Abstract
The Frankish king Charlemagne, crowned emperor in Rome by the Pope in the year 800, created an empire larger than anything that had been seen north of the Mediterranean since the Romans. What was it that enabled this empire to cohere? And what, if anything, was its long-term legacy? The answer given by Phelan’s interesting book to both these questions is the Christian initiation ritual of baptism. The historian Walter Ullmann once memorably described the Frankish movement of cultural reform—the so-called Carolingian Renaissance, traditionally associated with the regime of Charlemagne and his successors—as the baptism of an entire society, a collective baptism operating ‘on the largest conceivable scale’. Phelan takes that insight to a new level, arguing that baptism was Carolingian Francia’s ‘most basic organizing principle’ (p. 1), and provided its ‘conceptual glue’ (p. 10).
In the later Middle Ages, baptism was a Christian sacrament, one of the seven major religious rituals marking stages of the life cycle from birth through to death. Things were not so codified in the early Middle Ages, but nevertheless from an early date, the rite was described using the complex Latin term sacramentum. For this reason, Phelan begins with a helpful survey of that word’s semantic field in Late Antiquity and the period prior to Charlemagne’s rule, showing how it shrugged loose from its moorings in military and legal contexts to take on a theological sense. He then explores the significance of baptism in capitularies (royal edicts) and letters from Charlemagne’s reign, notably around the great council of Frankfurt in 794, before concentrating on the work of one particular scholar at Charlemagne’s court, Alcuin of York. Phelan discusses Alcuin’s ideas about baptism as expressed in his surviving letters and in the early medieval liturgical commentary on the baptism ritual, a commentary known by its opening words as Primo paganus and attributed here to the emigrant Yorkshireman.
The following chapter, Chapter 4, is the most compelling and rewarding chapter for this reviewer: a close reading of a discussion in 811–12, initiated by Charlemagne himself, around baptismal practice in the Frankish kingdom. In a sophisticated analysis, Phelan exploits Susan O’Keefe’s remarkable editions of the surviving traces of an empire-wide flow of information, to show something of the mechanisms by which it took place: how Charlemagne contacted the archbishops of his empire, who duly passed on his written questionnaire to the bishops under their supervision, and then sent back the results to the imperial court. This is an impressive illustration of how efficient early medieval administration really could be under the Carolingian dynasty of kings. The fifth chapter examines the extent to which the concepts of baptism had worked their way into everyday consciousness by the later ninth century—Phelan thinks very far indeed—while the conclusion presses home the point that Carolingian discussions of baptism left an imprint on medieval Europe that far outlasted Charlemagne’s territorial empire itself, gone by 900.
Phelan’s book will certainly dispel any doubts its readers may have about the great importance of baptism to early medieval European thinkers. However, sometimes its focus seems to waver. The slippery Latin word sacramentum was used to denote oaths as well as baptism, but contemporaries were quite aware of the difference between swearing an oath and being baptised, as one of the Carolingian authors that Phelan cites, Radbert, makes clear. So, the book’s extensive discussions of oaths appear a little out of place. Occasionally, too, the book pushes its sources too hard in its quest for allusions to baptism. For instance, it treats a passage from Alcuin’s account of the life of the fourth-century saint Martin as revealing ‘an underlying conceptual framework of sacramenta’ (p. 47); but to this reviewer, Alcuin was simply drawing a contrast between Martin’s former military service and his new Christian activity, without particularly dwelling on baptism as such. Whether baptism ‘provided the frame’ (p. 207) for the history written by the ninth-century layman Nithard, or whether Charlemagne’s authority really was ‘anchored’ in baptism (p. 52), is to my mind not quite demonstrated either.
The result is a book that at times seems to expand what is fundamentally a perceptive and usefully contextualised study of ideas about baptism during Charlemagne’s reign into a slightly over-stated argument about the very nature of Frankish society. That baptism was important to Carolingian thinkers in coordinating ideas about the imperium christianum rests assured, but Charlemagne’s empire did not rest on liturgy, theology and prayer alone. One would hardly guess from reading this book that some ninth-century lay people in Francia instrumentalised baptism for their own personal ends, for example, by acting as godparent for their own children in order to orchestrate a divorce, still less that things like law codes or Frankish identity could have been important in holding the empire together too.
It is also striking how liberally the book makes use of the word Europe, whether as ‘Frankish Europe’ or ‘Carolingian Europe’. Contrary to some current assumptions, the Carolingian Franks did have a concept of Europe, but it was not a prominent one, and in this regard, the book perhaps betrays its own intellectual and cultural assumptions: this is an account of the Carolingian Empire, and of its associated cultural renewal, that is very much oriented to a general history of Western or European civilisation, written in a religious key. However, these reservations should not detract from the fact that Phelan has undoubtedly provided the most sustained and wide-ranging exploration to date of the role that baptism played in ninth-century Frankish culture, and it is a study which has a great deal to commend it.