Assembling the Austrasian Letters at Trier and Lorsch

Abstract

This article is a reconsideration of the Epistulae Austrasicae. We critique the widespread notion that the constituent letters were compiled by a courtier in the late sixth century at Metz as a book of models for use in the Austrasian chancellery. We argue instead that a monk from the monastery of Lorsch assembled the letters in the early ninth century from individual exemplars and groupings that he found in archives at Trier. We conclude by outlining some implications of this rereading for the edition and interpretation of the letters as sources for the Merovingian period, and point out some avenues for future research on their reception in the Carolingian period.

The building projects and the Histories of Gregory of Tours

“…49 The survival of the so-called 'Austrasian Letters', meanwhile, is largely attributable to episcopal record-keeping practices at Merovingian Trier. 50 Gregory clearly had access to documents when he composed the Histories, but the evidence from Trier would indicate that the Tours archive was more likely distributed across multiple locations, rather than being a single-site entity. 51 St Martin's certainly had a thesaurus ('treasury')a term Gregory uses elsewhere to refer to documentary archiveswhere Gregory discovered the relics of the Agaune Martyrs in 589/90.…”

“…50 Gregory clearly had access to documents when he composed the Histories, but the evidence from Trier would indicate that the Tours archive was more likely distributed across multiple locations, rather than being a single-site entity. 51 St Martin's certainly had a thesaurus ('treasury')a term Gregory uses elsewhere to refer to documentary archiveswhere Gregory discovered the relics of the Agaune Martyrs in 589/90. 52 Gregory knew that Bishop Perpetuus kept notes of Martin's miracles, which were presumably stored there.…”

Codex Nicholsonianus

“…61 The omission of Vergilius Maro grammaticus is also perplexing. Only occasionally in ODLA does the Carolingian period intrude into literary history as in 'Epistolae Austrasicae' (see Barrett and Woudhuysen 2016).…”

“…63 The omission of Vergilius Maro grammaticus is also perplexing. Only occasionally in ODLA does the Carolingian period intrude into literary history as in 'Epistolae Austrasicae' (see Barrett and Woudhuysen 2016). 64 Winterbottom 1993: 380. entries for a few earlier gures, 'Bardaisan' and 'Numenius', for example, but it is not always clear where the chronological line falls.…”

Review of periodical literature on the history of education published in 2016

“…The history of universities has a close relationship with intellectual history and histories of literacy and the book, one example being Graham Barrett and George Woudhuysen's article on the Epistulae Austrasicae, a collection of letters from early medieval Germany. 15 The period 1500-1750 is also less prominent in the history of education than was, at one time, the case. 17 Many of these concern intellectual history and the history of universities and libraries, with a particular interest in the history of science, which is certainly growing among scholars of this period.…”