The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages

by Edited by Yitzhak Hen , Matthew Innes

• ISBN13: 9780521639989
• ISBN10: 0521639980
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-06-26
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This volume investigates the ways in which people in western Europe between the fall of Rome and the twelfth century used the past: to legitimate the present, to understand current events, and as a source of identity. Each essay examines the mechanisms by which ideas about the past were subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) reshaped for present purposes. As well as written histories, also discussed are saints' lives, law codes, buildings, Biblical commentary, monastic foundations, canon law and oral traditions. The book thus has important implications for how historians use these sources as evidence: they emerge as representations of the past made for very special reasons, often by interested parties. This is the first volume to be devoted fully to these themes, and as such it makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the role of the past within early medieval societies.

Table of Contents

List of contributors	vii
Acknowledgements	viii
List of abbreviations	ix
Introduction: using the past, interpreting the present, influencing the future	1	(8)
Matthew Innes
Memory, identity and power in Lombard Italy	9	(20)
Walter Pohl
Memory and narrative in the cult of early Anglo-Saxon saints	29	(38)
Catherine Cubitt
The uses of the Old Testment in early medieval canon law: the Collectio Vetus Gallica and the Collectio Hibernensis	67	(11)
Rob Meens
The transmission of tradition: Gregorian influence and innovation in eighth-century Italian monasticism	78	(24)
Marios Costambeys
The world and its past as Christian allegory in the early Middle Ages	102	(12)
Dominic Janes
The Franks as the New Israel? Education for an identity from Pippin to Charlemagne	114	(48)
Mary Garrison
Political ideology in Carolingian historiography	162	(13)
Rosamond McKitterick
The Annals of Metz and the Merovingian past	175	(16)
Yitzhak Hen
The empire as ecclesia: Hrabanus Maurus and biblical historia for rulers	191	(36)
Mayke De Jong
Teutons or Trojans? The Carolingians and the Germanic past	227	(23)
Matthew Innes
A man for all seasons: Pacificus of Verona and the creation of a local Carolingian past	250	(30)
Cristina La Rocca
Index	280