The Early Middle Ages:

Europes Long Morning

Jennifer R. Davis and Michael McCormick

The long morning: Paul Duttons felicitous phrase captures well the exciting
new vision emerging from ongoing research into the early Middle Ages.
Increasingly scholars recognize here the age when, after the collapse of Rome,
Europe set off in the new directions that led to high medieval and even modern
civilization. From the grandest superstructures to minute details of country
life, early medieval women and men wrought patterns that shaped the next
thousand years of European history.
Not even a generation ago, scholars located around the year 1000 a series
of crucial new directions in the development of European civilization: the
demographic upturn after the late Roman decline, the spread of new agricultural
techniques and productivity, the beginning of medieval trading centers and
circuits, to name only them. All have now been detected closer to 800, or even
700. These apparently precocious developments fit nicely next to those which
have long been recognized as already underway in the early Middle Ages: the rise
of the papacy and the imperial idea, the triumph of coenobitic monasticism on
the Benedictine model, sacralized monarchy, the spread of a new, pan-European
handwriting in the form of Carolingian minuscule, the rebirth of classicizing
Latin, and the diffusion of a Romanizing liturgy and chant. Many features that
distinguished the full flowering of medieval civilization in the eleventh and later
centuries had in fact begun to develop two or three hundred years earlier than
previously perceived. That forces us to rethink the place of the early Middle
Ages in the long-term development of European civilization. Today the early
Middle Ages appear not so much as a dark night after the fall of Rome, but as
a long morning whose creative powers laid down the parameters and future
directions of European economic, cultural and political development. It is to
this new vision, and to the last twenty years of distinguished scholarship in
Europe and North America which have produced it, that we pay tribute with
this books title.
Like the languages still spoken there, modern nation states such as England
and France reach their roots into what had been until then the Roman soil of
Britannia and Gallia. In that long morning of medieval civilization, the great and

The Long Morning of Medieval Europe

permanent linguistic frontier came to distinguish the worlds of Germanic- and

Romance-speakers, not so far from the edge that separated eaters of butter and
of olive oil. It was the monasteries, scribes and ambitious patrons of this age no
other who found, copied and preserved virtually every word we know of the
great world literature of ancient Latin. The telling statistic bears repeating. From
the birth of Latin literature down to 800 AD, even counting every fragment,
only 1800 manuscript books or scraps of books have been preserved. Many,
perhaps most of them were copied in the eighth century. Flush with new-found
or, as Chapter 2 argues, newly extracted wealth, ninth-century scribes in the
Carolingian dominions alone used the skins of countless flocks and herds to
produce another 9000 surviving manuscript books. And that does not include
the works written in the British Isles and Spain. These 9000 books constitute a
cultural monument which, as Chapter 4 observes, is also a biological one. That
we can even think so synoptically owes much to the quiet labors of previous
generations great specialists of early medieval manuscripts.
For the rest of the medieval millennium, power would flow through the
kingdoms, counties and duchies that early medieval people imagined and invented,
often out of the rubble of Rome. So too the religious structures: Benedicts
monasticism, the obsession with Rome and the papacy, the ritual gestures and
the very words performed down to the last century in village churches and
great cathedrals across Europe and the Americas all are creatures of this age.
Alongside the ephemeral trading towns of the dawn of European commerce,
places like Dorestad, Hamwic, Haithabu, Birka and Kaupang, archaeologists are
uncovering others, newly founded or revived, whose names are as familiar as
Dublin, London or Venice. Their open economies were expanding into scarcely
suspected economic circuits that stretched from Scandinavia to beyond Baghdad

See Michael McCormicks Introduction to Part Three in this volume.

A pioneer here was Karl Hauck in his Von einer sptantiken Randkultur zum
karolingischen Europa, FS, 1 (1967): 393. See also Karl Ferdinand Werner, La gense des
duchs en France et en Allemagne, in Nascit dellEuropa ed Europa carolingia: unequazione da
verificare, Settimane, 27 (2 vols, Spoleto, 1981), vol. 1, pp. 175207, as well as the works in the series
Transformation of the Roman World: for example, Hans-Werner Goetz, Jrg Jarnut, Walter Pohl
and Sren Kaschke (eds), Regna and Gentes: The Relationship Between Late Antique and Early Medieval
Peoples and Kingdoms in the Transformation of the Roman World, Transformation of the Roman World,
13 (Leiden, 2003).

See, for example, on Benedictine monasticism: Josef Semmler, Reichsidee und
kirchliche Gesetzgebung, Zeitschrift fr Kirchengeschichte, 71 (1960): 3765, and his numerous
other contributions, cataloged in Mnchtum, Kirche, Herrschaft, 7501000, ed. Dieter R. Bauer et
al. (Sigmaringen, 1998), pp. 33548. On the importance of religion in political life in general,
see Eugen Ewig, Zum christlichen Knigsgedanken im Frhmittelalter, in his Sptantikes und
frnkisches Gallien: Gesammelte Schriften (19521973), Beihefte der Francia, 3 (2 vols, Munich, 1976),
vol. 1, pp. 371, and his numerous other contributions collected therein; on the creation of
ties between empire and papacy, see Peter Classen, Karl der Grosse, das Papsttum und Byzanz:die
Begrndung des karolingischen Kaisertums, Horst Fuhrmann and Claudia Mrtl (eds), Beitrge zur
Geschichte und Quellenkunde des Mittelalters, 9 (Sigmaringen, 1985); on ritual, see the references
in the introduction to Part Four of this volume, note 3.



Introduction. The Early Middle Ages: Europes Long Morning

and laid the groundwork for the global reach of high medieval commerce. As
this volume argues, even the population geography of the modern European
countryside goes back to these centuries. Water mills and heavy swivel plows
were then spreading across the acres reconquered from the retreating forests
and helping to spawn the villages that still structure the landscape. Kings,
the aristocracy and the law too took on lasting new features amidst this ages
complex politics.
Medieval Europes emerging long morning bears little resemblance to
the dim barbaric era, illiterate and closed in on its stagnating self, that once
dominated even medievalists vision. In Europe, this period has proved a
dynamic field of medieval investigation for a few decades, its growth scanned by
the rise of important new journals, such as Frhmittelalterliche Studien (MnsterWestfalen, 1967) or Early Medieval Europe (Harlow, 1992). In North America,
research change has come more slowly. Notwithstanding expert investigators
of early medieval civilization in leading universities, quite literally from coast
to coast, the field sometimes suffers still from a lingering disdain, perhaps
connected with the ever-shrinking territory labeled as Dark Ages, the last
redoubt of an obscurantist myth that once engulfed the entire millennium of
European civilization after the fall of Rome. One reason the label lingers lies
in a misperception that the evidence for the early Middle Ages is so poor as to
hopelessly impoverish the investigation of its civilization. In fact, the quantity

Joachim Henning (ed.), Post-Roman Towns, Trade and Settlement in Europe and Byzantium,
Millennium Studies, 5 (2 vols, Berlin, 2007); Richard Hodges, Dark Age Economics: The Origins of
Towns and Trade A.D. 5001000, 2nd edn (London, 1989); Bjrn Ambrosiani (ed.), Birka Studies,
8 vols to date (Stockholm, 19922003). On the archaeology of towns generally, Martin Biddle,
Approaches to Urban Archaeology (Edinburgh, 1988).

Among fundamental contributions to the debates on the early medieval countryside, see
Adriaan Verhulst, Rural and Urban Aspects of Early Medieval Northwest Europe (Aldershot, 1992),
and Jean-Pierre Devroey, Etudes sur le grand domaine carolingien (Aldershot, 1993), in addition to the
works discussed in Part One of this volume.

Landmark works on early medieval aristocrats and/or royal power include: Gerd
Tellenbach, Knigtum und Stmme in der Werdezeit des deutschen Reiches (Weimar, 1939); Eduard
Hlawitschka, Franken, Alemannen, Bayern und Burgunder in Oberitalien (774962), Forschungen zur
oberrheinischen Landesgeschichte, 8 (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1960); Carlrichard Brhl, Fodrum,
gistum, servitium regis. Studien zu den wirtschaftlichen Grundlagen des Knigtums im Frankenreich und in
den frnkischen Nachfolgestaaten Deutschland, Frankreich und Italien, Klner historische Abhandlungen,
14 (2 vols, Cologne, 1968); Hagen Keller, Adelsherrschaft und stdtische Gesellschaft in Oberitalien,
9.12. Jh., Bibliothek des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Rom, 52 (Tbingen, 1979);
Eckhard Mller-Mertens, Die Reichsstruktur im Spiegel der Herrschaftspraxis Ottos des Grossen (Berlin,
1980); Karl Schmid, Gebetsgedenken und adliges Selbstverstndnis im Mittelalter, ed. Gerd Althoff and
Dieter Geuenich (Sigmaringen, 1983); Michael Borgolte, Geschichte der Grafschaften Alemanniens in
frnkischer Zeit, Vortrge und Forschungen, 31 (Sigmaringen, 1984); Herwig Wolfram, History of
the Goths, trans. Thomas J. Dunlap (Berkeley, 1988); Jean Durliat, Les finances publiques de Diocltien
aux Carolingiens (284889), Beihefte der Francia, 21 (Sigmaringen, 1990); Rgine Le Jan, Famille
et pouvoir dans le monde franc (VIIeXe sicle): essai danthropologie sociale (Paris, 1995), and Patrick
Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1999).

See, for an example of the new vison, Rosamond McKitterick, The Carolingians and the
Written Word (Cambridge, 1989).

The Long Morning of Medieval Europe

of textual evidence available since the nineteenth century is abundant enough

that few if any scholars have read it all. This is not to say that it is evenly
distributed over time and literary genre, or that the writings of early medieval
women and men lack challenges for the linguistic and interpretive skills of the
inexperienced. Over the last few decades, nevertheless, scholars have grown
more ingenious at devising penetrating new questions; more sensitive attention
to our early medieval witnesses mental world has changed how we understand
what they have to say. The level of investigation has deepened, and the probing
grown more acute.10
The reasons behind the new vision are multiple, of course. In part, the very
difficulty of studying this remote civilization has fanned scholars creative fires,
challenging them to invent new ways of squeezing the rich surviving written
record without stretching it. Remarkably, in recent years the volume of written
source materials securely assigned to this age has ballooned. New written
evidence comes from texts long published but misattributed or misdated,
while others have never before seen print. From the fifth century we have new
sermons and letters of St. Augustine; from the Roman, Germanic and Byzantine
culture of North Africa, quite literally hundreds of unnoticed texts have now
been identified; a digital detectives astute flair has even uncovered a hundred
short new texts of the Venerable Bede.11 A hundred or so new documents
from Visigothic Spain, as well as ten thousand new charters have come from
early medieval Catalonia to join the thousands of acts already known from
the Middle Rhine, Bavaria, and St. Gall; from the folios of a famous ancient
manuscript of Virgil hundreds of hitherto unknown glosses have emerged to

On early medieval Latin, see Dag Norberg, Au seuil du Moyen Age: tudes linguistiques,
mtriques et littraires (2 vols, Padua, 197498); Bengt Lfstedt, Ausgewhlte Aufstze zur lateinischen
Sprachgeschichte und Philologie, Walter Berschin (ed.) (Stuttgart,2000).

Walter Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550800) (Princeton, NJ, 1988) led
the way here. Among studies of individual early medieval figures, see Jacques Fontaine, Isidore de
Sville et la culture classique dans lEspagne wisigothique, 2nd edn (3 vols, Paris, 1983); Alain Stoclet, Autour
de Fulrad de Saint-Denis (v. 710784) (Paris, 1993); and Donald A. Bullough, Alcuin: Achievement and
Reputation, Education and Society in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 16 (Leiden, 2004).
10
Peter Godman, Poets and Emperors. Frankish Politics and Carolingian Poetry (Oxford, 1987);
Matthias Becher, Eid und Herrschaft. Untersuchungen zum Herrscherethos Karls des Grossen, Vortrge
und Forschungen, 39 (Sigmaringen, 1993); Martin Heinzelmann, Gregor von Tours (538594): Zehn
Bcher Geschichte: Historiographie und Gesellschaftskonzept im 6. Jahrhundert (Darmstadt, 1994); Patrick
Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton,
NJ, 1994); Guy Halsall (ed.), Humour, History and Politics in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
(Cambridge, 2002); and Ian Wood, Misremembering the Burgundians, in Walter Pohl (ed.),
Die Suche nach den Ursprngen:von der Bedeutung des frhen Mittelalters, sterreichische Akademie
der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse, Denkschriften, 322 (Vienna, 2004),
pp. 13948.
11
Augustine, Vingt-six sermons au peuple dAfrique, ed. Franois Dolbeau (Paris, 1996);
Augustine, Lettres 129: nouvelle dition du texte critique, ed. Johannes Divjak (Paris, 1987); for
newly identified North African texts, see Leslie Dossey, Christians and Romans:Aspiration,
Assimilation, and Conflict in the North African Countryside (unpublished Ph.D thesis, Harvard
University, 1998), pp. 36678; for Bede see Paul Meyvaert, Bedes Capitula lectionum for the Old
and New Testaments, Revue bndictine, 105 (1995): 34880.

Introduction. The Early Middle Ages: Europes Long Morning

document the Carolingian reception of the ancient epic.12 Systematic scrutiny

of ancient archives has even turned up new capitularies of Charlemagne, and
finally produced a reliable edition of the royal charters of the Merovingians.13
The list goes on, but the point should be clear. And this is but the beginning
of the revolution worked by the passage from paper and ink to digital format,
whose barely broached analytical capacities are already transforming our
knowledge, including for so big and so traditional a set of sources as the lives
of the saints, as Chapter 6 will show.
However, even hundreds of new texts seem like small potatoes next to
the extraordinary avalanche of new data from the soil and the sea. Medieval
archaeology is today, first and foremost, early medieval archaeology. Since the
path-breaking synthesis of Hodges and Whitehouse in 1983, historians have
been on notice that a whole new world of early medieval material remains
pots, fences, forts, pollens, iron tools and slave collars, ships and the early
medieval Europeans themselves is opening up thickly documented new paths
where before we saw only trackless deserts.14 So abundant are the materials that
only computers can keep track of them. Nor do they merely add to the written
sources. Once we analyze, classify, and understand the new material data, the
inevitable result is to challenge the marvelous written sources bequeathed to
us by early medieval men and women. Todays historians have only begun to
wrestle with the fact that the emergence of a whole new window on medieval
realities will force them back to the texts, to test and sometimes strip from
them interpretations accumulated over the last two centuries. In the light of
archaeological results, the texts must be reanalyzed, and our conventional
wisdom, rewritten. That process is already underway among early medievalists,
as numerous chapters in Parts One, Three and Five of this volume show.15 Yet
the discovery of new fields must not come at the expense of our tried and
12
Isabel Velzquez-Soriano (ed.), Documentos de poca visigoda escritos en pizarra, siglos VIVIII,
Monumenta palaeographica Medii Aevi, Series Hispanica (2 vols, Turnhout, 2000); Michael
McCormick, Five Hundred Unknown Glosses from the Palatine Virgil, Studi e testi, 343 (Vatican City,
1992); Pierre Bonnassie and Jordi Fernndez-Cuadrench, Les documents catalans des IXe-XIIe
sicles: ditions rcentes et publications en cours, Le Moyen Age, 105 (1999): 14953.
13
Hubert Mordek, Unbekannte Texte zur karolingischen Gesetzgebung, Deutsches
Archiv, 42 (1986): 44670; Hubert Mordek and Gerhard Schmitz, Neue Kapitularien und
Kapitulariensammlungen, Deutsches Archiv, 43 (1987): 361439; Die Urkunden der Merowinger, ed.
Theo Klzer, Martina Hartmann and Andrea Stieldorf, MGH Diplomata regum Francorum e stirpe
Merovingica (2 vols, Hanover, 2001), and Klzers articles: Theo Klzer, Merowingerstudien, MGH
Studien und Texte, 21 and 26 (2 vols, Hanover, 199899).
14
Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe:
Archaeology and the Pirenne Thesis (London, 1983), which should be used in the extensively revised
French edition: Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse, Mahomet, Charlemagne et les origines de
lEurope, trans. and ed. Ccile Morrisson, Jacques Lefort and Jean-Pierre Sodini (Paris, 1996).
15
In addition to which, see, for example, Patrick Prin, The Origin of the Village in Early
Medieval Gaul, in Neil Christie (ed.), Landscapes of Change: Rural Evolutions in Late Antiquity and the
Early Middle Ages (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 25578; Heiko Steuer, berlegungen zum Stadtbegriff
aus der Sicht der Archologie des Mittelalters, in Peter Johanek and Franz-Joseph Post (eds),
Vielerlei Stdte. Der Stadtbegriff (Cologne, 2004), pp. 3151.

The Long Morning of Medieval Europe

true methods of close reading of the sources, as the chapters of Part Three
indicate.
When were the early Middle Ages? Few would contest that they began with
the fall of Rome. But when was that? And where in space, and in the logic
of systems? Economic, mental, social, biological, or political systems need
not evolve in linear lockstep, much though we may suspect or impute dim
webs among them. In space the chronology of collapse varies by regions, and
by the markers that we accept as signifying the end of Roman civilization.16
Religion, for instance, was undeniably central to early medieval civilization, so
the triumph of Christianity might urge an early date even in the Mediterranean,
perhaps around 400.17 For political structures, the end of direct Roman political
authority militates for various moments in the fifth century in the northwestern
provinces of the Roman Empire, in Italy and North Africa. For the rest of
the imperial provinces, the period from about the mid-sixth to mid-seventh
century was decisive, as the Roman empire continued to be amputated into
the Byzantine, to paraphrase Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, a tenth-century
eastern heir of Augustus and Constantine the Great.18 From the point of
view of economic structures, the answer varies also according to geography
and sector of the economy.19 The modern nucleated settlements that replaced
Romes dispersed rural settlement began at a time which is controversial,
but falls within our period. Western Mediterranean long-distance trade and
shipping witnessed a first, sharp contraction in volume in the fifth century.
When the final spasms constricted there around 700, the eastern Mediterranean
was not far behind, however much some low level of ecologically conditioned
connectivity persisted.20 In sum, the fifth or sixth centuries are good starting
points for todays early Middle Ages in most of western Europe.
When did they end? The easy answer is 1000, or at least the eleventh century.
By then towns were growing smartly, new forms of art and culture were afoot,
and feudalism was triumphing as a political and social force.21 Our chapters
16
Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford, 2005); Alexander
Demandt, Die Sptantike. Rmische Geschichte von Diocletian bis Justinian, 285565 n. Chr. (Munich,
1989).
17
The debate over magic in the early medieval world is relevant here: Peter Brown,
Society and the Supernatural, in his Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, CA, 1982),
pp. 30232; Valerie I.J. Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton, NJ, 1991);
Alexander Murray, Missionaries and Magic in Dark-Age Europe, Past and Present, 136 (1992):
186205.
18
De administrando imperio 21.1, ed. Gyula Moravcsik and trans. Romilly J.H. Jenkins, Corpus
fontium historiae Byzantinae, 1, 2nd edn (Washington, DC, 1967), p. 86.314.
19
See Chapters 1 and 5 in this volume.
20
Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea. A Study of Mediterranean
History (Oxford, 2000).
21
On the debated political transformations of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, see
Thomas Bisson, The Feudal Revolution, Past and Present, 142 (1994): 642; with responses of
Dominique Barthlemy and Stephen D. White, Past and Present, 152 (1996): 196205 and 205
23, respectively; responses of Timothy Reuter and Chris Wickham, Past and Present, 155 (1997):
17795 and 196208, respectively, and Bissons reply, pp. 20825.

Introduction. The Early Middle Ages: Europes Long Morning

in fact fall within the broad framework of the period from 400 to 1000, but
reach back to the early days of Roman economic structures and forward to the
religious transformations of the later Middle Ages. Echoing slow transformation
and abrupt change, the studies in this book include close readings of particular
moments such as Charlemagnes empire or King Wambas triumph, as well as
analyses of gradual shifts underlying economic systems or the perception of
weather.
So dynamic a field of investigation defies the compass of one volume. As
Patrick Geary observed, research into the early Middle Ages has today grown
so prolific that a comprehensive overview would require a multi-volume text
authored by an army of early medievalists; they would have to specialize in
everything from architecture to zooarchaeology. We chose to illustrate, very
selectively, rather than attempt an encyclopaedia. The papers focus on part of
western Europe, knowing full well that they leave largely untouched vast and
dynamic areas of Europe whose transformations owed and brought so much to
early medieval civilization: England, the Celtic fringe, Scandinavia, the emergent
Slavlands.22 The Islamic and Byzantine frontiers too were important in this age,
and fertile work is under way on early medieval Iberia.23 Rather, moreover, than
impose an exclusive vision on a vibrant field whose very dynamism authors
its complexity, we chose to approach a number of accomplished practitioners.
We asked them to come to Harvard to discuss what they found most exciting
and promising from their varied disciplinary perspectives. Those who could
come proposed questions and issues that were wonderful in their variety. We
22
The essays in Lars Jrgensen, Birgir Storgaard and Lone Gebauer Thomsen (eds),
Sieg und Triumpf. Der Norden im Schatten des rmischen Reiches (Copenhagen, 2003), conveniently
introduce the emergence of pre-Viking Age Scandinavia; for an admirable synthesis of one
aspect of Viking Age civilization, see Jesse L. Byock, Viking Age Iceland (London, 2001). In the
Slavlands, archaeology is fundamental: see Joachim Henning and Alexander T. Ruttkay (eds),
Frhmittelalterlicher Burgenbau in Mittel- und Osteuropa (Bonn, 1998); Przemysaw Urbaczyk (ed.),
Origins of Central Europe (Warsaw, 1997), surveys in English recent work; for Poland, see Andrzej
Buko, Archeologia Polski wczesnoredniowiecznej. Odkrycia, hipotezy, interpretacje (Warsaw, 2005).
Important recent work on Anglo-Saxon England includes Nicholas Brooks, Anglo-Saxon Myths:
State and Church, 4001066 (London, 2000); James Campbell, The Anglo-Saxon State (London,
2000); Michael Lapidge, Anglo-Latin Literature, 600899 (London, 1996). On the Celtic world, see,
for example, Wendy Davies, Small Worlds: The Village Community in Early Medieval Brittany (London,
1988); Prinsas N Chathin and Michael Richter (eds), Ireland and Europe in the Early Middle
Ages:Texts and Transmission (Dublin, 2002), and the overview in Donnchadh Corrin, Ireland,
Scotland and Wales, c. 700 to the Early Eleventh Century, in NCMH, pp. 4363.
23
On these frontiers, see, for example, Philippe Snac, La frontire et les hommes (VIIeXIIe
sicle): le peuplement musulman au nord de lEbre et les dbuts de la reconqute aragonaise (Paris, 2000), and
Michael McCormick, The Imperial Edge: Italo-Byzantine Identity, Movement and Integration,
A.D. 650950, in Hlne Ahrweiler and Angeliki E. Laiou (eds), Studies on the Internal Diaspora
of the Byzantine Empire (Washington, DC, 1998), pp. 1752. For work on early medieval Iberia
beyond the frontier, in addition to Chapter 10 in this volume, see, for example, Kimberly Diane
Bowes and Michael Kulikowski (eds), Hispania in Late Antiquity: Current Perspectives (Leiden, 2005),
and for archaeology, for example, the contributions collected in Josep Mara Gurt Esparraguera
and Nria Tena (eds), V Reuni darqueologia cristiana hispnica: Cartagena, 1619 dabril de 1998
(Barcelona, 2000).

The Long Morning of Medieval Europe

were surprised at some of the themes that turned up, such as the weather, and
at others that came up only rarely, for instance, gender.24 Even so, the volume
offers a broad sampling of some of the most exciting new directions of early
medieval research, including by authors who rarely publish in English. And,
still more satisfying, across papers, comments and lengthy open discussions,
a remarkable synergy emerged among participants, many of whom had never
before met.
The result is this book, a sampling of some very new ways that people are
thinking about five great themes in early medieval studies. They form the five
parts of this book: Discovering the Early Medieval Economy, Sounding
Early Medieval Holiness, Representation and Reality in the Artistry of Early
Medieval Literature, Practices of Power in an Early Medieval Empire and
The Intellectuality of Early Medieval Art. Michael McCormick introduces
each part with a brief essay indicating the broad lines of how research into
each theme has developed to date, and where the papers are pointing future
investigation. Accompanying essays conclude each part, highlighting and
complementing the new approaches and the new questions raised by each
thematic strand.
Part One, Discovering the Early Medieval Economy, presents new
interpretations, new tools, and new data about the production and distribution
of wealth. Chris Wickham brings fundamental concepts of modern economics
to bear on early medieval realities. His new view of the early medieval economy
sketches its broad logic and organization across regional variation. Joachim
Henning turns the old historical questions about why empires fail into new ones
by using archaeology and texts to compare the nature of the production and
distribution of wealth in the late Roman and early medieval countrysides. Slave
labor, the much-touted great estate, technology, and economic performance
fuel this essay in archaeological synthesis. Drawing on decades of excavation
and field survey, Riccardo Francovich confronts the results with documentary
records. The patterns that emerge challenge the conventional wisdom about
how, and especially, when villages developed in early medieval Italy, and it is
earlier than historians have hitherto supposed. New tools are essential for
Michael McCormicks recent investigations. Biomolecular archaeology opens up
questions previously inconceivable outside of science fiction, from the sexual
relations of the Anglo-Saxon invaders to the paths of the pathogens that struck
the early medieval world, and the reader will find here a humanist-friendly
introduction to the main methods and results of this entirely new approach to
24
A lively field in early medieval studies since the foundational work of Suzanne Fonay
Wemple, Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister 500900 (Philadelphia, PA, 1981). See
also Julia M.H. Smith, The Problem of Female Sanctity in Carolingian Europe c. 780920, Past
and Present, 146 (1995): 337; Janet L. Nelson, Women at the Court of Charlemagne: A Case of
Monstrous Regiment?, in her The Frankish World, 750900 (London, 1996), pp. 22342, and the
essays collected in Leslie Brubaker and Julia M.H. Smith (eds), Gender in the Early Medieval World:
East and West, 300900 (Cambridge, 2004). See also Chapter 8 in this volume on the importance
of gender as a category of analysis.

Introduction. The Early Middle Ages: Europes Long Morning

the early medieval economy. What the new interpretations, new data, and new
tools mean for our understanding of the economy as a whole becomes clearer
when examined by Angeliki Laiou in the comparative light of Byzantium.
Part Two, Sounding Early Medieval Holiness, plumbs two different
perspectives on early medieval piety. Guy Philippart and Michel Trigalet use
their massive database of the manuscripts that preserved medieval hagiography
to detect broad new patterns in the copying and composing of the literature
of the saints in the early Middle Ages. The mental underpinnings of religious
offerings of real property in the early Middle Ages, and beyond, emerge from
Arnold Angenendts analysis of the long-term cultural trajectories that shaped
this fundamental component of medieval religion, culture, and economy.
Thomas Head deepens both perspectives by drawing in recent English-language
research into hagiography and the anthropology of real property transactions in
the early Middle Ages.
In Part Three, Representation and Reality in the Artistry of Early Medieval
Literature, literary approaches balance traditional strengths with new methods,
as they take early medieval literary works with the seriousness they deserve.
Heated debates over global warming have gotten Paul Edward Dutton thinking
about discussions of the weather in early medieval literature. The responses of
medieval men and women to weather illuminate their fears and joys, helping us
to see their reality through its literary representation. Joaqun Martnez Pizarro
trains the tools of literary criticism on an ambitious writers depiction of betrayal
and confrontation in the high literary art of seventh-century Spain. He spotlights
the sophistication with which early medieval writers manipulated and thereby
developed literary conventions inherited from late antiquity. Combining literary
criticism and philology with the archaeology of weapon finds and manuscript
illumination allows Jan Ziolkowski to illuminate the Latin verse epic Waltharius
and clarify the compositional tactics behind an early medieval adventure poem,
while Danuta Shanzers erudite commentary on these papers throws into relief
the classical and biblical background which continued to inform the literary art
of the early Middle Ages.
Part Four, Practices of Power in an Early Medieval Empire, highlights
new directions in the study of the Carolingians. As Janet Nelson observes,
connections and communication are crucial to understanding Charlemagnes
ungainly empire. Hostages shepherded across the landscape, oaths sworn by
all, and the kings multiple intrusions into the localities of the Carolingian
realm tied together the far-flung regionalisms of the Frankish empire. Rather
than bemoan the irregularity of the evidence for governance, Jennifer Davis
searches out underlying patterns of political response in Charlemagnes politics
and approach to ruling. They reveal new details of how Charlemagne and his
advisers actually exercised power and they sketch a new method for evaluating
fragmented political evidence. The complex ways in which early medieval
women and men used property to save their souls and to act out their familial
and political ambitions form the theme of Matthew Innes study. As Stuart

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The Long Morning of Medieval Europe

Airlie insists, future work will reach beyond uncovering new patterns in the
evidence, old and new, to link such patterns to broader changes over time.
Finally, Part Five, The Intellectuality of Early Medieval Art, studies from
three different angles this most striking aspect of the artistic creation of the
early Middle Ages. Todays early medievalists are an interdisciplinary lot, and
so it is not untypical that historian Mayke de Jong takes us on a novel tour of
Carolingian architecture. She explores the meaning in ninth-century palaces of
an expression for an architectural feature borrowed from the Bible. How early
medieval artists grappled with the fundamental issue of the nature of God and
its implications for visual art attracts Herbert Kessler. Early medieval artists
manipulated color and techniques of representation in their quest to depict the
divine in a powerfully evocative yet theologically respectful manner. As Thomas
Noble observes, seeing was never simply a visual phenomenon; his concluding
essay once again underscores the deeply intellectual underpinnings of early
medieval peoples thinking about the art and architecture they created.
In the long morning of the early Middle Ages, the peoples of western
Europe rebuilt their societies on the surprisingly sturdy ruins of Romes culture
and traditions. The framework of the edifices constructed then structures
western Europe to this day. These essays illuminate both the transformations
that marked this period, and the new directions which are defining its study.
Rather than a dark age, what we discover in western Europe between 400 and
1000 AD is the long morning of an expanding and changing world. Where do
twenty-first-century scholars go from here? New tools and methods highlighted
in this volume open new possibilities for discovering the early medieval past.
But they also require new skills. No single intellect can master the intricacies
of all these disciplines as our expanding knowledge becomes more and more
specialized, more and more diverse, yet more and more interconnected. This
means that we in the humanities need to learn to collaborate better, with each
other and with our colleagues in disciplines that are coming to be related fields,
such as economics, certainly, but biology and computer science as well. The
vision of the early Middle Ages conveyed by these studies shows us a vibrant,
expanding Europe, illuminated by a rich and varied source base. Particularly
in North America, we need to do better at sharing the new vision of the early
Middle Ages with other scholars, including other medievalists. We hope that this
book may mark one step in this new direction. Our understanding of the early
Middle Ages has shifted in only the last generation or so from the Dark Ages
to a long morning of rebirth, and of building the foundations of medieval and
modern Europe. Still more unsuspected new directions await us.