God and History in the Early Medieval West : The Theology of Carolingian Historians

While virtually all early medieval historians wrote about God, they did not do so in the same way.Rather than taking their comments about God at face value then, as has been the case in much work on medieval history-writing, they are deserving of closer scrutiny, with implications not simply for how we understand the key narrative sources for early medieval history, but also the cultures in which they originated. Seeking to fill this historiographical gap, this book explores, through the prolific writing of historians in the Carolingian Empire, how historians in early medieval societies thought about God and what this meant for themselves and their audiences.It argues that although Carolingian historians wrote about God's agency with tremendous literary subtlety, while reflecting complex theological ideas and attempting to intervene into challenging political realities, in many respects they also broke with the example of early Christian historians from Late Antiquity, which demonstrat