The conference on Louis the Pious held in Oxford in 1986 was remarkable for its lack of discussion of the two rebellions against Louis in 830 and 833, which Theodor Schieffer had called ‘The crisis of the Carolingian empire’. Louis the Pious was characterised by Stendhal as a ‘roi dépourvu de la faculté de vouloir’ and by Florentine Mütherich as a ‘Pantoffelheld’, though at the 1986 conference Janet Nelson made a forceful case for his recovery of control in the last years of his reign. In 2009 two monographs focused upon Louis's deposition: Mayke de Jong's The pentitential state: authority and atonement in the age of Louis the Pious and the book under review here. Booker combines a close reading of the sources with a survey of treatments of Louis in French and German historiography and literature. By taking the deposition of Louis in October 833 as his starting point he can explore the ‘drama’ and ‘tragedy’ of the reign, and he has hunted such terms from Montesquieu to Halphen. He commands the secondary literature, including unpublished theses, and he has already edited the account of the deposition drawn up by Louis's bishops (a translation is provided in an appendix): he reveals that the site of Louis's imprisonment in 833 was supplied with an inscription in French supposedly carved by the emperor. His focus on the ‘proposed meanings and received meanings’ of the deposition means that his book investigates the ‘decline of the Carolingians’ as a perception (with the deposition as a ‘symbolic cliché’) rather than a process.

Booker has excellent things to say about the contemporary narratives: the Annals of St Bertin, Thegan (whose work contains an ‘allusive sermon’), the Astronomer, who uses the word tragedy, Nithard, Paschasius Radbertus (seen in terms of theatricality) and Odilo of Soissons, who gives Louis a voice. He tackles Odbert of Utrecht's remarkable life of Bishop Frederick of Utrecht, composed c. 1024, which tells how the adulterous Judith ordered the bishop's assassination after he had rebuked Louis. He is sensitive to biblical typologies and to the influence of Augustine and Gregory the Great on Carolingian authors. But he seems reluctant to investigate why Louis was deposed: there is little treatment of polity. This is a book in which ‘binary opposition’ has an index entry, but ‘capitulary’ does not.

The early modern historiography of Louis is assimilated to the editing of sources, with fine if brief treatments of d'Achéry, Mabillon, Jean-Papire Masson and Théophile Raynaud's 1662 defence of Agobard's opposition to Louis. Booker's remarks about Leibniz's use of the Epitaphium Arsenii leave the reader wishing for a fuller account of Leibniz. He writes eloquently about Schürmann's 1726 Braunschweig opera Ludovicus Pius, but seems not to know that it derives from l'Anarchia dell'imperio, a work by Legrenzi performed in Venice in 1683. Nor does he mention another opera about Judith, l'Innocenza difesa, with a libretto by Silvani, performed in Venice, Genoa, Florence, Bologna, Naples, Turin, Prague and Rome, and sometimes entitled Carlo, re d'Alemagnia. A German version, Judith Gemahlin Kayser Ludwigs des Frommen (1732) has music by Telemann and Chelleri (see Christian Seebald, ‘Medieval’ librettos /libretti vom ‘Mittelalter’: discoveries of history in (North) German and European opera around 1700/Entdeckungen von Historie in der (nord)deutschen und europäischen Oper um 1700, Berlin–New York 2009). Booker is insightful about how Louis is presented in the works of Montesquieu and Mably (he relegates Mably's retelling of the story of Angilbert of Milan and Louis to a footnote: to me it seems decisive for Mably's stance). He shows how the ultra-royalist Marchagny, in his La Gaule poétique, a work which went into five editions between 1815 and 1835, offered a plan for a drama about Louis in which the conflict between ‘les droits de l'autel et du trône’ would be depicted. (It is no accident that Flaubert referred to Marchagny's ‘sottises innocents’.) The drama Louis Premier ou Le fanatisme au IXe siècle (1822) by Prudent-Marc-Xavier Drap-Arnaud was inspired by Marchagny: Drap-Arnaud was the author of chants libres gallo-régaliens rightly despised by his less royalist contemporaries. But Lothaire: tragédie en trois actes (1817) by Hippolyte Bis and F. Hay is not mentioned. (Bis was the librettist of Rossini's William Tell.)

Though he praises Michelet for discernment as well as an awareness of drama Booker cites J.-M.-F. Frantin, Louis le Pieux et son siècle, and the superior work Wala et Louis le Débonnaire by the Chartiste and future professor of geography A. Himly, only because they speak of ‘scandalous scenes’. The liberal F. Funck's Ludwig der Fromme: Geschichte der Auflösung des grossen Frankenreichs (Frankfurt-am-Main 1832) is relegated to a footnote: it has a good account of the sources, noting why Einhard and Nithard cannot be trusted. More space is given to the German dramas of Karl Robe: Ludwig der Fromme (1862) and Ernst von Wildenbruch, Die Karolinger (1881). In the latter Louis the Pious is poisoned by Judith's lover Bernhard of Septimania and Charles the Bald is described as:

Booker characterises Wildenbruch as a ‘pseudoromantic’ yet he was praised by the New York Times in 1911 for his demands for German moral courage and his criticism of German philistinism and the refusal to acknowledge intellectual debts to France. Was the decision not to survey the twentieth-century historiography of Louis the correct one?

The survey of narratives is followed by an investigation of ‘justifications’ with an excellent treatment of the texts about Louis's deposition linked to Ebo of Reims: his Resignatio, his apologies, his condemnation at the synod of Soissons, and the interventions of Hincmar and his clerics, and Charles the Bald himself. (I am not clear, when we have that archbishop's autograph and a Gospel book made for him, why Booker chooses to spell his name with two ‘B's.) The final chapter considers Carolingian concepts of equity as a way into the value system shared by Louis's supporters and opponents, tracing the term in Cicero, the Psalter and Benedict's Rule. This is where Hrabanus' letter to Louis about the rebellion and Louis's own letter to Abbot Hilduin of St Denis in 834 are discussed. But was iniquity more than a synonym for a sinful realm? Booker suggests that a poem by Sedulius Scottus about iniquity ‘may provide traces of the general transformation of Louis’ ideological program of equity' but this seems special pleading. In the end Booker refuses to take sides with or against Louis: the sources he examines are not always allowed to respond to one another.

The book is well designed and printed, though the publishers will win few admirers by printing the important footnotes at the end of the volume.