The Early Medieval Era · 751-888 · Francia
Carolingian Reform Christianity
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About This Movement
When Pippin was anointed king in 751 and his son Charlemagne built an empire across western Europe, they treated the condition of the church as a matter of government: schools attached to cathedrals and monasteries, corrected copies of Scripture and the liturgy, one monastic rule for the whole realm, and decrees ordering that every priest be able to explain the Creed and the Lord's Prayer to his people in words they could understand. Scholars were imported to run it, Alcuin of York above all, and the clear round script their scriptoria developed — Carolingian minuscule — is the ancestor of the letters you are reading now. Almost everything that survives, though, is what people were told rather than what they thought. The reform is documented from the top down, and its ordinary interior life has to be inferred from its own instructions. One striking exception is a lay voice, Dhuoda, a noblewoman writing a handbook of faith and conduct for her absent son in the 840s. The imperial framework that carried the reform broke apart after 888.
Sources
- Admonitio generalis (789) and related capitularies — trans. in P. D. King, Charlemagne: Translated Sources (1987) (primary) — The reform program in its own words - what people were told; King's translation.
- Alcuin of York, letters (trans. S. Allott, Alcuin of York: His Life and Letters, 1974) (primary) — The reform's chief architect's working correspondence; selections also in standard sourcebooks.
- Dhuoda, Handbook for William (trans. Carol Neel, CUA Press, 1991) (primary) — A lay noblewoman's own religious counsel to her son (843) - a genuine ordinary-lay voice inside the reform world, though hers is an aristocratic voice, not a non-elite one.
- Rosamond McKitterick, The Frankish Church and the Carolingian Reforms, 789-895 (Royal Historical Society, 1977) (secondary) — The standard study of the reform as a pastoral program, arguing it reached further down than 'policy tradition' skeptics allow.
- Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 3 (Noble & Smith, 2008) — Carolingian material (reference) — Coverage runs across Part I ch. 5 ('Germanic Christianities', Abrams) and the thematic chapters, including ch. 13 'Asceticism and its institutions' (Helvétius & Kaplan), rather than one dedicated chapter.