Friday, March 14, 2014
Congressional B (Omni Shoreham)
The Carolingians of the late eighth into the tenth centuries are known as superb copyists. They standardized a readable, efficient paleography and filled their Christian empire with orthodox, tried and true, texts from the past. Sermons were especially circulated for they packaged weighty Christian doctrine into manageable and teachable morsels. They were copied for bishops and abbots for study; however, sermons were also sent to powerful laymen in need of church direction, and to rural pastors in charge of the souls of the masses. This wide readership and multifaceted usage of sermons shows that they were a valuable resource to the Carolingian reformers and yet, they are understudied by historians. This is because, in true Carolingian fashion, most of these sermons were not original but were copies of messages that had been given hundreds of years before by renowned stalwarts of the faith. There are, however, fascinating novelties and strategies of Christianization in the midst of this mass copying agenda. The Carolingians were resurrecting the past to speak to their present. In these efforts, they were selective in the sources used, creative in the ways they were combined and inventive in how they were subtly altered. Paris, BN lat. 2328 is one intact manuscript with a collection of sermons that demonstrate the beauty of these copying novelties. As shown in this manuscript analysis, the Carolingians should not be dismissed as derivative when it is their “copies” that display the practical ingenuity that allowed their ambitious and large-scale reforms to succeed.
