This essay offers a new examination of medical knowledge in Merovingian Gaul (c. 500–c.750), the ways that it became part of non-specialized learning, and its continuities with Carolingian medicine. In most histories of medicine, the Merovingian world is portrayed as providing a hostile environment for medicine due to the Christianization of knowledge. A significant problem, however, is that there has been no study of what medicine was known or how it was treated since 1937, and even that study can now be seen to be built on false premises. The first part of the present paper offers a new conspectus of Merovingian medical knowledge based on the earliest manuscripts and argues that this new overview changes where we can see continuities in content and practice with Carolingian medicine. The second part builds on this to explore the intersections between religious and secular study, and how medicine fitted within a generalist rather than specialist education. The final section looks at how this learning complemented understandings of the miraculous and nature and in the process helped to deal with challenges from folk practice and the failures of medicine to offer effective aid during pandemics. It is concluded that medicine was in good health in the Merovingian period as it contributed useful ways to see natural order in Creation.

The renunciation of the devil in the rite of baptism appears in high frequency in baptismal expositions, royal capitularies, acts of church councils, and popular sermons during the later reign of Charlemagne. Close examination of these sources demonstrates a discourse of reform that centers on the proper life and conduct of Christians. In reply to Charlemagne's questions in his encyclical letter on baptism, authors of baptismal expositions commonly expounded baptismal renunciation as a symbol of Christians’ moral conversion. Charlemagne projected his deep solicitude for the life and conduct of ecclesiastics of his realm on the issue of the renunciation of the devil in two capitularies of 811. Archbishop Leidrad of Lyon elaborated his exposition on baptismal renunciation in his second letter of reply to Charlemagne on baptism, which preserves a sample of how an ecclesiastical leader responded to the emperor's reform concerns. Several popular sermons from the later reign of Charlemagne reveal how the moralistic discourse of the renunciation of the devil was disseminated to common Christians. Baptismal renunciation was part of the rhetoric of Charlemagne's empire, and various modes of communication that involved the agency of multiple parties made it a totalizing discourse of reform.

Hrabanus Maurus's Commentary on Matthew provides a lens through which to view the centrality of biblical studies to Carolingian reform initiatives. The commentary sits amid a burst of interest in Matthew's Gospel in the first quarter of the ninth century. It also occupies a central place in Hrabanus's program for clerical education and renewal. Hrabanus imagined the work as a user-friendly reference guide or introductory text and structured the commentary with highly sophisticated and complementary indexing, organizing, and searching features to privilege ease of use. Hrabanus's design allows for quick appreciation and simple interpretation of the Gospel's overall narrative structure, its principal episodes, and its individual verses. Moreover, Hrabanus took painstaking effort to document the numerous patristic sources upon which he drew in building the commentary, as well as to acknowledge when he contributed thoughts of his own. The manuscript record, epistolary remarks, sermon texts, and literary references — including in the vernacular — testify to broad dissemination and use of the commentary by Hrabanus's network of patrons, peers, and students across Frankish Europe. Attention to the structure, content, and influence of the commentary expands scholarly appreciation of Hrabanus's genius beyond his achievements as an abbot and bishop or as a prolific biblical exegete, to include resourcefulness and practicality in teaching. Moreover, the study illumines the close association Carolingian leaders saw between biblical studies and broader cultural renewal along with the networks connecting leaders across the Frankish world as they reflected upon and promoted reform.

The sixth-century Rule of Benedict became a foundational text for the practice of Christian monasticism in medieval Europe, but its utility extended outside of the monastery as well. In the Carolingian period church prelates repurposed parts of this influential monastic handbook for the purpose of pastoral care. In the decades around 800 CE, excerpts from the rule appeared in several composite manuscripts made for the instruction of parish priests and by extension their lay audiences. Benedict's fourth chapter on the “Instruments of Good Works” was deemed particularly useful in the context of preaching to lay people not only because of its ecumenical message to love God and one's neighbor but also due to its formulaic and repetitive idiom. This study examines the redeployment of extracts of the Rule of Benedict for the cura animarum in Carolingian parishes with particular attention to the role of Bishop Theodulf of Orléans (ca. 760–821) in disseminating Benedict's teachings beyond the walls of the cloister.

The “Defense of Medicine” prefaces the Codex Bambergensis Medicinalis 1, a Carolingian collection of medical texts. Some scholars have dismissed the Defense as an incoherent patchwork of quotations. Yet, missing from the literature is an adequate assessment of the Defense's arguments. This present study includes the first English translation accompanied by a complete source commentary, a prerequisite for valid content analysis. When read systematically and with attention to the author's use of sources, the Defense is limpid and cogent. Its first purpose is to defend the compatibility of Christian faith and secular medicine. Key propositions include the following: God made nature good, so the natural sciences are reconcilable with divine learning; scripture respects medicine; God expects the sick to avail of physicians and deserves honor for healings done through physicians. Counter-arguments used by the Defense's opponents, who rejected medicine on principle, can also be reconstructed from the text. Two further purposes of the Defense have hitherto been explored insufficiently. After justifying medicine, the Defense addresses sick patients. It encourages them that illness can be spiritually healthful, an instrument for curing their souls. The Defense then addresses caregivers. It tells them why they should succor the sick, even the poor: not for gain or fame, but in imitation of Christ and as if treating Christ himself, whose image the sick bear. The Defense thus contributes to the history of ideas on medicine, health, sickness, and the ethics of altruistic care.

Modern historians have long argued that the early medieval Franks thought themselves to be the chosen people or new Israel, especially as they gained a great empire under the Carolingian dynasty in the late eighth century. The Opus Caroli of Bishop Theodulf of Orléans has often been cited as one of the clearest expressions of this self-conception as God's elect. A massive work attacking the legitimacy of the Byzantine empire in the context of the iconoclasm dispute during the early 790s, it does indeed contest the Byzantine claim to be the Christian empire. But Theodulf's repeated statement that ‘We are the spiritual Israel’ is best understood not as an assertion of ethnic election, but as a reference to the Christian tradition of Scripture exegesis which should (he argues) underpin both the Frankish and the Byzantine understanding of images. The Carolingian claim to empire rested on the Frankish championing of the universal Church, and its traditions of orthodoxy and correct biblical interpretation.

This essay seeks to refute the idea that doubt is an essentially modern phenomenon and to show that doubt was also a feature of earlier medieval existence. It argues that in the Carolingian period, for both individuals and groups, debate, disturbance and religious doubt coexisted uneasily with religious faith and cultic community. Religious experience is examined at the level of individuals, groups, and larger social organizations. Three case studies focus on the noblewoman Dhuoda, unique in having left a detailed record of a spiritual life lived out within a family and in social and political relationships at once collaborative and conflictual; the heretic Gottschalk, whose voluminous works reveal something of his spirituality and much about the religious and political pressures that taxed his faith; and Archbishop Elipand of Toledo, a Church leader living under Muslim rule, and accused of heresy by Christian scholars themselves uncertain of their ground. Two further sections discuss particular contexts in which doubts were harboured: conversion from paganism, in a world of Christian mission; and local cults of relics which depended on the establishing of authenticity where there had been doubt, and then the forming of believer-solidarities. Finally the figure of Doubting Thomas is considered in a period when faith and cult sustained individual identities in dyadic relationships founded on oaths of fidelity and mutual trust but also on collective solidarities.

Hrabanus Maurus's De institutione clericorum is a masterpiece of clerical formation, emblematic of the Carolingian Renewal and esteemed by thinkers throughout the Middle Ages. In the third book, Hrabanus juxtaposes Augustine's teachings in De doctrina christiana with Gregory the Great's instruction in the Regula pastoralis to craft an original case for a close connection between wisdom and moral life in priestly training. Hrabanus's effort concretizes long-standing concerns of Carolingian reformers reiterated in landmark reform documents from the late eighth and early ninth centuries. Moreover, throughout his life, Hrabanus periodically returns to his work on priestly formation for words and ideas to undergird subsequent efforts at integrating education with pastoral practice in a variety of genres, including his model sermons, his encyclopedic commentary, and his handbook for missionary conversion. In addition to highlighting Hrabanus's individual genius as one who adroitly applies traditional authorities in novel ways to contemporary problems, this study illumines the crucial role played by monasteries like Fulda as engines for the Carolingian reform.