this time, but although that could be significant it is also circular: the evidence for dating the works to Frodoí’s rule is that we ‘know’ he was instrumental in changing the liturgy, so we can’t really then use the cathedral works as proof that he did so!¹³ Is there nothing better? And to this, those who know this area will probably already be saying: of course there is, there’s the synod of Attigny in 874! And indeed there is, so let’s have a look at it. It survives as a capitulary, so it’s already conveniently in sections which can be summarised.¹⁴

1. Bishop Frodoí reports that a Cordoban priest called Tirs has set up shop in a church, within the Barcelona city walls but without episcopal authorisation, and managed to appropriate two parts of the city’s tithe from the congregation he’s attracted; here are a whole bunch of canon law citations and cites from the laws of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious about how this is wrong (which actually comprise two-thirds of the document); since it’s a long way and dangerous to bring these people from the March (even though Frodoí had made it, but moving on), King Charles delegates dealing with this to his marquis in the area.
2. Frodoí also demands that he should get back the ministry of the castle of Terrassa, which ‘by the insolence of the priest’ (presumably still Tirs) has been acquired by ‘the faction of Baió’; there are several council rulings about why that’s wrong too.
3. Lastly, Frodoí also reports that a Goth called Madeix has taken over the church of Sant Esteve in Barcelona and turned it over to the ‘conversation of rustics’ and another Goth called Requesèn has grabbed the field of Santa Eulàlia, and both of them claim they have these things by royal precepts; the king thus being implicated, he sends missi to investigate this and they are to send a report to the court; if it turns out that these Goths do in fact hold by royal grant, then those grants are to be sealed and sent back to the king too, and examined according to the law so that he can see how they lied to get them and cancel it.

And that’s it. Now, do you see anything about liturgy in there? I mean, it is clear that Frodoí has problems; large parts of his congregation would rather go and listen to some fly-by-night from the south, who seems to be able to reorganise ecclesiastical property at whim, while Frodoí’s church’s property is being nibbled at by people who seem at least to have royal connections, but, even if I put the full text in here you’d see nothing about liturgy.

Now, it may be that liturgy is implied: it has been correctly observed that a priest from Córdoba at this time would be trained in the Hispanic rite still, and maybe this is why he had such an attraction to Frodoí’s flock, but if so in this lengthy complaint about all the things he was doing wrong, it never comes up; instead, his independent operation in the face of the diocesan bishop’s authority is the be-all and end-all of the ruling, some of which is actually supported from Visigothic councils! The other hidden factor that may be here is that Terrassa had once had a bishopric of its own, at Egara, swallowed into Barcelona by the Frankish reorganisation. This gives some context as to how a priest could set up there, presumably in the late antique complex of Sant Pere, Santa Maria and Sant Miquel de Terrassa below, and defy a bishop; but Tirs was working inside Barcelona, where it seems decently obvious Frodoí had almost no power, so while it’s likely that that’s in there somewhere, it’s not clear how.

What we can safely say from this document, then, is that in 874, very few people in Barcelona were willing to listen to their bishop, and were entertaining alternatives; it may be that that is because he was forcing upon them an unpopular but apparently somewhat delayed change of liturgy, but if so that isn’t what he asks for help with; it may because he was a foreigner, and ‘Goths’ do seem to be part of the problem, but Tirs was presumably hardly less so and you know what I think Goths are here anyway.¹⁵

Panoramic view of the three churches of Egara at Terrassa. “Egara. Conjunt episcopal” by Oliver-Bonjoch – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.

So, really, you have already to believe that liturgy was an issue for Frodoí’s episcopate before you can see it here. So what is the basis for believing that there was a Carolingian attack on the Hispanic liturgy? Good question, to which the answer is basically that that liturgy goes away. There is no legislation against it as such, and in fact really no texts that mention it other than booklists. Now, from those, you can do something: the late Anscarí Mundó long ago argued, from the manuscripts he knew so well but cited so rarely, that the window of change is 785xc. 1000. He thought it was probably early in that window, by reason of it being unlikely that any imported personnel would know or use the Hispanic liturgy, so that with the steady replacement of local priests by immigrant ones or ones trained by the cathedrals of immigrant bishops, the Hispanic liturgy would be less and less used, and he listed the immigrant bishops and observed a near-total dropout of evidence for the copying of texts of the Hispanic liturgy over the ninth century.¹⁶

This all makes sense to me, and it is also roughly how I think charter formulae were changed, but where I differ from Mundó is in how much compulsion I think was involved and how total this replacement was. Booklists of course tend to be in the wills of people who had lots of stuff, and it’s at the lower levels that I think we see more interesting things. For example, do you remember my writing about Bishop Nantigis of Urgell and the non-heretical priest Adeudat, who in 901 had an ordo toletanum, a Toledan priest’s service-book, to give to his church at Guils de Cantó? It’s among a bunch of other service books which would probably have been Latin rite, but nonetheless he passed it on and Bishop Nantigis didn’t stop him doing so.¹⁷ This far out, having a priest who was able to carry out the ministry at all was probably more important than exactly which service they used. Probably in most cathedrals or old mother churches there would have been a copy, probably increasingly battered and hard to replace, for the rare occasions when the priests from there officiated at such places. And that’s in the early tenth century, pace Mundó.

Part of a leaf from a Hispanic-rite breviary from fourteenth-century Toledo, Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, MS 10110, fo 2r, borrowed from Ainoa Castro Correa, “Codex of the month (IX): Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, ms 10110″. Littera Visigothica (October 2015), http://litteravisigothica.com/codex-of-the-month-ix-madrid-biblioteca-nacional-ms-10110 with thanks

So, if in fact there wasn’t an effective Carolingian campaign to stamp out the Hispanic liturgy, but a slow and opportunistic replacement of it instead, where does this leave Bishop Frodoí? Not obviously Frankish; not visibly any kind of reformer; extremely unpopular for a time at least in his episcopal city and with only grudging support from local secular authority; backed to the hilt, nonetheless, by the king whose orders some numismatists would have us believe he ignored; and held later, but not in contemporary evidence, to be the finder of Saint Eulalie’s relics. And that might well still be true, or at least I don’t think there’s any obvious reason to disbelieve it and plenty of signs that needed whatever support he could get; but I think any attempt to bring liturgical reform into the reasons he was disliked is just basically unfounded! And that means that everything that is founded on that belief is also in trouble…

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1. The stock reference for all this is Ángel Fabrega Grau, Santa Eulalia de Barcelona: revisión de una problema histórico (Roma 1958), online here, which prints the source text pp. 151-155; the revised date of 877 is suggested in Joan Vilaseca Corbera, “Sant Vicenç i Santa Eulàlia, la cristianització del culte a Apol·lo i la política internacional carolíngia de la segona meitat del segle IX” in idem, Recerques sobre l’Alta Edat Mitjana Catalana (II) (Terrassa 2013), pp. 1-95 at pp. 64-65, and he certainly shows that it can’t easily have been 878. I should also mention that I owe my copy of this work to the generosity of the author; thankyou Joan, it has made me think!

2. Fabrega used Archivo de la Catedral de Barcelona, MSS 104, 105 & 108 which are early-fourteenth to early fifteenth-century in his estimation.

3. That precept printed as Ramon d’Abadal i de Vinyals (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia II: els diplomes carolingis a Catalunya, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològica 2 & 3 (Barcelona 1926-1952), 2 vols, Barcelona: Esglésie Catedral de Santa Creu II.

4. I think this must come from Fabrega, but I first met it in Miquel Crusafont i Sabater, “La moneda barcelonina del segle X. Altres novetats comtals” in Acta Numismàtica Vol. 38 (Barcelona 2008), pp. 91-121 at pp. 94-95, without citation, which is how I’ve usually met it since, as e. g. in J.-F. Cabestany, “El culte de Santa Eulàlia a la Catedral de Barcelona (S. IX-X)” in Lambard: estudis d’art medieval Vol. 9 (Barcelona 1996-1997), pp. 159-165, online here, last modified 8th February 2007 as of 20th June 2009, where the only relevant citation is to Ramon d’Abadal i de Vinyals, Els primers comtes catalans, Biografies catalanes: sèrie històrica 1 (Barcelona 1958, repr. 1980), which doesn’t in fact support the claims.

5. Crusafont, “Moneda barcelonina”, p. 96, again without citation; Miquel Crusafont, Anna M. Balaguer and Philip Grierson, Medieval European Coinage, with a Catalogue of the Coins in the Fitzwilliam Museum, 6: the Iberian Peninsula (Cambrdge 2013), p. 73, however says the first publication of the idea is Miquel Crusafont i Sabater, Numismàtica de la Corona Catalano-Aragonesa medieval (785-1516) (Madrid 1982), p. 31; cf. Joaquim Botet y Sisó, Les monedes catalanes (Barcelona 1908-1911), 3 vols, I p. 189, Xavier Sanahuja i Anguera, “La moneda de Barcelona al segle X segons les troballes Epsanya-1 i Espanya-2 (925)” in Acta Numismàtica Vol. 36 (Barcelona 2006), pp. 79-113 at p. 94 and Jonathan Jarrett, “Currency change in pre-millennial Catalonia: coinage, counts and economics” in Numismatic Chronicle Vol. 169 (London: Royal Numismatic Society 2010 for 2009), pp. 217-243 at p. 220, all of which argue that a modification of the Carolingian ‘temple’ reverse type seems more likely.

6. For the concession see n. 3 above; for unused minting concessions in the area see Jarrett, “Currency change”, pp. 224-225.

7. The Attigny record is printed in Abadal, Catalunya Carolíngia 2, ap. VII, among other places.

8. A. M. Mundó, “Les changements liturgiques en Septimanie et en Catalogne pendant la période préromane” in Cahiers de Saint-Michel de Cuxa Vol. 2 (Codalet 1971), pp. 29-42 at p. 38.

9. It doesn’t seem to be possible to link to a search in Nomen et Gens, but it’s easy enough to run; I searched for ‘Frod%’ without quotes. The Wissembourg Chrodoin occurs or Chrodoins occur in Karl Glöckner and Ludwig Anton Doll (edd.), Traditiones Wizenburgenses: die Urkunden des Klosters Weissenburg (661-864) (Darmstadt 1979), doc. nos 36, 45, 46, 169, 186, 194-196, 202, 213, 218, 224-227, 232, 239, 244, 247, 256, 257, 261 & 265 and Theo Kölzer (ed.), Die Urkunden der Merowinger, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Diplomata regum Francorum e stirpe Merovingica) I (Hannover 2001), 2 vols, doc. no. 1. What d’you reckon, Alan?

10. Compare Miquel Crusafont, “Nou tipus carolingi de Barcelona de Carles el Calb: el diner de Barcelona fins a R. Berenguer I” in II Simposi numismatic de Barcelona (Barcelona 1980), pp. 47-55 to Simon Coupland, “The early coinage of Charles the Bald” in Numismatic Chronicle Vol. 151 (London 1991), pp. 121-158, reprinted in Coupland, Carolingian coinage and the Vikings: studies on power and trade in the 9th century, Variorum Collected Studies 847 (Aldershot 2007), IX, at p. 126; it’s not very often Simon Coupland’s missed a coin, but on this occasion…

11. In this respect I now differ from Jarrett, “Currency Change”, pp. 219-220.

12. See Stuart Airlie, “The Cunning of Institutions” in Jennifer R. Davis & Michael McCormick (edd.), The Long Morning of Medieval Europe: new directions in early medieval studies (Aldershot 2008), pp. 267-271.

13. Cabestany, “El culte de Santa Eulàlia”, tries the logic I argue against here.

14. See n. 7 above.

15. I follow Jesus Lalinde Abadia, “Godos, hispanos y hostolenses en la órbita del rey de los Francos” in Federico Udina i Martorell (ed.), Symposium internacional sobre els orígens de Catalunya (segles VIII-XI) (Barcelona 1991-1992), 2 vols, also published as Memorias de le Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona Vols 23 & 24 (Barcelona 1991-1992), II pp. 35-74, online here.

16. Mundó, “Changements liturgiques”.

17. Cebrià Baraut (ed.), “Les actes de consagracions d’esglesies del bisbat d’Urgell (segles IX-XII)” in Urgellia: anuari d’estudis històrics dels antics comtats de Cerdanya, Urgell i Pallars, d’Andorra i la Vall d’Aran Vol. 1 (Montserrat 1978), pp. 11-182, doc. no. 14.

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.

Seminars CXXVII-CXXIX: the price, the mark and the buildings of early medieval Christianity

Interior view of the Hagia Sophia mosque, Istanbul, in slightly better state than shortly after the Emperor Justinian built it as a church, when part fell down, as his rather conflicted historian Procopius records

I’m sorry to have gone silent again so quickly: in my defence, I was finishing a chapter for a book of essays in memory of Mark Blackburn, and that’s now done so we’ll see whether it passes muster. Meanwhile, I still have a backlog here of course. The seminar reports seem not to have drawn many comments lately, but I intend to persist, so for those not so interested I’ll try and stay brief, by my own elevated standards of course. The next three I have to report on are all Oxford ones, and they begin with a visit to the Late Antique and Byzantine Studies seminar there by Dr Peter Sarris of Cambridge on the 28th February 2012, whose title was “The Economics of Salvation in late Antiquity and Byzantium”. This was a wide-ranging paper, with examples from England to Anatolia, and as ever with Dr Sarris heavily erudite, but its basic thrust was in fact fairly simple: he argued that in the late Antique period, the drain that the relatively-new Church represented on resources that might have gone to other supporters of the imperial or royal régimes, and the Church’s consequent wealth as a land- and slave-owner, meant that there was in fact a detectable amount of opposition to it and that this probably retarded conversion and/or Christianisation for a long time. His starting point was the Emperor Justinian, perhaps unsurprisingly, of whom Procopius scathingly said, “Justice for him lay in the priests getting the better of their opponents”, but we rapidly got down to the peasantry, for whom despite what has sometimes been argued, the Church for Dr Sarris was no better and perhaps a worse landlord than the aristocracy might have been, because of its greater potential to develop estates, move people around and of course exercise a form of social control over them via worship, as well as having the best possible state backing most of the time.¹ Benefaction and support for the Church, in this view, would come principally from those who saw a means to profit or advancement in it for themselves, the sort of people who might build churches on their estates or want to safely house family property with the tax-exempt Church in such a way that the family retained a heritable interest, a compromise that was easy to manage (and, according to one study Dr Sarris referenced, could represent a 5.5% return on investment per generation!).² In questions, he was forced to back down a bit and admit that obviously there were also sincere believers who gave to the Church for their souls and to fund God’s work, and there was a lot of argument about whether the fact that that is overridingly the sort of language that the sources use of donation to the Church should be taken as evidential or as merely formulaic (or, as I would have preferred, the ineluctable result of only Church archives surviving). There was also some argument about which regions this might be more or less true in, but overall this was a provocative paper thoroughly put forward and those arguing with it needed their evidence about them.

Obverse of a bronze coin of Herod Archelaus, Ethnarch of Judæa (4 B. C.-A. D. 4), with Chi-Ro symbol in field

Reverse of 50-denarius silver coin of King Gelimer of Carthage, 530×534, from Wikimedia Commons, with denomination mark derived from a letter

Then on the 1st March, Ildar Garipzanov gave the second of his two Oliver Smithies lectures in Balliol College. This was entitled, “The Rise of Graphicacy and Graphic Symbols of Authority in Early Europe (c. 300-1000)”, and to an extent it went over the same ground as his similar paper given in London a little while back on which I reported, but here managed also to cover the periods before and after. Graphicacy, you may need to know, is the skill of determining information from symbols, and it’s most usually used of maps, but Ildar was more interested in monograms here, which since they use letters meant a certain amount of definition-chopping over what is and isn’t text. His key reference point therefore was the symbol above, the Chi-Ro, composed of the first two letters of the word Christos in Greek. The basis of this is in text, but its meaning as a symbol for Jesus goes far beyond the text and was recognised far far beyond the realm where the language relevant for that text was spoken or read. It is seen as a marker on Christian objects in Britain as early as the early fourth century, before Emperor Constantine’s conversion had made it famous, and in general has a lot to tell us. Ildar wanted this time however to try and bring this tradition together with a different one of ownership marks used on property in shipment, usually elaborations of a letter N, M or H rather than anything related to an actual name, which were also widely used, including on coins very occasionally, and suggest the two traditions converged into the authority-marking monograms on which Ildar is more known for working.³ He didn’t quite leave himself time to make this case, as I felt, and had to withstand a full-on interrogation from Jonathan Shepard afterwards so couldn’t expand on it, but I expect that we will see it fully made before long, because Ildar does write quite a bit.

Altar and sculpture in the Asturian pre-Romanesque church of Santianes de Pravia

Last in this batch was a paper given before the Medieval Archaeology Seminar on 5th March 2012 by Isaac Sastre de Diego entitled, “Early Hispanic Churches through their Liturgical Sculpture”. This paper had been provoked by a phenomenon that irks me a lot too, the acute dearth of excavation around early medieval Spanish churches. (Catalonia is probably better for this than non-Catalan Spain, by the sound of it, though even there there’s a big difference between digging in and also digging around.) The other target assumption was that before Spain caught Romanesque, everything went in sensibly chronological phases that can be plotted in architectural styles, something which has also been disputed here so in general I was well placed to like this paper. Isaac’s solution to the problem, the problem being that this set-up gives a nice sensible system of dates for standing structures which is in fact entirely artificial, was to deal with the church’s architecture in terms of what we know about changes in the liturgy of the times and basically to see how that affects the dating of the churches. This is a big project, and here he focused specifically on altars. There are several types of altar to be found in Spain’s pre-Romanesque churches (even I can’t get away from the adjective, drat it), some late Roman ones reused (again, a subject dear to me by now), some set up as slabs on a single pillar like a Tau-cross (as above, or the one at Santa María de Quinzanas which was dated to 725×825 by carbon-dating of the relics still in place within), some as table-like slabs set up on legs at the edges, some slab-sided and roofed and some built of piles of slabs. When one stops assuming that there is a stylistic sequence to these types, and looks for actual dating evidence, which is rare, it becomes clear, said Isaac, firstly that we have nothing from before the second half of the fifth century as yet detected (though I pointed out that Sant Feliu de Barcelona, the first cathedral there, is known to be earlier even if we don’t have its altar any more), secondly that regional styles of decoration are detectable within the sample (and across types) and that there is certainly no such thing as a `Visigothic’-style altar as the old phased chronology has it, and thirdly (as emerged only in questions) there is nothing either that can be dated to the eighth century, though plenty after. Isaac suggested that that was best seen as a time of low investment in the Church, rather than some mass abandonment of altar-building. I found the dating arguments in this paper generally somewhat hard to follow, and it was some time before I was sure that the dates of the altars in question hadn’t in fact come from the same typology Isaac was attempting to dismantle, but it was not in fact so and as he said, while there is not a lot to go on here yet it’s still a step forward towards something a bit more scientific, from which indeed new and better-founded typologies could still be developed. So there we have it for now! More soon.

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1. One thing about Peter Sarris’s papers is that they always feature a full bibliography, so I can tell you that the paper derived from some of the work in Sarris, Matthew dal Santo and Phil Booth (edd.), An Age of Saints? Power, Conflict and Dissent in Early Medieval Christianity, Brill’s Series on the Early Middle Ages 20 (Leiden 2012), which I’ve not yet seen myself but which looks really interesting actually.

2. For this figure the cite was Paul Gautier (ed./transl.), “La Diataxis de Michel Attaliate” in Revue d’Études Byzantines Vol. 39 (Paris 1981), pp. 5–143 at pp. 17-129 [sic].

3. I think here mainly of I. Garipzanov, “Metamorphoses of the early medieval signum of a ruler in the Carolingian world” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 14 (Oxford 2006), pp. 419-464.

Seminary LI: `brothers’ in Byzantium

Due to reasons of travel idiocy I missed the antepenultimate Earlier Middle Ages seminar at the Institute of Historical Research this term, and although I made it to the penultimate one on 3rd June, Professor Claudia Rapp presenting on “Ritual brotherhood in Byzantium: origins and context”, so did Magistra and it it is very much more her thing than mine. One could say, eruditely, that complex questions of masculinities and historians’ attitudes to them were involved which she is far better educated in teasing apart than I am, or you could say, as she put it when we discussed it later, that she is the Internet’s go-to person for gay monks. I’m not about to argue with someone who can claim that sort of status, I tell you. And therefore she has done a proper write-up of it, which you should go and read, and I will therefore only do a summary so that you know roughly what was at issue.

Icon from St Catherine's Sinai of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, fifth-century martyrs, used by John Boswell as the cover image for his Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe

There is in Byzantine liturgical texts, 62 of them in fact, a rite called `adelphopoiesis‘ for allowing two men to become spiritual brothers, supporting each other above all others, cohabiting and sharing their property. It basically established an artificial kinship tie, but unlike the other two ways of doing this, marriage and sponsorship of baptism (that is, godparenthood), it doesn’t preclude marriage to others and doesn’t give any inheritance rights so doesn’t disenfranchise the family. (This latter, it should be said, came into question in the latter part of the paper.) Professor Rapp has written about this before, but was returning to it after some time away.¹ One of the reasons it’s an issue is that the controversial John Boswell included adelphopoiesis in his book Same Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe (New York 1994) as a cover for gay marriage, or at least a marriage-like arrangement. (Hello Byzantium? This is the 21st-century UK and California calling, we need to talk to you about wording… ) I haven’t read Boswell’s book so I don’t know if he suggests that this is what it was invented for or merely that it was allowed to perform this function, but this is what Professor Rapp was initially writing against. (You can find Paul Halsall, no less, speaking for Boswell’s defence with due respect to Professor Rapp, online here with an account of Boswell’s wider controversy and the sometimes vicious reaction it has engendered.)

Excavated monastic cells at the desert settlement of Pherme, Western Nile Delta, Egypt

In this paper, however, Professor Rapp was expanding on something that she only touched on in that earlier paper, the monastic context in which she believes the rite developed. Certainly she had lots of evidence for this kind of association, between hermits and disciples, between pupils of such hermits, and generally quite a lot of formations with which one might have been led to believe that the Lives of the Desert Fathers is full once you start looking. She also looked at building layout (as shown by archæology of monastic sites like Pherme, above), shared burial and general lifelong friendships being recognised in sources and attempted to place the whole thing in a much wider context of male homosociality that none of us, I think, would deny were it not raised in this context. Speaking as one whose work is fundamentally based on the idea that the fact that some people in the Middle Ages got on with some other people but didn’t get on with still others has historically explanatory value, I am all for this, but I still didn’t quite think she’d bridged the gap between the desert and Constantinople five centuries later. Perhaps this is just because she had so much evidence from the desert that it swamped the rather thinner trail to the later centuries, but it seemed to me that there was room for other antecedents and not enough ways to distinguish the results of this ceremony from ordinary lifelong friendship. The liturgy is evidence of a serious thing, yes: but we can’t use other male-male life collaborations as evidence for that same thing because that same thing seems to be defined by the liturgy, you see. If you argue that the liturgy is only recognising a pre-existent thing you wind up having to explain the liturgy as aberrant and thus losing all your evidence for social recognition of whatever it is you think is going on. There is more that could be said here and Magistra says much of it: here is a taster.

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1. Claudia Rapp, “Ritual Brotherhood in Byzantium” in Traditio Vol. 52 (New York City 1997), pp. 285–326.

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.