A comprehensive and accessible survey of the great Carolingian empire, which dominated western Europe in the eighth and ninth centuries.

Despite the wealth of scholarship in recent decades on medieval women, we still know much less about the experiences of women in the early Middle Ages than we do about those in later centuries. In Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World, Valerie L. Garver offers a fresh appraisal of the cultural and social history of eighth- and ninth-century women. Examining changes in women's lives and in the ways others perceived women during the early Middle Ages, she shows that lay and religious women, despite their legal and social constrictions, played integral roles in Carolingian society. Garver's innovative book employs an especially wide range of sources, both textual and material, which she uses to construct a more complex and nuanced impression of aristocratic women than we've seen before. She looks at the importance of female beauty and adornment; the family and the construction of identities and collective memory; education and moral exemplarity; wealth, hospitality and domestic management; textile work, and the lifecycle of elite Carolingian women. Her interdisciplinary approach makes deft use of canons of church councils, chronicles, charters, polyptychs, capitularies, letters, poetry, exegesis, liturgy, inventories, hagiography, memorial books, artworks, archaeological remains, and textiles. Ultimately, Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World underlines the centrality of the Carolingian era to the reshaping of antique ideas and the development of lasting social norms.

This book is not a conventional political narrative of Carolingian history shaped by narrative sources, capitularies, and charter material. It is structured, instead, by numismatic, diplomatic, liturgical, and iconographic sources and deals with political signs, images, and fixed formulas in them as interconnected elements in a symbolic language that was used in the indirect negotiation and maintenance of Carolingian authority. Building on the comprehensive analysis of royal liturgy, intitulature, iconography, and graphic signs and responding to recent interpretations of early medieval politics, this book offers a fresh view of Carolingian political culture and of corresponding roles that royal/imperial courts, larger monasteries, and human agents played there.

Collection of essays examining lay involvement in literary and artistic activity in the Carolingian Empire.

Re-evaluates the political integration and Christianization of Saxony following its violent conquest (772-804) by Charlemagne.

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

Detailed account of the common people's daily life in the time of Charlemagne and how politics and military struggle affected them.