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Zusatztext It would be wrong to spoil the pleasure of reading this brilliantly written book. While shifting the historiographical pendulum back to an approach that was thought to have been abandoned, it avoids the pitfall of going backwards… A memoirist of the French court under the Ancien Régime would not have written anything else. Informationen zum Autor Stuart Airlie is Senior Lecturer in History at University of Glasgow, UK. He is the author of Power and Its Problems in Carolingian Europe (2012). Vorwort An analysis of authority and power in Carolingian Europe. Zusammenfassung How does power manifest itself in individuals? Why do people obey authority? And how does a family, if they are the source of such dominance, convey their superiority and maintain their command in a pre-modern world lacking speedy communications, standing armies and formalised political jurisdiction? Here, Stuart Airlie expertly uses this idea of authority as a lens through which to explore one of the most famous dynasties in medieval Europe: the Carolingians. Ruling the Frankish realm from 751 to 888, the family of Charlemagne had to be ruthless in asserting their status and adept at creating a discourse of Carolingian legitimacy in order to sustain their supremacy. Through its nuanced analysis of authority, politics and family, Making and Unmaking the Carolingians, 751-888 outlines the system which placed the Carolingian dynasty at the centre of the Frankish world. In doing so, Airlie sheds important new light on both the rise and fall of the Carolingian empire and the nature of power in medieval Europe more generally. Inhaltsverzeichnis PrefaceAcknowledgementsList of AbbreviationsMapsFamily Trees1. A Ruling Family2. Building Carolingian Royalty 751-7683. A House and its Head: the reign of Charlemagne 768-814 4. Child Labour 751-8885. Louis the Pious and the Paranoid Style in Politics6. Lines of Succession and lines of failure, 843-8797. Universal Carolingians: masteries of time and space (751-888)8. Women’s Work9. The Loss of Uniqueness: 888 And All ThatBibliographyIndex...
