IMC 2023: Sessions

The international project 'Histories in Transition' project focuses on the writing and rewriting of history in the Carolingian and post-Carolingian periods. We want to investigate whether and, if so, how new approaches to the codification of knowledge changed the conceptualisation of history, its genre boundaries, its meaning and its place in (real or imagined) libraries. We expect to find and explore a wide range of possibilities, but also want to explore the limits of these possibilities through a comparative approach between different regions, places, cultural backgrounds and textual traditions.

Paper -a:
The process of writing and rewriting Frankish annals is commonly associated with the Annales regni Francorum and its revised version, the Annales qui dicuntur Einhardi. But a closer look at other sets of annals shows that this was a more common practice than previously has been assumed. A case study of the so-called Annales Laureshamenses-Mosellani shows how various scribes remembered the Saxon Wars and therefore serves as an example of the spectrum of literary strategies that writers used to forge a narrative of triumph and, more intriguingly, how they kept it up to date.

Paper -b:
Rome, the city of emperors and of Saints Peter and Paul, is remembered and celebrated in a great many Frankish texts and genres. The dearth of references to Rome in the Frankish Annals, therefore, is especially striking; there is almost no 'news from Rome' in the Frankish annals. In a narrative covering half a century, there are only a dozen years or groups of months straddling Christmas whose entries are concerned with Rome in any way. How can this very limited set of references to Rome and the popes be explained? Both the character and meagreness of the references to Rome in the later 8th-century annals are arguably a consequence of choice. The information included appears to be part of a narrative strategy, but can that strategy be more precisely identified? This paper will consider first of all the possible connection between the Annales regni francorum, the Codex epistolaris Carolinus and the Liber pontificalis. Secondly, the implications of the references to Rome in the Annales regni francorum within that narrative alone will be analysed for what they may suggest about Frankish attitudes towards Rome. Finally, the case will be made that the annals need to be understood within the larger context of the communication and information networks of the Frankish political community, some of which centred on the Carolingian court.

Paper -c:
The Annales Laureshamenses, among other annalistic works, strongly influenced the so called Chronicon Moissiacense and the Chronicon Anianense, which again both interrelate. Chosing two examples of quotations from the Annales Laureshamenses, the paper asks for the Annals' role in these two chronicles concerning both codicology and historiographical content. How did this annalistic text influence universal histories and, vice versa, has been changed by the compilers of the mentioned chronicles as well as other (not only) historiographical compositions? Additionally, the paper tries to put the codices containing the Chronicon Moissiacense and the Chronicon Anianense in a broader context of contemporary historiographies.