Courtney M. Booker, Past Convictions: The Penance of Louis the Pious and the Decline of the Carolingians

Courtney M. Booker, Past Convictions: The Penance of Louis the Pious and the Decline of the Carolingians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009)

There is an old Soviet joke about an international elephant research congress. At the congress, elephantologists from different countries boast about the current progress in their discipline. The British delegation presents a volume titled Elephants and the British Empire, the German delegation – three volumes under the title A Brief Introduction to Some Questions of the General Theory of Elephant Studies, the French delegation – a volume Elephants and Love, the Soviet delegation – Russia as the Motherland of Elephants and, finally, the Bulgarian delegation – Bulgarian Elephant as the Best Friend of Soviet Elephant.

The link between epistemologies, discourses and concepts, on the one hand, and socio-political reality, on the other hand, is a tricky one. Just like with elephants in the old Soviet joke, each specific epoch and geographic location create their own specific relationship with the conceptual apparatus that then becomes contested by different social or political forces in pursuing their interests. In this respect, a study of epistemologies, discourses and concepts can be as good an approach to understanding the social or political realities of the past as more straightforward approaches of political or social history. This is particularly true of epochs where the majority of sources left to historians belong to different literary genres of public writing, such as the Middle Ages.

As I have come experience in conceptual historical research (in particular, through my research trip to University of Bielefeld, a major centre of the German school of conceptual history, Begriffsgeschichte), I found Past Convictions surprisingly resonant with my research interests. Moreover, it is through this quite specific prism of Begriffsgeschichte that my reading of this text was shaped.

In the German tradition of conceptual history, the focus is placed on the way in which a concept expresses a complex relationship between interpretations of the past, the current political agenda and visions of the future. Each time a concept is used (and the current generation of German scholars expand their object from specific concepts to larger patterns of argumentation) – so, each time a certain mode of argumentation is employed, it allows to map the position of a text’s author in relationship to the past, the present and the future (in theory, at least). In Past Convictions, the relationship between different discourses on Louis the Pious’s penance and their author’s stakes in the representation of the past or in the current political agenda is convincing. What I found missing was a discussion of how these discourses were shaped by contested visions of the “proper” future, as the case of Louis’s penance obviously had to be often used in political debates over what an appropriate political system should look like (the most prominent theorist of Begriffsgeschichte, Reinhart Koselleck, elaborated two nice terms to conceptualize this link: “past futures” and “horizons of expectation”). The relationship is, perhaps, even more complex, since past discourses themselves exerted influences on new authors who appealed to them in pursing their own political agenda.

Actually, while I really fascinated by the explanations of political uses of discourses about Louis the Pious’s penance in different times by different political actors, at some points I wished more information were provided on the contemporary implications of use (and abuse) of this case. Since historical representations of this penance were, obviously, speech acts in John Austin’s sense of the term, they had, apart from their locutionary dimension, certain illocutionary force by making (usually high) stakes in the present. For instance, what was the rationale for making Louis’ wife Judith a scapegoat in certain historical representations of these events – could it have something to do with a changing attitude of the Catholic Church to the social and political role of women in European societies? Or what was the role of supernatural explanations (attributing all wrongdoings to the devil’s intervention)? Of course, these questions are mostly due to my ignorance in the mediaeval historiography and for specialists in this field they do not emerge due to their knowledge of the relevant historiography.

Another thing which came to my mind while reading Past Convictions – an interesting additional perspective on the subject could possibly emerge if “life trajectories” of manuscripts dealing with the Louis the Pious’s penance could be traced and interpreted. Where different manuscripts were stored, when and why they changed their location, how and by whom they were read, what “children” (i.e., other manuscripts) they produced by donating their parts or excerpts – a biography of a manuscript could be worth a whole detective story, perhaps. For example, there is a travel account of a manuscript on page 97 of Past Convictions – were the places of its location (in its cases, monasteries) meaningful in any sense to the problem under study?

Another question is related to the conceptual apparatus of the research. Prof. Booker writes in the Introduction:

As their incredible persistence attests, such metaphors, once adopted, become increasingly difficult to dispense with owing to their attractive conceptual economy. In addition, when used frequently and habitually, metaphors often subtly impose a situational construct upon their user, circumscribing all analysis within their confines, if not directing the course of the analysis itself (p. 4).

What I found less convincing in terms of conceptualization of research findings is the use of the conceptual framework of memory, remembering and forgetting. My understanding of the specific character of mediaeval studies is that they deal almost exclusively with the written traditions. Can remembering or forgetting  serve as something more than simply metaphors in this case? A written text deals more with representations that involve selection of material on a more complex basis, rather than just remembering or forgetting. It certainly has a pragmatic dimension, ethical implications and a performative function, and their metaphorization through memory-related concepts (as on pages 101, 148 or in Chapter 5) seems a simplification.

One final, but very broad question inspired by my recent readings in the field of French discourse analysis (it was actually addressed when certain sources were discussed, but not the discourses of Louis’s penance in general): how are expert positions formed in practices of writing about Louis’s penance, i.e. what levels are involved – ideological, factological, emotional, and how these positions produce the knowledge about the past, expertise about the present and confidence about the future.