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  • Charlemagne: The Formation of a European Identity
  • Hans Hummer
Charlemagne: The Formation of a European Identity. By Rosamond McKitterick (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2008) 478 pp. $80.00 cloth $28.00 paper

In this busy study, McKitterick, who has long emphasized the centrality of the written word in our understanding of early medieval culture, has brought the scholarship of historians, paleographers, and codicologists to bear on the reign of Charlemagne. For McKitterick, the great Frankish king's far-reaching achievement rests chiefly on his reforms, which were responsible, as the subtitle of her book proclaims, for "the formation of a European identity."

The book opens with a detailed examination of the image and career of Charlemagne as portrayed in the biographical and narrative depictions [End Page 131] of contemporaries. Throughout, McKitterick emphasizes the retrospective nature of these accounts and the implications, often occluding, for elucidating the person in his own time and place.

The second chapter examines the beginnings of the Carolingian dynasty—Charlemagne's ascension to sole kingship and his expansion of the realm. Readers are treated here, and elsewhere, to knotty scholarly debates about Carolingian legitimacy, Charlemagne's early rule, and his plans for succession. Charlemagne's wars of expansion are quickly surveyed, but they do not receive the exegesis that they merit in view of the Frankish preoccupation with warfare.

The final three chapters explore Charlemagne's governance of the realm. Chapters three and four examine the royal court and the vexed debates about its location and alleged itinerancy. McKitterick argues against the idea that Charlemagne presided over a primitive administration, forced to rove around an underdeveloped realm in search of food and scarce resources. Rather, a close examination of the documents and their manuscript traditions suggests periods of movement and residence, and a division between the ruler and the court, which might conduct royal business from several fixed places. Charlemagne himself seems to have traveled surprisingly little outside the heart of his realm in the Rhine-Moselle region, with the exception of his foreign campaigns or visits to Rome, which must have required a sophisticated network of communications and officials to disseminate the royal will.

The study culminates with a chapter on the so-called Carolingian Renaissance, Charlemagne's synthesis of a distinctive European culture from Roman, Christian, and Frankish traditions—the most far-reaching of his successes. At this point, McKitterick binds up many of the themes raised in the preceding chapters, as well as in her previous monograph, History and Memory in the Carolingian World (New York, 2004). She brings these themes to bear on Charlemagne's administrative and religious programs, placing them squarely within the context of Carolingian piety, which valued orthodoxy, liturgical and linguistic correctness, ties to the papacy, a veneration of Frankish royal tradition, and fealty to the saints. This concern for correctness was heightened, she argues, as the empire was enlarged, and the Franks came into contact with non-Christian peoples.

McKitterick's study may well combine, and recapitulate, the traditional and recent scholarship on Charlemagne's era a little too much for those seeking an evocative portrait of this pivotal ruler. The study speaks mostly to specialists, but in this capacity, it makes fundamental contributions to ongoing discussions about Charlemagne and the meaning of his reign. [End Page 132]

Hans Hummer
Wayne State University
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