“Why Remember Ratchis? Medieval Monastic Memory and the Lombard Past,” Archivio Storico Italiano 177.1 (2019): 3–57 (original) (raw)
Related papers
‘The Ancients recount an absurd tale’: Time, Myth and the Origins of the Lombards
This talk delivered at the ISCH Conference in Bucuresti in 2015 considers origins, identities and ethnicities which were all central concerns of Early Medieval writers. The interface between time, history and memory is demonstrated by Gregory of Tours, Bede and Paul the Deacon (amongst many others) and how they mediated the relationships between themselves and the pasts they depicted in their narrative works. Paul the Deacon, for instance, related how the Lombards acquired their name within the non-historical and mythic orbit of Book I of his Historia Langobardorum. Significantly, the episode is also discussed by ‘Fredegar’ and two subsequent and anonymous works of the VIIth- and VIIIth-centuries – the Origo Gentis Langobardorum and the Historia Langobardorum Codicis Gothani. This talk analyses the features of the origins of the Lombards which are described in the above works – which on each occasion have interesting and important variances- by doing so, it will be shown that time, memory and purpose have shifted and amended the ‘absurd tale’ so that it becomes a key to understanding the changes and pre-occupations of those who wrote about the mythic past and their present. Thus, we will be able to track and understand the responses of each of the writers to the Pagan and Mythic origins of the Lombards and how these responses were affected by time and memory.
The Carolingian conquest of Lombard Italy (774) was preceded by a massive effort on the part of the Church to convince the Frankish court of the legitimacy of the invasion. Relying on a terminology borrowed from Gregory I, the papal court produced an offensive portrait of the Lombards, depicted as treacherous, vile, and heathen. This article analyzes eighth-century papal epistolary and the Liber Pontificalis in order to establish the strategies behind this campaign. In a second moment, we turn to the Lombard response after the conquest, and the efforts of Paul the Deacon as well as the anonymous author of the Origo Langobardorum codicis Gothanis to question the papal portrait of the Lombards and to reclaim the Christian past of their people. Both Paul and the Gotha Origo focused on the importance of the conversion—and especially the role of Gregory the Great—in the rehabilitation of the Lombards. Their works, this article suggests, represent an attempt of the Lombards to dissociate their Christian faith from the conquest and to reclaim the narrative about their own past.
On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture, 2023
Ninth- and tenth-century Southern Italy was a crossroads where the Franks, the Byzantines, the Roman Popes, and the emirs of Sicily sought to increase their influence. The rivaling Lombard princes in Benevento, Capua, and Salerno had to cope with each other and these external pressures. That combination created unease and tension for the immediate future of the present of the ninth-century Lombardmonk Erchempert and the chronicle of Salerno’s anonymous tenth-century author. Although a century apart, they lived through a very uncertain present. Islamic raiders destroyed Erchempert’s abbey of Montecassino in 883, and the Salernitantext abruptly ended amidst a revolt against the reigning prince Gisulf I in the 970s. The chaotic nature of their present influenced both authors’ attempts to instruct future readers through a narrative focusing on the exemplary military conduct of specific Lombard princes. This contribution will consist of close readings of such social scenes featuring exemplary Lombard princes from both texts. It will be argued that the Lombard lords in these scenes served as idealized examples evoking a strong sense of Lombard independent-mindedness in the face of an unpredictable present. While their strong sense of independence has been noted in previous scholarship, comparing its manifestation in the two narrative texts has yet to receive a dedicated study. The article will reveal and compare how these texts, in an uncertain present, clung to an exemplary past, attempting to steer their unpredictable present’s future.