Set high on the wall in the portico of St. Peter’s Basilica, a modern visitor might be forgiven for walking past the inscription on black limestone commemorating the papacy of Hadrian I (reg. 772–795), but to do so is to miss an encounter with a remarkable survival from the Carolingian age. This epitaph of Pope Hadrian I, a gift to the basilica from Charlemagne, its verses by Alcuin, are the subject of this expansive study by Joanna Story. In this richly illustrated book, the author sets the epitaph inside a changing eighth-century world as the ambitions of the ascendent Carolingian dynasty entangled with those of its papal supporters in Rome.
In many ways, the book is an ambitious expansion of an earlier article by Story (“Charlemagne’s Black Marble,” Papers of the British School at Rome 73 (2005), pp. 157–190) which studied the petrology of the black stone of the epitaph and demonstrated conclusively that the epitaph was made in the north of stone quarried in Francia. What was important about that article sets the tone for the book: in both cases, analysis is centered on the epitaph, not primarily as a text, but as an object, where the materiality of the epitaph and the choices of its makers in materials and scope and script all serve to convey meaning as forcefully as its verses. This is the material turn in early medieval studies on full and productive display.
The book opens with an introduction (“Charlemagne and Italy”) in which Story considers eighth-century Rome and the uneasy interaction of Franks and Lombards, popes, and exarchs, all to provide a context for the message and audience of the epitaph.
Chapter 1 (“Renaissance Rome: Hadrian’s Epitaph in New St Peter’s”) considers how it is we have the inscription at all. Here, the focus turns to the century-long construction site that was St. Peter’s during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the ambitious disorder of this project, so much of Old St. Peter’s was lost, but not of course the epitaph of Hadrian. We are shown just how thoroughly renaissance and counter-reformation Rome had imaginative space for Charlemagne, and how the monument’s survival depended on its eighth-century message of partnership between king and papacy resonating for a new audience.
Chapter 2 (“The ‘Life’ and Death of Pope Hadrian”) works through what we can reconstruct of the career of Hadrian I and his relationship with Charlemagne from the not-always very forthcoming source base.
Chapter 3 (“Alcuin and the Epitaph”) considers the verses of the epitaph and offers a new defense of Alcuin’s authorship.
Chapter 4 (“Recalling Rome: Epigraphic Syllogae and Itineraries”) sets the epitaph further in its Roman context by widening the field of view to consider the many other inscriptions visible at that time in the city. The materials of this history are the syllogae, anthologies of inscriptions transmitted in Frankish manuscripts for a Frankish audience, partly as travel guides to pilgrims, and partly to provide a kind of armchair experience of pilgrimage for those who could not make the journey to Rome. Here, we are shown an early medieval culture of epigraphy and its appreciation as an integral part of the experience of Rome, an epigraphic culture into which the epitaph and its messaging of the Franco-Papal partnership was designed to participate.
Chapter 5 (“Writing on Walls: Epigraphy in Italy and Francia”) takes readers further into the epigraphic context of the epitaph by considering models for its script. Here, the papal past of Rome and the many memorials of Pope Damasus (reg. 366–384) provided primary inspiration.
Petrology and the meanings embedded in the choice of materials for the epitaph dominate Chapter 6 (“Black Stone: Materials, Methods, Motives”). Story considers the origin of the stone of the epitaph—deep in Frankish territory in the valley of the Meuse—and the resonances of that choice. While this black stone stands out as unusual for inscriptions in Rome, Story shows us how in its northern European context the black stone of the Franks was highly prized, and why this may have been so.
Chapter 7 (“Aachen and the Art of the Court”) further considers this northern context of the epitaph by reading the monument and its text as a yet further piece of the avalanche of cultural production that emanated from the Carolingian court in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. In this wide-ranging consideration, the palace at Aachen, under construction exactly at the time the epitaph was made, and often making use of the same black stone as Hadrian’s memorial, takes center stage. This discussion is supplemented by reading the epitaph against a series of manuscripts that usually fall under the heading of productions of the court school.
The epitaph arrived in Rome by the end of 796, shortly before Leo III, Hadrian’s successor, would weather an assassination attempt in 799, flee to Charlemagne’s protection in Francia, and then, in the following year, crown a new Roman emperor in St. Peter’s Basilica. In Chapter 8 (“Charlemagne, St Peter’s, and the Imperial Coronation”), Story takes on the forest of scholarship surrounding Charlemagne’s coronation and sets the ideas of empire expressed in the epitaph inside the contemporary forces that created an imperial title for the king of the Franks. This chapter bristles with fresh insight into Charlemagne’s imperial coronation and the difficulties of its source base: no mean feat for an event that has been under the historiographical microscope for so long.
Charlemagne and Rome’s examination of the epitaph of Hadrian shows just what rich possibilities lie in taking a medieval object and carefully, patiently, diligently working through the context in which that object was designed, seen, and used. When done well, as is emphatically the case here, it is remarkable just how gracefully such an approach can open new vistas on a familiar historical moment.
