Tracking Einhard's ‘Life of Charlemagne’ Einharts Vita Karoli. Studien zur Entstehung, Überlieferung und Rezeption. 2 vols. By Matthias M. Tischler. (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Schriften, 48.) Pp. lxx+896+8 plates; vii+898–1828. Hanover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2001. €140. 3 7752 5448 X; 0080 6951

Extract

‘Habent sua fata libelli’. Had Einhard been able to contemplate the fate of his own libellus of 41 pages (in the standard modern edition) as revealed in Matthias Tischler's 1,828-page two-volume liber, the gamut of his responses from angst to wonderment would surely have included gratitude. In all the voluminous historiography on the Vita Karoli, no one has paid Einhard the compliment of taking his little book as seriously as has Tischler in bringing this Heidelberg doctoral thesis of 1998, now in expanded form, to a wider audience. The subtitle indicates the three dimensions of Tischler's vast enquiry: the immediate context of the VK's original writing, as Einhard responded creatively to an urgent political situation; the VK's own evolving life (if books have fates, Tischler says they also have lives) through preservation and transmission in an extraordinary number of manuscripts; and the VK's afterlife in its variegated reception across eight centuries by scribes, scholars and patrons. Tischler has taken his cue from the literary historian Paul Aebischer: ‘la Vita Karoli est un immense continent’. In Tischler, the improbable continent – vaster than ever realised before and with larger prospects of cultural riches – has found its hinterland explorer and topographer.