Charting authority after Empire: Documentary culture and political legitimacy in post-Carolingian Europe

Abstract

Imperial legacies are very much ‘in’. One cannot walk into a bookshop without being confronted by multiple titles on the subject. And in an age of culture wars, they regularly grace the pages of our broadsheets, often in polemical terms. To date, the Middle Ages have contributed – and been asked to contribute – little to these debates, which tend to focus quite tightly (for reasons as understandable as they are problematic) on modern European empires. Yet there can be no doubt that processes of conquest, colonisation and exploitation have a longer history. Over three decades ago, Robert Bartlett persuasively argued that we cannot understand the colonial practices of modern Europe without appreciating their medieval origins. As he put it, ‘[t]he European Christians who sailed to the coasts of the Americas, Asia and Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries came from a society that was already a colonizing society’. It is not my purpose to retrace Bartlett’s arguments, nor to survey how they might be adjusted in light of recent approaches to race and ethnicity in the Middle Ages.2 Rather, I wish to explore some of the manners in which medievalists may learn from our modernist colleagues when it comes to tracing the afterlives of empire.