Bill Weis   (Institute for Medieval Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences)

Charlemagne’s Ghost in the 11th-century: Textual Reception during the Investiture Controversy

My dissertation centers around the relationship between historiography, conflict, identity, and concepts of universal history, in Europe in the central middle ages. In the same way that new identities and sensibilities, polities, and ideas of history-writing resulted from the breakdown of Europe in the 10th-century, I am interested in carrying these themes forward and exploring them in the context of dynastic change and social and religious reform of the 11th-century. I proposed to use the medieval genre of world chronicles as a window into this process. My presentation will address the following question: how did contemporary authors embed earlier historiography into the medium of universal chronicles to grapple with these crises, shape or advocate for a new form of political identity, or giving new meaning to these earlier works? To explore this research question, I will take a comparative approach to a sample of five different world chronicles—Frutolf of Michaelsburg, Hermann of Reichenau, Lampert of Hersfeld and the Annals of Quedlinburg and Hildesheim. I'll divide the presentation into broadly three sections: 1) the act and practice of creating historiographical compilations, and the interactions between 2) historiography and conflict and 3) historiography and identity, with a special eye towards discourses over Saxon identities. In short, we will find that the act of textual reception, often ignored in these otherwise well-known sources, was instrumental in composing historiography, imbuing these texts with social meaning, and deploying them to speak to contemporary issues in Ottonian/Salian society

If you are interested, please contact Leon Pürstinger for the Zoom link.