Historians, modern or medieval, both work within and shape the mental landscapes of their societies, and they do so by making choices of language and content for their audiences. Robert A. H. Evans uses this well-recognized and important fact as the basis for his examination of the theology of God’s agency in Carolingian histories written between the 760s and the 910s. In doing so, he makes the claim that this Carolingian mental landscape included religious concerns, which must be considered with the same seriousness as the political motivations that have been the more common focus of scholarship. What Evans demonstrates is how theological beliefs expressed themselves in different political situations, so that the theological always underlies the political context or identity being expressed. It is an important argument for the continued necessity of taking the religious lives of past people seriously, in a wide range of texts.
The Carolingian period is an excellent choice for this larger theoretical endeavor, since historians in the Carolingian empire were extraordinarily prolific, composing, reworking, and continuing large numbers of works that narrated their recent past, from annals to biographies to poems. Equally important, especially to Evans, these historians composed for a relatively large audience concerned with public life, often connected to the politics of the court, and who had personal experience of the events described. These histories therefore presented communities to themselves, which included not only political but also religious and theological functions. Narrative, according to Evans, allowed Carolingian historians to make statements about God’s particular actions in the world as a way of making claims about God’s agency in general. Carolingian history-writing is therefore deeply theological for Evans, and it presents a theology of God’s agency as the ultimate cause for human activity in a way that differs from earlier histories. In order to make this point, Evans uses the same attention to the particular that he identifies in his Carolingian historians.
After an introduction that positions the monograph within just this theoretical framework, the main text of the book is divided into three parts, of which the second is by far the longest. Part one establishes the wider context in which Carolingian historians expressed their perceptions of God’s agency, and so introduces many of the key points that will reappear throughout the book. For example, chapter one considers Carolingian culture through an examination of cartularies, the liturgy, exegesis, and works of moral instruction to argue that God’s agency was an important facet of Carolingian public life, but that this agency required reflection to be properly perceived. Other fundamental points Evans makes in this section include that early medieval theology is a viable scholarly subject, but that early medieval scholars did theology as part of other works, including history (chapter two), and that Carolingian historians differed from their predecessors in how they represented God’s agency (chapter three).
Part two forms the main evidence of the book, in which each chapter investigates history writing in one part of the Carolingian period: the age of Charlemagne, the reign of Louis the Pious up to the 840s, and the Carolingian successor kingdoms from the later ninth century up to about 910. Each chapter therefore considers a different set of political circumstances, which maps onto general trends in how the historians presented God’s agency in that moment. The overall claim, though, is that the religious and theological statements are not reducible to simple political justifications or propaganda, but “that religious implications counted for as much as political ones” (99). At the same time, the chapters are organized as a series of case studies, each analyzing one text, and so these studies also emphasize the diversity of how historians discuss God’s actions, as a set of deliberate choices. Throughout, Evans tracks trends in the language that authors use for divine agency, the content in which they mention that agency (military, ecclesiastical, the imperial succession), and different forms of identity that receive God’s agency (pagan or Christian, ethnic identities, or rulers or city defenders). The analysis of each history also serves as an introduction to its political context and important scholarship, as well as the linguistic and narrative features that have a bearing on how the texts depict God’s agency (or not). The analysis of the annals is especially important since those texts have a shorter history of serious literary study.
Evans identifies alternating moments of consensus and diversity, as subsequent authors reflect on the choices of their predecessors in their own political moment. The biggest shift occurred under the influence of Charlemagne’s court, where the Continuations of Fredegar and the Royal Frankish Annals both established a pattern of ascribing events to God’s help. Even in these few decades, though, Evans identifies differences in how individual texts, or even subsequent stages of the annals, describe God’s agency, so that some texts written from the 790s on continued to include many mentions of God’s help or actions, while others used far fewer. Then, likely in response to military setbacks in the 790s, in the early ninth century a different consensus replaced the earlier emphasis on God’s agency. This “secular” approach did not explicitly ascribe events to God, but that was because of a lack of confidence in being able to attribute events to God rather than a lack of interest in Christianity or the Church. This new consensus once again broke down in the political turbulence of the late 820s, and not only did different communities write different histories, but there was increasing diversity in the representation of God’s agency in those histories. Some, like the early annals of Xanten, used few mentions of divine agency, while others, like Nithard’s Histories, captured the important role of divine agency in public discourse by using explicit mentions of divine agency to describe the recent past of the 840s. By the end of the ninth century, and in the first decade of the tenth, Evans identifies a final period of consensus, in which the authors again become comfortable identifying God’s agency in contemporary events, epitomized by Regino of Prüm’s carefully constructed narrative. These small case studies are each illuminating and interesting in their own right, and together they build up a tapestry of different ways the authors engaged with the past.
In the final section, Evans returns to the topical organization of part one as he ties together the information from the case studies to make more general claims about God’s actions in Carolingian historiography. Therefore, the book shifts from emphasizing the differences between the texts and the local political contexts to identifying similarities. Chapter seven claims the theology of the Carolingian histories emphasized God’s help rather than God’s judgement and depicted human agency as primary but contingent upon God’s ultimate agency. As elsewhere, Evans’s most compelling argument rests on the close analysis of language and grammar, in this case the use of the ablative absolute. Unlike in most earlier histories, Carolingian authors frequently used the ablative absolute to describe God’s action in the world, which Evans argues means that God’s agency modifies human activities, while also making God’s action the primary motive force. Finally, Evans turns to the intended effect on the audience, to argue that, rather than a ritualistic morality, the Carolingian historians wanted to instill an intellectual and affective response in their readers. Thus, the audience learns to recognize the human dependence on God and then both trust in divine agency and give thanks for what God does. It is in this section that Evans most comprehensively explains the important theological role of narrative in both presenting God in specificities and in building up a portrait of how human beings ought to believe and act.
This monograph demonstrates once again the specificity necessary when discussing any one part of the Middle Ages. It depicts both continuity and diversity in a relatively small period of time, but in many different texts, and sets that time off from what came before and after. The tensions in the book lie in helping the readers see both the similarities and the differences at once. Thus, in part two, it can be difficult to relate each of the many histories to the larger arguments, while in parts one and three, the reader may sometimes wonder how the specificities described in part two map onto the similarities being elaborated. Nevertheless, its considerations of so many different Carolingian histories make it an important reference for scholars and students of the Carolingian era. At the same time, its more general arguments, about the necessity of studying the literary choices of historians for their theological and religious convictions, and the necessity of analyzing a small period of time for its diversities and general trends, will hopefully continue to shape future contributions to medieval historiography.