I

To some extent, historians take medieval historiography, in the sense of historical works written in the Middle Ages, for granted. Perhaps because we are ourselves historians, we do not often enough ask ‘Why did this person decide to write a history?’ Of course, in the Christian early Middle Ages, authors learned Latin, the dominant language of Western European literacy, by reading about (or hearing read out) past events in the Bible and in the works of Eusebius or Bede, as well as in the many works of hagiography. Knowing about Christianity required knowing (at least some) Christian history, and its students learned to see themselves as occupying a place in the continuous line of salvation history stretching from Creation to the Last Judgement.Footnote ¹ As Hans-Werner Goetz has explored in a number of different articles, medieval Christians produced history for a number of inter-related reasons, be it to uncover the work of providence in human history, putting the present within the scheme of salvation history, providing moral exemplars and instruction, or as tools for the contemplation of God's glory as demonstrated in saintly lives and miracles.Footnote ²

Whilst the general interest in, and production of, historiography in the early Middle Ages is thus not surprising, the individual act and decision to write a historical text does always require further explanation. For the last twenty or thirty years, one of the main ways of exploring and explaining the production of an early medieval historical work has been to identify what we might call its ‘key context’, that is, an event or circumstance, political or personal, that provided the work's specific motivation and which can thus help us to decode it. As early as the 1970s Heinz Löwe studied medieval histories to understand ‘the author [and] his way of seeing the past, in particular where his reconstruction of history is influenced by his present’, and explored how the ‘crisis of the empire’ preceding Charles the Fat's deposition in 887 had influenced Notker in his writing of his Gesta Karoli. Footnote ³ This ‘key context’ approach was perhaps exemplified in its most extreme form in Walter Goffart's controversial book on late antique and early medieval Narrators of barbarian history. Goffart famously argued that for authors such as Bede or Jordanes, ‘[h]istory was the medium of their writing, not its goal’.Footnote ⁴ He interpreted their works as sophisticated literary narratives aimed at contemporary audiences and addressing very specific contemporary concerns. Thus Goffart saw Bede's Ecclesiastical history as of direct relevance to Northumbrian ecclesiastical politics at the time, responding to Stephanus' Wilfridian propaganda, and argued that Jordanes was writing in the employ of Justinian to create a ‘love story’ of Roman and Gothic co-operation to contribute to the pacifying of Italy after the Gothic war.

The identification and exploration of such specific contemporary key contexts has done much to shed new light on early medieval historiographical texts. As part of developments in source criticism which accorded medieval authors more sophisticated literary and rhetorical skills and strategies than had been customary in earlier assessments, it has led to more attentive close readings of early medieval works.Footnote ⁵ Going beyond the traditional source-critical methods of testing the ‘accuracy’ and ‘reliability’ of early medieval historians, scholars showed that, whilst it was often not possible to use these texts as quarries for facts on the events that they purported to report, works of early medieval historiography proved goldmines of material for the time of their production, such as their authors’ concerns, methods and intended audience, contemporary perceptions of political or cultural crises, and the possible range of contemporary discourses in which to frame events.Footnote ⁶

On the other hand, whilst such analyses by identification of key context(s) can suggest a possible trigger for the production of a text and account for some of the work's features, they do not necessarily explain why authors chose to write a work of history in the first place. To make a political, moral or personal point, other genres were available, such as poems, accounts of dreams or visions, the letter(-treatise) which was a favourite with many Carolingian intellectuals, such as Alcuin, Hrabanus Maurus or Agobard of Lyon, or indeed producing a schedula to be presented at an ecclesiastical or regnal assembly.Footnote ⁷ Furthermore, for the Carolingian ninth century, David Ganz has pointed out that Carolingian intellectuals read and copied narrative histories more than they produced them.Footnote ⁸ Whilst there are thus more historiographical works available as a result of the Carolingian ‘Renaissance’, their number remained relatively small, compared to textual production overall.

The question for each text is therefore what a history might have done for the author that another genre of text could not. To answer this question, scholars have looked at the authors’ conceptions of history. Like many concepts – such as gender, childhood or emotions – history has in the last decades been recognised as not a ‘natural’ category, but a social and cultural construct. This historicisation of history should, however, not be taken to mean that we should seek to reconstruct a single, homogenous ‘medieval’ or ‘Carolingian’ idea of history. Medieval writers of historical texts could draw on a number of different traditions and models, classical and patristic, pagan, Jewish and Christian, from annals and chronicles to biographies and ethnographies,Footnote ⁹ and explore different aspects of Christian ideas of history and history-writing: providential, salvation-historical, moral, typological, allegorical, as pious labour or memoria. Each work thus poses to the modern reader the question of what individual combination of concepts of history it was shaped by, how its author chose to weave the cultural strands available to him or her together to come up with a solution to the task.

Furthermore, given the broad range of themes that could (and to some extent had to) be included in narratives of past events – even when they had an explicit focus, such as a people, ruler, saint or ecclesiastical institution – they could easily become multi-layered, expressing various ideas, opinions and concerns of the author. Notker Balbulus’ Gesta Karoli Magni provide a particularly striking example of a multiplicity of purposes and concerns which scholars have been able to identify in the work. Simon MacLean, following Heinz Löwe, identified an immediate political key context for the stories ridiculing and criticising bishops: probably at the behest of Charles the Fat, Notker included a series of stories exposing the pride and greed of a bishop whom MacLean identifies as Liutbert of Mainz, who was at the time opposing Charles's plans for making his illegitimate son Bernhard his successor.Footnote ¹⁰ On the other hand, David Ganz explored an intertextual key context for the work, showing how Notker's Charlemagne was a reaction to Einhard's portrayal, Christianising the representation of the emperor.Footnote ¹¹ Notker's complex work thus combined moral instruction with political points, as well as responding to wider issues in Carolingian biography and history-writing.

Furthermore, Ganz's analysis shows that two ninth-century authors could disagree about how to write history, and that early medieval authors could enter into a critical textual conversation with already existing works. His subtle appreciation of the Gesta Karoli, which previously had often been seen as a disjointed collection of sometimes amusing, sometimes rather bemusing anecdotes, also illustrates developments in textual scholarship. Showing its connection to philology, one of the main avenues of research for textual scholars of early medieval works previously had consisted of establishing textual and intellectual genealogies by tracing the origins of motifs and phrases taken from earlier classical or patristic texts. However, here too, granting early medieval writers more authorial and creative agency has led to a shift away from seeing them as mere transmitters of older learning. Textual ‘borrowings’ are no longer interpreted as inadvertent or subservient copying, nor are features which seemed odd or unsystematic to modern readers taken any longer as evidence of a lack of literary ability or logical faculties. Rosamond McKitterick pioneered the study of early medieval uses and perceptions of the past through the manuscript evidence, such as of the ‘history books’ written by Carolingian scribes. She and other scholars have demonstrated how the compilation and juxtaposition of existing texts can be seen as new, purposeful and subtle creations.Footnote ¹² This article will explore some of the choices made by Ratpert, a monk of the monastery of St Gall (located south of Lake Constance, in modern-day Switzerland) in writing the history of his own religious community in the late ninth century.

II

Ratpert's history, commonly known as the Casus sancti Galli, contains some interesting stylistic features which can be interpreted as reflections of his ideas of history. Whilst Hannes Steiner, Ratpert's most recent editor,Footnote ¹³ has identified a key context for his work in the struggles of the monastery to escape from the control of the bishops of Constance, the innovative and idiosyncratic ways in which Ratpert chose to write about past events revolving around a collective, the community of St Gall, is worthy of closer attention.

The current fame of the monastery of St Gall amongst medievalists, due above all to the unique Plan of St Gall and the fortuitous survival of significant portions of the community's medieval library,Footnote ¹⁴ can lead to an overestimation of its importance during the eighth and early ninth centuries. Re-founded in the early eighth century by the priest Otmar on the spot where the hermitage of Gall, one of Columbanus' Irish companions, had supposedly been a century before, the community remained very much a regional Alamannian affair for over a century.Footnote ¹⁵ Once the topography of royal power shifted with the creation of a more autonomous Eastern Frankish kingdom under Louis the German in the 840s, however, it was drawn into supra-regional political patronage games; its abbacy was granted by Louis the German first to Engilbert and then, in 841, to his archchancellor Grimald.

The monastery started to develop into a major centre of learning and manuscript production in the second quarter of the ninth century under Gozpert (abbot, 816–37). During Grimald's abbacy this trend continued, leading to a cultural flourishing in the late ninth century with figures such as Iso, Werinbert, Notker Balbulus and Ratpert. Apart from his monastic history, the latter also wrote a number of extant liturgical poems (versus), such as for the feast-day of St Gall, for the eucharist, for a Sunday procession, and for welcoming a queen on her visit to the abbey.Footnote ¹⁶

Hardly anything is known about Ratpert himself. There is nothing autobiographical in his history (he himself does not appear as either actor or authorial ‘I’ in his work). Nine of the monastery's charters, dated to between 876 and 902, contain the name Ratpert, but it is considered unlikely that all of these mentions refer to the author of the monastic history. Whilst a Ratpert magister et presbyter is entered in the St Gall necrology for 25 October, we do not know in which year ‘our Ratpert’ died.Footnote ¹⁷

More than these barest of bones of Ratpert's life can be taken from the eleventh-century continuator of his monastic history, Ekkehard iv, in whose account he appears as one of a ‘trinity’ of friends, together with Notker Balbulus and Tuotilo, a skilled artist. Amongst these tres inseparabiles,Footnote ¹⁸ ‘the three senators of our respublica’,Footnote ¹⁹ Notker is represented by Ekkehard as the sensitive intellectual type, thin and ‘voce non spiritu balbulus’, Tuotilo the hot-tempered artist, athlete and eager traveller, who beat off bandits who waylaid him and his companions in a wood with a club.Footnote ²⁰ Ratpert is described as in the middle between these two, a magister scolarum from an early age, the sensible and perhaps overly cautious one, keen on discipline, who called travel ‘death’ – if you like, a homebody, who therefore only needed two pairs of shoes a year.Footnote ²¹

Of course, a history written nearly a century and a half after events provides hardly the surest of footings, though historians have tended to assume that it contains at least a kernel of truth, mostly, one supposes, because it is all we have. Ratpert's characterisation by Ekkehard has done him no favours, as indeed more than one scholar has thought to be able to detect these characteristics reflected in his work: Brunhölzl's choice of adjectives to describe Ratpert rather patronises the ‘virtuous schoolmaster’ who wrote his history in ‘simple and clear’ language and whom he describes pointedly not as a poet, but as the St Gall Hauspoet, i.e. the in-house versifier.Footnote ²² Even Steiner, Ratpert's most recent editor, thought he detected in his Casus the teacher's ‘didactic tendency’, including an eagerness to emphasise just punishment – although it seems to me that Ratpert hardly paid more attention to this than any other early medieval hagiographer or historian chronicling divine intervention on the side of the just.Footnote ²³

Nor has the comparison with Ekkehard's continuation helped Ratpert's modern reputation: whilst Ekkehard's Casus contain many stories about the inner life of the monastery, recounting all kinds of occurrences, such as the suicide of a monk who jumped from the church tower, jealousies between monks and tricks that they played on each other, Ratpert's contain little of immediate human interest to a modern reader, and focus largely on events outside the cloister. His theme has been described as the ‘institutional and economic development’ of the monastery,Footnote ²⁴ and his style as sober, practical, even ‘colourless’.Footnote ²⁵ In contrast to the entertaining Ekkehard, then, it is unsurprising that Ratpert's work initially attracted scholarly attention mainly regarding its accuracy and reliability,Footnote ²⁶ not its conceptual underpinnings as a work of history.

The full title of Ratpert's work as given in the earliest manuscriptFootnote ²⁷ was Textus de origine et diversis casibus monasterii sancti Galli (‘Text about the origin and diverse ups and downs of the monastery of St Gall’).Footnote ²⁸ It seems to have been intended for the use of the St Gall community, as is shown by the instances in which the author referred the reader to the Vitae of Gall and Otmar, as well as St Gall's charters, clearly expecting the members of his audience to be able to access the monastery's library.Footnote ²⁹ The manuscript transmission of the Casus further supports this assumption, as the work remained exclusively in St Gall for most of the Middle Ages.Footnote ³⁰

Ratpert's work covered the history of the monastery of St Gall from the arrival of Columbanus and Gall in Gaul in the early seventh century through the various changes in the community's fortunes up to the 880s. In its early part (chapters 1 and 2 [−6]), Ratpert summarised the saints' Lives of Gall and Otmar as they related to the origins of the monastery, leaving out all miraculous events but Gall's exorcism of Duke Cunzo's daughter. The latter might have been included because it leads, in Ratpert's version of events, to the first royal donation of land to Gall, and, so he claims, its first royal charter of protection.Footnote ³¹ It thus relates to the key themes of the middle section of the text, the struggles over control of the monastery between the monks and the bishops of Constance, epitomised by the free election or imposition of abbots respectively, and fought with charters. This section seems confusing and repetitive to the modern reader, as many elements keep recurring: episcopal machinations and exploitation of the monastery, involving forged and stolen charters, alternate with periods of autonomy brought on by royal justice and renewed rights, only to be taken away again as episcopal or royal politics change. A succession of abbots and bishops pass before our eyes, struggling for control; their attempts, the reader knows, prove ultimately futile.

The character of the work changes again with the negotiated resolution of the dispute between the bishops of Constance and the monastery under Abbot Grimald, agreed on and recorded in charters in the presence of Louis the German at Ulm in 854.Footnote ³² The last section of the Casus includes three lists of manuscripts donated by, or copied or acquired at the behest of, abbots Grimald and Hartmut, as well as descriptions of the two abbots' activities to improve and beautify the monastic buildings, and even, in Grimald's case, examples of his personal piety, the only time Ratpert gets close to an abbot's vita.Footnote ³³

Knowing the date of a text's production and establishing its key context are, of course, closely linked. The latest datable event recorded in Ratpert's Casus is the death of the hermit Eusebius on 31 January 884,Footnote ³⁴ and the last event described is the three-day visit of the Emperor Charles the Fat to the monastery in December 883. Ratpert's work has therefore often been dated to shortly after these events. Hannes Steiner argues for a slightly later date, on the basis of the key context that he has identified for Ratpert's work. In this he follows a suggestion made by Wolfram von den Steinen as early as 1948, which had, however, received little attention.Footnote ³⁵ According to Steiner, Ratpert's emphasis on the monastery's struggle to win autonomy from the bishops of Constance fits in better with the situation in 890, when once again a bishop of Constance, Salomo iii, became abbot of St Gall. By contrast, in 884, St Gall had flourished for a generation under the Abbots Grimald and Hartmut, who had helped it to achieve its independence from episcopal lordship, built up its library and, according to Ratpert, done much to improve and adorn its churches and other buildings. St Gall had been graced by an imperial visit the year before, and had on that occasion elected its own abbot, Bernhard, with imperial approval. Why, asks Steiner, would Ratpert want to ‘reopen old wounds’ at such a time?Footnote ³⁶ He argues that it makes more sense to see the long exposition of the back and forth between monastic autonomy and episcopal control between St Gall and ConstanceFootnote ³⁷ in the context of the monastery's renewed loss of independence under Bishop Salomo's abbacy from August 890 onwards. The Casus, according to Steiner, might have been meant to serve as a reminder to the monks of the dangers that control by a bishop may bring, and perhaps as a call to action by showing them how independence had been achieved before.Footnote ³⁸

This interpretation of the work's contents, dating it to around 890 rather than 884, seems to be supported by a phrase describing Abbot Hartmut's desire to retire from the labores of the active government of the monastery due to his advanced age in 883.Footnote ³⁹ Ratpert wrote that Hartmut thought somebody younger and fitter ought to take over the reins of the community, because such a person would be better able to weather the ups and downs ‘which now (nunc) even stronger than before keep disturbing the world’.Footnote ⁴⁰ It is hard to see to what this might refer in 884, but in 890 both the kingdom and the monastery had encountered further changes of fortune, the former with the deposition of the emperor Charles the Fat in 887, the latter with the deposition of its abbot Bernhard as punishment for taking part in a rebellion against the new ruler, Arnulf, and the imposition of the latter's palace chaplain, Salomo iii, as its new abbot.

However, historians, including Steiner, might have become victims of circular reasoning by viewing Salomo's accession to the abbacy too much in light of Ratpert's negative portrayal of the conflict between bishopric and monastery. There is actually no (other) contemporary evidence for hostility to Salomo iii from the monastic community. The new abbot quickly reassured the community with a charter guaranteeing their rights and certain boundaries, witnessed by the surrounding local potentes and landowners.Footnote ⁴¹ It is now also generally agreed that Notker wrote his so-called Formelbuch, a collection of model charters, letters and verses, for Salomo iii, probably on the occasion of the latter's accession to the Constance cathedra or to the abbacy of St Gall, whichever came second.Footnote ⁴² Apart from examples of royal charters for a monastery, of charters and letters by a bishop, as well as of monastic charters – a combination suitable for Salomo iii as abbot of St Gall and bishop of Constance – the collection contains letters from Notker to Salomo and his brother Waldo. These range from declarations of friendship to advice, criticism and exhortation. In contrast to the picture of enmity and envy between contemporaries which Ekkehard iv painted of Salomo's relationship with Notker, Ratpert and Tuotilo,Footnote ⁴³ von den Steinen argued convincingly that these letters show Notker in the role of older friend and mentor to the two brothers, in particular Salomo. It seems that, whilst Notker was not the brothers' main teacher whilst they were educated in the ‘external school’ at St Gall, he certainly influenced Salomo's Latin style, and the two worked on exercises (such as letters of the kind that Salomo might have to write as bishop) together, some of which Notker later included in his Formelbuch. Notker also clearly kept up communication with both brothers during their subsequent careers at court.Footnote ⁴⁴

The accepted scholarly narrative of a community resentful of an outside, episcopal abbot imposed by King Arnulf in 890 thus rests solely on Ratpert himself and on his continuator (and careful reader) Ekkehard, and seems unsupported by any other evidence. The significance of the key context and causa scribendi proposed by Steiner will therefore require reassessment.

In order to do so, an exploration of the ideas of history contained explicitly and implicitly in the Casus is appropriate. Steiner himself emphasised that Ratpert's work is multi-layered and cannot be reduced to a single purpose, drawing out many different facets of the work in the introduction to his edition.Footnote ⁴⁵ A number of the aspects which have been most puzzling, or indeed unattractive, to modern readers, can be interpreted as deliberate rhetorical and literary strategies implementing Ratpert's conception of history, and monastic history in particular.

III

To understand what task Ratpert set himself, as well as the choices that he made in his realisation of it, we first need to appreciate that he was an innovator: he was doing something new. Whilst existing hagiographical and historiographical texts influenced his work, he was not following an existing model in his choice to describe the history of his community. Monastic history was not an established genre in the Carolingian empire at the time when Ratpert was writing. Within Western Europe, Bede's eighth-century Historia abbatum of Wearmouth/Jarrow seems the earliest monastic history framed in institutional terms (rather than occuring as an element of a founding saint's vita). Within the Carolingian world, the first such work was written in the 830s or 840s in Northern France: the Gesta abbatum/sanctorum patrum Fontanellensium. Footnote ⁴⁶ Around the same time as Ratpert, on the margins of Carolingian influence, an anonymous author penned what Mabillon called the Gesta sanctorum Rotonensium, the Deeds of the saints of Redon, in Brittany.Footnote ⁴⁷ However, while a few authors thus tackled the problem of their communities' histories before, or simultaneously with, Ratpert, he did not know any of their works. Like Ratpert's own, these texts stayed local – Bede's Historia abbatum does not seem to have been known on the continent in the early Middle Ages, and the manuscript traditions of the monastic historiography of Fontanelle and of Redon likewise suggest that these works did not travel outside their home institutions.

This casts Ratpert's work in a very different light: as Steiner emphasised in his edition, the ‘sober schoolmaster’ was experimenting.Footnote ⁴⁸ Furthermore, Ratpert came up with a solution that differed from the one chosen by most of the other authors who tried their hand at monastic histories. All the other works focus on important individuals in the community, often the abbots. The author(s) of the Gesta abbatum Fontanellensium used the model of the Liber pontificalis, the papal biographies, which provided a basic grid of themes to be covered for each abbot – such as his family background, the gifts he himself made to the monastery and any building works undertaken under his abbacy – though this did not impede the inclusion of freer sections. The monastic history thus consists largely, though not exclusively, of a serial biography of those who ruled it. The author of the Gesta sanctorum Rotonensium, although apparently also familiar with the Liber pontificalis, chose to model his work more on Gregory the Great's Dialogues.Footnote ⁴⁹ His work is thus not so much a serial biography as a collective miracle collection: whilst in book i most of the miracles are those of the main founder, Conwoion, as he established the community and led it in its early struggles for recognition and ducal and royal patronage, the second book describes the miracles performed by a large number of named members of the community. The third book moves on to recount the miracles worked by SS Marcellinus and Hypothemius (Apodemius). The Gesta sanctorum Rotonensium are thus much more an institutionally-framed hagiography, with different saintly agents serving as the foci of its different books.Footnote ⁵⁰

Whilst St Gall's abbots feature large in the Casus, there are no biographies:Footnote ⁵¹ there is nothing of their birth or family, only minimal character sketches – usually as part of the description and explanation of events – and nothing about their activities unrelated to the monastery. Ratpert remained silent on personal acts of devotion or miraculous deeds, which would be essential to a vita.Footnote ⁵² He did not mention any of the miracles attributed to Gall or Otmar (except the exorcism of Duke Cunzo's daughter), but only referred the reader to their saints' Lives for more information. This author's choice was clearly to distance his work from hagiographical conventions: he wanted to tell a different story.

If the abbots are not at the centre of Ratpert's narrative, however, who or what was? This brings us to one of the main reasons why modern historians have found Ratpert so sober, practical, schoolmasterly – frankly, a boring read. The central concern of Ratpert's work is clearly the community of monks. What is striking about Ratpert is that he chose to represent them as an anonymous collective.

Lots of individuals are named in the Casus : kings, aristocrats (some good, some bad), bishops (mostly bad), envoys from the king and to the king, as well as the abbots of St Gall. Very few monks of St Gall, however, are ever mentioned by name, and all but one of those who were seem to have been singled out in that way because they become abbots or bishops.Footnote ⁵³ The only exception is the unfortunate monk and deacon Amalgar, who appears in one of the more vivid episodes in Ratpert's work which would not look out of place in a nineteenth-century Gothic novel. Egino, one of the evil bishops of Constance working to keep St Gall under episcopal lordship, intercepts a messenger sent by the monks to the king in an attempt to have their rights restored as described in a charter by Pippin. He destroys the charter and then comes to the monastery to oversee a search to ensure that the monks have no further copies of it. Somebody suggests that Amalgar was going to have a copy made, and the bishop will only believe the deacon's assertion that there us in fact no other copy when he swears an oath at the altar of St Gall.Footnote ⁵⁴ This episode is the exception that proves the rule, and throws the namelessness, and resulting lack of individuality, of the rest of the community as represented by Ratpert into stark relief.

At the centre of Ratpert's narrative thus stand the fratres, but the lack of any detail to hold on to creates, for modern readers, a feeling of emptiness at the heart of the text. Ekkehard iv peopled the monastery with all kinds of characters, both good and bad, in his continuation of the Casus, recording the names of many monks who had been remembered by the community for their intellect, artistry, the wisdom of their simplicity, or – on the other hand – their greed, or mistrust, of others. Where Ekkehard's canvas of monastic life at St Gall is busy and colourful, then, Ratpert's, by contrast, looks vague, and uniformly grey.

On the other hand, the monks as a collective frequently appear in Ratpert's text as acting, and even feeling, together: they hold charters,Footnote ⁵⁵ elect abbots (when they are given the chance),Footnote ⁵⁶ petition their abbots,Footnote ⁵⁷ refuse to receive an abbot who is not a monk himself,Footnote ⁵⁸ and break a promise to elect somebody as abbot when they feel that the bishop has tampered with their charter.Footnote ⁵⁹ They hope for improvement in their circumstances when a fellow monk is elected bishop of Constance,Footnote ⁶⁰ are caused great sadness when yet another abbot is imposed on them from outside,Footnote ⁶¹ and put too much trust in a faithless messenger who betrays them to the bishop.Footnote ⁶²

Such collective agents do, of course, occur frequently in Christian and early medieval historical writing, such as the people of Israel in the Old Testament, crowds witnessing saintly miracles, or the assembled Franci consenting to their king's decisions.Footnote ⁶³ Concord or discord in such groups, and their collective joy or sadness, were frequently used symbolically in early medieval texts, signalling legitimacy and illegitimacy, respectively. Ratpert, too, emphasised the monks' consensual decisions in his work.Footnote ⁶⁴ Unanimity, of course, stood for the Holy Spirit at work in such collective decisions, as in the early Christian community in Acts iv.32: ‘Multitudinis autem credentium erat cor unum et anima una.’

Whilst this kind of anonymous collective was therefore a well-known topos in Christian histories, it remains for us to explore why Ratpert chose to represent the monastic community of St Gall in this way. He could have picked out, like Gregory the Great in the Dialogues, the author of the Gesta sanctorum Rotonensium, or his own continuator Ekkehard iv, individual figures to preserve the memory of their particular virtues or deeds. In Christian narratives, such as the Bible, groups often serve as witnesses to events. When they are given agency, it is often negative, such as the people of Israel's abandonment of the God of Abraham and their worship of the Golden Calf in Exodus, or the Jews' choosing Barabas over Jesus in the New Testament.Footnote ⁶⁵ Positive agency, and especially sanctity, seems reserved for individuals. Ratpert's idiosyncratic representation thus needs to be explored.

Arguably Ratpert chose to represent the community of St Gall as a faceless mass because this achieved a particular effect for his intended readers, and the anonymous collective of the monastic community had a particular role to play in his conception of history. The faceless community of monks which Ratpert depicts is in its very anonymity also rendered timeless. Identification with the brothers from the past becomes direct, unhindered by any distinguishing features. As some quotes above have already shown, apart from frequently referring to St Gall as ‘nostrum monasterium’, ‘our monastery’,Footnote ⁶⁶ Ratpert also refers to the monksFootnote ⁶⁷ as ‘our monks’ or ‘our brothers’,Footnote ⁶⁸ but most frequently just as ‘ours’ (nostri).Footnote ⁶⁹ Charters are described as given ‘to us’, the monastic property is ‘ours’, Bernwig, who held the abbacy between 837 and 840, that is before the birth of Ratpert and most of his audience, is described as ‘our abbot’.Footnote ⁷⁰ The monastic ‘we’ continues across the centuries. Without any names, occurrences, new arrivals or deaths reported beneath the level of abbot, changes in the community are rendered invisible.Footnote ⁷¹ By removing from view the individuals, the community becomes a seemingly unchanging constant in Ratpert's text.

Ratpert's representation of the community as anonymous and thus timeless does not enable the monks who read, or heard, the Casus to identify with their predecessors, for there are no people to identify with. Instead of ‘they were like us’, this is a case of ‘this is us’. The use of ‘nostri’ and ‘nos’ gives the impression that whatever was done to the monastic community throughout its history, was done to ‘us’. Instead of historicising his community in his history, Ratpert made it ahistorical.

This conception of the community as continuous, transcending time, can also be detected in other books of the community of St Gall in the ninth century, its two confaternity books and its Book of Professions. Early medieval confraternity books, Libri memoriales or Libri vitae, contained lists of the names of those for whom a monastic community prayed during certain masses.Footnote ⁷² They were the result of agreements that communities (such as monasteries, nunneries, and cathedral clergy) made mutually to pray for each other, exchanging lists of names. The older confraternity book of St Gall survives incompletely, but K. Schmid argued that in its lost first quire, the names of dead and living monks of St Gall would have been written in similarly arcaded tables as the surviving folios for other communities with which St Gall had prayer agreements.Footnote ⁷³ One could argue that these two books were the opposite of Ratpert's history, because they are full of names; they are lists of individuals. Certainly, in the liturgical and theological sense, both books are not just about the community, but also about the individual – in the case of the confraternity books, about the individual being prayed for and saved, in the case of the Book of Professions, about the individual's vows. Nevertheless, the overall effect of these books, of writing your name, or of having your name added, to their lists, I suggest, might have been similar to Ratpert's representation of the community in his history as an ahistorical constant, as the continuous lists of monks also create a single, continuous, endless (until the end of time) community.Footnote ⁷⁴

To see the role that this unchanging community plays in Ratpert's historical conception, we need to return to the work's title, Textus de origine et diversis casibus monasterii sancti Galli. Though it is not certain that this was Ratpert's own choice of title, it was written on the earliest manuscript of the work, which was produced during Ratpert's lifetime. After the early sections in which Ratpert summarised the Lives of SS Gall and Otmar to describe the origins of the community, the main part, dealing with the monastery's struggles to escape control by the bishops of Constance, is described by this title as diversi casus. The title deserves special attention as it, too, was an innovation, otherwise unknown in Carolingian historiography. Whilst casus could be interpreted as referring to the legal quarrels of the abbey, Steiner and other scholars have argued that a better translation would be ‘the changing fortunes’, or the ‘ups and downs’ of the monastery of St Gall.Footnote ⁷⁵ The word occurs in this sense in the text itself, in a quote already discussed above in relation to Hartmut's wish to retire: he is too old to support the casus which keep disturbing this world.Footnote ⁷⁶ Steiner rightly emphasised that, far from being just a title, the idea of casus is a leitmotif of Ratpert's work. It is apparent in the structure of the work's central section, which chronicles the back and forth of monastic autonomy and its loss (a cycle which is repeated around four times within the work).Footnote ⁷⁷ A number of times Ratpert explicitly emphasised the changeability of events. For example, describing one of the occasions on which the monks were able to elect their own abbot, Ratpert wrote: ‘Nostri vero Waltonem concoenobiotam, virum sapientem, sibi abbatem rege permittente constituerunt. Sed non in finem res ita permansit, ut in sequentibus manifeste declarabimus.’Footnote ⁷⁸ Later, when the monastery is flourishing under Grimald's abbacy, another perturbatio comes along in the shape of bishop Salomo i of Constance (kinsman and predecessor of Salomo iii who became abbot of St Gall in 890) demanding that the monastery pay him his dues. Ratpert introduced this event: ‘Sed sicut nox et dies sibi alternatim successerunt, ita adversa cum prosperis se sepius miscuerunt, talesque vices variaverunt.’Footnote ⁷⁹ In this mortal world, Ratpert's history makes very clear, nothing stays as it is for long. Like the constant cycle of night and day, so it is in the very nature of this world that casus will occur.Footnote ⁸⁰ The anonymous, timeless community of monks appears like the only constant in the choppy and changeable sea of worldly events.

The features that have disappointed modern scholars, such as the lack of human interest and the seeming vacuum at the centre of the history, created by the absence of individuality and detail given to the members of the monastic community, are in fact the result of deliberate literary choices made by Ratpert to express his conception of history. His intended readership could see themselves as members of the same, continuous community as their predecessors who lived through the events described, and who were equally subject to the fluctuations of political events and interests in the ever-changeable world outside their claustrum.

Ratpert's contemporary Notker elided past and present in his Gesta Karoli by using his contemporaries' ancestors as typological models for them (Charlemagne for Charles the Fat; Godfrid i, king of the Danes, for Godfrid iii),Footnote ⁸¹ condoning or condemning their actions by identifying them as part of a pre-established pattern. Whilst Ratpert's text, setting up a recurrent pattern of opposition between monastery and bishop, does not work with types, nevertheless in both cases the past is seen as a guide to make sense of the present, or to put it a different way, is constructed to explain present configurations. However, modern scholars often assume that such a narrative had a function of immediate relevance, legitimising or delegitimising, advising or arguing against certain courses of action. Ratpert's work, aimed not at an outside audience of political actors, but at the monastic community, does not suggest any obvious course of action. This affects how we interpret the ‘key context’ proposed by Steiner. Seeing the work as a warning to the monks, and perhaps a call to action, is an idea that fits with a more modern conception of the ability of humans to influence events in their favour. However, if Ratpert did produce his history in the context of another casus having befallen the monastery, his work makes sense for the monks of what has occurred by showing them the larger pattern at work: he is not protesting that a step back has been made in the journey to liberty, but explaining the event as a part of how history in this world proceeds. The community, and humans in general, are not granted much agency or control over events in Ratpert's history. It is not because the monks finally developed the right strategy, or even due to their particular piety, that the monastery gained its autonomy from Constance. Most of the actions which decide the community's fate happen outside the monastic cloister, through the agency of the named actors who come and go: abbots, bishops, kings and counts. But even they do not have much control over events: Bishop Wolfleoz grabs the wrong charter to show the king, thus inadvertently (and very much against his own intentions) causing him to confirm the community's old liberties.

As human actions are represented as ultimately futile, Ratpert's history cannot be seen as urging any particular cause of action. Although the word fortuna does not occur in Ratpert's work, it is difficult not to link his idea of human history as dominated by casus with Boethius' Consolatio philosophiae, a work which apparently arrived at the monastery through the agency of Grimald and which was the subject of intensive study at St Gall in the late ninth century.Footnote ⁸² The idea of change being as certain as night following day, rain following sunshine, etc., is central to the first part of the work, in which Lady Philosophy chides Boethius for mourning his lost worldly status, and reminds him of the futility of pursuing earthly glory. Steiner thought that he detected in Ratpert overtones of the third poem of book ii:Footnote ⁸³

The manuscript evidence suggests that the Consolatio was used in teaching at St Gall,Footnote ⁸⁵ and Ratpert as magister scholarum might well have sought to apply Boethius' ideas to the history of his own community. It could be argued that Ratpert either had not understood Boethius, or was contradicting him, by using the term casus. The notion of casus, meaning chance, is explicitly rejected in Boethius' work, as all events are subject to Divine Providence and are therefore not random.Footnote ⁸⁶ However, Ratpert's history could also be seen as implementing Boethius' argument that whilst all worldly events are subject to Providence, human reason is not able to understand the divine plan, nor should humans be so arrogant as to think they could grasp it.Footnote ⁸⁷ Boethius' work, after all, starts with a prisoner bemoaning, and not seeing any sense in, his fall from grace and the reversal of his fortunes, but he is guided by Lady Philosophy to the understanding that there is a higher purpose, even if he cannot at the moment see it. Ratpert's history could similarly be read as demonstrating the unreliability of worldly position and possessions, leaving the discernment of the divinely-appointed order to the divine intellect. Ratpert's solution to the ups and downs of the saeculum comes at the very end of his work, when he provides the framing for the events recounted: he retreats to the higher level of the things that really matter, which are constant and timeless. After all the struggles for power and authority over the monastery, the successes and mishaps, and after, in the last pages, describing at length the earthly splendour and honour of Charles the Fat's imperial visit in December 883 (which, if he wrote in 890, he also knew had not lasted), Ratpert closes his work with the words: ‘super omnia vero regnante Domino nostro Iesu Christo, cui est honor et gloria per indeficientia saecula’.Footnote ⁸⁸ The sense and meaning of mortal, unstable history is provided by the larger picture of unending time ruled over by Jesus Christ.

IV

If there is, then, no strategy proposed in Ratpert's Casus, no advice given to the monks as to what they should be doing, then Steiner's key context of Salomo iii's accession in 890, whilst still suggesting a probable date of production, becomes less important to the interpretation of the work, less pressing as the causa scribendi. Whilst emphasising early medieval writers' authorial intention and agency through identifying key contexts has done much to sensitise modern scholars to the sophistication of their literary strategies and uses of the past, their works should be taken seriously also as attempts to write history, not merely read as political tracts in disguise. Historia, with its complex combination of purposes of commemoration, moral instruction and providing witness to (a part of) salvation history, was of course influenced by contemporary concerns, and could be aimed at providing guidance on contemporary issues. However, it should not be reduced to its context.

We do not actually know how Ratpert's text was (intended to be) used. It does not seem to have been destined for dissemination beyond St Gall, because it assumes access to the monastic library and, above all, because it speaks of nostri from the perspective of the monastic community. Steiner did not resolve the problem of how (what he regards as) a text very critical of Salomo iii's abbacy could be read in that prelate's monastery. Even if Salomo did not often stay at St Gall (and even if present was not usually expected to visit the claustrum) it is hard to imagine that he would not have heard of a text critical of his authority being read or circulated there.Footnote ⁸⁹

A reading of Ratpert's work as above all a history, perhaps to some extent inspired by Boethian ideas, can suggest a solution to this conundrum. Whilst admittedly the bishops of Constance who were also abbots of St Gall are portrayed negatively by Ratpert, they do not represent the only possibilities of identification for Salomo iii in the Casus. The third section of the work focuses upon the abbacies of Grimald and Hartmut. Ratpert's protrayal of Grimald is the most positive of any of the abbots whom he describes. Grimald was not, however, a canonically elected abbot: like Salomo iii, he was a courtier imposed upon the community by the king. Ratpert thus included a positive role model for Salomo iii (who in 890 had been a royal chaplain for much longer than he had been a bishop), as well as providing exempla of evil predecessors and their nasty ends. Another possible clue that Ratpert might have intended the new abbot to read his work is his treatment of Salomo i, Salomo iii's great-uncle who held the see of Constance in 838/9–871. Salomo i seems to be excused for his attempts to re-establish the census that St Gall owed to Constance with a reference that he was doing his duty as bishop, looking to increase the dignity of his see. Whilst Ratpert leaves no doubt that he thinks the payment is unjust and Salomo i's demands bad for St Gall, he nevertheless calls him ‘venerabilis praesul’ and describes his actions as ‘religiose’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Compared to Ratpert's references to some of the earlier bishops,Footnote ⁹¹ this is treatment with kid-gloves. Furthermore, Salomo i was the bishop with whom Grimald came to the agreement which ended the long-running dispute between bishopric and monastery. One could therefore read Ratpert's work, like Notker's Formelbuch with its combination of model charters and letters and advice, as admonishing and instructing the new abbot-bishop in the right execution of his various duties, not as a one-sided attack on his dual role.

Seeing the work not as a tirade against abbot-bishops but as an account of the ups and downs of the community's history which includes potentially instructive examples of good and bad abbots does leave 890 as a likely date for composition, though it changes the exact nature of the presumed key context of production. However, the Casus should not now be read solely as a mirror for abbots, and for Salomo iii in particular: Salomo i is only named twice, and Salomo ii, Salomo iii's uncle and immediate predecessor, is not mentioned at all in the Casus. If Ratpert's main audience had been his new abbot, it is likely that he would have emphasised St Gall's connection with the Salomos to a greater extent. The work is, above all, a history of the community for the instruction of the community: it expresses the view from the stability of the cloister onto the changeable world outside. Ratpert paints a complex picture of the position of the monastic community in history: in its timeless continuity the monastery is perhaps not a little piece of heaven, but it shares some of its features – a community that is about the eternal, constant things, but which, in its current state, exists in the world, and is therefore subject to its diverse casus.