Saxony often feels like one of the odd regions out in early medieval western European history. It lacked much of the Roman heritage and infrastructure of the rest of Germania to the south, while also being non-Christian relatively late. At the same time, it was never coherently integrated with the Scandinavian or viking worlds to the north, or the Slavic worlds to the east. Scholarly interest in Saxony, as a consequence, has sometimes been rather uneven: the region often ends up being a peripheral part of someone else's story, or else being a little on the insular side. With Conquest and Colonization, Ingrid Rembold offers a laudably clear and nuanced study that will offer stronger foundations for the subject going forward, and hopefully connect developments in Saxony more fully with those being studied elsewhere in the Carolingian world.
Rembold's introduction sets the tone well. She surveys key scholarship succinctly, primarily so that the reader can get a sense of the kind of source material available. Carolingianists have a tendency to have their scholarly gaze led by the narratives of major chronicles, which poses problems for ninth-century Saxony, as most chroniclers were not interested in the region. Even Widukind of Corvey, writing in the tenth century, skipped from the infamous wars of Charlemagne up to 804 to the rise of the Ottonians a century later in just a few sentences. What we have instead for Saxony are a variety of wealth of distinctive hagiographical material, supplemented by a few vernacular compositions and a modest amount of legal material. There are probably other regions of the Carolingian world of which this could be said, of course, but it does mean that Saxony does not look much like the normative centres more familiar from Carolingian studies.
Chapter 1 continues the brisk pace, no-nonsense exposition, and measured breadth, with a masterly account of Charlemagne's thirty-three years of campaigning in Saxony. It is a story told many times: about how the Frankish king was drawn deeper and deeper into the north to try to neutralise the problems of border raids, en route attempting to solve the problem with mass murder, forced migration, and forced conversion to Christianity. What Rembold does very well here is to set out the complexities of this for the Saxons themselves as (in practice) disparate peoples with a varied elite experiencing Carolingian force and favour differently at different times. Nobody won anything easily or for long, and any nonsense about a clearly defined Saxon elite doing very well out of the wars will not do. At the same time, Rembold argues, the ways in which the wars were memorialised in Saxon historiography meant that the wars were considered to be the beginning of the region's Christian history--with consequences later for what Christian histories and identities meant here.
Chapter 2 necessarily jumps to the next major political clash in Saxony: the Stellinga revolt of 841-2. This revolt has, at various times, been described as a pagan uprising by the lower classes of free and freed men, unhappy with their leaders and the loss of their traditional customs. It is what some of the sources say, of course, but Rembold reasonably argues that this characterisation stems almost exclusively from writers with axes to grind against the Emperor Lothar--briefly in communication with the Stellinga--after the Carolingian civil war of 841-3. In the context of recent work on the multiplicity and flexibility of legal cultures in the early Middle Ages, Rembold finds it most likely that the Stellinga were a guild (or guild-like), whose objectives were more or less acceptable until any violence of the uprising transgressed accepted norms. This would make Lothar's initial courting of their support in 841 more understandable. The real impact of the revolt, Rembold contends, is that it shaped ways in which later writers sought to anachronistically project a sense of the ordering of their society onto the past--not necessarily an entirely imagined ordering, but certainly one defined more by late-Carolingian tensions than pure age-old traditions.
Rembold's careful exposition of the political and social environments of ninth-century Saxony neatly set-up chapters three and four, on the establishment of a Saxon 'micro-Christendom' (employing Peter Brown's popular phrase well). In Chapter 3, Rembold roundly demolishes any lingering assumption that Charlemagne's wars led to a simple-if-uneven top-down imposition of Christianity by highlighting the significant extent to which churches and monasteries relied upon local support despite occasional external boosts. As part of this, she argues that we need to understand the multiple beginnings and redefinitions of institutions, as their functions and territories shifted over time, they took on new cults and relics, or simply won or lost at local politics. This was not always to the institutions' advantage, with resources apparently uncertain for many in the century; but of course we would see this change radically were we to extend the story into the tenth century. In Chapter 4, finally, Rembold considers the content of religious belief that emerged in this environment. She takes seriously that 'Christian' and 'pagan' are not simple binaries, but rather part of a complicated (Christian) thought-world that makes religion on the ground impossible to reconstruct by simply reading narrative sources with a bit of caution. Instead, one reads these across source-types--and here, admirably, bringing in Old Saxon poetry and penitential material as well as burial evidence--to establish a sense of a spectrum, of grey-areas and hardlines, of polemics and exaggeration, of ambiguous communication in a world of unambiguous instruction. For Saxony, this probably reveals a society that was not particularly pagan, but also not always Christianised according to everyone's taste when it came to things such as heroic verse. Rembold's Saxony is rich and complex in what makes it distinctive, while having much to commend it for comparative work in future.
Rembold states at the outset that her intention was to gain a fresh understanding of how Saxony became part of the Carolingian political and ecclesiastical order, and what that transformation meant. She is undoubtedly successful on her terms and readers will be glad to have such a detailed and thoughtful volume on the subject. As often with Carolingian regional studies, one is left to contemplate exactly what it meant to be integrated into a political and cultural landscape that was so diverse, and what that integration contributed to increasing that diversity. But fuller comparative work is a longer-term project for all--and anyone wishing to study the regional diversity of the Carolingian world in future, or indeed processes of conquest and conversion, will appreciate the clarity and detail of Rembold's work.