King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne, by Janet L. Nelson

Abstract

Jinty Nelson requires no introduction. To write, then, that this book represents the culmination of her career is high praise indeed—and completely warranted. This is not, despite its title, a biography of Charlemagne; rather, it is a biography of Charles, who is neither to be approached in terms of later legends and political (mis)appropriations (these are promptly dispatched: pp. 2–3), nor as a cipher for larger political, cultural or religious projects (though these do come into view, often with startling new perspectives). Rather, Nelson is interested in Charles as a flesh and blood man, echoes of whose voice—and even personhood—can be heard if one listens closely enough. Here, Nelson works with a central paradox: the enduring ‘strangeness’, or even foreignness, of Charles’s world (p. 13) coexists with significant commonalities and shared humanity, a fact that can easily be forgotten at a 1,200-year distance. Charles emerges as an embodied individual, and not solely in relation to his sex drive, a subject that has long been the subject of prurient interest (here contextualised within a more multifaceted approach to Charles’s sexual relationships). We are told, in what Nelson plausibly argues to be a retelling of Charles’s own story, of how he lost his milk tooth (falling into the hole prepared for the translated body of St Germain: pp. 76–8); many years later, we learn about the ‘excruciating toothache’ of Charles’s wife Fastrada (healed at the monastery of St Goar, presumably at the same time as the reconciliation of Charles’s sons (the Young) Charles and Pippin: pp. 270–6, at 274). Charles’s emotions, in so far as they can be accessed, are sensitively reconstructed: we see echoes of Charles’s grief at the death of his infant daughters (pp. 30–31, 133, 203) alongside the ‘pathological vocabulary of anger’ deployed in accounts of the 790s (pp. 322–3).