My primary research interest lies in tracing the collision or collaboration of religious ideas with society and secular culture. This meeting of religion and the world might involve people's reactions to the struggle of the poor in overcoming the trials of daily life, the construction of ethnic identity in the face of conquest by a foreign power of a different religion, grand ideals of love reflected in the roles of men and women, or simply the challenges of applying the Bible to flawed people preoccupied with other legitimate concerns. My research focuses on the Carolingian era (mainly eighth- and ninth-century France and western Germany), but has extended to other times and places including Anglo-Saxon England and Mediterranean Arles in Late Antiquity. My current book project focuses on charity to the poor; as I complete that work, I am dabbling in a consideration of love in the ninth century during the chaotic power struggles between members of the Carolingian family.
The Rise of Medieval Charity: Society, Christianization, and the Poor in the Early Medieval West (Current Book Project)
This book project argues that, contrary to earlier assumptions, charity to the poor played a central role in the Christian society of Anglo-Saxon England and the area of the Carolingian empire between 700 and 1025 A.D. This helps to answer important questions about the survival strategies of ordinary people, lay religion, and the concrete impact of Christianization. In addition, restoring early medieval charity to its rightful place necessitates rethinking earlier assumptions about the broad development of poor relief. This book proposes an interactive rewards model of charitable giving to explain how a wide variety of changing circumstances shaped the culture of charity, leading, for example, to a rejection of the Foucauldian use of poor relief to police the behavior of the poor in this period. I expect to have a book manuscript completed in the first part of 2014.
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Love in the Early Middle Ages: Society, Religion, and Gender in a Time of Civil War (Upcoming book Project)
This project in the history of emotions aims to unravel the idea of “love” in the ninth-century Carolingian empire. In an age wracked by civil war between royal family members and other problems, writers deployed the rhetoric of love in explicitly political and non-political situations to address and manipulate these divisions. Based on my preliminary research, the predominant model of love to which they appealed was not our modern romantic love or even the idea of friendship noted by earlier historians (though both existed), but rather the hierarchal father-son relationship. This project has three intertwined goals: (1) to confirm and expand on the results of that preliminary research; (2) to define how religious and secular influences interacted and fused; and especially (3) to trace the gender implications of this seemingly male-centric model of love for Carolingian ideas of both masculinity and femininity, with particular attention to its concrete influence on people as social actors.
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Recent Publications
Articles:
“Caesarius of Arles and the Origins of the Ecclesiastical Tithe: From a Theology of Almsgiving to Practical Obligations,” Traditio 67 (2012): 43-69. “The Saxons within Carolingian Christendom: Post-Conquest Identity in the Translationes of Vitus, Pusinna and Liborius,” Journal of Medieval History 36 (2010): 39-54. See below for abstracts on each. Digital Scholarship: Contributing Translator, Hildemar’s Expositio Regulae (c. 21), for The Hildemar Project, online at http://www.hildemar.org/index.html (posted June 2013). |
Caesarius of Arles and the Origins of the Ecclesiastical Tithe: From a Theology of Almsgiving to Practical Obligations (first three paragraphs)
Few taxes have been as enduring and as evocative of identity as the Christian ecclesiastical tithe, arguably “the most important tax in the economic development of western Europe.” The secular enforcement in 779 of the tithe’s collection by the church clearly marked a decisive moment in its evolution, but its earlier origins as religious law have been much more elusive. Scholarship over the past five decades has made clear that mandatory tithing to the church was not a custom of early Christianity but rather something that developed in late antiquity, with our first unambiguous evidence of a developed theory of the tithe coming from sixth-century Gaul. The key figure providing that evidence was Caesarius of Arles (ca. 469–542).
The aim of this article is to explain the first crucial shift in the Christian understanding of what tithing meant, a shift in which Caesarius played a pivotal role. It was in his time period and apparently in his written sermons that tithing was first defined as a mandatory payment of a fixed percentage of income to the church incumbent on all Christians and distinct from other forms of offerings. Before Caesarius, churchmen used the language of tithing only to discuss almsgiving, which by its nature resisted being made a fixed due. However, certain useful and ambiguous elements in early discourse and practice opened the way for the sixth century’s creation of a recognizable notion of the ecclesiastical tithe, which in turn opened the way for the tithe’s later imposition by secular authority. Caesarius’s sermons, as the first elucidation of a tithe distinct from almsgiving, offer us a privileged insight into why the ecclesiastical tithe was developed. Moreover, it is quite probable that Caesarius, rather than merely describing shifting practice, played an active and crucial role in the emergence of the tithe.
My argument falls into four parts. The first treats the trail of evidence up until Caesarius, pointing out both the conflation of almsgiving with tithing (as observed by previous scholars) and the desire of some churchmen for a system (perhaps similar to tithing) for regularizing the offerings of the faithful. The second section focuses on Caesarius himself, noting the practical challenges he faced as a forceful and innovative bishop. The third section delves into his theology of tithing, his argument for its necessity, and his consequent solution to some of the issues caused by the earlier use of Old Testament language of fixed dues for almsgiving. The final section briefly surveys the immediate history of tithing after Caesarius, which highlights his originality and influence in the development of the tithe.
The Saxons within Carolingian Christendom: Post-Conquest Identity in the Translationes of Vitus, Pusinna and Liborius (abstract)
The Franks incorporated Saxony into the Carolingian empire through a long, brutal struggle coupled with forced conversion. When Saxons themselves began to write a few decades afterwards, they had to make sense of this history and of their role and identity in their contemporary Carolingian world. In contrast to the portrayal of Saxons in writers such as Einhard and Rudolf, three ninth-century Saxon accounts of relic translations d those of Vitus, Pusinna and Liborius d reinterpreted history to claim a place for the Saxons as a distinct group equal to the Franks within the populus Christianus under the Carolingian monarchs. As a key part of their literary strategies, these authors attempted to salvage from the story of their defeat and forced Christianisation an account of God’s sovereignty, native agency and virtue (especially fidelity) as a foundational element of Saxon identity. These texts prefigure the debates about post-conquest Saxon identity which would underlay the later and better-known Ottonian triumphal self-conceptions. Moreover, the concerns of these authors led them to remarkable hagiographical innovations in grappling with paganism, conversion, miracles, social class and faith.
Few taxes have been as enduring and as evocative of identity as the Christian ecclesiastical tithe, arguably “the most important tax in the economic development of western Europe.” The secular enforcement in 779 of the tithe’s collection by the church clearly marked a decisive moment in its evolution, but its earlier origins as religious law have been much more elusive. Scholarship over the past five decades has made clear that mandatory tithing to the church was not a custom of early Christianity but rather something that developed in late antiquity, with our first unambiguous evidence of a developed theory of the tithe coming from sixth-century Gaul. The key figure providing that evidence was Caesarius of Arles (ca. 469–542).
The aim of this article is to explain the first crucial shift in the Christian understanding of what tithing meant, a shift in which Caesarius played a pivotal role. It was in his time period and apparently in his written sermons that tithing was first defined as a mandatory payment of a fixed percentage of income to the church incumbent on all Christians and distinct from other forms of offerings. Before Caesarius, churchmen used the language of tithing only to discuss almsgiving, which by its nature resisted being made a fixed due. However, certain useful and ambiguous elements in early discourse and practice opened the way for the sixth century’s creation of a recognizable notion of the ecclesiastical tithe, which in turn opened the way for the tithe’s later imposition by secular authority. Caesarius’s sermons, as the first elucidation of a tithe distinct from almsgiving, offer us a privileged insight into why the ecclesiastical tithe was developed. Moreover, it is quite probable that Caesarius, rather than merely describing shifting practice, played an active and crucial role in the emergence of the tithe.
My argument falls into four parts. The first treats the trail of evidence up until Caesarius, pointing out both the conflation of almsgiving with tithing (as observed by previous scholars) and the desire of some churchmen for a system (perhaps similar to tithing) for regularizing the offerings of the faithful. The second section focuses on Caesarius himself, noting the practical challenges he faced as a forceful and innovative bishop. The third section delves into his theology of tithing, his argument for its necessity, and his consequent solution to some of the issues caused by the earlier use of Old Testament language of fixed dues for almsgiving. The final section briefly surveys the immediate history of tithing after Caesarius, which highlights his originality and influence in the development of the tithe.
The Saxons within Carolingian Christendom: Post-Conquest Identity in the Translationes of Vitus, Pusinna and Liborius (abstract)
The Franks incorporated Saxony into the Carolingian empire through a long, brutal struggle coupled with forced conversion. When Saxons themselves began to write a few decades afterwards, they had to make sense of this history and of their role and identity in their contemporary Carolingian world. In contrast to the portrayal of Saxons in writers such as Einhard and Rudolf, three ninth-century Saxon accounts of relic translations d those of Vitus, Pusinna and Liborius d reinterpreted history to claim a place for the Saxons as a distinct group equal to the Franks within the populus Christianus under the Carolingian monarchs. As a key part of their literary strategies, these authors attempted to salvage from the story of their defeat and forced Christianisation an account of God’s sovereignty, native agency and virtue (especially fidelity) as a foundational element of Saxon identity. These texts prefigure the debates about post-conquest Saxon identity which would underlay the later and better-known Ottonian triumphal self-conceptions. Moreover, the concerns of these authors led them to remarkable hagiographical innovations in grappling with paganism, conversion, miracles, social class and faith.