A long overdue update

Its been almost six months since I've posted anything here, which has to have been the longest hiatus this blog has had since, well, the beginning. And well a lot has been going on in this space of time. First there was the final term of the PGCE which was hectic and incredibly stressful but ultimately successful in the end - by July I had qualified as a secondary school history teacher and secured my first paid full-time teaching job at the very first school I'd trained at. And I'm now coming up to the end of the first month at the job. Now you might be asking "surely you could have spared us at least one blogpost during the summer holidays in between?" I of course am probably just self-indulgently imagining that I have any kind of devoted fan club like that at all, and a good few of my blog posts have essentially been just arguments with myself. But still, I do feel this inactivity deserves an explanation. And that explanation is that this August I began researching and writing a book on my favourite people in history - the Carolingians, of course!

Now there are of course a lot of books on the Carolingians of course, though certainly not as many as there are on Ancient Rome, the Norman Conquest, the Tudors, the Industrial Revolution, the  American Civil War, Nazi Germany or other incredibly mainstream historical topics. And, at least as far as the literature on the Carolingians by and for Anglophones is concerned, its predominantly aimed at academic early medievalists who already know their way around the sea of Charles', Pippins and Louis' and for whom Benedict of Aniane, Bernard of Septimania and Berengar of Friuli are a lot more than just names. At the very least they come in the form of textbooks aimed at first year undergraduates who in the UK are doing a compulsory medieval history paper as part of their Bachelors' degree in History, or on the other side of the Atlantic are doing the Plato to NATO Western Civilisation courses that are a big part of humanities curricula there. Everything out there either relies on quite a lot of assumed background knowledge or is written in a style that the general reader might find jarring or heavy-going. The closest exceptions to this general rule are Chris Wickham's "The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 - 1000" (2009) and Janet Nelson's "King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne" (2018), and absolutely brilliant as they are they're not quite ideal for the lay person. There really is precious little out there aimed at the general reading public, which I think is a gap that needs to be filled. 

But why is it a gap worth filling and why should the general reading public (in the UK specifically) care about the Carolingians. After all, they don't have brand recognition like the Tudors or even the Plantagenets do. People of a certain generation didn't spend their teenage years reading historical novels about them, and the closest thing to a Television series that features them is The History Channel's "Vikings." Charlemagne is probably the only Carolingian monarch whose name is at all meaningful to most ordinary educated British people interested in history. Needless to say, none of the Carolingians command fanclubs, unlike with medieval English monarchs, among whom Richard III commands the biggest of them all - counter-intuitive as that may seem to some people until you've spent enough time on certain corners of the internet. And I only know of one UK secondary school that has the Carolingians on their curriculum, whereas the Norman Conquest, Thomas Becket, Magna Carta and the Peasants' Revolt are almost ubiquitous and even the Anglo-Saxons are making a comeback in Year 7 history lessons. After all, a lot of people like to read history books on stuff they're already very familiar with and interested in (that's why Ancient Rome, the Tudors, the World Wars and modern America are able to carve out such huge slices of the popular history book market pie). 

Then there's the more political side to it all. On the surface of it, there's nothing in recent politics that makes the Carolingians seem super relevant and topical to now. The territories of the Carolingian Empire (France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy and the northeastern corner of Spain) don't feel very pivotal in global affairs right now, unlike say Russia and Ukraine which are now filling history bookshelves in Waterstones and Blackwells. Nor can we claim the Carolingians as part of some kind of common cultural or civilisational heritage here, now that we've Brexited. Forget any past pioneers of European unity, they're for the Brussels bureaucrats, metropolitan liberal elites and the dreaded experts. True patriotic Britons should want to read about Alfred the Great, not Charlemagne. And from a different political standpoint, aren't the Carolingians too white and European? History is going global and decolonising now. Why focus on Western Europe in the seventh to tenth centuries which as we are constantly being reminded was, globally speaking, a backwater? Instead, one could be enlightening the general reading public on contemporaneous Tang China and the Abbasid Caliphate, whose highly advanced empires make the achievements of the Carolingians look puny and insignificant by comparison. And Peter Frankopan's "The Silk Roads" (2016) has demonstrated clearly that exactly this kind of enterprise is not only worthy, it can also be hugely successful!

But having weighed up all these counter-arguments, I'm still mad enough to think that I should write a book on the entire history of the Carolingian dynasty. This wouldn't just cover the headline Carolingian monarch, Charlemagne, but give the full gamut of Carolingian history from their earliest origins as courtiers to the Merovingian kings of the Franks in the seventh century through to the death of the last Carolingian monarch, Louis V of West Francia, in 987. Indeed, in some ways the planned book even goes beyond this, as it includes two chapters on origins of the Franks and the Merovingians (to provide background) and also explores what was going on in neighbouring realms as they influenced or were influenced by the Carolingians. How is this project not pure fanaticism and insanity, especially for someone who is just a school teacher with a masters' degree in medieval history?

But hear me out. In the next couple of posts, I will give the reasons why I think this is a worthwhile project for a popular history book.

Not really on topic: just a nice, fairly expressive ninth century Anglo-Saxon fresco from Winchester I saw this summer.