A secular shift in Carolingian history writing?

Abstract

This article explores a series of Carolingian historians, writing in the early ninth century, who marginalized the role of God's agency, in sharp contrast to the pattern established by the Annales Regni Francorum. Where this has been noted before, largely in relation to Einhard's Vita Karoli, it has been explained either as a clash between lay and monastic ideals or as a by-product of the classical renewal at the Carolingian court. Examining this process across multiple texts suggests, however, that these historians can be understood as self-consciously 'secularizing' in response to contemporary crises. * I should like to thank all the participants at the 'Sacral and the Secular' conference at Churchill College Cambridge in June 2018 for helpful comments and feedback on this paper, and especially Conor O'Brien for many fruitful discussions then and since. This paper draws partly on my doctoral thesis, and I should like to thank Rosamond McKitterick for her generous supervision over many years, and I am further grateful to my examiners Stuart Airlie and Mayke de Jong for prompting many improvements to my original arguments about secularity. All errors remain my own.