Surely, one of the most familiar facts of Carolingian history is the famous question sent by Pippin III to Pope Zachary asking whether it was right that those in Francia who had the name of king had no power, while those who had power had not the name of king. To be sure, source criticism of the solid, traditional variety can still sometimes bring important new insights.
Undergraduates, beginning graduate students, and the elusive “general reader” who have no Latin are unlikely to read French, German, or Italian. It is also worth remarking, in a volume of English translations of Carolingian historical texts, that most of the old scholarship and much of the new exists in languages other than English. Until recently, with some notable exceptions, too little attention has been paid to the sources themselves in their own right and to their authors.
Nevertheless, the sources have usually been treated as great quarries from which the building blocks of narrative, documentation, and corroboration have been hewn. To their painstaking labors we own much of our basic picture of what happened in the eighth and ninth centuries. To be sure, for more than two centuries scholars in many lands have scrutinized Carolingian “sources” for information about the Carolingian period. By “reuniting” these five essential medieval texts in an English translation, this volume makes these voices accessible to scholars and non-experts alike throughout the Anglophone world.Ĭarolingian history has long been a staple of teaching and research, but the numerous and impressive histories written by the Carolingians themselves are only recently coming into their own as serious subjects of investigation. Noble’s new English translations of these five important texts-Einhard’s Life of Emperor Charles, Notker’s Deeds of Charles the Great, Ermoldus Nigellus’s Poem in Honor of Louis, Thegan’s Deeds of Emperor Louis, and the Life of Louis by “the Astronomer”-are each accompanied by a short introduction and a note on “Essential Reading.” Offering details on matters of style, sources used by the author, and the influence, if any, exerted by the text, Noble provides a context for each translation without compromising the author’s intended voice. This collection brings together, for the first time in one volume, the five royal/imperial biographies written during the Carolingian period. The ninth century gave birth to a new revival of secular biography, which has come to be recognized as one of the brightest bands in the spectrum of Carolingian historical writing.
Carolingian historical texts have long stood at the base of our modern knowledge about the eighth and ninth centuries.
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