I leave to several futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths - Jorge Luis Borges, "The Garden of Forking Paths."[1] It is a staple of popular internet videos and posts: what if history happened differently? What if the Germans had won WWII? What if the
It was a November day when the unified Carolingian empire came to a final end. The last emperor to rule the entire realm, Charles the Fat, found himself on the wrong side of a political coup led by his own nephew Arnulf of Carinthia. On November 27th, 887 Arnulf granted
After a very long lapse I managed to finish reading the 2024 book by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry called Oathbreakers: The War of Brothers that Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe. For those who are unfamiliar, it covers the years leading up to the Carolingian Civil War
In a modern world of instant communication technologies, aircraft, and cars, it is easy to take for granted the speed at which the modern world works. A journey that takes hours today may have taken days, or even weeks or months in the past. This can cause us to downplay
For many Americans, the meaning of a king and a tyrant are largely synonymous. It is common in American media to see kings treated as tyrannical, because they are not bound by the will of the people, are arbitrary, etc. Here is what the inhabitants of my hometown had to
I only have a few more days left in Munich, where I have been conducting research at the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. The MGH library is world class, and the idea of not having access to it is despair inducing. I also got to spend a good chunk of time in
Imagine you are watching a movie set in the Middle Ages. Something seems off so you dutifully Google "movie + historical accuracy," giving you plenty of results that emphasize the mistakes in the film. You might also occasionally find the directors, costume designers, etc. defending their decisions to break
This week I have been in the Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv looking at charters in person. Not only has this been particularly useful academically, it is also just really cool to see them in real life instead of in a digitized copy. It is a remarkable accident of fate that we have
As some of you may know, I am spending two months at the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in Munich, Germany. In essence, I am interested in a seemingly boring question: who wrote Arnulf's charters? This isn't simply minutia, but is tied to long-standing debates about royal power
There are many biographies of medieval kings, but that does not mean all are the same.
Rapidly approaching is this year's Leeds International Medieval Congress, one of the biggest conferences for medieval studies in the world. It is a great place to hear new research and to meet other scholars, not to mention the general social and celebratory atmosphere it tends to have. This
Recently Fraser McNair wrote an interesting piece on defining "the Carolingian court." Fraser rightly notes that "the word ‘court’ encompasses five concepts: the court is a location, a community, an institution, a set of activities, and an identity." I want to add to this picture somewhat