Past Convictions. The Penance of Louis the Pious and the Decline of the Carolingians by Courtney M. Booker (review)

These are heady days for studies of Carolingian kings. After multiple recent biographies of Charlemagne and Louis the German, two books on Louis the Pious appeared: Courtney Booker’s Past Convictions and Mayke de Jong’s The Penitential State (New York, 2009). It is revealing that whereas most studies of other Carolingian kings adopt a biographical approach, both of these books center on one event—that of Louis’s famous enforced penance of 833. Given this common focus, they are surprisingly unlike each other. Whereas de Jong’s follows the political events leading up to 833 in a broadly chronological structure, Booker’s focuses more on competing currents of interpretation of these events and their literary legacy. It is comparatively lighter on context and weighted in favor of their later memory.

Part I, amounting to more than half of the book, deals with the triumph of the “loyalist” reading of the events of 833 in the major narrative sources (treated in chapter 1) and the distorting effect of this success on modern scholarship. Chapter 2 deals with the legacy of these accounts in later medieval writings, along with the sidelining of the version presented in “rebel” texts; it also examines the views of the early-modern editors of these texts. Chapter 3 takes the story through the Enlightenment. Part II then moves away from this master narrative to consider the rebels’ texts on their own terms: Chapter 4 offers a close textual analysis of the arguments of contemporary rebel accounts. Chapter 5 considers later ninth-century texts connected with the deposition of Archbishop Ebbo, the unfortunate scapegoat in the whole affair. Part III fits the rebels’ argument into the context of the new moral standards and priorities established by Louis, and retraces the ideal of (Benedictine) equity as the implicit counterpart to claims regarding Louis’s “iniquity.”

The subtitle is more likely to raise hackles than the actual content of the book would warrant; perhaps “The Penance of Louis the Pious and Medieval and Modern Claims of the Decline of the Carolingians” would have been more accurate. In fact, Booker characterizes 833 not as a pivotal moment in a traditional narrative of Carolingian decline but, less controversially, as part of a “continuum of process and transformation” (p. 10). He also takes issue, however, with more upbeat recent readings: “the current trend to correct this view [of decline] by underscoring Carolingian agency has itself produced a skewed narrative of early-medieval ‘strategists,’ tacticians who proactively maneuvered through their difficult times in accordance with suspiciously modern notions of pragmatism and utility” (pp. 7–8). The pessimism of early-medieval sources, he argues, did not always amount to skillful political positioning: Sometimes they just meant it. One main obstacle to understanding 833 properly has been the presumption of a clever hidden agenda in the rebel bishops’ presentation of their case: This is ascribed both to the success of the loyalist reading (one moral of this book is that we all love Nithard and his Realpolitik too much, leading to an anachronistically cynical view—although some may find this to be a slight caricature both of Nithard and modern research) and to the dramatic “emplotment” lent to these events by both medieval and modern authors, peopling the narrative with heroes and villains, manipulation, revelations, and coups de théâtre.

Perhaps an inevitable downside of focusing on strands of interpretation is that it comes at the cost of some clarity over the sequence of events. As a result, the book does not quite convey the atmosphere of growing moral panic, eventually reaching fever pitch, which is treated so well in de Jong. It does show contemporary anxiety but does not make it entirely clear what it was precisely that rebels were so anxious about: No explicit reference is...