Search

3 results

Edward Roberts
Published online:

05 September 2019

Print publication:

05 September 2019
- Book
- - Get access
    
    Buy a print copy
    
    Check if you have access via personal or institutional login
    
    Log in Register
- Export citation
Flodoard of Rheims (893/4–966) is one of the tenth century's most intriguing but neglected historians. His works are essential sources for the emergence of the West Frankish and Ottonian kingdoms in the tumultuous decades following the collapse of the Carolingian empire in 888. Yet although Flodoard is a crucial narrative voice from this period, his works have seldom been considered in the context of the evolving circumstances of his turbulent career or his literary aims. This important new study is the first to analyse and synthesise Flodoard's entire output, suggesting that his writings about Rheims, contemporary politics and the Christian past have until now been taken at face value without regard for his own intentions or priorities, and therefore have been misunderstood. Edward Roberts' re-evaluation of the relationship between political participation, historical understanding and authorial individuality casts important new light on the political and cultural history of tenth-century Europe.

Introduction
Edward Roberts, University of Kent, Canterbury
Book:

Flodoard of Rheims and the Writing of History in the Tenth Century

Published online:

05 September 2019

Print publication:

05 September 2019, pp 1-28
- Chapter
- - Get access
    
    Check if you have access via personal or institutional login
    
    Log in Register
- Export citation
Summary

This chapter offers a rationale for the book and an introduction to Flodoard’s career and works. It summarises key political developments in the tenth-century West Frankish kingdom and provides an outline of the dominant historiographical interpretations of the period. In theory, Flodoard should be a star witness in debates about the nature of political and social change in the kingdoms and polities that succeeded the Carolingian empire, but his works have tended to be overlooked in favour of charters and other ‘documentary’ evidence. When Flodoard has been invoked by scholars, this usage has tended to be uncritical, primarily because he appears to be a straightforward, impartial writer. From what Flodoard himself tells us about his career, however, this apparent neutrality is clearly an illusion, and therefore an authorial strategy that requires interrogation. Finally, this chapter provides a historiographical survey of the major political and literary approaches to medieval historiography and medieval authors that underpin the methodology of this book.

12 - Lotharingia
from PART II - POST-CAROLINGIAN EUROPE
- By Michel Parisse
Edited by Timothy Reuter, University of Southampton
Book:

The New Cambridge Medieval History

Published online:

28 March 2008

Print publication:

13 March 2000, pp 310-327
- Chapter
- - Get access
    
    Check if you have access via personal or institutional login
    
    Log in Register
- Export citation
Summary

The kingdom held by Zwentibald, who died on 13 August 900, became a duchy with the same boundaries, known from the start by the convenient designation of Lotharingia. King Charles was subsequently able to appoint his notary Gauzlin to the see of Toul in 922, but if everything was still running smoothly for him in Lotharingia things were very different in west Francia. One might say that from the accession of Otto I to that of Otto III, even up to the accession of Hugh Capet, Lotharingia had the character of a Francia media, disputed between its two neighbours much as the kingdom of Lothar II had been earlier. The division of 959 took effect on Brun's death, but Godfrey, to whom lower Lotharingia had been entrusted, had already died in Italy in 964, and was not replaced immediately. Lotharingia has always been a transit zone. Calligraphy was a Lotharingian speciality.