IMC 2014: Sessions

In Medieval Europe, the Shadows of Empire were perhaps nowhere as palpable nor cast as directly as in the Carolingian world of the 9th century. Not only had the Western Empire been literally reinstituted in 800, older echoes of the Roman past were also still on the forefront of the minds of the intellectuals who were busy shaping and reshaping the world around them, constantly formulating new ideals that, they hoped, would give it direction and purpose. This session highlights three different strategies employed by these actors. First, Kelly Gibson will investigate how the descriptions of empire, emperors, and imperial activity in 9th-century saints' lives and accounts of relic translations shed light on hagiographers' perceptions of the development of the Carolingian Empire's past and present. Then, Thomas Anthony Greene seeks to situate Haimo of Auxerre in his wider Carolingian context by mining his exegetical and homiletic writings to uncover his perception of empire during the turbulent middle decades of the 9th century, when the sons of Louis the Pious fought over the territory bequeathed to them by their father. Finally, Richard Corradini will highlight the long shadows cast by the ancient past on the contemporary understanding of Empire. Starting from a late 9th-century Reichenau manuscript containing a florilegium of world chronicles as well as texts on natural science and computus, this paper will showcase this unique historiographical document as a paradigm for the transforming perception of the history of the Frankish empire in a time of political change.