A secular shift in Carolingian history writing?

Abstract

This article explores a series of Carolingian historians, writing in the early ninth century, who marginalized the role of God’s agency, in sharp contrast to the pattern established by the Annales Regni Francorum. Where this has been noted before, largely in relation to Einhard’s Vita Karoli, it has been explained either as a clash between lay and monastic ideals or as a by‐product of the classical renewal at the Carolingian court. Examining this process across multiple texts suggests, however, that these historians can be understood as self‐consciously ‘secularizing’ in response to contemporary crises.