Making and Unmaking the Carolingians: 751-888

How does power manifest itself in individuals? Why do people obey authority? And how does a family, if they are the source of such dominance, convey their superiority and maintain their command in a pre-modern world lacking speedy communications, standing armies and formalised political jurisdiction? Here, Stuart Airlie expertly uses this idea of authority as a lens through which to explore one of the most famous dynasties in medieval Europe: the Carolingians. Ruling the Frankish realm from 751 to 888, the family of Charlemagne had to be ruthless in asserting their status and adept at creating a discourse of Carolingian legitimacy in order to sustain their supremacy. Through its nuanced analysis of authority, politics and family, Making and Unmaking the Carolingians, 751-888 outlines the system which placed the Carolingian dynasty at the centre of the Frankish world. In doing so, Airlie sheds important new light on both the rise and fall of the Carolingian empire and the nature of power in medieval Europe more generally.

Table of Contents:
Preface Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Maps Family Trees 1. A Ruling Family 2. Building Carolingian Royalty 751-768 3. A House and its Head: the reign of Charlemagne 768-814 4. Child Labour 751-888 5. Louis the Pious and the Paranoid Style in Politics 6. Lines of Succession and lines of failure, 843-879 7. Universal Carolingians: masteries of time and space (751-888) 8. Women's Work 9. The Loss of Uniqueness: 888 And All That Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Stuart Airlie is Senior Lecturer in History at University of Glasgow, UK. He is the author of Power and Its Problems in Carolingian Europe (2012).

Review :
Making and Unmaking the Carolingians is a new standard work which assembles the international research into a full panoply. Stuart Airlie's brilliant examination of the Carolingian dynasty is epic in range and depth. The author investigates how this Frankish ruling family cooperated with the realm's elites to weave a web of structures, activity and ideas that formed the political reality of the Carolingian world. But this book does not stop there. Airlie's narration draws one into this Carolingian reality, uncannily exposing its fabricated nature while simultaneously retelling its history with such ingenuity that the reader often feels they're turning the pages of a Carolingian 'Game of Thrones.' Indeed, this masterful study reveals the workings of early medieval politics, along with the life and death of its most powerful dynasty, as we have never seen them before. Stuart Airlie takes all the best-known incidents in Carolingian history (and many lesser known ones as well) and rearranges them around a focus on family and dynasticism. The result is a surprising new history not just of the Carolingians but of the entire empire, its aristocracy, its politics, and its transformations. Making and Unmaking the Carolingians is consistently insightful, inventive, and compelling ... and also a pleasure to read. It would be wrong to spoil the pleasure of reading this brilliantly written book. While shifting the historiographical pendulum back to an approach that was thought to have been abandoned, it avoids the pitfall of going backwards… A memoirist of the French court under the Ancien Régime would not have written anything else.