Robert A.H. Evans’s excellent new study operates from a quietly provocative premise: that the presence of God as an actor in human history is so literally omnipresent in early medieval texts that it has been treated as an automatic, pro forma topos, and consequently overlooked by many modern scholars. Taking a critical step back from such scholarly assumptions, Evans argues that medievalists, in neglecting literary representations of God’s agency, have consequently failed to recognize one of the most malleable, creative aspects of Carolingian histories. Such “histories,” as broadly conceived by Evans, can include annals and chronicles, narratives of recent events, vitae of rulers, ecclesiastical leaders, and saints, “universal” historiae, and panegyric poetry.
In the book’s introduction, Evans situates his methodological orientation within a “‘religious turn’ among historians [that] has helpfully challenged the tendency to read sources politically to the exclusion of other functions” (11). Understanding contemporary political circumstances, Evans suggests, may help scholars to situate some of the choices made by Carolingian historians – but there is always more to the story than political imperatives, as evinced by the striking variety of ways that God’s presence is employed in (or sometimes conspicuously absent from) Carolingian accounts of the past. “Talking about God was a decision, not a reflex,” asserts Evans, and “ubiquity should not be mistaken for uniformity” (5).
Part I, “The Context of Carolingian History Writing,” is divided into three chapters. Chapter 1 sketches out the cultural parameters, or limits, within which Carolingian histories can be examined for their depictions of God’s agency. Evans creates this thicker cultural context by surveying a sample of notable Carolingian texts across genres, including, for example, the General Admonition of 789, Dhuoda’s Manual, and biblical commentaries by Hrabanus Maurus. Evans demonstrates that Carolingian writers allowed for the possibility that “humans could – with thought and reflection – recognize divine actions” (38). The degree of such recognition, ranging from confident discernment to cautiously vague ascription of divine causes, is one of the most variable, and subtly revealing, elements in Carolingian history-writing. Chapter 2 turns to earlier Christian precedents for Carolingian notions of divine and human agency. Here, Evans shows both the strong influence exercised by figures like Augustine, Jerome, Gregory the Great, and Bede, and the myriad cognitive options and adaptable textual strategies available to Carolingian readers/writers. Chapter 3 continues that discussion of earlier authors and their works but with a focus on historical exemplars, from Flavius Josephus to Gregory of Tours and the Liber pontificalis. Of special significance, Evans describes a loose theological framework that retained space for a limited autonomy of human actions within, and without compromising, God’s ultimate omnipotence. Per Evans, “the agency of the evildoer can function independently of God (as to intention) without contradicting the premise that all things happen because of God’s will (as to capacity)” (50). Establishing this nuanced distinction between the intentionality and the capacity of the divine will is essential for what follows in Evans’s analysis of Carolingian historical writing.
In Part II, “God in Carolingian History Writing,” Evans turns directly to Carolingian texts recounting the past. Chapter 4 surveys the early period of the Carolingian dynasty through to Charlemagne’s reign and considers the role of God in histories produced during that period, including the Continuations of the Chronicle of Fredegar, the Annals of Metz, and the early Royal Frankish Annals. From these sources, Evans suggests that “Frankish historians increasingly felt the need to treat God as a real actor in the whole of Frankish political life, without which their competing visions of social order would not gain any traction” (111). Chapter 5 turns to the tumultuous reign of Charlemagne’s successor, Louis the Pious, and considers such diverse texts as Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne, Ermold the Black’s verse In Praise of the Emperor Louis, the biographies of Louis by Thegan and “The Astronomer,” the early Annals of St-Bertin, Nithard’s Histories, and Frechulf of Lisieux’s “universal” history. The wide-ranging approaches to historia and divergent views of past events in these texts yield markedly different depictions of divine agency. Evans argues that an ostensible “consensus that seemed to have developed in the 790s was challenged, rejected, and renewed” by authors who composed histories during Louis’s reign (814–840) and the subsequent civil war, “reflect[ing] the tensions” of this fraught period (149). In chapter 6, Evans follows that discordant thread to the dissolution of the Carolingian empire, culminating with Regino of Prüm’s early-tenth-century Chronicle, which “located divine agency in the experience of Viking raiding,” while “remain[ing] vague about what had caused God’s displeasure” with the Carolingians (192). Regino’s wariness regarding the “epistemological problems entailed in discerning divine agency” and his “qualified theological perspective,” Evans contends, are particularly illustrative of the “complexities of the tenth-century world” and the distance of that world from the epistemological confidence of histories produced during Charlemagne’s reign (195).
The third and final Part of Evans’s book, “Theology and Its Implications,” consists of two chapters reflecting back on the many Carolingian histories surveyed in Part II, now with closer attention to the formal, grammatical, and narrative devices employed by Carolingian writers (chapter 7), and to key themes of “identity,” “merit,” “belief,” and “affections” as they intersect with ideas about divine agency in history (chapter 8). Evans follows these chapters with a brief conclusion, reminding “both historians and theologians [of] the value of taking seriously the theological dimension of seemingly ‘un-theological’ sources” like Carolingian histories (250). Such sources, Evans holds, are theological “in the fundamental sense of talking about God” (201) but rooted in a “lived theology” (251) that is distinctively revealing of how some Carolingian writers perceived the world and their place within it.
In recent decades, there have been numerous significant studies on the writing and study of history in the Carolingian world. Evans’s book is both an important contribution to that literature and a refreshing redirection of its conversations into a register closer to cultural history. By problematizing representations of God’s agency in Carolingian historical writing, Evans restores something specific, vivid, and vital to the culture of Carolingian Christian writers, while also suggesting new ways of measuring cultural, social, and political changes between the late eighth and early tenth centuries in the Latin West.
