2025/05/20 by Robert Evans · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Medieval Literature and History #Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies #Historical and Religious Studies of Rome
paper · doi:10.1017/stc.2024.30
This article explores how accounts of those living on the periphery of the Carolingian empire were used by authors at the centre as good examples, in order to promote the lessons of religious reform. Scholarship has primarily focused on how early medieval authors elided geographical distance and a lack of moral probity. In many cases, this helped to construct a sense of a geographically bounded Christian people defined by their moral conformity. The cases in this article, however, demonstrate a willingness – especially in the later ninth century – to take lessons from people who were strange and different, and even to use these as critiques of those at the centre who ought to have known better.