This article examines the office of advocate at the abbey of Saint‐Martin of Tours. It studies what was regionally distinctive about its emergence there in the late ninth century and suggests a reason for the office’s demise in the early tenth century. In doing so, it draws out the important discursive shifts which were part and parcel of both the…[Read more]

The development of ducal authority in tenth‐century Aquitaine was a major change in the region’s political culture. The emergence of a regional, aristocratic polity was a shift from the Carolingian past, and historians have proffered several explanations for it. This article examines several models for the development of principalities: as the e…[Read more]

In 965, Count Arnulf the Great of Flanders died, leaving a small child as his only heir. In the wake of his death, the West Frankish King Lothar annexed his southern lands for the crown. This paper examines how and why Lothar was able to succeed in this. By the 950s, the Flemish count was diplomatically isolated and facing threats to his southern…[Read more]

Carolingian kingship was not an all-or-nothing proposition. This article compares three border regions of Charles the Bald’s kingdom, Neustria, Aquitaine and Brittany, all operating at a variety of removes from central authority, examining their rulers to see the extent to which they participated in the aspects of kingships. In doing so, it a…[Read more]

In August 923, Charles the Simple was imprisoned by Count Heribert II of Vermandois, spending the rest of his life in prison. The six years between his imprisonment and his death, however, have never been the focus of a sustained study: Charles usually disappears into a jail cell and out of history. This article uses the difficult source material…[Read more]

In 966, by the end of the reign of its third duke, Richard I, Normandy had overcome the crises that had beset it in the middle of the century. Much of this success came from the coherence of its ruling group, which expressed itself partly in terms of ‘Norman’ identity. This article uses Dudo’s history of the dukes and Richard’s charters to arg…[Read more]

The monastery of Homblières, after 949, when it was turned from a community of nuns into a reformed Benedictine monastery under the rule of Abbot Berner, left a surprisingly large amount of tenth-century written material, producing both a Vita and a Translatio of Homblières’ patron saint Hunegund, as well as a large collection of charters. The…[Read more]