At the center of the legends stand three kings whom the monks favored as founders: Clovis, Pippin the Short, and, above all, Charlemagne. Remensnyder reveals the many implications of this legendary affection for kings, a startling predilection on the part of monks living in a region where actual rulers hardly ventured during the period.

The Norman conquerors of Anglo-Saxon England have traditionally been seen both as rapacious colonizers and as the harbingers of a more civilized culture, replacing a tribal Germanic society and its customs with more refined Continental practices. Many of the scholarly arguments about the Normans and their influence overlook the impact of the past on the Normans themselves. The Continuity of the Conquest corrects these oversights. Wendy Marie Hoofnagle explores the Carolingian aspects of Norman influence in England after the Norman Conquest, arguing that the Normans’ literature of kingship envisioned government as a form of imperial rule modeled in many ways on the glories of Charlemagne and his reign. She argues that the aggregate of historical and literary ideals that developed about Charlemagne after his death influenced certain aspects of the Normans’ approach to ruling, including a program of conversion through “allurement,” political domination through symbolic architecture and propaganda, and the creation of a sense of the royal forest as an extension of the royal court. An engaging new approach to understanding the nature of Norman identity and the culture of writing and problems of succession in Anglo-Norman England, this volume will enlighten and enrich scholarship on medieval, early modern, and English history.

A major re-assessment of the Frankish historian Flodoard of Rheims, one of the tenth century's most intriguing but neglected narrators.

In “The Making of Europe”: Essays in Honour of Robert Bartlett, a group of distinguished contributors analyse processes of conquest, colonization and cultural change in Europe in the tenth to fourteenth centuries. They assess and develop theses presented by Robert Bartlett in his famous book of that name. The geographical scope extends from Iceland to the Islamic Mediterranean, from Spain to Poland. Themes covered range from law to salt production, from aristocratic culture in the Christian West to Islamic views of Christendom. Like the volume that it honours, the present book extends our understanding of both medieval and present day Europe. Contributors are Sverre Bagge, Piotr Górecki, John Hudson, Hugh Kennedy, Simon MacLean, William Ian Miller, Esther Pascua Echegaray, Ana Rodriguez, Matthew Strickland, John Tolan, Bjorn Weiler, and Stephen D. White. This is an excellent collection of essays that do justice to Rob Bartlett’s inexhaustible book, The Making of Europe. Rather than merely repeating and venerating Bartlett’s ideas, the essays engage creatively and critically with them and spark new ideas and insights that cast a flood of light on the culture of medieval Europe. The result is a worthy tribute that will send readers scurrying back to Bartlett to quarry yet more nuggets from The Making of Europe, still fizzing with intellectual brio some twenty years after its publication. Stuart Airlie, University of Glasgow October 2015

This 2004 book looks at the writing and reading of history during the early middle ages.

The true importance of cathedrals during the Anglo-Norman period is here brought out, through an examination of the most important aspects of their history. Cathedrals dominated the ecclesiastical (and physical) landscape of the British Isles and Normandy in the middle ages; yet, in comparison with the history of monasteries, theirs has received significantly less attention. This volume helps to redress the balance by examining major themes in their development between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. These include the composition, life, corporate identity and memory of cathedral communities; the relationships, sometimes supportive, sometimes conflicting, that they had with kings (e.g. King John), aristocracies, and neighbouring urban and religious communities; the importance of cathedrals as centres of lordship and patronage; their role in promoting and utilizing saints' cults (e.g. that of St Thomas Becket); episcopal relations; and the involvement of cathedrals in religious and political conflicts, and in the settlement of disputes. A critical introduction locates medieval cathedrals in space and time, and against a backdrop of wider ecclesiastical change in the period. Contributors: Paul Dalton, Charles Insley, Louise J. Wilkinson, Ann Williams, C.P. Lewis, RichardAllen, John Reuben Davies, Thomas Roche, Stephen Marritt, Michael Staunton, Sheila Sweetinburgh, Paul Webster, Nicholas Vincent

Authoring the Past surveys medieval Catalan historiography, shedding light on the emergence and evolution of historical writing and autobiography in the Middle Ages, on questions of authority and authorship, and on the links between history and politics during the period. Jaume Aurell examines texts from the late twelfth to the late fourteenth century—including the Latin Gesta comitum Barcinonensium and four texts in medieval Catalan: James I’s Llibre dels fets, the Crònica of Bernat Desclot, the Crònica of Ramon Muntaner, and the Crònica of Peter the Ceremonious—and outlines the different motivations for the writing of each. For Aurell, these chronicles are not mere archaeological artifacts but rather documents that speak to their writers’ specific contemporary social and political purposes. He argues that these Catalonian counts and Aragonese kings were attempting to use their role as authors to legitimize their monarchical status, their growing political and economic power, and their aggressive expansionist policies in the Mediterranean. By analyzing these texts alongside one another, Aurell demonstrates the shifting contexts in which chronicles were conceived, written, and read throughout the Middle Ages. The first study of its kind to make medieval Catalonian writings available to English-speaking audiences, Authoring the Past will be of interest to scholars of history and comparative literature, students of Hispanic and Romance medieval studies, and medievalists who study the chronicle tradition in other languages.