Past Convictions: The Penance of Louis the Pious and the Decline of the Carolingians by Courtney M. Booker, and The Penitential State: Authority and Atonement in the Age of Louis the Pious, 814–840 by Mayke de Jong (review)

REVIEWS 233 tional values attached to church property were generally reinforced. Barthélemy carefully walks through the arguments for the Peace of God and for millennial terror. He suggests that while the attention to the spiritual motives of those who attended peace councils that more recent historians make is an important corrective to nineteenth-century histories of the Peace of God, these same modern historians read their sources too literally. He urges them to be more critical of Rudolfus Glaber and other millennial sources. Dominique Barthélemy’s book carefully inspects the work of historians on the turn of the first millennium from the nineteenth century to the present. He examines and critiques the work of George Duby and Pierre Bonassie, among others, in regard to serfs and knights, and the work of Richard Landes in regard to the Peace of God and millennial fears. In his early chapters, he points to the work of Marc Bloch as a more effective starting point for discussing serfs and servitude than more modern historians. He notes where historians have not read their sources carefully enough or where they have allowed the concerns of the present to impede their understanding of the past. In his last chapter, he enumerates the historians who have changed their views in the last ten years in regard to the feudal revolution. In effect he claims to have won that debate. Whether or not one agrees with Barthélemy’s assertion that, with the exception of a few unconvinced souls, he has won the feudal revolution debate, his insightful critiques make this a valuable book for discussions on methodology and for understanding how the various debates over changes around the year 1000 fit together. RUTH MILLS ROBBINS, History, University of Southern California Courtney M. Booker, Past Convictions: The Penance of Louis the Pious and the Decline of the Carolingians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2009) 420 pp.; Mayke de Jong, The Penitential State: Authority and Atonement in the Age of Louis the Pious, 814-840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009) xv + 317 pp. In 833, Louis the Pious, the Frankish emperor and son of Charlemagne, was involved in two events that completely shaped the memory of his time as emperor as well as the reigns of later Carolingian kings. These two incidents, the massive desertion of his army at Rothfeld in June and his penance at the monastery St-Médard in Soissons in October, have sparked continual interest amongst historians, from the ninth to the twenty-first centuries, who saw the two episodes as the effective end to his imperial rule and the beginning of the decline of the Carolingian dynasty. In 2009, two books have re-evaluated the events at Rothfeld and St-Médard and their place in the historical memory. Mayke de Jong in The Penitential State: Authority and Atonement in the Age of Louis the Pious 814-840 presents a new reading of the ninth-century sources and argues that Louis’ penance was part of a larger Carolingian political culture that was shaped by the awareness of having sinned and needing to atone. In Past Convictions: The Penance of Louis the Pious and the Decline of the Carolingians, Courtney Booker is interested in how these two occurrences of crisis were remembered in Carolingian and modern historiography. REVIEWS 234 Both books strive to reassess the narrative sources holistically and to rehabilitate the last eight years of Louis’ imperial reign, but it is the authors’ divergent approaches and audiences that creates two unique books that both make noteworthy contributions to the fields of Carolingian and early medieval history . Many scholars, when creating their accounts of 833, have plumbed the numerous ninth-century sources—often just pulling out the relevant paragraphs and chapters and ignoring the context of the larger narrative of these writings. For both scholars, this method creates distorted readings of the descriptions and fails to explicate the nuanced meanings created by the Carolingian authors. One of the distortions caused by this use of the sources is the modern assessment about the nature of Louis’ reign after his penance, which was seen as ineffectual . Janet Nelson, in “The last years of Louis the Pious...