The Social Life of Hagiography in the

Merovingian Kingdom Kreiner

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-social-life-of-hagiography-in-the-merovingian-king
dom-kreiner/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Hispanic Hagiography in the Critical Context of the

Reformation Hagiologia 19 1st Edition Fernando Banos
Vallego (Editor)

https://ebookmeta.com/product/hispanic-hagiography-in-the-
critical-context-of-the-reformation-hagiologia-19-1st-edition-
fernando-banos-vallego-editor/

The Ethics Of Social Punishment: The Enforcement Of

Morality In Everyday Life 1st Edition Linda Radzik

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-ethics-of-social-punishment-
the-enforcement-of-morality-in-everyday-life-1st-edition-linda-
radzik/

The Social Life of Busyness 1st Edition Clare

Holdsworth

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-social-life-of-busyness-1st-
edition-clare-holdsworth/

The Hagiography of Saint Abercius 1st Edition Ken Tully

Pamela D Johnston

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-hagiography-of-saint-
abercius-1st-edition-ken-tully-pamela-d-johnston/
The Social Life of Forensic Evidence 1st Edition
Corinna Kruse

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-social-life-of-forensic-
evidence-1st-edition-corinna-kruse/

The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New

World John Leddy Phelan

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-millennial-kingdom-of-the-
franciscans-in-the-new-world-john-leddy-phelan/

Conceptual Metaphor in Social Psychology The Poetics of

Everyday Life 1st Edition Mark J. Landau

https://ebookmeta.com/product/conceptual-metaphor-in-social-
psychology-the-poetics-of-everyday-life-1st-edition-mark-j-
landau/

Thecla and Medieval Sainthood The Acts of Paul and

Thecla in Eastern and Western Hagiography Ghazzal
Dabiri (Editor)

https://ebookmeta.com/product/thecla-and-medieval-sainthood-the-
acts-of-paul-and-thecla-in-eastern-and-western-hagiography-
ghazzal-dabiri-editor/

The Social Life of Politics Ethics Kinship and Union

Activism in Argentina 1st Edition Sian Lazar

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-social-life-of-politics-ethics-
kinship-and-union-activism-in-argentina-1st-edition-sian-lazar/
 T HE SO C IAL LI FE O F H AG IOG RAP HY IN T HE
M EROVIN G IAN KIN G DOM

This book charts the inluence of Christian ideas about social responsibil-
ity on the legal, iscal, and operational policies of the Merovingian govern-
ment, which consistently depended upon the collaboration of kings and
elites to succeed, and it shows how a set of stories transformed the political
playing ield in early medieval Gaul. Contemporary thinkers encouraged
this development by writing political arguments in the form of hagiog-
raphy, more to redeine the rules and resources of elite culture than to
promote saints’ cults. Jamie Kreiner explores how hagiographers were able
to do this efectively, by layering their arguments with diferent rhetorical
and cognitive strategies, while keeping the surface narratives entertain-
ing. The result was a subtle and captivating literature that gives us new
ways of thinking about how ideas and institutions can change, and how
the vibrancy of Merovingian culture inspired subsequent Carolingian
developments.

JA M IE KR EI NER is Assistant Professor of History at the University of

Georgia where she researches and teaches the history of Late Antiquity
and the Middle Ages.
 Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought
Fourth Series

General Editor:
ROS A M O N D M C K IT T E RIC K
Professor of Medieval History, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College
Advisory Editors:
CH RI ST IN E CA RP E N TER
Professor of Medieval English History, University of Cambridge
J O N AT H A N S HE PA RD

The series Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought was inaugurated by
G. G. Coulton in 1921; Professor Rosamond McKitterick now acts as General
Editor of the Fourth Series, with Professor Christine Carpenter and Dr Jonathan
Shepard as Advisory Editors. The series brings together outstanding work by
medieval scholars over a wide range of human endeavour extending from polit-
ical economy to the history of ideas.

This is book 96 in the series, and a full list of titles in the series can be found at:
www.cambridge.org/medievallifeandthought
 THE S O CI AL LIF E OF
HAGIO GRAPHY IN THE
ME ROV ING IAN KIN GDOM

JA MIE KREI NER

University of Georgia
 University Printing House, Cambridge C B 2 8BS , United Kingdom

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.
It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107050655
© Jamie Kreiner 2014
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2014
Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Kreiner, Jamie, 1982–
The social life of hagiography in the Merovingian kingdom / Jamie Kreiner.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
I S B N 978-1-107-05065-5 (hardback)
1. France–History–To 987–Historiography. 2. Merovingians–France–History. 3. France–
History–To 987–Sources. 4. Christian hagiography–History–To 1500. 5. Church and state–
France. 6. France–Civilization–To 700. I. Title.
D C 65.K 66 2014
944′.013072–dc23
2013045305
IS B N 978-1-107-05065-5 hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
U RL s for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
 T HE SO C IAL LI FE O F H AG IOG RAP HY IN T HE
M EROVIN G IAN KIN G DOM

This book charts the inluence of Christian ideas about social responsibil-
ity on the legal, iscal, and operational policies of the Merovingian govern-
ment, which consistently depended upon the collaboration of kings and
elites to succeed, and it shows how a set of stories transformed the political
playing ield in early medieval Gaul. Contemporary thinkers encouraged
this development by writing political arguments in the form of hagiog-
raphy, more to redeine the rules and resources of elite culture than to
promote saints’ cults. Jamie Kreiner explores how hagiographers were able
to do this efectively, by layering their arguments with diferent rhetorical
and cognitive strategies, while keeping the surface narratives entertain-
ing. The result was a subtle and captivating literature that gives us new
ways of thinking about how ideas and institutions can change, and how
the vibrancy of Merovingian culture inspired subsequent Carolingian
developments.

JA M IE KR EI NER is Assistant Professor of History at the University of

Georgia where she researches and teaches the history of Late Antiquity
and the Middle Ages.
 Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought
Fourth Series

General Editor:
ROS A M O N D M C K IT T E RIC K
Professor of Medieval History, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College
Advisory Editors:
CH RI ST IN E CA RP E N TER
Professor of Medieval English History, University of Cambridge
J O N AT H A N S HE PA RD

The series Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought was inaugurated by
G. G. Coulton in 1921; Professor Rosamond McKitterick now acts as General
Editor of the Fourth Series, with Professor Christine Carpenter and Dr Jonathan
Shepard as Advisory Editors. The series brings together outstanding work by
medieval scholars over a wide range of human endeavour extending from polit-
ical economy to the history of ideas.

This is book 96 in the series, and a full list of titles in the series can be found at:
www.cambridge.org/medievallifeandthought
 THE S O CI AL LIF E OF
HAGIO GRAPHY IN THE
ME ROV ING IAN KIN GDOM

JA MIE KREI NER

University of Georgia
 University Printing House, Cambridge C B 2 8BS , United Kingdom

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.
It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107050655
© Jamie Kreiner 2014
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2014
Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Kreiner, Jamie, 1982–
The social life of hagiography in the Merovingian kingdom / Jamie Kreiner.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
I S B N 978-1-107-05065-5 (hardback)
1. France–History–To 987–Historiography. 2. Merovingians–France–History. 3. France–
History–To 987–Sources. 4. Christian hagiography–History–To 1500. 5. Church and state–
France. 6. France–Civilization–To 700. I. Title.
D C 65.K 66 2014
944′.013072–dc23
2013045305
IS B N 978-1-107-05065-5 hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
U RL s for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
To Bang, Flank, and Chuck
 CONT ENTS

Acknowledgements viii
Note on the text x
List of abbreviations xi

I ntroduction 1
1 H ag i og raphical argume nt and le gal c ulture 33
2 T h e sty le and scie nce of pe r suasi on 88
3 Double - scope narrative and the e conomy
of g ove rnme nt 140
4 Prope rty and community b eyond th e c ult 189
5 T h e C aroli ng i an synthe sis 230

Appendix:The Merovingian manuscript evidence 277

Bibliography 288
Index 324

vii
 AC KNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book carries years of conversations within it, and for me it reads
like a memory and a continuation of the company I have been fortu-
nate to keep. In the ifth century the bishop Eucherius of Lyon wrote
his Instructiones while thinking of his own great group, and he hoped
that its dedicatee would recognize himself in the book – ‘where at this
very moment you are asking and I am answering’ – and the entire circle
of people they both knew and cherished besides. I’m glad to know the
feeling.
Three teachers and friends stuck with this project from the start, and I
only hope it shows. Peter Brown was always generous and always adven-
turous, and he taught me how our work can be kind. Bill Jordan is the
reader I wrote to satisfy: he knows that some questions and answers are
better than others. Helmut Reimitz shared his lunch breaks, his library,
and above all his nimble perspective on the early Middle Ages. It was also
a really lucky break that we were both writing our books at the same
time. I thank Helmut for sharing that, too.
I owe a lot to Ian Wood, who read the whole thing and ofered an
engineer’s expert nudges to set it in much better order. And to Alex Bick,
Scott Bruce, Dan Bouk, Henry Cowles,Will Deringer, Max Diesenberger,
Peter Jefery, Bob Kaster, Seth Kimmel, Chris Kurpiewski, Sarah Milov,
Dael Norwood, Anne O’Donnell, Padraic Scanlan, Ben Schmidt, and Joe
Younger, for listening and reading and arguing so sharply over the years.
The students in my seminars at Stanford and UGA brought new energy
and sharpness to problems that I hadn’t really appreciated before, and
they were just generally a lot of fun. Rosamond McKitterick gave the
manuscript a gratifying scrubbing. An anonymous reader for Cambridge
will ind many grateful responses to her or his careful and encouraging
appraisal. Liz Friend-Smith and Chloe Dawson made the publishing pro-
cess unexpectedly straightforward and even enjoyable. And I also greatly

viii
 Acknowledgements
appreciate the work that Robert Whitelock, Jenny Slater, Kaiya Shang,
Michael Watson, Maartje Scheltens, and the Design and Marketing teams
at Cambridge University Press put into this project in order to bring it
to life.
My work relied on the support of the Department of History at
Princeton University, the Mrs Giles Whiting Foundation, the Andrew W.
Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities at Stanford University,
the Department of History and the Willson Center for Humanities and
Arts at the University of Georgia, the terriic Interlibrary Loan staf
at UGA, the Institut für Mittelalterforschung at the Österreichische
Akademie der Wissenschaften, and a set of hubs at Princeton – the Center
for the Study of Religion, the Davis Center for Historical Studies, and
the Group for the Study of Late Antiquity. It also relied on many warm
welcomes. This includes the libraries and the archivists who shared their
collections: the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Österreichische
Nationalbibliothek, the Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen, the British Library, the
Badische Landesbibliothek in Karlsruhe, and the Trierer Domschatz. And
it includes Monique Goullet in Paris, Gerda Heydemann and Marianne
Pollheimer in Vienna, Melissa and Steve (and Eddie) Geinitz in Zürich,
Jinty Nelson in London, Jef Miner in San Francisco, and my new friends
in Athens: they made it so easy to migrate!
Chapter 3 began as an article, ‘About the Bishop: The Episcopal
Entourage and the Economy of Government in Post-Roman Gaul’,
Speculum 86 (2011): 321–60, and some of that material is reprinted here
with permission from Speculum and from Cambridge University Press.
I’ve changed the focus of that article in some important ways, to address
more directly the concerns of this book.

ix
 NOTE ON T HE TEXT

The regnal dates of the Merovingian kings follow Margarete Weidemann’s

analysis in ‘Chronologie der Merowinger’, published in two instalments
in Francia. Biblical citations follow the numbering of the Vulgate, and
when I quote the Bible directly I follow the Latin of the fourth edition
of the Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam versionem, edited by Robert Weber and
Roger Gryson.

x
 A BBR EVIATI ONS

AASS Acta Sanctorum

BHL Société des Bollandistes and H. Fros (eds.), Bibliotheca
Hagiographica Latina antiquae et mediae aetatis, 2 vols.
(Brussels, 1898–9, 1986)
BNF Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France
CCSL Corpus Christianorum Scriptorum Latinorum
ChLA G. Cavallo, J.-O. Tjäder, A. Petrucci, R. Marichal, A.
Bruckner, et al. (eds.), Chartae latinae antiquiores: Facsimile-
Edition of the Latin Charters Prior to the Ninth Century,
106 vols. (Zürich, 1954–2013)
CLA E. A. Lowe (ed.), Codices latini antiquiores: A Palaeographical
Guide to Latin Manuscripts Prior to the Ninth Century, 12 vols.
(Oxford, 1934–66)
CSEL Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum
DACL F. Cabrol and H. Leclerq, Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne
et de liturgie, 15 vols. (Paris, 1907–53)
LHF Liber historiae Francorum, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SS rer. Merov.
2 (Hanover, 1888)
Marculf Marculf, Marculi formularum libri duo, ed. A. Uddholm
(Uppsala, 1962)
MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica
Auct. ant. Auctores antiquissimi
Epp. sel. Epistolae selectae
LL nat. Germ. Leges nationum Germanicarum
SS Scriptores (in folio)
SS rer. Germ. Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum
scholarum
SS rer. Merov. Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum
ÖNB Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek

xi
 List of abbreviations
PL Patrologia Latina
RB Regula Benedicti, ed. T. Fry, in RB 1980:The Rule of St.
Benedict in Latin and English with Notes (Collegeville,
MN, 1981)
RGA H. Beck, D. Geuenich, and H. Steuer (eds.), Reallexikon der
germanischen Altertumskunde, founded by J. Hoops, 35 vols.,
new edn (Berlin, 1968–2007)
RICG H. I. Marrou (ed.), Recueil des inscriptions chrétiennes de la Gaule
antérieures à la renaissance carolingienne, 3 vols. (vols. 1, 8, 15)
(Paris, 1975–85)
SC Sources Chrétiennes

xii
 I NTRODUC TI ON

The authors whose work forms the heart of this history said they would
rather be brief than be boring. It is a testament to their skill that they
managed to express so many ideas with such economy. It is a testament to
their art that we, their modern readers, do not always notice their efort.
The rub is that explaining what Merovingian hagiographers did, and
how and why they did it, took a whole book to do, and many more to
lean on. This makes me think that Thomas Mann began Der Zauberberg
with a wink:‘We shall tell it at length, in precise and thorough detail – for
when was a story short on diversion or long on boredom simply because
of the time and space required for the telling? Unafraid of the odium of
appearing too meticulous, we are much more inclined to the view that
only thoroughness can be truly entertaining.’1
The aesthetic and semantic virtuosity of the Merovingian texts had
everything to do with their social functions, which is why this book
is not just an examination of hagiography but of the society that cre-
ated and read it and changed in the process. It takes a wide-angle-lens
view of a socially involved literature in order to help recover a pol-
itical and intellectual culture whose history has been delated. The
Merovingian kingdom of Gaul (which the hagiographers usually called
it) or Francia (which modern historians usually call it) lasted almost
300 years. It bridged the dissolution of the Roman Empire in the West
with the kingdom that Charlemagne would reshape in Rome’s image.
But a negative reputation that the Carolingians themselves set in motion
concealed what Merovingian society had achieved in transforming its
late antique legacies into new patterns of politics, economics, and self-
relection. Hagiography is not only the most abundant source we have
for the Merovingian period; its authors were also highly interested and

1
Foreword to Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. John E. Woods (New York, 1995).

1
 Introduction
invested in the way that the kingdom was structured. It is an essential
source for the history of Gaul’s cultural transformation.
On the surface, hagiography is a literature devoted to narrating the
life and virtues of exemplary Christians. Its portraiture may seem arti-
icial – Walter Berschin aptly remarked that the Merovingian vitae were
not biographies but a ‘sweep of scenes’ (Bilderbogen) – but hagiography
was predicated on a model of truth that is diferent from ours.2 The
modern distinction between fact and iction is too stark a contrast to
explain ancient and medieval approaches to truth-telling. Across a broad
spectrum of genres, authors were allowed to eschew the details of ‘what
actually happened’ in favour of relating a deeper understanding of the
world, one that they conveyed through a sophisticated use of symbolic
cues, narrative convention, and inventive rewriting. Historia was as much
a sculpted story as it was an account of what happened.3
Merovingian hagiography was constrained by the past it narrated, but
it was also a literature of persuasion, and the following study is alert to –
and also depends upon – the close and charged connection that the texts
maintained between truth and argument. A vita (the hagiographical unit
of one saint’s ‘life’) had to be taken seriously in order to be persuasive. As
the hagiographers saw it, the moral-social system that a vita embodied
was only worth following if one believed that the events it narrated were
both legitimate and credible. The pressure of these obligations made for
a taut compositional tension.Without it, the texts would not ofer nearly
so rich a history.
But for early scholars of hagiography, who were interested in recon-
structing a political history from what the vitae reported, the ancient and
medieval idea that narrative could communicate truth through artful
representation gave them pause. It was diicult to tell where the hagiog-
raphers’ notion of historical truth coincided with theirs.When historians
scrutinized these texts in the nineteenth century, their answer was scep-
tical. They gleaned what they could about people and places and events
from material that they saw as otherwise superluous. Some were more
sensitive than others to the pedagogical and devotional quality of the
vitae, but that was often a source of further discouragement. The Jesuit
scholar Hippolyte Delehaye, who set the standard for twentieth-century

2
W. Berschin, Merowingische Biographie: Italien, Spanien und die Inseln im frühen Mittelalter,Vol. II (1988)
of Biographie und Epochenstil im lateinischen Mittelalter (Stuttgart, 1986–2001), p. 6.
3
F. Wittchow, Exemplarisches Erzählen bei Ammianus Marcellinus: Episode, Exemplum,Anekdote, Beiträge
der Altertumskunde 144 (Munich and Leipzig, 2001); G. W. Bowersock, Fiction as History: Nero to
Julian (Berkeley, 1994); R. Morse, Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages: Rhetoric, Representation,
and Reality (Cambridge, 1991); J. Martínez Pizarro, A Rhetoric of the Scene: Dramatic Narrative in the
Early Middle Ages (Toronto, 1989).

2
 Introduction
hagiographical criticism, observed that the content of a vita was subject
to conlicting forces: to historical fact, and to the popular imagination
that ‘embellished and disigured’ it, all the more so if a saint was especially
loved.4 It was the mirror image of Bruno Krusch’s exasperated complaint
that hagiography was kirchliche Schwindelliteratur, a literature produced by
ecclesiastical con men.5 Whether by clerics or by the masses, readers were
being deceived.
There is no need to subject these positivist approaches to further crit-
icism. As part of the turn to social and then cultural history, historians
have been challenging that historiography for decades, and the conse-
quences of their challenge for the study of hagiography have been enor-
mous.6 Scholars began to put diferent questions to the vitae. They asked
about the social structures and imaginations of the societies that pro-
duced these texts, and hagiographers’ interest in persuasion became less
of a liability and more of an indication that medieval society hungered for
Christian intercessors, whose strengths and services changed depending
on the society that valued them. But these views of hagiography veered
among intimidating sets of risks and limitations. The main risk was tak-
ing the hagiographical perspective as directly representative of society
more generally. Not only can it be diicult to square a vita with reality
in the absence of other evidence, but there is always the possibility that
a hagiographer might have a sense of humor, too (as Ian Wood pointed
out in a discussion of the Breton Vita Samsoni), and we may be missing
the joke.7 On the other hand, the only sure way to avoid that risk entirely
is to limit the study of hagiography to the history of texts, and to resist
drawing conclusions about their relationship to the real world entirely.

4
H. Delehaye, Les légendes hagiographiques, 2nd edn (Brussels, 1906), p. 11.
5
The phrase originally appeared in B. Krusch,‘Zur Florians- und Lupus-Legende: Eine Entgegnung’,
Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft für altere deutsche Geschichtskunde 24 (1899): 533–70 (p. 559), although it
has proven to be infectiously quotable. Paul Fouracre also noted the similarity here with Delehaye’s
scepticism: ‘Merovingian History and Merovingian Hagiography’, Past & Present 127 (1990): 3–38
(pp. 4–5 n. 5).
6
I include only a slim summary here: the subject has received many reviews on the state of the ield.
E.g., P. Henriet, ‘Texte et contexte: Tendances récentes de la recherche en hagiologie’, in Religion
et mentalités au Moyen Age: Mélanges en l’honneur d’Hervé Martin, ed. S. Cassagnes-Brouquet, A.
Chauout, D. Pichot, and L. Rousselot (Rennes, 2003), pp. 75–86; E. Paoli (ed.), Gli studi agiograici
sul Medioevo in Europa (1968–1998) (Florence, 2000); P. J. Geary, ‘Saints, Scholars, and Society: The
Elusive Goal’, in Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1994), pp. 9–29; F. Lifshitz,
‘Beyond Positivism and Genre: “Hagiographical” Texts as Historical Narrative’, Viator 25 (1994):
95–113; J. M. H. Smith,‘Early Medieval Hagiography in the Late Twentieth Century’, Early Medieval
Europe 1 (1992): 69–76; and the research guide by J. Dubois and J.-L. Lemaître, Sources et méthodes
de l’hagiographie médiévale (Paris, 1993).
7
I.Wood,‘Forgery in Merovingian Hagiography’, in Fälschungen im Mittelalter: Internationaler Kongress
der Monumenta Germaniae Historica, München, 16.–19. September 1986, 6 vols., Vol. V: Fingierte Briefe,
Frömmigkeit und Fälschung, Realienfälschungen (Hanover, 1988), pp. 369–84 (pp. 383–4).

3
 Introduction
This was a conservative consequence of the linguistic turn. Fortunately
the concerted and cautious disciplinary relection of the 1990s and early
2000s has encouraged more researchers to investigate the relationship
between texts and social practice, and to consider hagiography as much a
participant in the present as a new record of the past.8
This is a brisk assessment, but it is still an act of gratitude. Centuries of
suspicions and reservations toward hagiography have been as productive
as they have been cautionary, and they have laid down a critical tradi-
tion of great depth and sophistication. On the subject of Merovingian
hagiography speciically, I would like to make a few debts clear from
the start. Most of my narrative sources come from the editions that
Bruno Krusch and Wilhelm Levison produced for the Scriptores rerum
Merovingicarum series of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Their
seven-volume collection of hagiography and histories is not exhaustive
and their conclusions are not always correct, but the generally high quality
of their editorial methods and criticisms has weathered the century very
well. The success of the series had the additional and unintended efect
of drawing attention away from texts that Krusch and Levison did not
include, and as a result, vitae that are or could very well be Merovingian
have sat in obscurity. Specialists already know this. But I mention it here
to make clear that although this book does look to hagiography outside
the MGH corpus, it is necessarily restricted to texts that modern scholars
have dated with certainty, which are often but not always the ones that
Krusch and Levison brought to critics’ attention in the irst place. In the
book’s inal chapter, I will review what makes the vitae so tough to date
and to what extent the intellectual horizons of hagiography can illumi-
nate the context of their production; but in order to ofer a persuasive
account of the developments that were distinctive to Merovingian soci-
ety, this book has to begin with sources whose origins are already secure.
This means that I do not consider rich texts like the Vita Eligii, which
Audoin of Rouen originally wrote between 660 and 684, but which
was modiied in diferent phases into the Carolingian period.9 These are
8
E.g., S. K. Herrick, Imagining the Sacred Past: Hagiography and Power in Early Normandy (Cambridge,
MA, 2007); M. Diesenberger, ‘Der Cvp 420: Die Gemeinschaft der Heiligen und ihre Gestaltung
im frühmittelalterlichen Bayern’, in L’hagiographie mérovingienne à travers ses réécritures, ed. M.
Goullet, M. Heinzelmann, and C.Veyrard-Cosme, Beihefte der Francia 71 (Paris, 2010), pp. 221–50;
M. Diesenberger, ‘Hagiographie et réforme en Bavière à la in du VIIIe siècle’, Médiévales 62 (2012):
67–82; P. Sarris, M. Dal Santo, and P. Booth (eds.), An Age of Saints? Power, Conlict and Dissent in
Early Medieval Christianity (Leiden, 2011). And earlier, J. Fontaine, ‘King Sisebut’s Vita Desiderii
and the Political Function of Visigothic Hagiography’, in Visigothic Spain: New Approaches, ed. E.
James (Oxford, 1980), pp. 93–129; and I. Wood, ‘Missionary Hagiography in the Eighth and Ninth
Centuries’, in Ethnogenese und Überlieferung: Angewandte Methoden der Frühmittelalterforschung, ed. K.
Brunner and B. Merta (Vienna and Munich, 1994), pp. 189–99.
9
The best discussion is T. Kloník, ‘Vita Eligii’, in RGA,Vol. XXXV (Berlin, 2007), pp. 461–524.

4
 Introduction
disappointing decisions to make, but it will become clear why they were
necessary for the kind of analysis I make here.
Other scholars took like prospectors to the terrain that Krusch and
Levison had surveyed – and struck gold. František Graus’ Volk, Herrscher
und Heiliger im Reich der Merowinger, published in 1965, was one of the
irst studies on any period of history to argue that rather than harbour-
ing the dogma of an insulated clergy, hagiography relected the inter-
ests of a society that stretched far past the purview of the institutional
Church. Martin Heinzelmann took a long view of the vitae and has
repeatedly demonstrated their debts to late antique rhetoric and cul-
ture. Marc Van Uytfanghe’s Stylisation biblique et condition humaine dans
l’hagiographie mérovingienne highlighted how hagiographers’ exegetical
practices coherently and strategically addressed a set of shared theological
concerns. Walter Berschin emphasized the texts’ distinctive philological,
stylistic, and thematic voice.10 Ian Wood’s studies of Merovingian pol-
itics rest in good measure on his careful and critical readings of hagio-
graphical texts, including many vitae that did not make the MGH cut.11
Paul Fouracre and Richard Gerberding provide excellent introductions
to select Merovingian vitae in translation in their Late Merovingian France:
History and Hagiography, and the collection ofers an expansive consid-
eration of both the pitfalls and the possibilities of the material.12 Most

10
F. Graus, Volk, Herrscher und Heiliger im Reich der Merowinger: Studien zur Hagiographie der
Merowingerzeit (Prague, 1965); M. Heinzelmann, Bischofsherrschaft in Gallien: Zur Kontinuität
römischer Fuhrungsschichten vom 4. bis zum 7. Jahrhundert. Soziale, prosopographische und bildungsge-
schichtliche Aspekte (Munich, 1976); M. Heinzelmann, ‘Neue Aspekte der biographischen und
hagiographischen Literatur in der lateinischen Welt (1.–6. Jahrhundert)’, Francia 1 (1973): 27–
44; M. Heinzelmann, ‘Die Rolle der Hagiographie in der frühmittelalterlichen Gesellschaft:
Kirchenverständnis und literarische Produktion im spätantiken und merowingischen Gallien’,
in Sakralität zwischen Antike und Neuzeit, ed. B. Hamm, K. Herbers, and H. Stein-Kecks, Beiträge
zur Hagiographie Geschichte 6 (Stuttgart, 2007), pp. 123–36; M. Heinzelmann, ‘L’hagiographie
mérovingienne: Panorama des documents potentiels’, in L’hagiographie mérovingienne à travers ses
réécritures, ed. Goullet, Heinzelmann, and Veyrard-Cosme, pp. 27–82; M.Van Uytfanghe, Stylisation
biblique et condition humaine dans l’hagiographie mérovingienne (600–750) (Brussels, 1987); W. Berschin,
Von der Passio Perpetuae zu den Dialogi Gregors des Grossen,Vol. I (1986) of Biographie und Epochenstil;
Merowingische Biographie.
11
E.g., I. Wood, ‘The Vita Columbani and Merovingian Hagiography’, Peritia 1 (1982): 63–80; The
Merovingian Kingdoms, 450–751 (London and New York, 1993); The Missionary Life: Saints and the
Evangelisation of Europe, 400–1050 (Harlow, 2001).Wood is most explicit about his analytical approach
in ‘Jonas, the Merovingians and Pope Honorius: Diplomata and the Vita Columbani’, in After Rome’s
Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History. Essays Presented to Walter Gofart, ed. A. C. Murray
(Toronto, 1998), pp. 99–120;‘The Use and Abuse of Latin Hagiography in the Early Medieval West’,
in East and West: Modes of Communication, ed. E. Chrysos and Wood, Transformation of the Roman
World 5 (Leiden, 1999), pp. 93–109; and ‘Forgery in Merovingian Hagiography’.
12
P. Fouracre and R. A. Gerberding, Late Merovingian France: History and Hagiography, 640–720 (New
York, 1996). See also Fouracre’s inluential article pre-dating that book: ‘Merovingian History and
Merovingian Hagiography’.

5
 Introduction
recently, new questions about how the vitae were quietly and continually
revised or recombined with other texts in subsequent centuries – posed
by Monique Goullet, Martin Heinzelmann, and Max Diesenberger,
among others – have increased the hagiographical source base exponen-
tially by inding productive uses for texts that had once seemed derivative
or corrupted, a reclamation they made possible by drawing attention to
the subtle ways in which a vita was capable of conveying and acquiring
meaning.13
But the vitality of Merovingian hagiography is so great that its pos-
sibilities have not been exhausted. The possibilities, of course, are never
exhausted. As historians’ interests and frames of reference change, so will
their histories. Today, our narratives tilt toward a history that looks to
Late Antiquity and to the Mediterranean as a whole, and consequently
the history of early medieval Europe is shifting, too. When scholars lifted
the conventional periodizations that bracketed the ancient and medi-
eval worlds and de-privileged the history of western Europe, they made
two surprising discoveries: irst, that Rome left a legacy that outlived its
imperial presence in the West, and second, that post-imperial societies in
the eastern and western wings of the Empire took this common legacy
in diferent directions. The recent work of Chris Wickham and Peter
Brown furnishes two mature examples of the dynamic and experimental
world that has emerged as a result of such geographical and chrono-
logical readjustments, although as Brent Shaw has pointed out, we have
yet to unscramble the causes and efects of the changes that took place
between the ifth and the eighth centuries.14 At the time there was no
consensus or foregone conclusion on what a post-imperial society would
or should look like, although in retrospect it seems obvious to ask how
and why the western kingdoms developed as they did, and how it was
that the bland, grand narrative of a civilization in decline had more or
less loated past the question. But recent reappraisals of diferent bodies of
sources attest to the concerted efort that early medieval societies applied
to their own remaking.To take the case of Gaul alone: Helmut Reimitz’s
work on histories, Stefan Esders’ on royal legislation, Albrecht Diem’s on
monastic rules, Alice Rio’s on formularies, and Gregory Halfond’s on
13
E.g., Goullet, Heinzelmann, and Veyrard-Cosme, L’hagiographie mérovingienne. See Chapter 5 for a
full discussion.
14
For the varied legacies of Rome’s political and economic structures, Wickham’s comparative
analysis is the obvious starting point: C. Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the
Mediterranean, 400–800 (Oxford, 2005); and Brown shows that contemporaneous conceptual uni-
verses were equally varied, even as they responded to a common Roman past: P. Brown, The Rise
of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, AD 200–1000, rev. edn (Malden, MA, 2013). B. Shaw,
‘After Rome: Transformations of the Early Mediterranean World’, New Left Review 51 (2008):
89–114.

6
 The structure and argument of the book
ecclesiastical councils have exhumed a complex of pragmatic and opti-
mistic approaches to managing and improving the social order – all of it
part of the early medieval ‘experiment’.15
Merovingian hagiographers were energetic participants in these
eforts, especially in the seventh and eighth centuries when debates about
social organization looked to the kingdom as a deinitive unit. The vitae
were not parochial. Although they took single protagonists as their focal
points, the hagiographers wrote not just to praise the life and virtues
of individuals, but also to posit a society based on the principles that
those individuals represented, to shape how the kingdom saw itself.They
argued – among themselves and to the highest echelons of government –
for a Merovingian polity based on new concepts of authority, group
identity, political responsibility, and economic value; and to do so they
blended elements of history, law, and literature, in order to makes these
ideas more persuasive and efective.

T h e st ructure and argume nt of the book

It is my goal to show that, if we are equally attentive to Merovingian
hagiography’s dual objectives of truth-telling and persuasion, we get a
view of Merovingian society, and the contribution of the vitae to that
society, that are otherwise diicult to detect. There are therefore two
major arguments in this book, one about the content of this literature
and another about its form, although as we will see that distinction is
somewhat supericial. The irst argument is that the Merovingian king-
dom transformed its standards for justice and order, and its criteria for
political legitimacy, in response to Christian ideas about social responsi-
bility and discipline.The second major argument, which moves alongside
the irst throughout the book, is that hagiography played a pivotal role
in these transformations by deploying speciic rhetorical and cognitive
strategies to efect the social order for which it so strenuously argued.

15
H. Reimitz, ‘Social Networks and Identities in Frankish Historiography: New Aspects of the
Textual History of Gregory of Tours’ Historiae’, in The Construction of Communities in the Early
Middle Ages:Texts, Resources and Artefacts, ed. R. Corradini, M. Diesenberger, and Reimitz (Leiden,
2003), pp. 229–68; H. Reimitz, ‘Der Weg zum Königtum in historiographischen Kompendien der
Karolingerzeit’, in Der Dynastiewechsel von 751: Vorgeschichte, Legitimationsstrategien und Erinnerung,
ed. M. Becher and J. Jarnut (Münster, 2004), pp. 277–320; H. Reimitz, History, Frankish Identity
and the Rise of Western Ethnicity, 550–850 (forthcoming at Cambridge University Press); S. Esders,
Römische Rechtstradition und merowingisches Königtum: Zum Rechtscharakter politischer Herrschaft in
Burgund im 6. und 7. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1997); A. Diem, Das monastische Experiment: Die Rolle
der Keuschheit bei der Entstehung des westlichen Klosterwesens (Münster, 2005); A. Rio, Legal Practice
and the Written Word in the Early Middle Ages: Frankish Formulae, c. 500–1000 (Cambridge, 2009); G.
I. Halfond, Archaeology of Frankish Church Councils, AD 511–768 (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2010).

7
 Introduction
This happened at a time when changes to the structure of royal politics
after an extended period of civil war saw the rise of a ruling class that was
at once competitive and cohesive: this was hagiography’s core audience.
I begin with the subject of law, in order to show that the hagiographers
optimized even the basic structure of their texts to make their arguments
more convincing and forceful, which they did by invoking and adapting
principles of Merovingian legal culture. It helped that written documen-
tation was a form of evidence that the courts took seriously, so the for-
mat of the vitae gave their arguments an edge. But the hagiographers also
appealed to norms and principles that already had legal force and ofered
new views of how those laws should play out in practice. Most dra-
matically, they argued that although the Merovingian kings ruled with
God’s favour, rulers should be held accountable for their responsibility
to uphold the stability and security of the realm. In extreme cases at least
one hagiographer allowed for the execution of an intractably unjust king,
and other elites, though not necessarily other hagiographers, also cau-
tiously endorsed this perspective.
Because a Merovingian vita was at its core a legalistic argument, the
second chapter explains how such arguments were supposed to make a
diference once readers were persuaded that they were legitimate. Here I
analyse the hagiographers’ ideas about what we might call cognitive and
behavioural psychology. They considered the relationship between lan-
guage, the individual mind, and social practice, with the aim of crafting
their narratives in a style that would help focus the mind and memory.
They did this with the expectation that their prose would train willing
readers to follow new patterns of thinking, and that audiences would
eventually reorient their behaviour and their sense of community along
the lines that the vitae suggested. The hagiographers argued that their
model and plan for social consensus were superior to others – that
Christian identity was the most important set of interests, incentives,
and practices for ensuring the integrity of the kingdom. This was a irm
challenge to their contemporaries’ interest in deining the polity princi-
pally on the basis of ethnic identity, but it was not a complete rejection
of ethnic identiication, either.
The irst two chapters examine the role that documents and narratives
played in Merovingian society in order to demonstrate hagiography’s
potential to connect with and persuade audiences that did not share
their perspective. The next two turn to focus more comprehensively on
what kind of society it was that the vitae described and envisioned, and
they also examine a third mode of argument that the more fundamen-
tal forms of communication made possible, which I describe as discur-
sive or double-scope representation. (I take the ‘double-scope’ concept
8
 The structure and argument of the book
from the cognitive scientists Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, and I
will explain and justify that borrowing in the third chapter.) The very
unfolding of a story, ostensibly about a single life, conveyed claims about
the priorities and practices of an entire kingdom through a great econ-
omy of representation. Chapter 3 discusses this process in the context
of how Merovingian elites increasingly expected kings to consider the
consequences of their iscal actions on their subjects. The hagiographers
supported and responded to these expectations by expanding the dein-
ition of who deserved the king’s consideration, to include royal subjects
who were economically and politically marginal. They also insisted that
bishops were indispensable to the royal government because they were
in an ideal position to represent this large swathe of the Merovingian
population to the Crown – and the evidence we have for a burgeoning
liturgical economy by the later seventh and early eighth centuries sug-
gests that the kingdom invested heavily in this view.
The fourth chapter continues to explore this debate about who mat-
tered in the Merovingian realm by focusing on a contemporaneous devel-
opment, the construction boom in Christian sanctuaries across Gaul. I
will discuss how and why scholars have traditionally explained the elor-
escence of cult sites as part of the competitive self-promotion of the
Merovingian aristocracy. I will also argue that it still remains to ask why
sacred power was seen to enhance secular power at all. We have natural-
ized a transformation that at the time was new and somewhat controver-
sial. The loca sanctorum – the saints’ places – were already appreciated as
spiritually proitable, but the hagiographers suggested that contributions
to ecclesiastical enterprises were proitable on earth, too. Since this was
the same period in which iscal and social generosity was acquiring pol-
itical charge, the vitae presented the loca sanctorum as opportunities for
elites to transform their personal wealth into indiscriminately beneicial
wealth. By founding and supporting sanctuaries for the spiritual succour
of an entire population, donors were better positioned to claim political
authority on the grounds that they were advancing the interests of the
public and therefore the interests of the kingdom.
The book concludes by addressing how the Carolingian dynasty made
use of the Merovingians’ political-hagiographical legacy. I use two case
studies and a new methodological approach to do this. Fusing the insights
that research centres in Paris and Vienna have most recently developed,
my analysis considers how the Merovingian vitae were rewritten in the
Carolingian period and how they were assembled and anthologized into
manuscript collections. This approach highlights the value that particu-
lar texts continued to have in subsequent centuries; it also allows for
more precision about the possibilities that hagiography ofered to the
9
 Introduction
intellectual and political circles who were involved in reproducing and
reinventing it.
The argument of the inal chapter, which also serves as a relective
conclusion to the entire book, is that despite their famously dim view of
the dynasty they replaced, the Carolingians actually found a great deal to
preserve in Merovingian hagiography, and their hagiographical compen-
dia and rewritten vitae are some of the best sources we have for how the
Carolingians adapted older norms and practices for their own purposes.
While they retained and even ampliied models of royal responsibility to
the law, Christian-inlected ethnic identity, episcopal representation, and
ecclesiastical donation – all of which Merovingian hagiography had pro-
moted – the Carolingians restricted the production of new saints, a sign
that they were as wary of hagiography’s power to innovate as they were
appreciative of what it had already accomplished.

Audi e nce and re ce p tion

The Carolingian record prompts the question: how is it possible to gauge
the audience and impact of the vitae in their own day? Most hagiogra-
phers wrote anonymously, and today the manuscript trail of their work is
paltry. Only two Merovingian manuscripts with hagiographical content
still survive: a sixth-century copy of the Passio martyrum Acaunensium,
which Eucherius of Lyon had written in the mid ifth century, and a
copy of the Merovingian Vita Wandregiseli, which survives in a booklet
made around AD 700.16
These two lucky survivals give tantalizing indications that Merovingian
scribes copied hagiography in ways that reinforced and interacted with
the narrative content of their material. Both manuscripts divide up their
texts into narrative chunks that in many cases happen to match the epi-
sodic division in their modern guises, and the copyists of the Wandregisel
libellus also made regular, strategic use of ornamented initials further to
divide and punctuate the text, as a way of marking subtle narrative shifts
within larger scenes or to punctuate material that occurs in the form
of a list or sequence. (Interested readers can ind a full analysis in the
appendix.) These formatting elements may represent aesthetic choices,
or perhaps copies of earlier aesthetic choices, but it is also clear that they
correspond closely to the content of the texts and, in many instances,
the visual and rhetorical elements of the vita interlocked. It is possible
that the elements of design helped guide the processes of reading and
remembering.
16
BNF Ms. Lat. 9550; BNF Ms. Lat. 18315.

10
 Audience and reception
But these are only snippets of sources, and we have to look elsewhere
for more substantial, if indirect, signs of an audience. The prologues are a
good place to start, although the primary goal that hagiographers declare
there – to broadcast a saint’s deeds – have been too narrowly understood
as a function of the cult. Unlike their sixth-century predecessors, espe-
cially Gregory of Tours, whose prodigious output has served as a standard
template for thinking about hagiography, later hagiographers were not
especially concerned with directing more attention and traic to cult
sites. Several of them made a point of saying that physical contact with a
saint’s tomb, or with the secondary relics connected to it, was not neces-
sary for those who wanted the saint’s help. Faith in the powers that God
exercised through a saint was sometimes enough.17 We will also see in
the course of the book that most of the vitae were not even particularly
interested in postmortem miracles.
Some historians have suggested that hagiography was principally a
liturgical literature.18 The vitae may have been repurposed for celebra-
tions of the divine oice or the Mass, but they were not exclusively
written for this context. Landibert of Maastricht’s hagiographer, who
was writing at the tail end of the Merovingian period, is alone among his
peers in suggesting that his work might serve as a yearly commemoration
of his protagonist.19 A handful of other references from sixth- and eighth-
century sources tell us that hagiography was a source of readings for mat-
ins, the Mass, and monastic mealtimes in at least some places in Gaul.20
But the passiones, acta, and gesta to which these texts refer could very well
be the material of older and better-established saints. This was at least
the case for the only extant example of hagiography in a Merovingian
lectionary (a book of readings for liturgical services): the eighth-century
Lectionary of Luxeuil includes a lengthy vita of Julian of Antinopolis
17
Baudonivia, Vita Radegundis 17 (ed. B. Krusch, MGH SS rer. Merov. 2 [Hanover, 1888]); Vita
Geretrudis 5 (ed. B. Krusch, MGH SS rer. Merov. 2 [Hanover, 1888]); Vita Audoini episcopi
Rotomagensis 17 (ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison, MGH SS rer. Merov. 5 [Hanover and Leipzig,
1910]); Virtutes Geretrudis 8 (ed. B. Krusch, MGH SS rer. Merov. 2 [Hanover, 1888]); Vita Wandregiseli
abbatis Fontanellensis 16 (ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison, MGH SS rer. Merov. 5 [Hanover and
Leipzig, 1910]); Vita Boniti episcopi Arverni 13 (ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison, MGH SS rer. Merov.
6 [Hanover and Leipzig, 1913]).
18
M.Van Acker, Ut quique rustici et inlitterati hec audierint intellegant: Hagiographie et communication verti-
cale au temps des Mérovingiens (VIIe–VIIIe siècles) (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 21–49; F. Lifshitz, The Norman
Conquest of Pious Neustria: Historiographic Discourse and Saintly Relics, 684–1090 (Toronto, 1995),
pp. 13–17; Y. Hen, Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul, AD 481–751 (Leiden, 1995), p. 84.
19
Vita Landiberti episcopi Traeiectensis vetustissima 1 (ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison, MGH SS rer.
Merov. 6 [Hanover and Leipzig, 1913]).
20
B. de Gaiier’s early discussion is still a judicious and thorough review of the evidence (‘La lecture
des actes des martyrs dans la prière liturgique en Occident: A propos du passionnaire hispanique’,
Analecta Bollandiana 72 [1954]: 134–66), which M.Van Uytfanghe supplements with hagiographical
material in ‘L’audience de l’hagiographie au VIe siècle en Gaule’, in ‘Scribere sanctorum gesta’: Recueil

11
 Introduction
for matins readings, and another set for Peter and Paul.21 Most liturgical
readings were probably not identical to the full vita. To take an example
from the eucharistic liturgy: the Missale Gothicum, a book of prayers for
the Mass that was assembled around 700, possibly in Autun, combined
elements of the Passio Leudegarii (which had been written only a decade
or two earlier) with the generic praises that it gave to all the celebrated
martyrs in its pages. But the Missal’s use of the vita is selective. As Els
Rose pointed out in her edition of the sacramentary, only the ofering
of the Mass exhibits the direct inluence of the Passio. And although this
prayer quotes the Passio and repeats some of its imagery, it is not a dupli-
cated discourse but rather a reworking of a slim portion of the original
that was appropriate to the occasion.22
The relationship between hagiography and liturgy is better docu-
mented in subsequent centuries, but it can be an unreliable analogy for
the Merovingian context. To take just one example: in the early tenth
century, Stephen of Liège composed or closely supervised an oice for
Landibert, and he took the oldest version of the Vita Landiberti as his start-
ing point.23 First, Stephen expanded some sections of the Vita vetustis-
sima, including Landibert’s childhood and education, his election, and his
temporary exile at the monastery of Stavelot during a political conlict.
Stephen also embellished his version with direct speeches, exclamations,
and blazons of Landibert’s virtues. As a testament to the irst hagiog-
rapher’s narrative craft, however, Stephen retained the most brilliant set
pieces of the Vita vetustissima.24 In general, his treatment does not change

d’études d’hagiographie médiévale ofert à Guy Philippart, ed. E. Renard, M.Trigalet, X. Hermand, and
P. Bertrand, Hagiologia 3 (Turnhout, 2005), pp. 157–77.
21
Le lectionnaire de Luxeuil (Paris, ms lat. 9427), ed. P. Salmon, Latina 7 (Rome, 1944), nos. 18, 63
(pp. 27–57, 181–2). Cf. V. Rafa, ‘Lectiones hagiographicae in liturgia occidentali’, Ephemerides
liturgicae 69 (1955): 25–30 (p. 27).
22
Missale Gothicum e codice Vaticano Reginensi latino 317 editum, ed. E. Rose, CCSL 159D (Turnhout,
2005), pp. 312–16, 512–15 (‘Missa sancti Leudegarii martyris’). Liturgical composers for oices and
masses of the apostles were similarly selective with the apocryphal traditions available to them: E.
Rose, Ritual Memory:The Apocryphal Acts and Liturgical Commemoration in the Early Medieval West, c.
500–1215 (Leiden, 2009), esp. pp. 251–91.
23
Facsimile edition of the oice (readings, antiphons and responsories), Brussels, Bibliothèque
Royale Cod. 14650–59: Lectionarium Sancti Lamberti Leodiensis tempore Stephani paratum (901–920):
Codex Bruxellensis 14650–59, introduced by F. Masai and L. Gilissen, Umbrae codicum occiden-
talium 8 (Amsterdam, 1963), fos. 21r–39r. Krusch and Levison provide an incomplete version of
Stephen’s Vita Landiberti, including the prologue, excerpts of the irst and eighth readings, and
all of the ninth: Stephen of Liège, Vita Landiberti episcopi Traiectensis, partially ed. B. Krusch and
W. Levison, MGH SS rer. Merov. 6 (Hanover and Leipzig, 1913), pp. 385–7 (prologue), 387–92
(oice). For a complete print edition: Stephen of Liège, Vita Landiberti episcopi Traiectensis, PL 132,
cols. 643–60 (Paris, 1853), which unfortunately does not indicate the text’s original division into
readings.
24
V. Landiberti vetustissma (hereafter V. Landiberti) 6; Stephen, V. Landiberti, Lectio 6 (Chapter 2.19–21
in PL). V. Landiberti 14–17; Stephen, V. Landiberti, Lectio 9 (Chapter 3 in PL).

12
 Audience and reception
the shape of the plot but rather swells it with meditative interludes that
break with the bustling pace of the original story. The language, too, is
diferent. Stephen turned the brusque Latin of the Merovingian ori-
ginal into a gently percussive prose, with end rhymes that coincide with
psalm tones or musical cadences.25 For a rising cultural centre, as Liège
was at the time, a polished vita may have better suited its star than the
Vita vetustissima did. Stephen was known for his liturgical and musical
talents, and although he professed respect for the oldest life, Stephen felt
that it did not take full advantage of the structure of the oice, and that
it lacked special musical accompaniment. So in addition to ‘adorning’
(comens) the old text, he appended new antiphons and responsories that
dovetailed neatly with the nine matins readings from his revised vita; and
by braiding these melodies and texts into the evening, night, and early
morning oices (vespers, matins, lauds), he turned the whole feast day
into a coherent programme.26
Merovingian and Carolingian liturgical tastes difered, and so did their
Latin, which is part of the reason why the Vita vetustissima dissatisied
and even embarrassed the sensibilities of Stephen and his colleagues.27
But the deliberation Stephen put to his réécriture also reinforces Ruth
Steiner’s observation that ‘deciding upon texts for lessons [that is, matins
readings] and responsories in the medieval Divine Oice was far from
being a matter of routine’.28 Liturgical repertories were as original as
hagiography was.
Although it is possible, then, that the vitae were read aloud in full to
a general public on feast days, the liturgy was not the site of contact
between the vitae and Merovingian society that interested hagiographers
the most. This is not to suggest that hagiography had no audience out-
side the cloister. Quite the opposite: I am extending a point that Martin
Heinzelmann made decades ago, that elites were a core component of

25
R. Jonsson, Historia: Etudes sur la genèse des oices versiiés (Stockholm, 1968), pp. 141–51.
26
V. Landiberti, prologue. On Stephen and Liège: A. Auda, L’école musicale liègeoise au Xe siècle: Etienne
de Liège (Brussels, 1923), pp. 11–151.
27
‘Nam a quibusdam nobiscum agentibus festum sancti Lantiberti, qui litteraria videbantur sibimet
scientia praeiti, non minimum sumus despectuosis risuum iniuriis lacessiti, quandoquidem prisco-
rum haudquaquam cato eloquio edita legebatur apud nos praefati patris vita et passio atque nulla
propria oiciorum cantabatur modulati’ (‘For when I celebrated the feast of Saint Landibert with
certain persons who seemed to outdo themselves in literary expertise, I was harassed more than a
little by their ofensive and insulting laughter, since the vita and passio that was read in our pres-
ence about that father had in no way been written in the wise speech of the ancients; and there
were no melodies speciic to the feast to sing for the oices’). V. Landiberti, prologue.
28
R. Steiner, ‘Matins Responsories and Cycles of Illustrations of Saints’ Lives’, in Diakonia: Studies
in Honor of Robert T. Meyer, ed. T. Halton and J. P. Williman (Washington, DC, 1986), pp. 317–32
(p. 328).

13
 Introduction
hagiography’s audience and interests.29 These texts were not conined to
the monasteries and dioceses where they were written. As we will see in
Chapter 2, linguists have demonstrated that the Latin would have been
comprehensible to native speakers. But the point about cultic promo-
tion is too narrow, and the idea of pastoral instruction of ‘the public’ too
loose, to explain the kind of audience that the hagiographers imagined.
When we look past the prologues, we will see that the persuasive struc-
ture of the vitae, the substance of their arguments, and in some cases
the similarities of their ideas to those in other sources, suggest that this
was principally, although not exclusively, a literature of and for the rul-
ing classes, who collaborated with each other and with the king. This
qualiies Graus’ view that hagiography was a literature of the people,
der Volk.
It is not only the particular arguments of the vitae that suggest who
their main audience was.The characters suggest it, too.The vitae are fam-
ous for featuring upper-class protagonists who had only recently died.
(That was what attracted Krusch and Levison to the material in the irst
place.) As we will see repeatedly, this hagiographic ensemble was highly
interconnected. The characters bustle between monastery, church, and
court, and they crisscross the vitae as supporting actors in each other’s
lives. For example: Arnulf of Metz, a warrior and then royal advisor to
three successive kings, and the star of the Vita Arnuli, shows up in another
vita as receiving a visit from Germanus, the future abbot of Granval,
whose monastery was founded with the inancial support of Gundoin,
the duke of Alsace. We learn from a third vita that this Gundoin was the
father of Sadalberga, the founding abbess of Laon who was healed in her
childhood by Eustasius, the abbot of Luxeuil. A fourth vita tells us that
Eustasius had succeeded the famous Irish exile, Columbanus, and that
Columbanus had blessed Audoin of Rouen as a child. Audoin, as we
will see, was one of the best connected men in the kingdom and, besides
appearing in his own vita and the Vita Columbani, he also shows up in the
Vita Amandi, which reports that Audoin had been sent by King Dagobert
as an envoy to the itinerant bishop Amand, who fought paganism in what
is present-day Belgium with Jonas of Bobbio. Jonas, inally, had been
commissioned to write the Vita Columbani by his abbot, Bertulf, who

29
Heinzelmann, ‘Neue Aspekte’; see also M. Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours: History and Society in
the Sixth Century (originally published as Gregor von Tours (538–594): ‘Zehn Bücher Geschichte’.
Historiographie und Gesellschaftskonzept im 6. Jahrhundert [Darmstadt, 1994]), trans. C. Carroll
(Cambridge, 2001), pp. 174–7; and A.-M. Helvétius, ‘Hagiographie et formation politique des
aristocrates dans le monde franc (VIIe–VIIIe siècles)’, in Hagiographie, idéologie et politique au Moyen
Age en Occident: Actes du colloque international du Centre d’Etudes supérieures de Civilisation médiévale
de Poitiers, 11–14 septembre 2008, ed. E. Bozóky (Turnhout, 2012), pp. 59–80.

14
 Audience and reception
was a relative of Arnulf of Metz.30 This is just one circular chain in the
social web of hagiographical politics.
The hagiographers themselves were versed in each other’s work.31
The author of the Vita Landiberti, for example, was especially fond of
Audoin of Rouen’s Vita Eligii. Not only had Amand met Audoin in
person; his hagiographer read the Vita Audoini. The author of the Vita
Balthildis knew the stories of other famous queens, including those about
Radegund, only to conclude that Balthild had been the best. Jonas began
the Vita Columbani by praising centuries of other hagiographers and their
work; the Passio Praeiecti repeated a lot of this list and added Jonas to
it! Jonas had other fans, too: the Vita Columbani deeply inluenced the
vitae of Wandregisel of Fontenelle, Sadalberga of Laon, and Germanus of
Granval.32 These textual relationships are only one sign among many we
will see that although the kingdom was somewhat fragmented in terms
of royal and local administrations, it was nevertheless highly intellectually
integrated.
The history of hagiography’s audience and function is important not
just because it helps us better understand and enjoy a well crafted body
of literature. The question is also linked to the history of Christianity in
Merovingian society. My argument that many vitae served as political
discourses more than as saint makers raises three related points about
the place of Christianity in the kingdom. First, the texts’ lack of interest
in the proits of the cult is one indication that the hagiographers who

30
Vita Arnuli 3–4, 16–18 (ed. B. Krusch, MGH SS rer. Merov. 2 [Hanover, 1888]); Bobolenus, Vita
Germani abbatis Grandivallensis, ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison, MGH SS rer. Merov. 5 (Hanover
and Leipzig, 1910), 4 (Arnulf–Germanus), 7 (Germanus–Gundoin); V. Sadalbergae 4 (Gundoin–
Sadalberga–Eustasius); Jonas of Bobbio, Vitae Columbani abbatis discipulorumque eius, ed. B.
Krusch, MGH SS rer. Germ. 37 (Hanover and Leipzig, 1905), 1.30 (Eustasius–Columbanus), 1.26
(Columbanus–Audoin); Vita Amandi episcopi [prima], ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison, MGH SS rer.
Merov. 5 (Hanover and Leipzig, 1910), 17 (Audoin–Amand); V. Columbani, prologue (Amand–
Jonas; Jonas–Bertulf), 2.23 (Bertulf–Arnulf). Many of these connections are studied in detail by Y.
Fox, ‘Columbanian Monasticism and Frankish Aristocracy: Power and Religion in Merovingian
Gaul’ (doctoral thesis, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2012). I thank Yaniv for sharing this
work with me in advance of its publication with Cambridge University Press.
31
Léon van der Essen’s work, though focused on northern Gaul, is still one of the most comprehen-
sive analyses of the proliic intertextual borrowings in Merovingian hagiography. Although many
of the texts he examined were revised or rewritten in subsequent periods, the allusive and con-
versational quality of what was originally Merovingian material still peeks through them. L. van
der Essen, Etude critique et littéraire sur les vitae des saints mérovingiens de l’ancienne Belgique (Louvain,
1907).
32
For the Vita Landiberti’s use of the Vita Eligii see Krusch and Levison’s marginal notes through-
out the text; V. Amandi prima 9; Vita Balthildis 18 (ed. B. Krusch, MGH SS rer. Merov. 2 [Hanover,
1888]); Jonas, V. Columbani 1.1; Passio Praeiecti episcopi et martyris Arverni, ed. B. Krusch and W.
Levison, MGH SS rer. Merov. 5 (Hanover and Leipzig, 1910), prologue. On the Vita Columbani’s
readership, see A. O’Hara, ‘The Vita Columbani in Merovingian Gaul’, Early Medieval Europe 17
(2009): 126–53; and on its circulation outside Gaul, see Wood, ‘The Vita Columbani’, pp. 68–9.

15
 Introduction
wrote about Merovingian protagonists were not in the business of creat-
ing instant icons. Newly minted saints – which an unusually large num-
ber of Merovingian saints were – were not The Saints; if anything they
were initiates, local heroes, ‘low-frequency’ saints on what was a wide
spectrum of sanctity. As we will see in the ifth chapter, the hagiographers
and their readers knew the diference. Hagiography was an opportunity
in itself. The genre allowed writers to scale complex systems of values
and practices down to human size: if all saints were valuable because they
were exemplars, the recently dead illed this representative function all
the more sharply when it came to exemplifying an ideal Merovingian
order. So the familiar concept of an Adelsheilige, of a nobility for whom
sanctity was either homologous with power or used to ‘anchor’ it (in the
words of Friedrich Prinz), is based on a somewhat backward reading of
how the vitae worked.33 Holiness was less an attribute of elite status or
form of self-defence than it was a suggestion about what elite standards
were supposed to be.34 And the arguments for why they ought to be that
way were made with reference to religious tradition but also to contem-
porary social contexts.
To take this a step further – and this is my second point about
Christianity – the idea of hagiography as propaganda is too misleading
to be useful.35 As we will see in the course of this book, the narratives
were propositions pitched to a heterogeneous elite culture. Their ideas
were not a retroactive justiication or ‘cover’ for power that elites already
held. Instead, they were a conversation about what kind of principles of
power and government should be fostered and rewarded. As François
Bougard and Régine Le Jan have pointed out, the study of elites neces-
sarily involves asking how hierarchies are created and reinforced through

33
The classic statements are K. Bosl, ‘Der “Adelsheilige”: Idealtypus und Wirklichkeit, Gesellschaft
und Kultur im merowingischen Bayern des 7. und 8. Jahrhunderts’, in Speculum historiale: Geschichte
im Spiegel von Geschichtsforschung und Geschichtsdeutung, ed. C. Bauer, L. Boehm, and M. Müller
(Munich, 1965), pp. 167–87; and F. Prinz, ‘Heiligenkult und Adelherrschaft im Spiegel merow-
ingischer Hagiographie’, Historische Zeitschrift 204 (1967): 529–44. More recently see R. Le Jan,
‘Aspects anthropologiques de la recherche sur les élites au haut Moyen Age’, in Théorie et pratiques
des élites au haut Moyen Age: Conception, perception et réalisation sociale, ed. F. Bougard, H.-W. Goetz,
and Le Jan (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 66–99 (pp. 70–6), on Christianity as an ideal that ‘servait
aux élites d’une société à légitimer, conserver et reproduire leur position dominante’ (p. 70).
34
For similar approaches see T. F. X. Noble, ‘Secular Sanctity: Forging an Ethos for the Carolingian
Nobility’, in Lay Intellectuals in the Carolingian World, ed. P. Wormald and J. L. Nelson (Cambridge,
2007), pp. 8–36; Berschin, Merowingische Biographie, p. 79; and K. F. Werner, ‘Le rôle de l’aristocratie
dans la christianisation du nord-est de la Gaule’, Revue d’histoire de l’Eglise de France 62 (1975):
45–73.
35
Pace (e.g.) H. Röckelein, ‘L’hagiographie, élement d’une culture des élites?’, in La culture du haut
Moyen Age: Une question d’élites?, ed. F. Bougard, R. Le Jan, and R. McKitterick (Turnhout, 2009),
pp. 187–200, esp. p. 190: ‘La technique culturelle élitaire qu’était l’écriture fut depuis l’antiquité
tardive mise au service de la propagande des saints et de leurs cultes.’

16
 Audience and reception
an unequal distribution and circulation of resources, and then further
secured through cultural codes that motivate and justify those social and
economic practices.36 But Merovingian hagiography also encourages us
to consider culture as even more politically formative than this. The vitae
suggested not only what elites ought to do with the resources they had;
they also redeined what could count as a resource in the irst place. And
in order to redeine what the kingdom valued, the hagiographers had to
involve the ruling class in its own refashioning.
Graus’ fundamental insight therefore still holds: hagiography was an
interactive discourse, not an ideological imposition. Recent work on
hagiographies and varieties of Christianity around the Mediterranean
suggest that the Merovingian material was not unique in this regard.
The martyrologies of the Iranian aristocracy, the miracle accounts of
the Constantinopolitan shrines of Cosmas and Damian, the Carolingian
accounts of relic translations, and even the more polemical works of
Athanasius of Alexandria and John of Ephesus: these were sites of self-
and religious deinition, but their authors necessarily acknowledged, if
only tacitly, their critics and competitors.37 Contestation was part of the
genre’s genetic structure. It was coded into a literature that was born to
rebrand the victims of imperial persecution as heroes.38 The discursive
operation of hagiography is what makes it work as a source for a history
of society and not just of texts; and as I argue in this book, the vitae also
continued to be conversational and lexible even after they were written.
The inluence that hagiography had was generated through an ongoing
interplay between text and reader that the vitae were uniquely crafted
to initiate and sustain. It was a strategic form of composition to be sure,
but it depended upon earning and holding an audience’s attention and
support.

36
F. Bougard and R. Le Jan, ‘Hiérarchie: Le concept et son champ d’application dans les sociétés du
haut Moyen Age’, in Hiérarchie et stratiication sociale dans l’Occident médiéval (400–1100), ed. Bougard,
D. Iogna-Prat, and Le Jan (Turnhout, 2008), pp. 5–19 (pp. 5–7); see also Rosamond McKitterick’s
brief remarks in her introduction to Bougard, Le Jan, and McKitterick, La culture du haut Moyen
Age, pp. 5–9.
37
R. Payne, ‘The Emergence of Martyrs’ Shrines in Late Antique Iran: Conlict, Consensus and
Communal Institutions’; P. Booth, ‘Orthodox and Heretic in the Early Byzantine Cult(s) of Saints
Cosmas and Damian’; G. Heydemann, ‘Relics and Texts: Hagiography and Authority in Ninth-
Century Francia’; P. Wood, ‘Excluded from Power? The Boundaries of Orthodoxy in the Works
of Athanasius and John of Ephesus’. All are in Sarris, Dal Santo, and Booth, An Age of Saints?,
pp. 89–113, 114–28, 187–204, and 62–76 respectively.
38
J. Elsner, ‘Beyond Compare: Pagan Saint and Christian God in Late Antiquity’, Critical Inquiry
35 (2009): 655–83; P. Buc, ‘Martyre et ritualité dans l’Antiquité tardive: Horizons de l’écriture
médiévale des rituels’, Annales: Histoire, Sciences sociales 48 (1997): 63–92; D. Potter, ‘Martyrdom
as Spectacle’, in Theater and Society in the Classical World, ed. R. Scodel (Ann Arbor, MI, 1993),
pp. 53–88.

17
 Introduction
Finally, this book’s reconsideration of why and how hagiography
worked suggests that the history of Christianity is necessarily a history
of culture more broadly: about why the religion took the forms and
meanings that it did. Marc Van Uytfanghe worried that focusing on the
elite audience for hagiography risked overlooking all the aspects of the
literature that are not overtly political or strictly secular. But Martin
Heinzelmann (whose hypothesis Van Uytfanghe was addressing) was
concerned about exactly this problem, and as he has stressed, the risk
runs both ways: no matter which way we cut our categories today, hagi-
ography’s ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ arguments were part of the same social
discourse.39 The redeinition of the rules and goals of Merovingian pol-
itics moved in tandem with the redeinition of Christianity, and the par-
ticular evolution of both calls for explanation. The ruling class turned to
ideas and practices that were identiiably Christian, but the shape of those
ideas and practices, and the value attributed to them, also have a history,
and it is tied to the larger story of the Merovingian kingdom.

H i stori cal method and a the ory of cultural chang e

Hagiography is a viable source for this history because its authors wrote
to persuade their kingdom on the basis of truthful – albeit complicated –
reporting. In one sense, then, my research method is straightforward: I
proceed through close readings of Merovingian hagiography, and I set
them into the context of the broader source base, which includes legal
codes, charters and judgements, wills, histories, letters, epigraphy, litur-
gical texts, and archaeological research. In the ifth chapter, I also consult
Carolingian manuscripts to ask what a vita’s presence in a codex and its
relationship to its companion texts suggest about the continuation of
Merovingian culture in subsequent centuries.
This ‘close reading’ simultaneously involves what the philosopher
Robert Brandom would call de dicto and de re analyses of the material. I
study the explicit preoccupations of the vitae, while at the same time I
situate these concerns in a broader narrative that they were not necessar-
ily interested in or aware of per se. This is a history of hagiography in the
subjective and objective genitive senses – a history through hagiography
and also about it – in which the source is both a window onto a world

39
M. Van Uytfanghe, ‘L’hagiographie et son public à l’époque mérovingienne’, Studia patristica 16
(1985): 54–62 (p. 62); Heinzelmann, ‘Die Rolle der Hagiographie’; M. Heinzelmann, ‘“Adel” und
“societas sanctorum”: Soziale Ordnungen und christliches Weltbild von Augustinus bis zu Gregor
von Tours’, in Nobilitas: Funktion und Repräsentation des Adels in Alteuropa, ed. O. G. Oexle and W.
Paravicini (Göttingen, 1997), pp. 216–56.

18
 Historical method and a theory of cultural change
and a problem in itself.40 This kind of analysis assumes a rationality that
Brandom characterized as ‘inferentialist’, meaning that we can only judge
the logic of others’ premises and conclusions with reference to our own
understanding, and that we focus our study on the basis of what we want
to know.41 The inferentialist model does not suggest that inquiry into
others’ rationales is impossible, but it does presume that the act of inter-
pretation will always be open-ended, or continually subject to revision,
in the image of the hermeneutic circle.42 David d’Avray seems to prefer
Weber’s ‘helical’ view of historical analysis to this circular one, by sug-
gesting that although there is an abundance of rational systems, they all
behave in identical ways: they are rooted in convictions that many parts
of a culture replicate and reinforce, so that an action can be explained as
an instrument toward some end whose value has already been airmed
through the playing-out of culture. This provides considerable stability
to the act of historical analysis, not least because it productively renders
rationalities more transparent and measurable, which therefore makes it
easier to judge whether an outsider’s explanation succeeds or does not.43
But the circularity of interpretation that Brandom proposes serves as
more of a warning that it is impossible thoroughly to explain or resolve
our questions because we inescapably pose them from a restricted vant-
age point.
If we pull back from the philosophical language of rationality, this
concept of understanding is actually very familiar to historians.44 But it is
still worth making its logic explicit. In the case of this study, Brandom’s
historically inlected philosophy ofers two related clariications. First,
expressing historical analysis as both de dicto and de re is an acknow-
ledgement that my conclusions are formulated dialectically. They are not
exactly how hagiographers would have explained their work to their
contemporaries because the questions I ask are mine, not theirs. But the
schema of inferentialist interpretation has a second and extended beneit,
40
R. B. Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality
(Cambridge, MA, 2002), pp. 94–111.
41
Ibid., pp. 6–12, with reference to R. B. Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing,
and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA, 1994); and Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to
Inferentialism (Cambridge, MA, 2000).
42
Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead, esp. pp. 90–118.
43
D. L. d’Avray, Rationalities in History: A Weberian Essay in Comparison (Cambridge, 2010), p. 5.
44
E.g., I. Wood:
[T]he deconstruction of a text involves the construction of a context, and sometimes – indeed,
often in the early Middle Ages – a single source provides the material for both exercises. It is rare
enough that early medieval sources overlap for it to be possible to keep the source to be con-
structed out of the initial construction … Moreover interpretations are open to endless revisions,
as new contexts are perceived and as old ones are rejected or modiied. (‘Jonas, the Merovingians,
and Pope Honorius’, p. 99)

19
 Introduction
which to my mind is more exciting and valuable. It posits the dialogue
of history not just as an efort to square modern and past interests, but
also as an attempt to illuminate unspoken assumptions on both sides. And
I argue that a history both through and of hagiography – a history that
analyses the explicit and implicit reasons why the hagiographers wrote
about the subjects they did, in the forms that they did – can unearth a
new model of cultural and social change.
Recent critics of cultural history and of poststructuralism more gen-
erally have argued that the view of reality as discursive, of experience
as something socially constructed and contingent, is underequipped to
explain how societies change their ideas. The criticism comes from two
directions. On the one hand, the proposition of culture as a semiotic sys-
tem of interwoven practices and understandings – what Pierre Bourdieu
dubbed a habitus or a ‘ield’ – tends to assume that this system constrains
the people within it to interpret their situation in particular ways from
the outset. This leaves little to no room for the individual to act as a
subject. On the other hand, those who view this system instead as an
aggregate of individual acts of meaning-making performed by agents
with purpose and power tend to account insuiciently for how the social
structures that are already in place impact individuals’ resources, attitudes,
and consequently their choices.45 The second set of questions is in many
ways a challenge to the irst, a reaction to the politics of the late twenti-
eth century – the ‘age of fracture’, as Dan Rodgers called it, an age when
both the academy and the world of policy-making intensely emphasized
the individual as the fundamental category in rationality and morality.
One of the virtues of Rodgers’ book is to show that these politics were
irreducible to single parties or platforms, and he highlights the real gains
and losses that both the social and individual orientations ofered.46 The
challenge today is to strike a balance, if one is possible, between a view

45
For criticism of the irst sort see G. Spiegel, introduction to Practicing History: New Directions in
Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn (New York and London, 2005), pp. 1–31. For the second
see especially W. Sewell, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005); but
also J. Banaji,‘Introduction:Themes in Historical Materialism’, in Theory as History: Essays on Modes
of Production and Exploitation (Leiden, 2010), pp. 1–44; d’Avray, Rationalities in History, pp. 94–145;
D. Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value:The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (New York,
2001); J. L. Martin, ‘What Is Field Theory?’, The American Journal of Sociology 109 (2003): 1–49.
There are clear parallels here to current debates in new institutional economics, e.g., A. Greif,
Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade (Cambridge, 2006); and
in sociology, e.g. D. Little, ‘Causal Realism’ (April 7, 2012), Understanding Society: Innovative Thinking
about Social Agency and Structure in a Global World (blog), http://understandingsociety.blogspot.
com/2012/04/causal-realism-and-historical.html, and ‘Levi Martin on Explanation’ (February 27,
2012), http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2012/02/levi-martin-on-explanation.html.
46
D. T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA, 2011).

20
 Historical method and a theory of cultural change
of society as a historical inheritance and society as a dynamic engine of
potentially ininite pieces: what causes culture to change?
We can answer pragmatically and say that a person reads a book or
has a conversation and then applies an idea she got from it to a new sit-
uation. We can also qualify that observation by acknowledging that this
person did not have her pick of all the ideas in the world before she made
her decision, that she was only able to assess the situation through pre-
existing ilters of (say) race, gender, and class, and that her opportunity
to act was itself profoundly or even completely constrained by her posi-
tion within a particular physical and social environment. But we are still
left with a problem that William Sewell diagnosed as the Achilles heel
of history: if our minds and bodies are contained within a given ield of
meaning and action, how is it possible for structural shifts to occur? How
do historians explain changes to the system itself?
Sewell ofers one answer through an analysis of the taking of the
Bastille, which he uses to build a theory of how events act as ‘structural
dislocations’.47 And he is probably correct to argue that only events –
through a volatile mix of semantic lexibility, spatial and social constraints
and leeways, and collective emotion – are capable of causing the rupture
and even dissolution of mega-structures on the scale of the French mon-
archy. But I think that if we turn to the Merovingians (de re), we can also
learn more about how smaller-scale change occurs, and how concep-
tual shifts on an individual level can eventually cause modest changes to
pre-existing social structures, and possibly more drastic transformations
on the level of (for example) the dynasty or patterns of tenurial depend-
ency. The progression from mid-level to macro-level structural change is
not something that I analyse in detail, although I have tried to indicate
when such connections seem especially promising. This book is instead
primarily concerned with the more subtle varieties of social change,
because that is the sort with which hagiography was most involved. I
hope it goes without saying that in ofering a new way to think about
the history of ideas, I am not assuming a natural equivalence between
the early Middle Ages and other periods of history. Compared to most
societies today, books in Gaul were a precious commodity, and literacy
rates were low – although not as low as one might think, and there was
always the possibility that besides reading books out loud, stories could
be retold, too.48 Technologies of communication and learning will difer
47
Sewell, ‘Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille’,
in Logics of History, pp. 225–70.
48
Book costs: R. McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 135–55.
Literacy: R. McKitterick, ‘Women and Literacy in the Early Middle Ages’, in Books, Scribes and
Learning in the Frankish Kingdoms, 6th–9th Centuries (Aldershot, 1994); R. McKitterick, ‘Nuns’

21
 Introduction
in diferent cultures of literacy and documentary production. But the
hagiographers’ attention to questions of culture and change may very
well be worth putting to other histories, too, even though the answers
may difer dramatically.
Merovingian hagiography was a literature highly attentive to the pro-
cess of persuasion at a time when the political and social frameworks of
the kingdom were in an ambitious and experimental phase of devel-
opment. It was the product of and for an elite class that considered the
operation of the written word from several diferent angles. For the hagi-
ographers, and for their society more generally, the form and style of
narrative expression afected the spread and success of the ideas they
communicated. Being precise about the particular techniques and rhet-
oric of representation, while also examining their efects to the extent
that it is possible, can help explain the course of culture, in the same way
that historians look to naval technology (say) to understand how patterns
of commercial activity changed. This is not to ofer up technology as a
deus ex machina as if science were not a socialized operation, but only to
suggest that social and cultural history can be linked to the history of lit-
erature even more intimately than Erich Auerbach had proposed in the
mid twentieth century.
The hagiographers devised three major strategies for making a text
efective, which were tied to a particular understanding of human agency.
In Merovingian psychology – perhaps an overly technical shorthand for
the period’s biological, sociological, and theological understanding of
cognition and action – the active consent of a thinker was the initial
requirement for change, but once accepted into the mind, a text had
a semi-independent life of its own. Ideas could act upon the receptive
thinker as much as the other way around. Guided by this model, hagiog-
raphers built narratives that took an active role in the process of persua-
sion and transformation, which operated on several levels.To break down
what was an integrated process somewhat artiicially: the vitae communi-
cated on a legal-moral level (to convince and legitimize), a memorable-
neurological level (to keep an idea accessible and active in the mind once
accepted), and a representational level (to create an imaginary that capti-
vated). These were simultaneous operations and goals, but I diferentiate

Scriptoria in England and Francia in the Eighth Century’, Francia 19.1 (1989): 1–35; I. Wood,
‘Administration, Law and Culture in Merovingian Gaul’, in The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval
Europe, ed. R. McKitterick (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 63–81. Listening and paraphrase: W. S. van
Egmond, ‘The Audience of Early Medieval Hagiographical Texts: Some Questions Revisited’, in
New Approaches to Medieval Communication, ed. M. Mostert, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy
1 (Turnhout, 1999), pp. 41–67; see further Chapters 1 and 2.

22
 Historical method and a theory of cultural change
and schematize them here to underline how serious these early medieval
authors were about the particular power of language and narrative.
Besides providing a greater degree of speciicity about the medium
of communication, an attention to the mechanisms of hagiography also
suggests a diferent way to think about where new ideas come from and
how they take hold in the ways that they do. The social and cognitive
aspects of persuasion imply that neither a strictly pragmatic nor strictly
structural model of intellectual history will suice to explain why the
Merovingian kingdom changed in the ways that it did. But more than
that, the composition and reception of the vitae makes clear that it was
(and is) hard to delimit one ‘idea’ from another completely. A narrative
was something to accept or reject, but the implications and consequences
of that choice were not entirely knowable. Reading was a partial surren-
dering to the terms of the text and to its presence in the memory.
Writing too was a surrendering. The reuse of Merovingian hagi-
ography in the Carolingian period attests to the multiplicity of possi-
bilities that a single vita contained. As Roland Barthes pointed out in
his analysis of Honoré de Balzac’s Sarrasine, there is no single answer
to a question that a text poses. Does the narrator’s withholding of the
word ‘castrato’ indicate the social stricture upon the character within
the world of the story, or is it pure novelistic artiice meant to build
suspense? When Sarrasine rests against a church column after his irst
encounter with La Zambinella, does this symbolize a regaining of com-
posure, religious refuge, a return to masculinity, or just a pause in the
story? For Barthes, classic iction maintains the ambiguity, and that is
one of its pleasures.49 Hagiographers valued clarity of meaning rather
than ambiguity, but Barthes’ observation about the endlessly layered
quality of a text still applies. The application and consequences of their
narratives, although pointed, were still only partially determinate: to
activate an utterance – to read, to hear, to accept, to repeat – was to
open a door to other uses.
Recent research in cognitive neuroscience suggests that ‘an idea’ is
not a concrete block of information but rather the product of blend-
ing two or more frames of experience and knowledge into a new one.
Observing that there is no milk in the fridge requires combining two
separate inputs – the appearance of the inside of the fridge, and an idea
of a fridge with milk in it – in order to reach this conclusion. A banal
conclusion, sure, but one whose banality disguises the cognitive work
and cultural knowledge (about what is typical) that are required for it to

49
R. Barthes, S/Z (originally published in French as S/Z [Paris, 1970]), trans. R. Miller (New York,
1974), esp. pp. 76–7 (‘And/Or’), 119–20 (lexia 249 and ‘Euphemism’).

23
 Introduction
occur as apparently efortlessly as it does.50 This is a subject I will discuss
more fully in the third chapter, with respect to the more complicated
blending that happens in the vitae. For the moment, though, this insight,
in tandem with the Merovingian material, encourages me to suggest that
rather than necessarily looking for the roots of new ideas and structures
outside the existing social ield, we can also ind signiicant change as the
product of recombination and reuse of what a society already has avail-
able to it. Some of this recombination is the purposeful work of intelli-
gent agents, but some of it is unintentional – thanks to the semi-opaque
work of the memory, and to the cognitive blending that happens every
time diferent frames of reference collide.
The latest work on identities in late antique and early medieval soci-
eties suggests, furthermore, that there were countless cognitive or cul-
tural frames of reference available to choose from, thanks not only to
the constant movements and exchanges that were taking place between
diferent groups across Europe and the Mediterranean, but also to the
variety of parameters at play within every individual, which those inter-
actions multiplied further. As valuable as terms like ‘ield’, ‘habitus’, or
‘structure’ are, they can also latten the possibilities for explaining social
and cultural change in circumstances like these. For example, across the
sea from Gaul, a contemporary of the Merovingians could be a resident
of the Maghreb, but he might also be a soldier, a Byzantine employee,
an Armenian, and a Christian, all at once. Identities, loyalties, and con-
victions were layered. And although we tend to focus on the ones that
rise to the surface at a given moment – say, when the soldier deserts the
Byzantine army and turns to the Umayyads – the other options are still
there and make a diference. In this particular case, as Walter Kaegi has
suggested, the Umayyads did a better job than Byzantium when it came
to accommodating the whole template of experiences and interests that
informed the soldiers’ choices.51
Peter Brown’s analysis of why the meaning and function of wealth
changed in Late Antiquity poses a similar challenge to the cultural con-
cept of a single structurating system or ield. Through the Eye of a Needle
highlights several factors for how and why the late antique conceptual

50
G. Fauconnier and M. Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden
Complexities (New York, 2002). Fauconnier and Turner are not the irst to explain cognitive activ-
ity and blending, and they make generous use of previous research, but they analyse the process
much more intensively and consider its implications and applications expansively.
51
W. E. Kaegi, ‘Seventh-Century Identities: The Case of North Africa’, in Visions of Community in
the Post-Roman World: The West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, 300–1100, ed. W. Pohl, C. Gantner,
and R. Payne (Burlington, VT, 2012), pp. 165–79 – but it is the collection as a whole that proves
this point so forcefully.

24
 Historical method and a theory of cultural change
universe changed. One important reason for the philosophical and
theological transformations within Christianity, Brown suggests, is that
diferent actors brought their own palette of perspectives to bear on the
debate about whether wealth was a hindrance to salvation; and as the
demographics of the Church changed, the questions that were posed
and the answers that were ofered changed, too. Late Roman society
was a diverse population. It included pan-provincial aristocrats of ‘old
money’, imperial bureaucrats of ‘new money’, respectable regional elites
who were threatened by downward mobility, aspirational civic notables,
modestly comfortable mediocres or middling persons, citizens entitled to
annona and admission to the games, unexpectedly hard-up persons oi-
cially provisioned by local churches, tenants protected but also guarded
by local landowners, slaves, and the urban destitute. Brown’s panoramic
‘repopulation’ of late Roman society also plays out on a geographical
scale, too. The social ensembles that we meet in his book take on difer-
ent proiles around the Empire. Milan emerges as a city of professional
transplants. North Africa features as a province of modest resources but
ierce social competition. Gaul is a rich hinterland and highway to Trier.
Each social stratum and each region of the Empire relied on diferent
resources for stability and security. Each had diferent anxieties and vul-
nerabilities that surfaced when political conditions shifted, and this luc-
tuating mix of assets and interests afected how the question of wealth
was handled.
At the same time, Brown suggests that these arguments and changes
were never strictly a function of class interests and regional idiosyncrasy.
The views he canvasses are also generational. Age cohorts were bound
by diferent event horizons. The gravitational pull of certain ideas and
self-explanatory metaphors varied accordingly. Brown takes a cue from
Cliford Geertz to suggest that a certain common sense can hold fast to
a culture and stick with a generation as its ages. But as he also points out,
common sense from a diferent vantage point can look outdated. One
group may hold on tenaciously to a conviction even as other possibilities
start to compete with it.
The sway of common sense also raises another explanation for how
things changed, besides the factors of social and generational perspective.
Imagery moves this history, too: not just visual imagery but any logical
system that is expressed in some powerful shorthand – or as Brown puts
it, as an ‘ego ideal’ or a ‘landscape of the heart’. The right image could
be the diference between any idea that was loating around, and an idea
that was captivating. A new way of articulating or representing a prob-
lem could do as much if not more persuasive work than an extensively
reasoned argument could. A good image could ‘[lay] down a highway in
25
 Introduction
the mind’.52 And highways like this could in turn coalesce into a new
infrastructure of common sense that gradually replaced the old.
Brown ofers a supple sense of how cultural change was caused by
individual eforts that were nevertheless informed and constrained by
signiicant parameters. I would suggest that his book also ofers a new
way of thinking about the history of those structural parameters, too. It
implies that to worry about how a culture can change as if it is calciied
and closed is to miss how much movement constantly lows through it.
Brown’s view of late antique society is not that of a hermetically sealed
system. It is a cascade of partially overlapping ields, each with its own
deined set of priorities and resources. Individuals were not bounded
by a single ield or social group exclusively: that is why the analysis of
status but also of region and age and aesthetics brings so much to bear
on this period, too. The complex aggregation of social horizons in Late
Antiquity and the early Middle Ages is also what led John Haldon and
Hugh Kennedy to suggest that perhaps ‘society’ itself is a misleading term
that can obscure too much if we apply it uncritically.53
The digital humanities are beginning to reveal the extent to which
suggestions like these hold true. The quantitative analysis of what some-
times amounts to millions of texts makes it possible to see that although
we tend to think that change happens deliberately and conspicuously,
it often moves generationally, non-consciously, and even imperceptibly.
An academic community might tell one story about shifts within a dis-
cipline – say, the inluence of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the rise of struc-
turalism – but an algorithm that combs through that discipline’s journals
will snag on other signiicant shifts that are harder to detect because
they do not have obvious representatives or narratives – say, a decline
in Italy’s contributions to PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language
Association.54
The new data that we generate when we apply algorithms to massive
corpora have their own problems, as digital humanists are quick to point
out.The trends that surface can be misleading if they are read uncritically.
But a major of advantage of the ield, as Ben Schmidt has suggested, is that

52
P. Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the
West, 350–550 (Princeton, 2012), pp. 99 (‘landscape of the heart’), 189 (‘ego ideal’), 237 (‘highway
in the mind’).
53
H. Kennedy and J. Haldon, ‘Regional Identities and Military Power: Byzantium and Islam c.
600–750’, in Pohl, Gantner, and Payne, Visions of Community, pp. 317–53 (pp. 327–8).
54
A. Goldstone and T. Underwood, ‘What Can Topic Models of PMLA Teach Us about the History
of Literary Scholarship?’, Journal of Digital Humanities 2.1 (2012), journalofdigitalhumanities.
org/2–1/what-can-topic-models-of-pmla-teach-us-by-ted-underwood-and-andrew-goldstone/.

26
 Historical method and a theory of cultural change
the data it ofers ‘[compel] us to think about historical forces precisely as
dissociated from individual experience’.55 It draws attention to how easy
it is to over-emphasize conspicuous and deliberate decision-making as
the main force at play in a society, not only because it visually renders
data in ways that draw out the presence of social and cultural constraint
with particular clarity, but also because it deploys a source base whose
scope makes it possible to discern other kinds of forces and changes that
we were not necessarily looking for in the irst place. Historians who
want to trace the intellectual impact of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species,
for example, can complicate and enrich their analyses through author
metadata, which suggest that writers who were born around the year
that Origin was published were the ones who used ‘evolution’ more fre-
quently than the generations before and after them.56
It is not that such an insight is only possible through quantitative ana-
lysis. Peter Brown made such an argument for generational diference in
Late Antiquity without a dataset of comparable size. But when historians
work with, as Schmidt puts it, ‘a massive statistical core that wasn’t col-
lected by a state’ – and a core that is not dependent on an individual
researcher’s reading choices, for that matter – they are more likely to
notice trends that occur outside the obvious channels.57 The quantitative
analysis of texts, too, is a project of ‘repopulation’. Although it sidelines
individual stories and experiences in favour of processing a high volume
of data, it makes more apparent how many diferent identities and gen-
eric parameters are at play in a given culture, and how sometimes the
forces that ‘operate orthogonally or antagonistically to human freedom’
(Schmidt again) come from directions we did not expect.58
The presence of so many experiential and semantic orders makes cul-
ture less a question of how ‘structural dislocation’ is even possible, and
more a question of what brings diferent ields to the fore when it comes
to interpreting familiar things like scripture or expenditure or biological
variation in new ways and even coming to some consensus about their

55
B. M. Schmidt, ‘Where Are the Individuals in Data-Driven Narratives?’ (November 14, 2012),
Sapping Attention (blog), http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2012/11/where-are-individuals-
in-data-driven.html; and Schmidt’s example of whaling history, ‘Reading Digital Sources: A Case
Study in Ship’s Logs’ (November 15, 2012), Sapping Attention, http://sappingattention.blogspot.
com/2012/11/reading-digital-sources-case-study-in.html.
56
B. M. Schmidt, ‘Generations vs. Contexts’ (April 1, 2011), and ‘Age Cohort and Vocabulary Use’
(April 11, 2011), both at Sapping Attention, http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2011/04/gen-
erations-vs-contexts.html, and http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2011/04/age-cohort-and-
vocabulary-use.html respectively.
57
B. M. Schmidt, ‘Theory First’, Journal of Digital Humanities 1.1 (2011), journalofdigitalhumanities.
org/1–1/theory-irst-by-ben-schmidt/.
58
Schmidt, ‘Where Are the Individuals in Data-Driven Narratives?’

27
 Introduction
meanings. Maybe ‘structure’ is too sedentary a metaphor for cultural his-
tory. Maybe ideas exist in a world that is shaped by patterns of motion,
something more akin to an ocean current than a skeleton. When quanti-
tative analysis sheds light on particular vectors, it is still up to the cultural
historian to account for them, to explain why the waves rolled the way
they did. Or to lean more heavily on the cognitive science metaphor of
‘blending’, ideas about the world work like an ininite series of stere-
oscopes.They are a composite view or frame drawn from diferent lenses,
and those composite pictures are stacked or paired into a single frame, and
so on. In this metaphor, culture is the process of combination and aggre-
gation of all those data or parameters into some kind of coherent image.
And the analogous task of cultural history is to identify the tendencies of
certain images to remain stable or combine with others, and explain why
those patterns appeared.
To bring this back, after this surfeit of metaphors, to Merovingian
hagiography: the vitae ofer a partial answer to this question by suggest-
ing that some images or ideas acquire stability – or give social practice
a deinite shape – through narrative. If a narrative explains the world in
terms that are both simple and satisfying, only something equally efect-
ive and more persuasive will unseat the perception and conviction it
fosters. My emphasis on narratives as the inluential force here, rather
than on narrators, is deliberate, partly because even narrators as masterful
as the hagiographers cannot control for all the possibilities of motion or
blending that their work might activate, and also because authors too are
constrained by the parameters of narration itself – by genre, to an extent
(hagiographic, heroic, legal, historical, liturgical), but also by the cognitive
and cultural apparatus upon which storytelling relies to communicate.
That is why this is necessarily a history de dicto, and de re. The further
we go in this book, the deeper the irony gets: we have to deprive our-
selves of the cognitive satisfaction of telling a linear historical narrative
about agents and events and causes, but that is precisely what hagiogra-
phy relied on to succeed.
It might seem like a stretch to turn to late Roman society or to the
modern developments that show up in digitized printed materials to
explain how it was possible for Merovingian culture to change, but the
Merovingian kingdom was not a self-contained world, either. It too was
home to overlapping frames of reference. The image on the cover of this
book is a great example of this. It comes from a deluxe set of the Gospels
that was produced at Echternach in the irst generation of the monas-
tery’s foundation, probably after 720 but before 739. The manuscript is
now housed near its birthplace, in the treasury of the cathedral of Trier
(Ms. 134/61).
28
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
she prepared a series of illustrations from ancient history and from the Old
Testament; and was further engaged in the simplification of Roman and
English history for young readers.
The book that has come down to us as representing Mrs. Trimmer’s
work, “The History of the Robins,” is a nature story of no mean value, easy
in narrative and full of appeal for very young persons who are interested in
simple incident. To American readers it is now available in a cut-up state,
for Dr. Edward Everett Hale, in editing it, called the style “stilted” and
diffuse, and thought that its unity could better be preserved by dealing only
with the robins, and not at all with the extraneous doings of the Benson
family.
When the Lambs removed to Enfield in 1827, Thomas Westwood, a boy
of thirteen, lived near them. It was not long before he and Elia were on
intimate terms, and he must have had exceptional merit for Lamb to give
him free entrée to his books. “Lamb,” so he has recorded, “initiated me into
a school of literature which Mrs. Trimmer might not have considered the
most salutary under the circumstances. Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster,
Farquhar, Defoe, Fielding,—these were the pastures in which I delighted to
graze in those early years; and which, in spite of Trimmer, I believe did me
less evil than good.”
An alteration in attitude appears to have been going on in several
directions; the social strata were readjusting themselves. For Hannah More
(1745–1833), it is claimed, stood at the parting of the roadways, where
clergymen and schoolmasters, once frowned upon as quite inferior beings,
now took positions of a higher nature. Had Miss More not thrown herself so
heartily into the moral movement, she might have occupied a much more
important position in English letters than she does. One cannot help feeling
that, by the part she took in the Sunday-school development, she sacrificed
her genius to a cause. In the biographies of these well-intentioned writers
for children and for poor people, it is always satisfactory to linger, wherever
opportunity presents, on the genial aspects of their lives; they are estimated
in criticism so greatly by the weight, or by the lack of weight, of their ideas,
that the human value which existed at the time is often lost sight of.
However dry their preachments, their social lives were warmed by human
intercourse and human service. It is hard to forget such a group as Scott,
Maria and Patty Edgeworth, and others, listening to Patty while she sang
Irish melodies. A similar scene is associated with Sally and Hannah More
when they went to call on Dr. Johnson. He was not at home, and the two,
left together in the autocrat’s sanctum, disported themselves in mock
humour. Hannah approached his great chair, and sat pompously in it, hoping
to catch some of his genius. Can you not hear Johnson’s laughter as he
bluntly told her, when he was informed of the incident, that he rarely sat in
that particular chair?
Mrs. Barbauld was no less clever than Hannah More in the handling of
witty verse; in fact, the latter was ever ready with her gifts in the drawing-
room, and added generously her share to the circle gathered around the
actor, David Garrick. He it was who had sufficient faith in Miss More’s
dramatic ability to present two of her plays. Even at that time she had a
reputation among her associates for being very strict in her religious
observances; for one evening, it being Sunday, and Garrick not averse to
piano-playing, he turned to “Nine,” as he called her, thus indicating that she
was a favoured one among the muses, and told her to leave the room,
promising to call her back when the music was over.
Hannah More’s social work is to be considered from the year (1789) that
Mr. Wilberforce, one of her close friends, discovered the deplorable
conditions existing in the districts around Cheddarcliff. Her long intercourse
with the Garricks, and her various literary endeavours which took form
during 1782 in her “Sacred Dramas” for the young, have no direct bearing
upon her connection with the religious movement which places her in the
general scheme with Robert Raikes and Mrs. Trimmer. Patty More had had,
at an earlier period, large experience in school-teaching, and this was to
prove of inestimable service, for it was with her assistance that Hannah
carried on the work in the Mendip mining districts. The two met with some
opposition, not only from the classes for whom they were specially striving,
but from those who, less broad than themselves, held views regarding the
Sunday-school that placed spirituality above the actual needs of the
poverty-stricken communities. But, throughout, the Mores never swerved
from their set purpose, even though illness overtook them and made the
situation still harder than it was. For they were forced to ride many miles
from their home, at first unknown in the region they had elected to benefit,
a region cursed by ignorance, plagued by license, and wherein assault was a
common incident.
“Miss Wilberforce would have been shocked,” writes Hannah More,
“could she have seen the petty tyrants whose insolence we stroked, the ugly
children we fondled, the pointers and spaniels we caressed, the cider we
commended, and the wine we swallowed.”
A study of the centres established by these sisters, and which gradually
exerted an influence over twenty-eight miles of territory, a distance
traversed in a manner not unlike the journey of the circuit-riders who are to
be met with throughout the mountain districts of the South, would throw
considerable light on English labour conditions as they then existed. The
setting is an isolated wild land, thus described by Miss More:
“Several of the grown-up youths had been tried at the last assizes; three
were the children of a person lately condemned to be hanged; many thieves,
—all ignorant, profane, and vicious beyond belief. Of this banditti, we have
enlisted 170; and when the clergyman, a hard man, who is also the
magistrate, saw these creatures kneeling around us, whom he had seldom
seen but to commit, or punish in some way, he burst into tears.”
The work grew with the months, and mention is soon made of nine
hundred children flocking to a Mendip feast—little ones whose brightest
moments were centred in the regular visits of these ministering ladies.
Miss More’s powers were exerted toward counteracting the ideas being
spread by the French Revolution; both high and low were struggling against
them; they nearly swamped the genius of Wordsworth. Though she rejoiced
in the fall of the Bastille, she deplored the deification of Nature and the
reign of Reason, and vented her sarcasm on the philosophy of Paine. Her
chief alarm was felt for the effect such opinions might have upon the
middle class of England. But, despite her conservatism, Miss More was
regarded as too strong-minded for religious work; the High Church accused
her of too marked an independence. She was advised, much to her own
amusement, to publish a confession of her faith. The discussion which
ensued need not occupy us; it may, perhaps, have infused into her juvenile
tracts a more determined tone, but it did not originally encourage her in
their composition.
This was brought about through a desire to give the children of the poor
districts religious literature as soon as they were able to read. Mrs. Trimmer
was the only author then available, and her books were too expensive for
the masses. The More sisters, therefore, soliciting the interest of the Duke
of Gloucester, brother of George III, began the publication of the tracts,
three a month, containing short talks, ballads, and moral tales. These were
scattered broadcast over the country. The scheme lasted from 1794 to 1797,
when they were forced to discontinue it, for lack of pecuniary backing. But,
during the time, collections of “Repository Tracts” had been brought into
existence, which, for at least a quarter of a century, were to stand
representative of the best kind of reading for the poor.
A long list of books comprises the literary activity of Hannah More,[35]
but it is by such volumes as her “Christian Morals,” “Hints toward Forming
the Character of a Young Princess [Charlotte, Princess of Wales],”
“Practical Piety,” “The Spirit of Prayer,” “Strictures on the Modern System
of Female Education,” and “Thoughts on the Importance of Manners” that
her genuine art is overclouded. In her “Repository Tracts,” she was content
to approach the poor as a class, nor was she willing to allow herself to
forget for an instant that, because of their poverty, they were a type of
inferior being. Her object was to make them content with their lot in life,
and to have them feel comfortable and worthy within their particular
sphere. They were potential with the strength that might place them at the
head of their class, but could not carry them outside of it. An
insurmountable barrier was thought to stretch between the high and low.
“The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain” is considered the most famous of Miss
More’s tracts. They all are redolent with the common moral ideal, but the
local colour in them is real and the glimpses of the poor people, their
homes, customs, beliefs, hopes, and despairs are described with minute
vividness and with much feeling. Whatever brightness they contain is the
sort that is gained by way of contrast,—an ethical resolve to show that
things are not so bad that they may not still be worse. “Father,” says the
little girl, “I wish I was big enough to say grace. I am sure I would say it
heartily to-day; for I was thinking what poor people do who have no salt to
their potatoes.”
The standard is a narrow one; the child who does not go to church is the
bad child; the lack of a new gown fades before the delights over owning a
new Bible. Instead of marking books, as the Edgeworths advised, Miss
More italicised the passages worthy of memorising. Honest toil is the
subject-matter of these stories; the village is the scene of many a vexation.
The gaining of knowledge is only a means toward a better understanding of
the catechism; one’s duty is to learn to read, else the Holy Writ is a closed
subject. There is no aim to carry the children outside of themselves by
means of the highest imagination; they are told how they are to cope with
their own environment, how to remain satisfied with their own station. They
must be rich Christians, but still remain poor people.
Although Walpole retracted some of the harsh censure which he at first
heaped upon Hannah More, he was not far wrong in his condemnation of
her “ill-natured strictures.” The person who does not recognise a tendency,
in all this literature, “to protract the imbecility of childhood,” “to arrest the
understanding instead of advancing it,” “to give forwardness without
strength” has failed to understand the true function of a child’s book—to
afford the nursery a good time, is the way Mr. Lucas expresses it.
Was there not something in this religious one-sidedness to belittle the
true dignity of the spirit?[36] Heaven lies about us in our infancy, and we
find ourselves in a beautiful land of promise; we are placed therein to face
the years; by experience, by training, by guidance along the lines of our
own natures, we are prepared to understand something of the character of
the way we shall have to tread alone. We should be made to face the future,
but not to discount the present. We find ourselves defined by circumstances,
but we need not remain slaves to them. To stigmatise a class in literature is
to stigmatise a reader. Miss More and her contemporaries never questioned
their social attitude—whether it was just or broad or transitory. Full of the
pioneer work which they were doing, they did not recognise the right for
the poor which was already the right for the rich. Juvenile literature was not
for the heart of all youth, but for the benefaction of this one and of that.
And while the educational idea broadened and was to advance with the
scientific spirit on the one hand, on the other, it had narrowed and was
destined for a long, monotonous struggle with the conscious Sunday-school
tale. This character of story was flat and void, and, because removed from
the reality of nature, it was robbed of the inherent spirit of truth. It
identified religion with literary meekness.

IV. The Poets: Watts; Jane and Ann Taylor;

William Blake.
Everything depends on the reality of a poet’s classic character. If
he is a dubious classic, let us sift him; if he is a false classic, let us
explode him. But if he is a real classic, if his work belongs to the
class of the very best (for this is the true and right meaning of the
 word classic, classical), then the great thing for us is to feel and
enjoy his work as deeply as ever we can, and to appreciate the wide
difference between it and all work which has not the same high
character. This is what is salutary, this is what is formative; this is
the great benefit to be got from the study of poetry. Everything
which interferes with it, which hinders it, is injurious.—Matthew
Arnold, in “The Study of Poetry.”
We have progressed sufficiently in our outline to begin showing the links
that bind the past with the present. To dwell upon more writers of the
generation just treated is simply to repeat the same essential characteristics
of the type. These authors all used the medium of prose in their desire to
give young people books suitable to their comprehension. But there were a
few poets who braved the intricacies of verse, and who wrote some very
simple and pleasing lyrics, which have survived the change in spirit, and
form some of the most agreeable pages in our children’s anthologies. It will
be recollected that Mrs. Barbauld feared poetry would not be understood,
and so she wrote her volume of prose pieces which acted as a substitute.
Wordsworth himself could not have demanded a more careful attention to
the simplicity of word selection than that paid by Dr. Isaac Watts (1674–
1748), who, though not first in the field of hymn-writers, for his immediate
predecessor was Bishop Thomas Ken[37] (1637–1711), author of “Morning
and Daily Hymns,” was nevertheless one of the very first consciously to
pen a book of verse for a juvenile public.
Not only was he actively engaged in the interests of education, but,
during his famous thirty-six years’ spent as visitor in the household of Sir
Thomas Abney, of Newington, he crystallised his ideas on education, and
incorporated them in his “The Improvement of the Mind: To which is added
A Discourse on the Education of Children and Youth.”
This treatise may be regarded as a fair example of the pre-Rousseau style
of pedagogy. The child was measured in terms of sectarian standards, it
being assumed that the first step was to impress him with the truth that his
very nature was sinful, and that it could be shrived only by having the mind
centred always upon holy thoughts. The religion of the closet must be held
above every pleasure. Yet Dr. Watts notices that such pleasures are
increasing to an alarming state; that children are rebelling against Puritan
principles. His sternness relents, in so far as he would allow children to play
draughts and chess, and to amuse themselves with games which might
instruct them in the rudiments of grammar and geometry.
Though there are not many who would discountenance his diatribe
against the gaming table, the dangers besetting midnight revellers, and the
freedom which results in immorality, one cannot but view with distrust the
strictures which would turn girls into dowdy creatures and boys into prigs.
The theoretical predecessors of Rousseau’s Émile were the two creations of
Dr. Watts,—Eugenio and Phronissa—his ideal children, combining those
qualities which rob youth of all charm. Theirs must have been wearisome
lives. The boy, we are told, “is an entertaining companion to the gay young
gentlemen, his equals; and yet divines and philosophers take pleasure to
have Eugenio amongst them.” Dr. Watts never deigned to tell us what
requirements Eugenio set for the staid divines, or whether he tried to get
away from them. And Phronissa: she stands before us now, in attitude
betokening detestation of the stage, and we hear her proclaiming the song
and the dance as her meanest pleasures—talents not to be proud of!
Two points are worthy of note in Dr. Watts’s book. Despite his many
limitations which argued for piousness and for the composure of the
youthful spirit; despite his disapproval of all exercise which might turn
one’s thoughts away from the prescribed paths, he was nevertheless a
pleader in the cause of advance. For what he lays down as educational
theory he would have parents hearken to; in his eyes the bringing up of
youth is a sacred duty, involving obligations of a delicate nature. He would
emphasise the responsibility of the Home; he would have parents eager to
see the moral laws obeyed by their children. He would have education
applied equally as well to girls as to boys; in fact, so Dr. Watts confesses, in
tones as though he were making a great concession, the habit of reading is
quite as important to the former as to the latter.
Dark as the days may seem in the lives of those children educated
according to theories and tracts, the lighter recreations must have
brightened moments unrecorded. Even John Locke (1632–1704), in his
“Thoughts on Education” (1693), recommends besides the Psalter and the
New Testament, Æsop and Reynard the Fox, as good food for infant minds.
This was an excellent basis to start upon.
The two small volumes of “Divine Songs, Attempted in Easy Language
for the Use of Children” [editions, New York: Mahlon Day; Cambridge:
1803] which I have examined, bear upon the fly-leaves tales recorded in
uncertain handwriting. The one has, “To ——, a present from his Mamma”;
the other, “—— his Book: If this should be lost and you should fine, Return
to me, for it is mine.”
“You will find here nothing that savours of party,” says the poet in his
foreword. “... As I have endeavoured to sink the language to the level of a
child’s understanding, and yet to keep it, if possible, above contempt, so I
have designed to profit all, if possible, and to offend none.”
Yet the usual theological doctrines reek from every page; there is much
of the tenor of the “New England Primer” in the verses. The wonder is that
with all their atmosphere of brimstone and sulphur, with all their effort to
present to the child grown-up beliefs in simple doses, the poems still retain
a spontaneity, a sweet, quaint simplicity that strike the sympathy, if they do
not entirely appeal to the fancy. “His dreadful Majesty” is more suited to
Milton than to a song; “How doth the little busy bee,” though not yet in
accord with the lyrist’s pure, unfeigned delight in nature, is overtopping in
childish appeal, “The eternal God will not disdain, To hear an infant cry.”
We pit an understanding of childhood’s graces against that old-time theory
of inherited ruin. There has been a revulsion of feeling which tends to bring
the heart much nearer the soul, and to give to the nursery the sanctified love
of good rather than the abiding fear of evil.
There is a picture in Lamb’s “Books for Children” [ed. E. V. Lucas],
showing the ark with the animals in their symmetrically built stalls. The
clouds are rolling over the waters with as much substantial outline as
though they were balls of cotton; there is interest for a child in the close
examination of this graphic art, which is done with that surety as though the
artist had been on the spot. The reproduction was made from Stackhouse’s
Bible, with which Mrs. Trimmer used to amuse her young folks on
Sundays. Your wooden Noah’s Ark, with the sticky animals, was built along
the same lines. Dr. Watts’s poems have been illustrated many times in
similar conventional fashion. One cut in particular represented creation by a
dreadful lion and a marvellous tiger, anatomically wonderful.
Though parts of the Bible have been paraphrased by Dr. Watts as well as
such can ever be done; though ducks and lambs and doves, symbols of
simplicity, take one to the open, there is no breath of clover sweeping across
the page. It is by such a beautiful cradle hymn as “Holy angels guard thy
bed,” which is to be treasured with Martin Luther’s exquisite “Hymn to the
Christ Child,” that this poet deserves to be remembered.
 Always the truest verse, the truest sentiment, the truest regard for
children are detected in that retrospective tone—the eternal note of sadness,
as Matthew Arnold phrases it—in which grown people speak of the realm
of youth lost to them; not the sentimental stooping, not the condescending
superiority,—but a yearning note brought about by the tragedy of growing
up,—a yearning that passeth understanding, and that returns with every
flash of the remembered child you were.
The Taylors of Ongar, the two sisters, Ann (1782–1866) and Jane (1783–
1824), are the poets of the didactic era; they apply to verse the same
characteristics Miss More introduced in her tracts—a sympathetic feeling,
but a false tenderness. They are not doctrinal in their “Original Poems for
Infant Minds,” but are generally and genuinely ethical. Their attitude is
different from that of Watts; they attempt to interpret feelings and
impressions in terms of the child’s own comprehension. But so far were
they ruled by the customary requirements of their time, that they falsely
endowed the juvenile mind with the power of correlating external beauty
with its own virtuous possibilities. The simplicity of Jane’s “The Violet”
and “Thank you, Pretty Cow” is marked by an unnatural discrimination on
the part of the children from whom such sentiments are supposed to flow;
these defects detract from many a delicate verse deserving of better
acquaintance than “Twinkle, twinkle, little star.”
The Taylors wrote together for a number of years; they opened a field of
interest in and kindness to animals; their verse abounds in the beginnings of
a spontaneous love of nature. Their children troop past us, the industrious
boy and the idle boy, the rich and the poor. They are not active children;
their positions are fixed ones of contemplation, of inward communing, not
of participation. Yet the sweet spirit predominates, and the simple words are
not robbed of their purity and strength. However, their desire “to abridge
every poetic freedom and figure” dragged them often into absurdities. This
is the great danger in writing simple verse; unless its excellence is
dominant, it shows its weakness; the outline of lyric beauty must have
perfect symmetry; the slightest falsity in imagery, the slightest departure
from consistency and truth, destroys the whole.[38]
Jane, when she was very small, used to edify her neighbours by
preaching to them; this impulse found expression later in a series of hymns.
Ann also composed religious songs which in quality are superior to those of
her sister. The literary association of the two lasted until 1812, when Ann
was sought in marriage by a Mr. Gilbert; this negotiation was consummated
by letter before they had even met.
A further advance in the art of children’s verse was made when William
Blake (1757–1827) wrote his “Songs of Innocence,” and infused into them
a light spirit of grace and of joy. Strangely, he had difficulty in disposing of
his poems; on this account, he determined to prepare the plates for them
himself. The drawings which resulted proved to be some of his very best art
work. Through his acquaintance with Godwin, he was employed to
illustrate many of the books issuing from Mrs. Godwin’s publishing house,
and it has not yet been fully settled whether or not he made the original
illustrations for the Lambs’ “Tales from Shakespeare.” He was employed to
engrave the plates for Mary Wollstonecraft’s translation of Salzmann’s
“Elements of Morality.”
We detect in Blake’s verses the apt blending of grown-up regard for
childhood, with the ready response of childhood to grown-up love. By his
exuberance, by his fancy, by his simple treatment he set a standard which is
the same that dominates the best of Wordsworth and Christina Rossetti.
Stevenson later carried forward the art, by adding thereto a touch as though
youth, fearful of growing up, knew something of the heavy burden of man’s
estate. Thus does Blake express infant joy:
“I have no name:
I am but two days old.”
What shall I call thee?
“I happy am,
Joy is my name.”
Sweet joy befall thee.
The crystal clearness in such sentiment is born of our adult reverence.
Again he makes the nurse in one of his poems sing:
“Then come home, my children, the sun is going down,
And the dews of night arise;
Come, come, leave off play, and let us away
Till the morning appears in the skies.”
A child appreciates such mellow tones; there is no reaching down; the
picture is distinct, reduced to its truest sentiment. It contains traceries of
action, and fairest hints of beneficent nature. It gives a promise of to-
morrow. There is no herding into the land of sleep. Let us away! Do you not
feel the distinction of dignity in it, rather than “get you to bed”?
In Stevenson’s verse the dominant note is retrospective; he returns to
childhood with his quota of world experience; he slips into the youthful
state, glad of being there once more, yet knowing what it all means to have
to leave it again. Night fears and day joys flow through his lines:
Away down the river,
A hundred miles or more,
Other little children
Shall bring my boats ashore.
There is the preternatural strain of sadness in the make-up of youth; they
like to discover in their elders those same characteristics they possess; they
will creep to the strong arm of him who marvels as they do at the mystery
of silent things. Such a one, even though grown-up, is worth while; he
knows what it is to be in bed in summer with “the birds still hopping on the
grass”; he knows what it is to be a child. Stevenson, the man, becomes the
remembered boy.
The poetry for children that has lived is of that quality which appeals to
the pristine sense of all that is fair and good and beautiful. Tender love,
unfettered joy, protecting gentleness recognise no age; we, who are no
longer young, look through the barred gates and up the gravel road, flanked
by the dense freshness of green. Somewhere we hear the splash of water, far
off we see the intense white of marble. Clinging to the iron bars outside, we
watch the girl and boy, we count their footprints in the sand. They stoop to
pick the violets as we stooped years ago; they look into the basin of clear
water as we looked years ago. And then the path curves out of view. Here is
where our appreciative contemplation of childhood becomes self-conscious;
we cannot see the little ones doing what we did in years gone by. Perhaps
this, perhaps that; we have our first moral doubt. Through the bars we call
to the childhood of our memory; we call it to come back. The poet has but
to sing of what he found beyond that bend when he was young, of the child
he was, who once looked up at him from the clear depths; the boy and girl
will creep down the gravel path again, they will marvel at what is told them
of revolving suns, of the lost childhood, of the flight of birds, and of the
shiver of grass. Let the poet but sing in true notes, making appeal to their
imagery, giving them vigour in exchange for their responsiveness, and
understanding in exchange for their trust; they will return, even to the iron
gate, and take him by the hand. This is what it means to be the laureate of
childhood.

V. Charles and Mary Lamb; The Godwins.

A story is told of Charles Lamb which, in view of actual facts, one must
necessarily disbelieve. It is to the effect that, dining out one evening, he
heard in an adjoining room the noise of many children. With his glass filled,
he rose from his chair and drank the toast, “Here’s to the health of good
King Herod.” Instinctively, those familiar with Elia will recollect his
“Dream Children,” and wonder how any critic could reconcile the two
attitudes. Lamb had an abiding love for young people and a keen
understanding of their natures.
As writers of juvenile literature, Charles (1775–1834) and Mary (1765–
1847) Lamb might never have been known, had it not been for William
Godwin (1756–1836) and his second wife. The two began a publishing
business, in 1805, under the firm name of M. J. Godwin and Company. The
only details that concern us are those which began and ended with the
Lambs and their work. Godwin, himself, under the pseudonym of Baldwin,
turned out literary productions of various kinds. But though, during one
period, there was every sign of a flourishing trade, by 1822 the business
was bankrupt.
The Lambs regarded their writings for children as pot-boilers; letters
from them abound with such confessions. But it was in their natures to treat
their work lovingly; their own personalities entered the text; they drew
generously upon themselves; and so their children’s books are filled with
their own experiences, and are, in many respects, as autobiographical as the
“Essays of Elia.” Mary undertook by far the larger number of the volumes
which are usually accredited to her brother; in fact, wherever the two
collaborated, Lamb occupied a secondary place.
The following list indicates the division of labour:
The King and Queen of Hearts, 1805. Lamb’s first juvenile work.
Tales from Shakespeare, 1807. Lamb wrote to Manning, May 10, 1806: “I
have done ‘Othello’ and ‘Macbeth,’ and mean to do all the tragedies. I
think it will be popular among the little people, besides money.”
Adventures of Ulysses, 1808. “Intended,” as Lamb told Manning, “to be
an introduction to the reading of Telemachus; it is done out of the
‘Odyssey,’ not from the Greek. I would not mislead you; nor yet from
Pope’s ‘Odyssey,’ but from an older translation of one Chapman. The
‘Shakespeare Tales’ suggested doing it.” Lamb’s delight in Chapman was
as unalloyed as that of Keats.
Mrs. Leicester’s School, 1809. Issued anonymously, hence commonly
ascribed to Lamb. The greater part of the work belongs to Mary; it seems
to have been her idea originally. Lamb to Barton, January 23, 1824: “My
Sister’s part in the Leicester School (about two-thirds) was purely her
own; as it was (to the same quantity) in the Shakespeare Tales which bear
my name. I wrote only the Witch Aunt, the First Going to Church, and
the final story about a little Indian Girl in a Ship.”
Poetry for Children, 1809. Lamb claimed about one-third of the book as
his own. Mr. Lucas believes that Mrs. Godwin issued these verses to
compete with the Taylors and Adelaide O’Keeffe.
Prince Dorus or Flattery Put Out of Countenance, 1811. Robinson
wrote: “I this year tried to persuade him [Lamb] to make a new version
of the old Tale of Reynard the Fox. He said he was sure it would not
succeed—sense for humour, said L., is extinct.” “Prince Dorus” was done
instead.
Beauty and the Beast, 1811. Authorship doubtful.

There is something keenly pathetic in noting the brother and sister at

work in the interests of children, hoping to add to their yearly income—
sitting down together and thinking out conceptions for their juvenile poems
and stories. Mary Lamb reveals, by those smaller elements in her prose, a
keener discernment of what a child’s book should be; she is far more
successful than her brother in entering into the spirit of the little lives she
writes about, while Lamb himself is happiest in his touches where he is
handling the literary subjects.[39] But on the whole, Lamb’s style was not
suited to the making of children’s books. We see them, while writing the
Shakespeare Tales, seated at one table, “an old literary Darby and Joan,”
Mary tells Sarah Stoddart, “I taking snuff and he groaning all the while, and
saying he can make nothing of it, which he always says till he has finished,
and then he finds out he has made something of it....”
Mrs. Godwin doubtless conceived her system of advertising direct from
Newbery; in the story of “Emily Barton,” which forms part of “Mrs.
Leicester’s School,” Mary Lamb tells how Emily’s papa ordered the
coachman to drive to the Juvenile Library in Skinner street [No. 41], where
seven books were bought, “and the lady in the shop persuaded him to take
more, but mamma said that was quite enough at present.”
By this, the Lambs indicated a willingness to accord with any business
suggestions which might further the interests of the Godwins; nevertheless,
they were not so bound that they could not act independently. And, in view
of the fact that Lamb disliked Mrs. Godwin, there was a certain
graciousness revealed in the concessions they did make from time to time.
Elia was to discover that Godwin had his eye alert for any unnecessary
element of cruelty which might creep into their books for children. When
the publishers were given the manuscript of “Ulysses,” Godwin wrote a
letter to Lamb, on March 10, 1808, which, with the answer, is worth
quoting, since the attitude is one to be considered by all writers and by all
library custodians.

Dear Lamb:
I address you with all humility, because I know you to be tenax
propositi. Hear me, I entreat you, with patience.
It is strange with what different feelings an author and a
bookseller look at the same manuscript. I know this by experience: I
was an author, I am a bookseller. The author thinks what will
conduce to his honour; the bookseller, what will cause his
commodities to sell.
You, or some other wise man, I have heard to say [it was
Johnson]: It is children that read children’s books, when they are
read, but it is parents that choose them. The critical thought of the
tradesman puts itself therefore into the place of the parent, and what
the parent will condemn.
We live in squeamish days. Amid the beauties of your
manuscript, of which no man can think more highly than I do, what
will the squeamish say to such expressions as these, ‘devoured their
limbs, yet warm and trembling, lapping the blood,’ page 10. Or to
 the giant’s vomit, page 14, or to the minute and shocking description
of the extinguishing the giant’s eye in the page following. You, I
dare say, have no formed plan of excluding the female sex from
among your readers, and I, as a bookseller, must consider that, if
you have, you exclude one half of the human species.
Nothing is more easy than to modify these things if you please,
and nothing, I think, is more indispensable....

The main argument here stated daily confronts the librarian and the
author; it is one so often over-considered, that in its wake it leaves a diluted
literature, mild in expression, faint in impression, weak in situation, and
lacking in colour. There is a certain literary style that, through zealous
regard for refinement, misses the rugged vitality which marks the old-time
story, and which constitutes its chief hold upon life. On the other hand,
children need very little stimulation, provided it is virile, to set them in
active accord; and it is wise for publishers to consider the omissions of
those unnecessary details, situations, or actions, without which the story is
in no way harmed. But to curtail or to dilute the full meaning, to give a part
for the whole, has resulted in producing so many versions of the same tale
or legend as to make the young reader doubt which is the correct one; and
in most cases leave in him no desire to turn to the original source. On your
library shelves, are you to have five or six versions of the same story, issued
by as many rival publishing houses, or are you to discard them all and take
only that one which is nearest the original in spirit and in general
excellence?
Lamb here brushed against the problem of writing for the popular taste.
This is how he met it:

March 11, 1808.

Dear Godwin:
The giant’s vomit was perfectly nauseous, and I am glad you
pointed it out. I have removed the objection. To the other passages I
can find no objection but what you may bring to numberless
passages besides, such as of Scylla snatching up the six men, etc.,—
that is to say, they are lively images of shocking things. If you want
a book which is not occasionally to shock, you should not have
thought of a tale which is so full of anthropophagi and wonders. I
 cannot alter these things without enervating the Book, and I will not
alter them if the penalty should be that you and all the London
booksellers should refuse it. But speaking as author to author, I must
say that I think the terrible in those two passages seems to me so
much to preponderate over the nauseous as to make them rather fine
than disgusting. [Remember, this is spoken by one who in youth
was sensitive and whose feelings are graphically set forth in
“Witches, and Other Night Fears.”]... I only say that I will not
consent to alter such passages, which I know to be some of the best
in the book. As an author, I say to you, an author, Touch not my
work. As to a bookseller I say, Take the work, such as it is, or refuse
it. You are free to refuse it as when we first talked of it. As to a
friend I say, Don’t plague yourself and me with nonsensical
objections. I assure you I will not alter one more word.

Lamb’s critical genius often showed remarkable subtlety in the fine

distinctions drawn between shades of effect which are produced by art. He
established, through his careful analyses, an almost new critical attitude
toward Shakespeare; and, in days when psychology as a study was
unknown, when people witnessed the different phases of emotional life and
judged them before formulæ were invented by which to test them
scientifically, he saw, with rare discrimination, the part that the spiritual
value of literature was to play in the development of culture. He here
weighs in the balance a fine terror with a nauseous scene; such a difference
presupposes a clear insight into the story and a power to arrive at the full
meaning at once; it infers an instinctive knowledge of the whole gamut of
possible effects. Lamb’s plea to Godwin is the plea of the man who would
rather keep a child in the green fields than have him spend his time on
wishy-washy matter.
The whole discussion resolves itself into the question: How much of the
brute element, in which early literature abounds, is to be given to children?
Shall they be made to fear unnecessarily, shall the ugly phases of life be
allowed, simply because they come through the ages stamped as classic?
All due consideration must be paid to the sensitiveness of childhood; but in
what manner? Not by catering to it, not by eliminating the cause from the
story without at the same time seeking to strengthen the inherent weakness
of the child. Dr. Felix Adler[40] would remove from our folk-lore all the
excrescences that denote a false superstition and that create prejudice of any
kind; he would have bad stepmothers taken from the fairy tales, because an
unjust hatred for a class is encouraged; he would prune away whatever is of
no ornamental or ethical value. Assuredly it is best, as Dr. Adler points out,
“to eliminate ... whatever is merely a relic of ancient animism.” Mr.
Howells believes that it is our pedant pride which perpetuates the beast man
in our classics, and it is true that some of our literature has lived in spite of
that characteristic, and not because of it. But who is to point this beast man
out for us, who is to judge whether this or that corrupts, who to eliminate
and who to recreate? The classics would have to be rewritten whenever
there was a shift in moral viewpoint.
A mushroom growth of story-writers, those who “tame” our fairy tales,
who dilute fancy with sentimentalism, and who retell badly what has been
told surpassing well, threatens to choke the flower. It is not the beast man in
classic literature we have to fear so much as the small man of letters,
enthused by the educational idea, who rewrites to order, and does not put
into his text any of the invigorating spirit which marks all truly great
literature. We have always to return to the ultimate goal, to the final court of
appeal. If there is too much brutal strength in a story intended for children,
it had best be read or told to them, rather than place in their hands what is
not literature but the mere husk.
Such a letter as Lamb wrote to Godwin leads us to feel that at times
misgivings seized him as to his own mutilation of Homer and of his much-
beloved Chapman. But such hesitancy is the exception and not the rule to-
day.
As poets for children the Lambs strike their most artificial note; the
verses are forced and written according to prescribed formulæ. There is a
mechanical effort in them to appear youthful, as though before setting to the
task—for so the two called it—a memorandum of childish deeds and
thoughts and expressions had been drawn up, from which each was to
extract inspiration. But inspiration is sorely lacking; to most of the poems
you can apply the stigma of “old maids” children; there is little that is
naturally playful or spontaneously appealing in sentiment. Such lines as
“Crumbs to the Birds” are unaffected and simple, and the paraphrase “On
the Lord’s Prayer” aptly interpretative. But on the whole, the verses are
stilted; the feeling in them comes not from the authors so much as it
indicates how carefully it was thought out by them. We find Lamb making
excuses to Coleridge in June, 1809: “Our little poems are ... humble, but
they have no name. You must read them, remembering they were task-
work; and perhaps you will admire the number of subjects, all of children,
picked out by an old bachelor and an old maid. Many parents would not
have found so many.”
It is this utmost sincerity and such a naïve confession which make
Charles Lamb one of the most lovable figures in English literature.

Bibliographical Note
Lucas, E. V.—Old-Fashioned Tales. Selected by. London, Wells, Gardner,
Darton & Co.; New York, Stokes.
Lucas, E. V.—Forgotten Tales of Long Ago. Selected by. London, Wells,
Gardner, Darton & Co.; New York, Stokes, 1906.
Morley, John—Jean Jacques Rousseau. Macmillan.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques—Émile; or, Treatise on Education. Abridged and
Translated by W. H. Payne. (International Educational Series.) New
York, Appleton, 1893.

De Genlis, Comtesse, As an Educator. Nation, 73:183 (Sept. 5, ’01).

De Genlis, Countess, Memoirs of the. Illustrative of the History of the
18th and 19th Century. Written by herself. (2 vols.) [English translation.]
New York, Wilder & Campbell, 1825.
De Genlis, Comtesse—Théâtre d’Éducation. (5 vols.) Paris, 1825.
De Genlis, Comtesse—Adelaide and Theodore. Letters on Education,—
containing all the principles relative to three different plans of education;
to that of princes, and to those of young persons of both sexes. Translated
from the French. (3 vols.) London, 1788.
Berquin, Arnaud—The Children’s Friend, Being a Selection from the
Works of. Montrose, 1798.
Berquin, Arnaud—L’Ami des Enfants. Paris, 1792.

Edgeworth, Maria—The Parent’s Assistant; or, Stories for Children. (3

vols.)
Edgeworth, Maria, and Richard Lovell—Practical Education. (1st
American ed., 2 vols.) New York, 1801.
Edgeworth, Richard Lovell, Memoirs of. Begun by himself and
concluded by his daughter, Maria Edgeworth. (2 vols.) London, Hunter,
1820.
Hare, Augustus J. C.—Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth. (2 vols.)
London, Arnold, 1894.
Edgeworth, Maria—Tales from. With an Introduction by Austin Dobson.
New York, Stokes, $1.50.
Pancoast, H. S.—Forgotten Patriot. Atlantic, 91:758 (June, ’03).
Ray, A. C.—Philosopher’s Wooing. Book-buyer, 24:287 (May, ’02).
Fyvie, John—Literary Eccentricities. London, Constable, 1906. [Vide p. 35:
The author of “Sandford and Merton.”]
Day, Thomas—Life of. (In the British Poets, Vol. lviii.) [By R. A.
Davenport, Esq.]
Day, Thomas—Sandford and Merton. London, George Routledge & Sons,
3s. 6d.

Barbauld, Anna Letitia—A Legacy for Young Ladies.... By the late Mrs.
B. London, 1826. [Morality leaps from every page, but the book is
agreeably written.]
Barbauld and Aikin—Evenings at Home. London, Routledge, 2s. 6d.
Murch, Jerom—Mrs. Barbauld and Her Contemporaries: Sketches of
Some Eminent Literary and Scientific English Women. London,
Longmans, 1877. [Vide also Memoir and Letters, ed. Grace A. Ellis; also
Memoir by Anna Letitia LeBreton.]
Barbauld, Mrs.—Hymns in Prose. London, Routledge, 2s.
Raikes, Robert—The Man and His Work. Biographical Notes Collected by
Josiah Harris. Unpublished Letters by Robert Raikes. Letters from the
Raikes family. Opinions on Influence of Sunday Schools. (Specially
Contributed.) Ed. J. Henry Harris. Introduction by Dean Farrar, D.D.
Bristol, London. [Illustrated; frontispiece of Raikes.]
Raikes, Robert—Memoir of the Founder of Sunday Schools. [Pamphlet.]
G. Webster. Nottingham, 1873.
Trimmer, Mrs.—Some Account of the Life and Writings of, with original
letters, and meditations and prayers, selected from her Journal. London,
1825.
Trimmer, Mrs. Sarah—The History of the Robins. (Ed. Edward Everett
Hale.) Heath, 1903. [In its day, this book was illustrated by many well-
known artists.]
More, Hannah, Life of. [Famous Women Series.] Charlotte M. Yonge.
Boston, Roberts, 1890.
More, Hannah, Life of, with Notices of her Sisters. Henry Thompson,
M.A. (2 vols.) Philadelphia, Carey and Hart, 1838.
More, Hannah, The Works of. (1st Complete American ed.) Harper, 1852.
[Vide also Memoirs by W. Roberts and Mrs. H. C. Knight; Mrs. Elwood’s
Memoirs of Literary Ladies; Monthly Review, Feb., 1809; April, 1813,
Feb., 1820. Vide London: Nurimo, for publication of many of Miss
More’s, Mrs. Sherwood’s and Jane Taylor’s stories.]

Blake, William, The Lyric Poems of. Ed. John Sampson. Oxford,
Clarendon Press, 1905.