The Penitential State: Authority and Atonement in the Age of Louis the Pious, 814-840

Abstract

The public penance of Emperor Louis the Pious at Soissons in 833 has long been identified as both a key moment in the decline of the Carolingian empire built by Charlemagne, and as clearly illustrating one of the causes of that decline. A fateful alliance with an increasingly ambitious ecclesiastical élite, ruthlessly determined to keep Charlemagne's heirs on a tight clerical leash, enabled Louis’ adult sons, led by Lothar, to act on their political frustration: the image of Charlemagne's heir reduced to grovelling in a hair shirt in church, in front of ranks of grimly self-righteous bishops, perfectly embodied Walter Ullman's classic diagnosis of early medieval ‘stunted sovereignty’. Though Jinty Nelson argued back in the early 1990s that Louis, and thus Carolingian kingship, was in fact not hamstrung by Soissons 833—for the emperor was back in control in a few months, and Carolingian kings kept on ruling for decades—historians have had to wait for Mayke de Jong's fine new book for a thorough investigation of the episode, which is properly impatient with such misleading master-narratives.