Rethinking the Carolingian Reforms

Carolingian culture has often been treated as an elite affair with little effect beyond a restricted circle close to the royal court. To do justice to the diversity of extant material, our traditional focal points need to be recontextualised. Many understudied manuscripts testify to a much wider circle of people, be it the anonymous schoolmaster who developed a better method of teaching Latin, the equally unnamed cleric who created new forms of liturgy, or all the people in monastic libraries who copied, reorganised, commented on and studied each other's books. These anonymous figures were not passive recipients of royal prescriptions. They were active agents who helped shape and reshape the ideas and ideals of their world, and their texts and manuscripts should be studied side by side with those composed by well-known authors. In so doing, a much more dynamic and collaborative image of Carolingian culture emerges.