This chapter examines the West Frankish political controversies that defined Flodoard’s career and reassesses the nature of the historian’s involvement in them. Between 925 and 961, the see of Rheims was contested by two archbishops in a dispute that was intrinsically linked with wider political struggles in West Francia. Even though Flodoard tells us about his own participation in the archiepiscopal dispute, previous scholars have downplayed this involvement, considering it to have had little impact on his historical works. This chapter scrutinises Flodoard’s autobiographical remarks and portraits of the two rival archbishops, Hugh and Artold, arguing that his role in the dispute did have a significant bearing on the content and tone of his Annals and History of the Church of Rheims. The History, moreover, has tended to be viewed as a passive work of ‘local history’ primarily of benefit for the clergy of Rheims. Yet Flodoard composed it immediately following the resolution of the Rheims schism. By reappraising the nature of this settlement and Flodoard’s impetuses for writing, this chapter advances a broader interpretation of the purpose and audience of his History.

In the History of the Church of Rheims, Flodoard devotes significant attention to describing the acquisition and defence of property by the bishops of Rheims. Flodoard’s emphasis on church property has often been thought to be a generic, unremarkable aspect of ‘institutional’ historiography. This chapter argues that Flodoard’s focus on Rheims’s property was far more targeted, and that he sought to justify his church’s claims to specific lands in response to the schism that wracked the archbishopric in the first half of the tenth century. After surveying the evidence for property management in early medieval Rheims, I examine Flodoard’s techniques as an archivist and his activities as an administrator involved in land disputes. Claims were constructed on the basis of written texts (sometimes forged), local tradition and recent history. This chapter also considers the question of genre as it pertains to such works of institutional or local history as well as the implications of its findings for the audience and function of the History.

This chapter offers a rationale for the book and an introduction to Flodoard’s career and works. It summarises key political developments in the tenth-century West Frankish kingdom and provides an outline of the dominant historiographical interpretations of the period. In theory, Flodoard should be a star witness in debates about the nature of political and social change in the kingdoms and polities that succeeded the Carolingian empire, but his works have tended to be overlooked in favour of charters and other ‘documentary’ evidence. When Flodoard has been invoked by scholars, this usage has tended to be uncritical, primarily because he appears to be a straightforward, impartial writer. From what Flodoard himself tells us about his career, however, this apparent neutrality is clearly an illusion, and therefore an authorial strategy that requires interrogation. Finally, this chapter provides a historiographical survey of the major political and literary approaches to medieval historiography and medieval authors that underpin the methodology of this book.