A key theme in this collection of thirteen essays is the creative tension between the Carolingian dynasty and its aristocratic followers across 250 years. The first section explores the rising dynasty's attempts to consolidate its power through war and rewards. The second section focuses on the exercise of authority through a complex system of governance and representation, and the pivotal role played by the courts of Charlemagne and his successors. In the third section, we see the Carolingian system undergoing a crisis of legitimacy, challenged by civil war, royal divorce, and aristocratic encroachment on dynastic exclusivity. These essays anatomise the dynamics of power relations in the greatest empire of the early medieval west.
Biography
Stuart Airlie is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Glasgow, UK.
'This selection of thirteen articles, originally published between 1990 and 2007, confirms Stuart Airlie’s standing as a foremost interpreter of Carolingian political culture, and as a superb essayist too.' English Historical Review 'Few if any historians these days write as stylishly and empathetically as Stuart Airlie, or with such wit. He has complicated, and humanized, what used often to seem a crude and violent political culture, and his Carolingian world is people with men and women who thought as well as felt ... Airlie's range of literary and interdisciplinary reference is as phenomenal as his historical one. He has made himself at home in the major scholarly traditions ... His citations ... are placed with absolute precision into substantial historical arguments where never a word is wasted.' Early Medieval Europe
