In chapter eighty of the Admonitio Generalis, the famous programmatic capitulary issued by Charlemagne in 789, the powerful Frankish king emphasized the importance of preaching. In doing so he not only ordered that priests should preach recte et honeste, in a proper and dignified way, but he also warned them not to preach new and uncanonical things to the people entrusted to them. He then went on to describe the most important topics that should be considered: the proper belief in the Trinity, the incarnation and resurrection of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, sins and their consequences, and the virtues that a Christian should foster. [1] With this long instruction on how to preach properly, Charlemagne closed the capitulary. It demonstrates how important preaching was in the mind of the king and his close advisors. The central importance of preaching in the Carolingian project to reform and correct the Frankish kingdom, and thus to retain or regain divine grace, is the point of departure for this impressive attempt to study the most influential Carolingian sermon collections.

Early medieval sermons studies have long been a neglected field of study mainly because of their lack of originality. Especially the Carolingian texts have often been criticized because of their strong reliance on citations from patristic material. Following in the footsteps of the pioneering work of Thomas Amos and the more recent work by Maximilan Diesenberger, Christoph Galle now has made a valiant effort to reinvigorate the study of the Carolingian sermon. For this he has analysed the most widespread and comprehensive Carolingian homiliaries compiled by Paul the Deacon, Hrabanus Maurus, Haymo of Auxerre, and Lantperhtus of Mondsee. Because of the lack of scholarly interest in these texts this is not an easy task. These collections have to be studied on the basis of editions that are not up to modern standards, mostly available through Migne’s Patrologia Latina, and careful investigations of individual collections are scarce. The analysis rests, therefore, necessarily, on shaky foundations, although in some instance Galle has also looked into specific manuscripts. Occasionally he compares the results of his analysis with an anonymous Northern Italian collection.

Chapter one discusses the central role of preaching in the Carolingian programme of reform, a concept that the author uses without qualifications, although in the meantime it has become the focus of some reconsideration. [2] In this project Galle identifies three main goals. First of all, preaching was the most timely way to make the political realm of the Franks truly Christian. At the same time this would establish a political order in which submission to the king was preeminent. Unity, finally, was in this ideology of central importance. The importance of preaching is clearly demonstrated in the works of Alcuin, the decrees of Carolingian councils, as well as in royal capitularies. Galle discusses these sources as being the outcome of a concerted effort by a political and religious elite. He has an eye for chronological developments but does not take regional variation into account. He reads the sources as a result of a centrally organized reform movement that was aiming for unity and uniformity. Although it is, of course, hard to prove or disprove, Galle claims that this programme was rather effective. Many Christians were going to Church on a regular basis and there formed the audience of a preaching priest or monk.

After having thus set out the main aims of the Carolingian programme to reform society by means of preaching, in the second chapter the author goes on to introduce his main sources. The information on the main Carolingian homiliaries is a bit uneven, because these collections have not been scrutinized to the same degree. Most information is available for the homiliary that Paul the Deacon put together on behest of Charlemagne himself. This collection has recently been studied in quite some detail by Zachary Guiliano and receives more attention in this chapter than the other collections. The collections that are under scrutiny here all target a different audience. Paul the Deacon aimed for clerics and monks, the Mondseer homiliary for preachers and a lay audience, the first collection of Hrabanus Maurus for a lay audience, while his second collection made for Lotharius was targeting an educated audience related to the court. The most learned collection, that made by Haymo of Auxerre, was tailored to a monastic audience.

Chapter three focusses mainly on the sources that have been used to put these collections together. Carolingian authors mostly relied on respectable patristic authorities, such as Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, Gregory, Caesarius of Arles, or Bede. Hrabanus’s collection, aiming at a courtly audience, frequently built upon the work of more recent scholars such as Alcuin, Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel, or Hrabanus himself in the form of his commentary on Matthew.

After laying this groundwork, chapter four, by far the longest chapter in the book (pp. 197-361), addresses the main issue of the book in looking at the major themes of the collections and relating them to current issues in the Carolingian world. Galle divides the main topics considered in the sermons into four parts. The first part is devoted to matters of orthodoxy and comprises a discussion of the nature of the Trinity, the person of Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, and the battle against remains of pagan beliefs. The inclusion of this last point demonstrates that Galle is not convinced by the manifold recent efforts to interpret references to paganism in the Carolingian world as literary constructions instead of as references to real beliefs. The second main part is concerned with Christian virtues, that people should not only be informed about but also put into practice. Particularly, the preacher himself should embody the virtues he preaches and thus lead the believers not only by word of mouth but also by practicing what he preaches. In this part Galle also discusses the preacher’s insistence on sexual restraint, the minimum requirements for a Christian, i.e., knowledge of the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed, and behaviour on Sundays and the main liturgical days of the year. In the third part Galle focusses on the treatment of sins and vices with a particular emphasis on pride and avarice. The fourth section discusses the ways in which Christians should live a truly Christian life by putting the main virtues into practice. This they should do by giving alms, paying the tithe, taking care of the poor, fasting, and striving for peace and concord. The chapter continually connects the contents of the sermons with other texts of the period, often of a normative kind, to show the role they played in getting the message across.

The book closes with a chapter on the afterlife of the collections on the basis of what we know of the manuscript transmission of the collections and the individual sermons, a vast and still underexplored field. Galle here relies mostly on the extensive, yet not conclusive, overview of the manuscripts containing the work of Hrabanus Maurus, compiled by Raymund Kottje. He concludes that Hrabanus’s sermons continued to be copied up to the fifteenth century with a peak of activity in the twelfth century. Geographically Hrabanus’s influence seems to have remained limited to the heartlands of the Carolingian empire; his sermons were mostly copied in Benedictine centres and do not seem to have attracted the attention of the Dominicans or Franciscans, their interest in preaching notwithstanding. This might suggest, Galle suspects, that they were used more for reading and meditation than for preaching. Galle assumes that the transmission of other collections followed similar patterns, and strangely enough makes no use of Guiliano’s study of Paul the Deacon’s homiliary here, although he uses it in chapter two. Guiliano’s study contains an appendix listing the many manuscripts up to the sixteenth century that would provide all the information to do a similar analysis.

In the conclusion, Galle stresses that preaching was part of a political programme that fostered unity and the forging of a political community in the multi-ethnic Frankish empire. The laying out of a common ethical frame in itself would already foster such a programme, while the specific virtues and Christian forms of behaviour that were propagated in sermons, in Galle’s reading, clearly contributed to specific political goals. The sermons would be demonstrating that they reacted to topical issues in the Carolingian world, and their close connection to normative texts issued by the leading political and ecclesiastical actors would make it clear that they functioned as the main medium through which political reforming efforts were transmitted to the population at large.

From this summary it may be clear that we are dealing with an ambitious study covering a lot of material. It is unavoidable that in a book of such a scope, minor lapses occur. Here and there the translations are a bit too easy, for my taste, for example, where he translates the terms molles and masculorum concubitores as “lustful men and homosexuals” (281). Haymo’s homily cited on the same page does not equate adultery and fornication with murder, but mentions them in one breath, which is not the same. The word homicidiae in Haymo’s homily 42, cited on page 302-303, is left out of the translation there. Moreover, the editions cited are not always the most reliable ones as is the case for the episcopal capitularies of Haito of Basel and Gherbald of Liège, referred to on pp. 65 and 68, that now can be consulted in the fine editions by Peter Brommer in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. The Excerpta de libro Davidis, cited on p. 277, are best consulted in Ludwig Bieler’s edition of the Irish penitentials. Furthermore, it is a puzzle to me on what grounds Galle dates the penitential attributed to Egbert of York to the years around 766 (p. 309).

Apart from these minor lapses, there are some more serious issues. The author claims that the Homiliary of Paul the Deacon was finished at about the same time as the Admonitio Generalis of Charlemagne. Yet he dates the homiliary in the years 797/8, whereas the Admonitio was issued ten years earlier (789). For that reason, it is not a surprise that the Admonitio nowhere refers to Paul’s work (p. 97). On p. 262 the author writes about the cardinal virtues faith, hope, and love, but these are in fact the so-called theological virtues that with the four cardinal virtues, prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, together form the seven virtues. The source discussed there, a sermon by Haymo of Auxerre, by the way, only speaks about the major virtues (virtutes principales). Furthermore, the claim that the sermons in this study allow for the conclusion that papal authority was pre-eminent in dogmatic questions seems too far reaching (p. 234).

The book raises two important questions. First of all, it makes it clear that the collections react to the normative sources issued by secular and religious authorities in the Carolingian world by addressing the main topics raised by them. The compilers do seem to have taken up the challenge formulated in conciliar legislation or in royal decrees. Yet they do so on a very general level and almost never go into any detail. If we look at one of the main issues that the preachers were confronted with, according to Galle--the continuous adherence to pagan practices--the sermons never talk about concrete forms of behaviour but only repeat the rather general condemnations from their sources. Galle here only discusses four sermons dealing with the exposition of the Gospel stories of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem composed by Haymo, and one sermon by Hrabanus Maurus dealing with the same story. According to Hrabanus, the ass that the disciples require for Jesus to ride on symbolizes the non-Jews, whereas for Haymo they symbolize the Jews while the young animal that Luke and Mark write about in their Gospels stands for the non-Jews. Is the discussion of this topic in only two of the collections an indication that the removal of forms of pagan religiosity really was one of the main challenges for Carolingian preachers as the author claims (240)? This is only one example of the way in which the author sometimes seems to overstate his case.

The second issue concerns the practical implementation of the sermon collections in the Carolingian period. The author assumes that these collections fulfilled an existing need and were actually used in preaching. Yet, his general overview of the manuscripts with this material for the later medieval period suggests that in that period they might have been used more for study or meditation than for actual preaching. Was this any different in the Carolingian period? The material provided in this study, at least, does not provide evidence that the sermons were actually preached. To establish this a careful examination of the early manuscripts of the collections is needed, something that this study does not supply, and understandably so. Recent research into Carolingian priest manuscripts, however, suggests that these collections did not reach priests on a local level; and inventories of local churches that survive from Bavaria and the Reims region suggest that Gregory’s homilies were more popular than the collections investigated here. Whether these collections reached a general audience, as the author of this study claims, is therefore still an open question that would need further research.

It is the merit of this ambitious study to point out how much still needs to be done in the field of Carolingian sermon studies. It clearly demonstrates how the compilers of sermon collections responded to the challenges of secular and religious leaders to make the Frankish kingdoms into a Christian empire that merited God’s grace. They definitely saw sermons as an important instrument in the process of instructing the population at large on how to lead a Christian life. Whether they succeeded in doing this by compiling large collections of sermons that were actually put in practice is still a question that invites further research. By drawing attention to the rich field of Carolingian sermon studies, this study reveals the need to dig further into Carolingian sermons, their contents, their audience, their role in society, and their manuscript transmission. This book therefore raises a set of intriguing questions that will help to better understand the relation between the ambitions of Carolingian elites and the way local populations might have responded to them.

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Notes:

1. Admonitio Generalis, eds. Morderk et al. MGH Fontes Iuris 16, c. 80, pp. 234-38.

2. See, for instance, Westwell, Rembold, and van Rhijn, eds. Rethinking the Carolingian Reforms. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023.