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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Religious Horror and Holy War in Viking Age Francia by Matthew Bryan Gillis Simon Coupland Religious Horror and Holy War in Viking Age Francia. By Matthew Bryan Gillis. (Budapest: Trivent Publishing. 2021. Pp. 158. €37,00. ISBN: 9786156405197.) This short book analyzes a series of texts from the period 880–920 against the backdrop of the Viking invasions of Continental Europe. It is based on “horror theory,” the notion that some writers use exaggerated rhetoric to elicit horror in their audience in order to provoke a response from them. The author contends that this was a new development in the late ninth century whereby various Carolingian authors used monstrous imagery to intensify dramatically the negative portrayal of Scandinavians, and particularly wayward Franks, found in earlier texts. Gillis takes as his starting point a capitulary of Carloman II from 884, in which Frankish soldiers and magnates are denounced as “flesh-eating, blood-drinking robbers” (p. 35). He goes on to discuss contemporary hymns, sermons, and the poem The Wars of The City of Paris by Abbo of Saint-Germain and highlights similarly graphic imagery within them. This is not therefore a study of events but of the response to them. The book is not interested in establishing what the Frankish nobility or their troops were guilty of, or whether their behavior was any worse than that of their predecessors. Its focus is the way in which they were described. It is an interesting and thought-provoking claim, and although the Annals of St. Vaast are not one of the texts under discussion and are therefore only cited in passing, there is undoubtedly a greater horror rhetoric in them than in the parallel Annals of Fulda, St. Bertin, or Xanten. Sometimes the approach can lead to the unquestioning repetition of contemporary claims: that during the siege of Paris Abbot Ebolus “could skewer seven Danes with a single arrowshaft,” for instance (pp. 79–80). In particular, no consideration is given to the fact that poems (which many of the texts are) do not have the same aims as chronicles, so that the “sword and cudgels” said in a poem to have killed Fulco of Rheims in 900 almost certainly differ from the lances described by Flodoard because of the influence of Matt. 26:47 and 55 (pp. 50, 54). The book performs a valuable service by focusing on a series of texts which are by no means unknown but not often analyzed to this degree (with the possible exception of Abbo’s long poem). Lengthy quotations are helpfully reproduced, translated, and then rephrased, though it would have been good to see a greater critical engagement with both the texts themselves and the secondary literature relating to them. There is no shortage of this, as the extensive footnotes make plain: these alone make the book a very useful resource for those who would take further the ideas set out within its four chapters. In this context it is important not to misunderstand the book’s claims. Contrary to the blurb on the back cover, the author is careful not to claim that the religious horror imagery in these Carolingian texts definitely influenced, still less directly led to, the theology of the Crusades. There is for one thing little evidence that they were widely read: a complete text of Abbo’s poem survives in only one [End Page 795] manuscript, for example. Rather, Gillis shows how these texts foreshadow later medieval developments, and are worth studying in their own right. Moreover, they offer a valuable insight into the mentality of a Frankish populace and especially clergy traumatized by internal strife and Viking invasions. Simon Coupland Fryske Akademy, Leeuwarden Copyright © 2022 The Catholic University of America Press