Suzanne Marchand

Paul Edward Dutton

Deborah Harkness, Professor

Looseleaf for Many Europes: Vol II

Between the reigns of Charlemagne and Charles the Fat, Europe underwent a series of alarming and unsettling changes. Civil war broke out, royal authority was divided, and the brightest of men and women began to entertain nightmarish thoughts of the corruption and collapse of their world. Amidst the ruin of their shaken and shattered assumptions, Carolingian intellectuals wrote down a series of dream texts. The Carolingian oneiric record, though dark with confusion and immoderate emotion, supplies us with a more subjective reading of this formative period of European history than the one found in standard histories. Carolingian dream-authors criticized and complained because they hoped to reform a royal society that had lost its way. This study begins by surveying the sleep of kings and the status of royal dreams from the classical period to the ninth century. Then it runs to an examination of individual dreams and the political disruption that informs them. The reader will encounter a variety of surprising dreams: of Charlemagne's lust, demons and archangels, a sorrowful prophet, disputed property and bullying saints, magical swords and mad princes, and Charles the Fat's journey through an awesome otherworld towards an uncertain constitutional future.

The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire

Herbert L. Kessler

Audrad le Petit

A major artistic study of a famous medieval masterpiece

The Poetry and Paintings of the First Bible of Charles the Bald

"I've been teaching the 'Age of Charlemagne' for 25 years. Thanks to Paul Dutton, I finally have the book I need to make this age come alive." - Charles R. Bowlus, Professor Emeritus, University of Arkansas at Little Rock

A Reader

Carolingian Civilization

Among the readings included are several existing letters by Emma (Einhard's wife), The Life of Charlemagne, and The History of His Relics. The latter work transports us into an almost unknown world as Einhard, the cool rationalist, arranges for a relic salesman, a veritable bone seller, to acquire saints’ relics from Italy for installation into his new church. The reader is taken on an intrigue-filled trip to Rome, where Einhard's men creep into churches at night to steal bones and then spirit them away to Einhard in the north. The relics are received in town after town as if they were the living saints come to cure the infirm. Einhard's descriptions of the sick, the lame, and the blind of northern Europe vividly expose us to a side of medieval life too rarely encountered in other medieval sources.

Paul Edward Dutton

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