Ideal and moral rulership between insular and Carolingian worlds

自政治共同体诞生以来，人们一直在争论一个好统治者的品质。该项目考察了在加洛林王朝时期，以建议文学的形式，以及其假设的来自岛屿世界的先例，好的和坏的统治的话语。它源于这样一种信念，即这种更明确的领导道德话语仍然可以为当代背景下的政治话语提供见解。尽管学术研究对统治者的经典建议有着悠久的传统，对中世纪后期和文艺复兴时期的“王子之镜”也有很大的兴趣，但人们对古代晚期和中世纪早期的过渡时期仍然知之甚少，部分原因是研究局限于现代国家边界。在统治话语中引入基督教的宗教道德元素对后来政治哲学的发展至关重要，这一元素出现在六至八世纪的孤岛文学中，然后在八至九世纪后期成为加洛林王朝话语的一部分。建议文学的范畴被定义为向国王提出关于理想、道德和良好统治的建议的文学。因此，它省略了一些重要的文献，这些文献附带包含对好与坏统治的评论或建议，例如世界历史。考虑到这一时期的文学作品数量包含一些说教或教育元素，以及现在公认的体裁界限的流动性，限制证据基础是不可避免的。然而，它确实为进一步研究其他文本中王权话语的本质留下了机会。在当前的史学气候下，跨国和全球历史研究方法越来越普遍，所以现在是时候把这种方法以建议文学的形式引入到狭隘的加洛林王朝的统治话语中了。这种跨国方法将与概念和语言学方法相结合，其中通过选定的原始材料追踪统治权话语的关键概念和主题，以确定连续性和变化。这使得比较方法可以跨越语言界限，如果要充分理解爱尔兰方言文学与加洛林王朝领导话语的联系，这是必要的。我们将分成几个部分，从岛屿文学到加洛林文学，然后探讨这两个松散文本群体之间的联系。这类群体不可避免地会有一些流动性，但总体目的是确定来自这些相互联系的环境的文本以何种方式共享共同的概念以及宗教和道德统治的共同话语。这也提供了一个机会来阐明这种话语在多大程度上影响了加洛林王朝时期的实际权力行使。这也具有真正的当代意义；在现代政治话语中，一个人行使政治权力是一个道德榜样的概念经常出现。很明显，尽管现代和加洛林王朝的政治话语存在明显的巨大差异，但这一观点并没有完全被抛弃。

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.