Scholars Award: Charlemagne and the Christian Revival of Science

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Objectives. What religious goals did Charlemagne (ruled 768-814) hope to achieve by supportinga revival of scientific knowledge at the beginning of the ninth century? How were royal politicallegitimacy and science related in Charlemagne's striving for greater order in his kingdom andempire? In what ways did royal court culture and the education of clerics intersect and promotethe sciences? Intellectual Merit In answering these questions the project will present Charlemagne's case for ordering a reform of Christian knowledge as part of a broad renewal of the religious culture in hisrealm. This religious renewal included the vision of Charlemagne and his dynasty as divinelychosen to direct the ordering of Christian Europe and improve Christian education within it. Theking assembled from Italy, England, Ireland, and elsewhere scholars with extensive knowledge tohis court. The court itself emerged as a source and a point of dissemination for revived orrediscovered literary texts and scientific knowledge along with fuller exploration of writings bythe church Fathers and more recent Christian authors. Using the advice of various scholars, bothsecular and clerical, the king oversaw doctrinal reform, ordered attention to specific areas ofstudy in the education of clerics, and stimulated the interest of ecclesiastical leaders in a renewaland expansion of the liberal arts as an essential foundation for biblical and doctrinalunderstanding. The project will show how certain of these leaders pursued a distinctiveinterpretation of Saint Augustine's view of secular scientific knowledge in order to justify anextensive revival and teaching of classical Roman texts (and some translated Greek texts) onastronomy, cosmology, medicine, agriculture, mathematics, and military science among others.The nature of these texts, illustrations from their pages, the ways they were studied in theCarolingian renaissance of the ninth century all these will be exposed. The search for anddiscovery of order in the heavens, the weather, human physiology, the structure of the cosmos,and the behaviors of animals contributed to a greater sense of confidence in the direction andorder of the church and kingdom. At the same time, such confidence always required renewalthrough analyses of new phenomena and newly revealed knowledge. The project will show how asuccession of clerics from Charlemagne forward interacted with the royal court and royalpatronage to support increasingly more sophisticated scientific study and the teaching of naturalscience. These were seen to strengthen the church and Christian culture and thereby to benefit theking, acting in accord with the will of God.Methods. Historical methods, reading and translating medieval Latin manuscripts, engaging andapplying current scholarship on the era of Charlemagne, will allow the PI to offer newunderstandings of the place of science in the vastly different world of ninth-century northernEurope. Description and analysis of the political and religious situations will use officialdocuments, letter collections, religious treatises, and scientific texts to expose the particulars ofscientific revival. These sources also reveal goals and strategies of ecclesiastical advisors andpower figures, interacting with the royal court and with each other in regard to the sciences.Intellectual merit. The history of scientific knowledge in ninth-century Europe has moved fromthe study of computus (calendar-making and computation) to astronomy and to medicine andbeyond. The present project will for the first time bring together a broad range of sciences andexplore more deeply the religious background behind the Carolingian profusion of scientificstudies, including the sense of connection between good kingship and the reform of religious andsecular studies in schools. This picture of a Christian revival of science will show the reasonsspecific to ninth-century politics and religion for such a renewal and advancement.Broader impacts. The project will show the importance of historical conditions for differentrelationships among science, religion, and politics. The publication of an accessible historicalnarrative in book form will engage public interest. Both the limits and opportunities, historicallyconditioned, of political and religious involvement in science will be set out and discussed.