Anyone, novice or expert, who turns to this book hoping for a judicious, trustworthy overview of the topic promised in the subtitle will be disappointed. Scarcely any statement, any account of a person, text, event or issue is wholly wrong; but equally, scarcely any is wholly correct. An example is one of the author's central claims: describing Carolingian politico-ecclesiology as “political Augustinianism” is a misnomer because the model is in fact contrary to Augustine's beliefs. As a “classic statement” of the thesis Michael Edward Moore is attacking he cites Henri-Xavier d'Arquillière's L'Augustinisme politique. But quite apart from the unwisdom of making a book published in 1934 the crux of a claim to revisionism, the reason d'Arquillière's book is, indeed, “classic” is because it convincingly established Moore's very point, not its contrary.
Moore does offer some valuable insights, especially in his early chapter on the Gallican episcopal councils and his later pages on the West Frankish councils held under Charles the Bald. In the former, he argues for the importance of the councils in forging a strong episcopal identity, in establishing an institutional vehicle for the projection of episcopal power, and above all in creating the vessel in which traditional Roman ideas of authority and law were recast into Christian ideas of governance. In the latter, he rightly emphasizes the councils' increasingly strident insistence on the independence and authority of the college of bishops. Yet neither set of arguments is really novel, and Moore's broader contextualizations are very problematic. Thus, Moore makes the West Frankish bishops speak too much with a single voice, that of Hincmar of Reims, so that the episcopacy appears more monolithic than it was.
Moore also ignores the important Lotharingian councils which at exactly the same moment were articulating an influential view much more supportive of royal authority (as was established by Hans-Hubert Anton in an article Moore frequently cites). From a few brief and intentionally tendentious statements in the records of the council of Aachen in 836, Moore concludes that the bishops held that “there were no theoretical limits to the church's claim to land and wealth,” that “controlling land was part of the religious function of the priesthood,” and that typological analogies between Old Testament altars and the altars of churches meant that “the transition was made from sacrifice to property” (344–345). Many scholars have noted that the ninth-century Carolingian church was concerned with property in ways that had not earlier been true; but to put the matter in such blunt terms deforms the issues and makes them less comprehensible. In particular, Moore's articulation of the bishops' position is anachronistic and simplistic because without understanding of the uses of precariae and secular abbacies or the Carolingian reform's emphasis on the purity of sacred space. When explaining the difficulties of Louis the Pious's reign, Moore writes, “powerful manorial establishments had long offered a challenge to episcopal government by incorporating church lands, churches, and clerics within a vassalic system” (305). Very little in this sentence makes sense within current understandings of the eighth and ninth centuries. Least of all can one cite (as he does) Susan Reynolds's Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpeted (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994) in support of it, since the whole force of Reynolds's argument is that there was no “vassalic system.”
Just as Moore relies too much on Hincmar for the episcopal position in Charles the Bald's reign, so his account of the episcopal critique of Louis the Pious is almost entirely dependent on Agobard of Lyon. But Agobard wrote so much largely because he lacked the influence Moore attributes to him. It is certainly not true that Agobard was at the 829 Council of Paris, let alone that he “dominated the proceedings” (315–316). Nor does the source Moore cites for this obviously false assertion (Wilfried Hartmann's Die Synoden der Karolingerzeit [Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1989]) say anything of the sort. Hartmann says, quite correctly, that Agobard would have been at the simultaneous Council of Lyon, whose acts do not survive.
In any case, given Moore's over-reliance on Agobard's writings, readers of this chapter will find none of the depth and subtlety with which Courtney Booker, Mayke de Jong, and Steffen Patzold have treated Louis's reign. In particular, readers will find nothing of these authors' appreciation for the shared ministerium of kings and bishops (and counts), working together for the salvation of the Christian people. Instead, they will be returned to the discredited idea of an organized Reichseinheitspartei that deposed Louis in 833 because he had gone back on the Ordinatio imperii. In earlier chapters, Moore uses the term “Arianism” for the Christianity of non-Frankish Germanic peoples with a certainty in its meaning (and existence and divisiveness) that goes against the grain of much current scholarship. He writes of Clovis's “consular” ceremony at Tours as “seemingly created on the spot” (112), thereby misrepresenting Michael McCormick's important 1989 article even as he cites it. On one page Moore writes that in Gregory of Tours's Histories, “the church is depicted not as a group of institutions gradually melding with Frankish society, but as an entity sharply marked off by its severe religious goals and the ascetic sanctity of individuals” (105). Eleven pages later, he states the opposite: “According to Gregory, the realm should be seen as a Christian space, anchored in churches and monasteries, organized by committed religious men and obedient Christian kings” (116). His account of the eighth-century Carolingian accession makes Boniface the prime mover in everything distinctive and important about the early Carolingian reform; and he insists that this reform was first and last about a mission that combined the conquest of external enemies with their conversion. Both interpretations are oversimplifications; neither well represents current scholarship.
The same is true of his account of the 789 Admonitio generalis, which Moore calls “an episcopal cultural manifesto issued under the aegis of royal power” (259). It is also hard to understand how such a statement could ever apply to a capitulary whose most original articles (cc. 60–82) show the direct influence of Alcuin, who was a teacher, a scholar, eventually an abbot, but never a bishop. Mistakes and misrepresentations like these are not obscure or unimportant.
