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11 results

The Charlemagne Legend in Medieval Latin Texts
  • Edited by William J. Purkis, Matthew Gabriele
  • With contributions by Jeffrey Doolittle , Miguel Gomez , Oren Margolis , Andrew Romig , Jace Stuckey , Sebastian Salvado and James B. Williams
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    21 October 2016
  • 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.

    Contributors: Matthew Gabriele, Jace Stuckey, Sebastián Salvadó, Miguel Dolan Gómez, Jeffrey Doolittle, James Williams, Andrew J. Romig, Oren J. Margolis.

  • 7. - Charlemagne the Sinner: Charles the Great as Avatar of the Modern in Petrarch's Familiares 1.4

    • By Andrew J. Romig, New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study
  • Edited by William J. Purkis, Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Birmingham., Matthew Gabriele, Associate Professor of Medieval Studies, Department of Religion & Culture, Virginia Tech
  • With contributions by Jeffrey Doolittle , Miguel Gomez , Oren Margolis , Andrew Romig , Jace Stuckey , Sebastian Salvado and James B. Williams
  • Book:
    The Charlemagne Legend in Medieval Latin Texts
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    21 October 2016, pp 181-202

  • Summary

    The appellation of great has been often bestowed, and sometimes deserved; but Charlemagne is the only prince in whose favour the title has been indissolubly blended with the name. That name, with the addition of saint, is inserted in the Roman calendar; and the saint, by a rare felicity, is crowned with the praises of the historians and philosophers of an enlightened age. His real merit is doubtless enhanced by the barbarism of the nation and the times from which he emerged: but the apparent magnitude of an object is likewise enlarged by an unequal comparison; and the ruins of Palmyra derive a casual splendour from the nakedness of the surrounding desert. Without injustice to his fame, I may discern some blemishes in the sanctity and greatness of the restorer of the Western empire. Of his moral virtues, chastity is not the most conspicuous: but the public happiness could not be materially injured by his nine wives or concubines, the various indulgence of meaner or more transient amours, the multitude of his bastards whom he bestowed on the church, and the long celibacy and licentious manners of his daughters, whom the father was suspected of loving with too fond a passion.

    Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 49.4 (1782)

    They recount that King Charles, whom they dare equate to Pompey and Alexander by giving him the surname of ‘the Great’, loved a certain ordinary woman desperately and immoderately.

    Francesco Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters 1.4 (written c. 1333, published 1364)

    WHEN the esteemed eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon wrote condescendingly of Charlemagne's legendary renown in his epic History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he must have known that he was echoing opinions penned by the famous Italian poet and scholar Francis Petrarch some four and half centuries earlier. Gibbon wrote that Charlemagne may indeed have been the greatest of his era, but this was only because his era had itself been something of a wasteland. Charlemagne was rather like the ruins of ancient Palmyra, which obtained their lustre only by standing out in stark relief against the surrounding bleakness of the Syrian desert.