Carolingian Catalonia: politics and culture in the Spanish March

FAIN: FT-55547-08

Cullen J. Chandler
Lycoming College (Williamsport, PA 17701-5100)

I propose to finish a book manuscript already in preparation and consideration by a top academic publisher in the field, Cambridge University Press. The study examines the impact of the eighth-century conquest of Catalunya by the Franks ruled by the Carolingian dynasty. The focus is on the status of Catalonia--known as the Spanish March--during the ninth century. Specialists and students alike recognize the Carolingian period (c. 700-c. 1000) for its relatively centralized empire and its Christian-based intellectual renaissance. Thus, the central question of my project is how the frontier region operated as a province of the large European empire in terms of political networks and cultural programs.

Associated Products

A New View of a Catalonian Gesta contra Iudaeos: Ripoll 106 and the Jews of the Spanish March (Book Section)
Title: A New View of a Catalonian Gesta contra Iudaeos: Ripoll 106 and the Jews of the Spanish March
Author: Cullen J. Chandler
Editor: Steven A. Stofferahn
Editor: Cullen J. Chandler
Abstract: Ripoll 106 is one of the oldest manuscripts in the Archive of the Crown of Aragon (Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó, or ACA) in Barcelona, one that deserves to be more widely known than it is. While the later medieval Crown of Aragon, which consisted of Catalonia and surrounding regions, is known for its wealth of documentary evidence, Anglophone scholars have just recently begun to explore the archive’s possibilities for earlier ages. The region possessed a religious diversity that is by now well known. In the last ten years studies in English have moved the chronological horizon back to the tenth century, and even the ninth, but still focus on the mundane matters recorded in charters. Manuscript evidence of the learned culture of monastic and cathedral schools is still relatively unknown to the readers of this recent literature, despite what it has to reveal about relationships between Christians and Jews in the ninth-century Spanish March. Ripoll 106 provides valuable clues about exactly this issue, the religious diversity of the March and what Christian educators thought about it.
Year: 2012
Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
Book Title: Discovery and Distinction in the Early Middle Ages: Studies in Honor of John J. Contreni

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