Confronting Crisis in the Carolingian Empire: Paschasius Radbertus’ Funeral Oration for Wala of Corbie (review)

Confronting Crisis in the Carolingian Empire presents a welcome new translation of one of the ninth century’s more enigmatic literary texts, the “Funeral Oration for Wala” (Epitaphium Arsenii) by Paschasius Radbertus. Until now, Anglophone Carolingianists have appreciatively consulted the venerable, if sometimes eccentric, translation by Allen Cabaniss, Charlemagne’s Cousins (Syracuse, 1967). Mayke de Jong and Justin Lake offer scholars a new alternative to Cabaniss that manages to be at the same time more consistently legible and more stylistically representative of Paschasius’s original Latinity.

Abbot Wala of Corbie (d. 836) was a cousin and close confidant of Charlemagne, who served that emperor and his imperial successor, Louis the Pious, in sundry roles before being implicated in the two rebellions against Louis that took place in 830 and 833. The Epitaphium represents Paschasius’s attempt to rehabilitate his former abbot’s reputation. De Jong and Lake argue that Paschasius wrote the Epitaphium in two parts at two distinct political moments. The first part, written during the 830s soon after the rebellions, makes a case for Wala’s exemplary life and virtues as a servant of God and empire. The second part, very different from the first, comprises a fiery retrospective of Wala’s final years that Paschasius wrote during the 850s, when he felt freer to speak openly and to pillory Wala’s former detractors and enemies. The full text of the Epitaphium provides, therefore, a unique witness to the troubles of this period, reflecting both the chaos of Louis’s final decade and the sorrowful modes by which Carolingian society later made sense of it.

After a useful biographical index of the Epitaphium’s dramatis personae, a scholarly introduction offers a summary of the text’s narrative, a history of its central figures and events, and a brief overview of relevant research to date. Sections ably analyze the text’s distinctive composition, style, and language within the broader context of the early Carolingian literary corpus—Paschasius chose to write his account as a prose dialogue, and his characters often borrow wholesale from the language of ancient Roman theater. Specialist readers will wish to read the introduction alongside De Jong’s most recent monograph, Epitaph for an Era (Cambridge, 2019), in which she presents her extended research on the text and the historical moment to which it speaks. Of particular interest to Latinists, furthermore, will be De Jong and Lake’s discussion of the Epitaphium’s parallels with Ambrose of Milan’s De excessu fratris sui Satyri, a funeral oration that Ambrose composed in the year 378 on the occasion of his own brother’s death. Connections to this earlier text have gone virtually unnoticed by previous editors and translators of the Epitaphium. Yet Paschasius’s extensive intertextual borrowing (made patent in extensive notes to the body of the translation) proves crucial to De Jong and Lake’s arguments for Paschasius’s planned composition of the two books.

In sum, De Jong and Lake have provided a readable and erudite update and companion to Cabaniss’s earlier work. Carolingian scholars will welcome with open arms both the new translation and the fresh scholarship that it will no doubt facilitate and inspire. Paschasius Radbertus’s literary art is certainly rich enough to sustain further scholarly attention.