On the limits of the Carolingian renaissance

Abstract

Einhard tells us that Charlemagne had a special liking for ‘those books of St Augustine calledThe City of God’. If only he had told us why. Did Charlemagne demand readings from book 5 on the happy Christian emperors? Or was he, as Ladner suggests, particularly attracted by ‘the idea of a society embracing earth and heaven, a society which a man could join through personal renewal’? If Ladner is right, then, he tells us, we should talk not of a Carolingian renaissance—‘secondary classicising features notwithstanding’—but of a Carolingian reform ‘as just one phase in the unfolding history of the realisation of the Reform idea in Christian history’ and specifically ‘an attempt to recreate the religious culture of the fourth and fifth centuries’. ButisLander right about Charlemagne? I have my doubts: perhaps what he really enjoyed most was book 22’s meaty chapter on the resurrection of the flesh or its rattling good miracle-story.