same duty of service and fidelity to their heavenly and earthly lords.
Admonitio generalis as a whole, therefore, and this final section in particular both articulate an ideology of shared and universal aristocratic identity and rely on that ideology for their provisions to be persuasive and logical. Without doubt, this ideology was already a driving force behind the convocation of the council of 789 and the drafting of Admonitio generalis in the first place—the boldness and scope of the document imply nothing less. The success of the document’s program of correctio over the course of the next century, furthermore, suggests that this ideology exerted a significant degree of influence upon the aristocratic receivers of Admonitio generalis as well. Regardless of whether the document reflected established thinking or created it anew, however, it can be no coincidence that within a few years of 789 and the dissemination of Admonitio generalis throughout the realm, we also find the first extended explications of the ideology that supported it. This ideology made caritas—“love of God and neighbor”—the core aristocratic value from which all other values derived. Caritas was the aristocrat’s key to both salvation and his worldly power, for it linked him directly to the authority of God.
Reading the “Lay Mirrors”
In 795 or 796, Paulinus of Aquileia wrote a treatise on the ideal lay life that we now call Liber Exhortationis (the “Book of Exhortation”).22 Just a short time later, in 799 or 800, Alcuin of York wrote a similar work, known today as De virtutibus et vitiis (“On the Virtues and Vices”).23 Both authors wrote at the direct request of powerful Carolingian frontier warlords: Paulinus for Eric of Friuli (d. 799), lord of the southeastern march, and Alcuin for Wido (Guy) of Brittany (d. 818), lord of the northwestern march.
These texts were the earliest of a small group of didactic books written specifically for lay, nonroyal aristocrats during roughly the first half of the ninth century.24 Scholars once referred to them as “ascetic florilegia”—“florilegia” because they excerpt and collect late antique patristic texts and “ascetic” because a majority of these patristic texts were written originally for monastic audiences and accordingly espouse quite traditional Christian ideologies of ascetic masculinity.25 We now label these books as a subcategory of the ancient “mirror for princes” genre: Laienspiegel, or “mirrors for the laity.”26 This new classification has been helpful in encouraging scholars to recognize at least a shade of art where previous readers found little. We now acknowledge that the mirrors do not simply collect patristic wisdom; they arrange, narrate, and adapt it to new purposes. Still, historians generally tend to regard these texts as rather dull and derivative. And even their closest apologists wonder about their ultimate significance as historical artifacts: how widely they were actually read and followed and whether they truly had an impact upon the majority of the Carolingian world.27 The question of what, exactly, these texts represent, not only as objects unto themselves but also in relation to their actual function within Carolingian aristocratic culture as a whole, deserves further consideration here.
J. M. Wallace-Hadrill once described the advice in these little books as “all very practical”—a line often quoted in discussion of the mirrors but with which very few scholars have agreed.28 Most interpreters have in fact assumed, with rather astonishing uniformity, that the mirrors could only have been received as problematic. At best, these scholars argue, the mirrors espoused a form of Christianity that would have been completely incongruent with the general character of Frankish secular values—values that included glory in war, hunting, conspicuous wealth, and sexual virility.29 Heinrich Fichtenau summed up this view with the dramatic claim that throughout the ninth century and until the mid-tenth century at the earliest, anyone who wished to lead a particularly devout Christian existence had to embrace an ideal of living that stood in “stark contrast” to the traditional Frankish way of life. Most, he suggested, were forced to choose a path of “lesser evils,” of marriage and almsgiving, of endowing churches and monasteries, and of doing private penance for the sins of the flesh that they could not or would not conquer.30 Pierre Riché believed that the incongruence between Christian and secular Frankish values was in fact so great that it created a lay “anxiety complex”—widespread fear throughout the lay world about whether they could possibly achieve salvation as the lowest members of a society “dominated” by the clergy.31
Other scholars, taking perhaps an even more skeptical position, have regarded the mirrors as largely toothless, featuring little in the way of focused advice or specific liturgical teaching. Janet Nelson has described the mirrors’ advice to the laity as “at once too specific and too vague” and “often banal.”32 Rachel Stone, who has conducted the most careful and extensive readings of the mirrors to date, recently quipped that Alcuin’s De virtutibus et vitiis is so bland that it “seems … to assume an audience less of ‘spiritual athletes’ than ‘spiritual couch-potatoes.’ ”33 Rafaele Savigni, merging the major themes of these scholarly positions into one all-encompassing theory, has argued that the corpus of lay mirrors therefore suggests two different and quite contradictory orientations with regard to laypersons in ninth-century ecclesiology: one “ascetic-monastic” (and therefore too strict and out of touch), the other focusing more on almsgiving and the channeling of violence (and therefore too banal and a conciliation to the “warrior” values of secular society).34
Reading the mirrors for their explicit and implicit ideological function frees us from this interpretative quagmire. It allows us namely to see how these texts would have served writers and readers within their historical moment and why they would have made perfectly logical sense to them. Focusing on the ideological messages of these texts suggests that actually there was no contradiction between the Christianity that the mirrors espouse and Carolingian secular life, as scholars have presumed. Nor do they represent a concession of “true” Christian values in favor of “lesser” forms. They do not call for monastic withdrawal from the world, nor do they “impose” a foreign set of “clerical” values upon a refractory or anxious warrior culture. Instead, they articulate exactly the ideology of worldly Christian masculinity that Gregory the Great explained in his Regulae pastoralis liber—an ideal of masculinity within which caritas allowed men to perform their allegiance to the Kingdom of God symbolically, providing them access to correct knowledge of right and wrong and, with it, divine authority. The crucial innovation of these texts is that they explicitly extended this authority to laymen as well as men “in religion.”
In other words, we must change the way in which we read the lay mirrors and understand what they can reveal about the cultural forces that produced them. Paulinus and Alcuin did not simply write books of practical (or impractical) advice. They wrote ideological narratives of their world. These narratives explained, both directly and by implication, the correct order of God’s creation and the role that Carolingian aristocratic men were destined to play within it. They articulated and framed connections between lay aristocratic masculinity, secular prosperity, and divine sanction as completely natural, rendering normative the aristocratic cooperation and moral rectitude for which Admonitio generalis called. In the end, it ultimately matters little, therefore, how widely these texts may or may not have been read and digested in their moment. They are significant because they codify the completely constructed logic that authorized Carolingian aristocratic power at the turn of the ninth century. This logic enabled Carolingian men to wield that power whether they were consciously aware of its ideological foundations or not.
Paulinus and Eric
Paulinus was Aquileia’s Patriarch, a title granted to that episcopal see during the sixth century as a means of demarcating its autonomy and primacy among the other powerful sees of the region, including the strongholds of Ravenna and Rome.35 It was a position, in other words, of highest spiritual authority. Yet in writing his Liber exhortationis for the most powerful secular lord in that region, Paulinus was still writing as a subordinate. We must always remember that Carolingian society was not the society of the European High Middle Ages. Charlemagne
