Transformation of the Carolingian World
The story of Europe after the end of the Carolingian Empire is ambiguous: its dissolution is often narrated as a tragedy – an obscure valley between the creation of Europe by the family of Charlemagne and the emergence in the eleventh century of the Middle Ages ‘proper’.
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Modern narratives define the time between c. 900–c.1050 often by what it was not: a period which witnessed the disintegration of ninth-century political geography, institutions and social structures. This practice was identified by older historiography as destroying the sense of the imperial centre and thereby sowing the seeds of political fragmentation and of the later European nation-states. It was post-Carolingian in the sense of having lost its Carolingian order.
But it was exactly the tenth century’s regional diversity and absence of higher-level political structures that endowed this time of ‘crisis’ with enormous potential for lasting and fundamental changes to European social order. Political authority took new shapes, for example the rise of sub-regnal ‘dukes’ in various kingdoms and the seeming increase in episcopal authority. Frontiers shifted and shifted again, and political geography was inverted as old centres. Ever more diverse groups participated in tenth-century political processes than had under the Carolingians.
These developments necessitated changes to the discourses on political and social order – changes that historians are able to read in the extant sources of this exciting period. Thus, the post-imperial lack of consensus about the location and nature of social and political authority was an essential feature of the tenth century, and that this was reflected in its multiple uses (and forgettings) of the past.
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The network
- Stuart Airlie
School of Humanities, University of Glasgow - Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak
Department of History, New York University (NYU) - Geneviève Bührer-Thierry
Laboratoire de Médiévistique Occidentale de Paris LAMOP, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - Jennifer Davis
Faculty of History, Catholic University of America - Philippe Depreux
Universität Hamburg, Fakultät für Geisteswissenschaften - Max Diesenberger
Institut für Mittelalterforschung, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften Wien - Stefan Esders
Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin - Patrick Geary
School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study Princeton - Eric J. Goldberg
School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge-Mass. - Maria Cristina La Rocca
Dipartimento di Scienze Storiche Geografiche e dell’Antichità (DISSGeA), Università degli Studi di Padova - Conrad Leyser
Faculty of History, Worcester College, University of Oxford - Steffen Patzold
Philosophische Fakultät, Fachbereich Geschichtswissenschaft, Seminar für mittelalterliche Geschichte, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen - Walter Pohl
Institut für Mittelalterforschung, Österreichische Akademie des Wissenschaften Wien - Helmut Reimitz
Department of History, Princeton University - Bernd Schneidmüller
Historisches Seminar, Universität Heidelberg
