Monastic Communities and Canonical Clergy in the Carolingian World (780-840): Categorizing the Church

In the years 816-819, a series of councils was held at the imperial palace in Aachen. The goal of the meetings was to settle a number of questions about ecclesiastical organization. These issues were hotly debated throughout the Christian Roman Empire of the fourth and fifth centuries, and then reinvigorated by the renewal of empire under Charlemagne and his son Louis the Pious. At the centre of the ensuing debate stood the distinction between monks and monastic communities on the one hand, and the so-called clerici canonici and their communities on the other. Many other reforms were proposed in its wake: the position of the episcopacy needed to be renegotiated, the role of the imperial court needed to be consolidated, and the place of every Christian within the renewed Carolingian Church needed to be redefined. What started out as a seemingly straightforward reorganisation of the religious communities that dotted the Frankish ecclesiastical landscape thus quickly turned into a broad movement that necessitated an almost complete categorization of the orders of the Church. The contributions to this volume each zoom in on various aspects of these negotiations: their prehistory, their implementation, and their influence. In doing so, previously held assumptions about the scope, the goals, and the impact of the ‘Carolingian Church Reforms’ will also be re-assessed.