The Charlemagne Legend in Medieval Latin Texts

The Charlemagne Legend in Medieval Latin Texts is now available from Boydell and Brewer

This book explores the multiplicity of ways in which the Charlemagne legend was recorded in Latin texts of the central and later Middle Ages, moving beyond some of the earlier canonical ‘raw materials’, such as Einhard’s Vita Karoli Magni, to focus on productions of the eleventh to fifteenth centuries. A distinctive feature of the volume’s coverage is the diversity of Latin textual environments and genres that the contributors examine in their work, including chronicles, liturgy and pseudo-histories, as well as apologetical treatises and works of hagiography and literature. Perhaps most importantly, the book examines the ‘many lives’ that Charlemagne was believed to have lived by successive generations of medieval Latin writers, for whom he was not only a king and an emperor but also a saint, a crusader, and, indeed, a necrophiliac.

Ed. William Purkis (University of Birmingham) and Matthew Gabriele (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University).

Contents

Introduction: The Many Latin Lives of Charlemagne (William J. Purkis)

1. Frankish Kingship, Political Exegesis and the Ghost of Charlemagne in the Diplomas of King Philip I of Francia (Matthew Gabriele)

2. The Twelfth-Century Vita Karoli and the Making of a Royal Saint (Jace Stuckey)

3. Performing Sacrality: The Liturgical Portrait of Frederick Barbarossa’s Charlemagne (Sebastián Salvadó)

4. Rex Parvus or Rex Nobilis?: Charlemagne and the Politics of History (and Crusading) in Thirteenth-Century Iberia (Miguel Dolan Gómez)

5. Charlemagne in Girona: Liturgy, Legend and the Memory of Siege (Jeffrey Doolittle)

6. ‘For the Honor of the Blessed Virgin’: The History and Legacy of Charles’s Devotion to Mary in the Gesta Karoli Magni ad Carcassonam et Narbonam (James Williams)

7. Charlemagne the Sinner: Charles the Great as Avatar of the Modern in Petrarch’s Familiares 1.4 (Andrew J. Romig)

8. The Quattrocento Charlemagne: Franco-Florentine Relations and the Politics of an Icon (Oren Margolis)