Ideal and moral rulership between insular and Carolingian worlds

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The qualities of a good ruler have been debated since the beginning of political communities. This project examines the discourse of good and bad rulership, in the form of advice literature, in the Carolingian period, and its hypothesised antecedents from the insular world. It arises from the belief that this more explicitly moral discourse of leadership can still provide insights regarding political discourse in contemporary settings. Despite a long tradition of academic studies of classical advice to rulers, and a great deal of interest in later medieval and Renaissance 'mirrors of princes', the period of transition at the end of late antiquity and during the early medieval period is still poorly understood, partly due to studies confining themselves to modern national boundaries. The introduction of a Christian religious-moral element to rulership discourse would be key to later developments in political philosophy, and this element appears in insular literature of the sixth to eighth centuries before becoming part of the Carolingian discourse in the later eighth and ninth centuries. The category of advice literature is defined as literature addressed to a king and offering advice on ideal, moral, and good rulership. As such, it omits a significant body of literature that contains commentary or advice on good and bad rulership incidentally, for example universal histories. Restricting the evidence base is inevitable, given the quantity of literature from this period that contains some didactic or educational elements, and given the now-recognised fluidity of genre boundaries. However, it does leave open the opportunity for further research into the nature of kingship discourse in these other texts.In the current historiographical climate, transnational and global history approaches are increasingly commonplace, and so the time is right to bring an approach like this to insular and Carolingian rulership discourse, in the form of advice literature. This transnational approach will be combined with a conceptual and philological one, where the key concepts and themes of rulership discourse are traced through the selected source material to identify continuities and changes. This allows for the comparative approach to be used across linguistic boundaries, which is necessary if a full understanding of the Irish vernacular literature's connection to Carolingian leadership discourse is to be gained. This will be divided into sections, proceeding from the insular literature onto the Carolingian literature, and then to explore the connections between these two loose groups of texts. Groups of this kind will inevitably have some fluidity to them, but the overall purpose is to ascertain in what way texts from these connected milieux shared common concepts and a common discourse of religious and moral rulership. It also offers the opportunity to elucidate how far this discourse affected the actual exercise of power in the Carolingian period. This also has genuine contemporary relevance; the idea of a person exercising political power being a moral example is one that regularly re-occurs in modern political discourse. It is apparent that this idea has not been totally abandoned, despite the obviously huge differences between modern and Carolingian political discourse.