The scabini in historiographical perspective

The introduction of the scabini, men who served as judgement finders, has long been connected to judicial reform enacted by Charlemagne. By the thirteenth century, the term scabini had become synonymous with legal culture and courts from Norway to Hungary and beyond. This article will trace the scabini from historiographical debates over their provenance, to their introduction under Charlemagne, why and how this change was enacted, their duties and the impact of the reform on terminology and the writing of documentary texts. This touches on keystones of changing historiographical perspectives of the Carolingians: from nineteenth‐century views of a ‘Germanic’ past that privileged collective judgement to twentieth‐century emphasis on the written word as a mode of governance and the relationship between Charlemagne and the aristocracy, and recent attention to the function of capitularies in tenth‐century western Europe. It will explore the alleged disappearance of the scabini, a development that is connected in scholarship to nothing less significant than debates concerning the feudal revolution, before considering areas for future study

Local Priests and their Siblings: Appendix - Bibliography

 Appendix to Alice Hicklin,  ‘Local Priests and their Siblings c. 900–c. 1100: The Documentary Evidence’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien (2023) ABSTRACT: Priests’ relationships with their brothers and sisters are richly evidenced in tenth- and eleventh-century documentary sources across the Latin West. But the looming shadow of the ‘Gregorian Reform’ has focused historians’ attentions on clerical marriage and vertical familial relationships (fathers and sons, or uncles and nephews). This article redresses the balance, arguing that sibling relationships have been underestimated in their importance to the lived experience of local priests, their families and communities in the tenth and eleventh centuries in post-Carolingian western Francia and the Iberian peninsula. It examines how priests and their brothers and sisters managed estates, co-operated to pool resources, and developed inheritance strategies with particular emphasis on how such records may reflect both practice on the ground and the concerns of the scribes, draftsmen and archivists who recorded, copied and edited them. The following list comprises all published editions of charters or notices of local priests with siblings that I have investigated at the date of submission of the article (November 2022). Entries are alphabetised by location.</p

Orchestrating Harmony: Litanies, Queens, and Discord in the Carolingian and Ottonian Empires

This chapter explores the role of Carolingian and Ottonian royal women in the royal liturgy, and particularly in the litanies and laudes regiae present in extant sacramentaries, graduals, tropers, and other liturgical manuscripts surviving from the late eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries. It describes a central tension between the manuscript evidence and the historical narratives, between the hope for a cosmic harmony and the reality of discord, disease, and war. As the Carolingian Queen Fastrada organized litanies within Saxony to ensure the success of Charlemagne’s campaign against the Avars, Ottonian queens and empresses also utilized this liturgical form to avert disaster in troublesome times. Liturgy structured the world as harmony; yet the performance of liturgical rites could be triggered by discord. The chapter examines the tension through queens and empresses who appear inconsistently in the liturgical manuscripts, but who consistently work within the wider political community at specific historical moments to oversee the important liturgical rites

Orchestrating Harmony: Litanies, Queens, and Discord in the Carolingian and Ottonian Empires

This chapter explores the role of Carolingian and Ottonian royal women in the royal liturgy, and particularly in the litanies and laudes regiae present in extant sacramentaries, graduals, tropers, and other liturgical manuscripts surviving from the late eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries. It describes a central tension between the manuscript evidence and the historical narratives, between the hope for a cosmic harmony and the reality of discord, disease, and war. As the Carolingian Queen Fastrada organized litanies within Saxony to ensure the success of Charlemagne’s campaign against the Avars, Ottonian queens and empresses also utilized this liturgical form to avert disaster in troublesome times. Liturgy structured the world as harmony; yet the performance of liturgical rites could be triggered by discord. The chapter examines the tension through queens and empresses who appear inconsistently in the liturgical manuscripts, but who consistently work within the wider political community at specific historical moments to oversee the important liturgical rites