Religious Horror and Holy War in Viking Age Francia, by Matthew Bryan Gillis

Abstract

The analysis of both religious and political rhetoric has long been a staple of Carolingian studies, often with the salutary benefit of revealing the underlying intentions of major secular and ecclesiastical figures, as well as their conceptions of their audiences. The fortuitously increasing scholarly attention to military matters in the Carolingian era in recent decades has opened up new areas for this type of rhetorical analysis, with concomitant benefits for our understanding of contemporary thinking about warfare and its role in shaping many different aspects of society. Matthew Gillis’s study is a valuable new addition to the rhetorical analysis of later ninth- and early tenth-century Carolingian texts, which shed light on contemporary attitudes and concerns about politics, religion and, above all, warfare against the Northmen. Rather than a traditional monograph, Gillis has organised his study into four distinct essays that nevertheless overlap both in subject matter and in the source materials. Part I considers in detail the language of horror employed by the West Frankish ruler Carloman II (879–884) in a capitulary that he issued at the royal palace of Ver in March 884. The focus of the capitulary, like many of the royal edicts issued by Carolingian kings in West Francia, was the danger posed to the realm by marauding bands of violent men, as well as by magnates, who were driven by lust for power rather than for the good of the res publica. As Gillis makes clear, however, Carloman’s capitulary differs from earlier texts in its use of the rhetoric of horror. Particularly striking is the king’s use of the imagery of Christian soldiers eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the people whom they were supposed to protect. Gillis argues that this imagery was chosen in order to shock Carloman’s audience into an understanding of just how great their sins were, and to make clear that victory against the Northmen, who were a constant danger in this period, was impossible so long as Christians were guilty of the same kinds of atrocities against their own people as were these marauders.