Sara Maclean
Biographic Data
| ID | 102756 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sara Maclean |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sara |
| FAMILY NAME | Maclean |
| SIGNATURE | MACLEAN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of St Andrews |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3543-7734 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 20 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 25 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1895 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The date and context of the Astronomer's Life of Louis the Pious
The Astronomer's Life of the emperor Louis the Pious (814–40) is a canonical source for scholars of Frankish history. It sits at the centre of recent debates about the nature and tone of Carolingian political discourse, and about the crisis of the empire in the 830s. Yet the date and precise context of the text's composition have hardly ever been debated. The consensus position, codified in Ernst Tremp's definitive 1995 edition, is that it was wr…
Der Umwelt begegnen
Journal Article Der Umwelt begegnen: Extremereignisse und die Verflechtung von Natur und Kultur im Frankenreich vom 8. bis 10. Jahrhundert, by Stephan F. Ebert Get access Der Umwelt begegnen: Extremereignisse und die Verflechtung von Natur und Kultur im Frankenreich vom 8. bis 10. Jahrhundert, by Stephan F. Ebert (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2021; pp. 344. €68). Simon Maclean Simon Maclean University of St Andrews, UK [email protected] Searc…
Kingship and Justice in the Ottonian Empire
The Ottonian family (919–1024) is remembered by posterity—not unproblematically—as the first great royal dynasty of ‘German’ medieval history. It has not always, however, been a topic of particular interest to those working in Anglo-American academia. Karl Leyser’s 1979 book Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society is usually reckoned to have been the real starting point of modern Anglophone interest in the subject, which has intensified in…
The Edict of Pîtres, Carolingian Defence Against the Vikings, and the Origins of the Medieval Castle
The castle was one of the most characteristic features of the western European landscape in the Middle Ages, dominating social and political order from the eleventh century onwards. The origins of the castle are generally assigned to the ninth and tenth centuries, and the standard story begins with the defensive fortifications established against the Vikings during the reign of the West Frankish king Charles the Bald (843–77). In this article I a…
Socially Engaged Art, Experimental Pedagogies, and Anarchiving as Research-Creation
Archives, as repositories of culture and knowledge, are closely linked to colonial power, control, hegemony, and conquest. In recognizing the limitations and problems of conventional archives, scholars and artists offer counter-archiving as a method of interrogating what constitutes an archive and the selective practices that continuously erase particular subjects. Unlike static, stable, and linear colonial archives, counter-archives are grounded…
Ottonian Queenship
This is the first major study in English of the queens of the Ottonian dynasty (919-1024). The Ottonians were a family from Saxony who are often regarded as the founders of the medieval German kingdom. They were the most successful of all the dynasties to emerge from the wreckage of the pan-European Carolingian Empire after it disintegrated in 888, ruling as kings and emperors in Germany and Italy and exerting indirect hegemony in France and in E…
Writing Ottonian Queenship I
This chapter turns to Adelheid, the second wife of Otto I, remembered as one of the most powerful queens of the Middle Ages. I begin with a discussion of the sources for Adelheid’s career, which is very well documented compared to the queens covered in previous chapters. I argue that this proliferation of evidence after 961 is not a coincidence, and that it relates to a deliberate attempt by the Ottonians to emphasize Adelheid’s status as a means…
Queens and Dynasties in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries
This chapter provides an introduction to the problems of interpreting early medieval queenship, and explains the core arguments of the book. Existing historiography is summarized and the main sources are described. The chapter offers a survey of the key elements of Carolingian queenship in the mid and late ninth century, and explains how Ottonian queenship differed. The argument is that whereas Carolingian queenship was defined around fairly stab…
The Carolingian Past in Post-Carolingian Europe
Morality and Masculinity in the Carolingian Empire, by Rachel Stone
Journal Article Morality and Masculinity in the Carolingian Empire, by Rachel Stone Get access Morality and Masculinity in the Carolingian Empire, by Rachel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2012; pp. xvii + 399. £60). Simon Maclean Simon Maclean University of St Andrews Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 533, August 2013, Pages 919–921, https://doi.org/10.1093…
Shadow Kingdom
The lost realm of Lotharingia presents an excellent case‐study with which to explore the last years of the Carolingian Empire in the ninth century and the emergence of its successor kingdoms in the tenth. Following the political history of the kingdom from its creation in the reign of King Lothar II (855–69) through the end of the empire in 888 and across the conflict‐ridden map of tenth‐century Europe reveals some of the key dynamics of the post…
Recycling the Franks in Twelfth-Century England
In the Middle Ages, even more so than today, history writing could be an act of political engagement. In an era without formal representation, the ability to persuade audiences of particular views of the past could be a significant weapon for those seeking to gain rhetorical leverage in political disputes. Yet “useful” history could be compiled from existing works as well as written from scratch. Because of the technologies of transmission in the…
The Carolingian World
At its height, the Carolingian empire spanned a million square kilometres of western Europe - from the English Channel to central Italy and northern Spain, and from the Atlantic to the fringes of modern Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. As the largest political unit for centuries, the empire dominated the region and left an enduring legacy for European culture. This comprehensive survey traces this great empire's history, from its origins a…
Legislation and politics in late Carolingian Italy
This article considers some overlooked evidence for royal legislation in the dying days of the Carolingian empire, a series of charters known as the Ravenna constitutions. These documents, which deal with the status of Italian freemen, are often analysed as sources for social history but rarely as texts in their own right. Reconstructing the context in which the charters were issued enables us to cast light on political events and royal self‐repr…
Anchoress and Abbess in Ninth-Century Saxony
Although most of the main Carolingian narrative sources have benefited from English translations over the last 20 years, hagiography has been less well served. Frederick S. Paxton is therefore to be thanked for making these two difficult texts (three, in fact, since Hathumoda's Life is accompanied by a long poetic Dialogue on her death) accessible to a wider readership in plain and readable English. The Lives can both be dated fairly closely to t…
Kingship and Politics in the Late Ninth Century
The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great ‐ By David Pratt
Insinuation, Censorship and the Struggle for Late Carolingian Lotharingia in Regino of Prum's Chronicle
Regino of Prüm's Chronicle, completed in the year 908, is one of the most important narrative sources for the history of the later Carolingian Empire, and contains the best contemporary account of its collapse in 888. Regino was not a detached observer of events, but a political actor whose career was profoundly affected by the turbulence of post-imperial politics. This article seeks to demonstrate how the text and its author's own career cannot …
Roman Barbarians
In this book Yitzhak Hen, a well-known specialist in the history of Frankish culture, presents a vigorous defence of the sophistication of ‘barbarian’ kings by emphasising the way in which many of them were concerned to patronise groups of scholars and intellectuals at their courts. This is framed as a rebuke to those who persist in seeing the post-Roman era as a cultural Dark Age, and to anyone who may be tempted to regard Charlemagne as the fir…
Reform, Queenship and the End of the World in Tenth-Century France
MacLean Simon. Reform, Queenship and the End of the World in Tenth-Century France: Adso’s “Letter on the Origin and Time of the Antichrist” Reconsidered. In: Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire, tome 86, fasc. 3-4, 2008. pp. 645-675
Reform, Queenship and the End of the World in Tenth-Century France
Peer reviewed
Struggle for Empire
Queenship, Nunneries and Royal Widowhood in Carolingian Europe
Peer reviewed
The Carolingian response to the revolt of Boso, 879–887
The decade leading up to the disintegration of the Carolingian Empire in 887–8 is traditionally characterised by historians as a period when royal authority was in terminal decline, crippled by the deaths of three great rulers in the mid‐870s and by the attempt of the non‐Carolingian rebel Boso of Vienne to seize a throne in 879. This article challenges the conventional view, and argues that Boso's revolt actually inspired the four surviving Caro…
The Tariff History of Canada
Socially Engaged Art, Experimental Pedagogies, and Anarchiving as Research-Creation
Archives, as repositories of culture and knowledge, are closely linked to colonial power, control, hegemony, and conquest. In recognizing the limitations and problems of conventional archives, scholars and artists offer counter-archiving as a method of interrogating what constitutes an archive and the selective practices that continuously erase particular subjects. Unlike static, stable, and linear colonial archives, counter-archives are grounded…
The Carolingian response to the revolt of Boso, 879–887
The decade leading up to the disintegration of the Carolingian Empire in 887–8 is traditionally characterised by historians as a period when royal authority was in terminal decline, crippled by the deaths of three great rulers in the mid‐870s and by the attempt of the non‐Carolingian rebel Boso of Vienne to seize a throne in 879. This article challenges the conventional view, and argues that Boso's revolt actually inspired the four surviving Caro…
Shadow Kingdom
The lost realm of Lotharingia presents an excellent case‐study with which to explore the last years of the Carolingian Empire in the ninth century and the emergence of its successor kingdoms in the tenth. Following the political history of the kingdom from its creation in the reign of King Lothar II (855–69) through the end of the empire in 888 and across the conflict‐ridden map of tenth‐century Europe reveals some of the key dynamics of the post…
Recycling the Franks in Twelfth-Century England
In the Middle Ages, even more so than today, history writing could be an act of political engagement. In an era without formal representation, the ability to persuade audiences of particular views of the past could be a significant weapon for those seeking to gain rhetorical leverage in political disputes. Yet “useful” history could be compiled from existing works as well as written from scratch. Because of the technologies of transmission in the…
Legislation and politics in late Carolingian Italy
This article considers some overlooked evidence for royal legislation in the dying days of the Carolingian empire, a series of charters known as the Ravenna constitutions. These documents, which deal with the status of Italian freemen, are often analysed as sources for social history but rarely as texts in their own right. Reconstructing the context in which the charters were issued enables us to cast light on political events and royal self‐repr…
The Tariff History of Canada
The Carolingian response to the revolt of Boso, 879–887
The decade leading up to the disintegration of the Carolingian Empire in 887–8 is traditionally characterised by historians as a period when royal authority was in terminal decline, crippled by the deaths of three great rulers in the mid‐870s and by the attempt of the non‐Carolingian rebel Boso of Vienne to seize a throne in 879. This article challenges the conventional view, and argues that Boso's revolt actually inspired the four surviving Caro…
Queenship, Nunneries and Royal Widowhood in Carolingian Europe
Peer reviewed
Struggle for Empire
Reform, Queenship and the End of the World in Tenth-Century France
MacLean Simon. Reform, Queenship and the End of the World in Tenth-Century France: Adso’s “Letter on the Origin and Time of the Antichrist” Reconsidered. In: Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire, tome 86, fasc. 3-4, 2008. pp. 645-675
Reform, Queenship and the End of the World in Tenth-Century France
Peer reviewed
Kingship and Politics in the Late Ninth Century
The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great ‐ By David Pratt
Insinuation, Censorship and the Struggle for Late Carolingian Lotharingia in Regino of Prum's Chronicle
Regino of Prüm's Chronicle, completed in the year 908, is one of the most important narrative sources for the history of the later Carolingian Empire, and contains the best contemporary account of its collapse in 888. Regino was not a detached observer of events, but a political actor whose career was profoundly affected by the turbulence of post-imperial politics. This article seeks to demonstrate how the text and its author's own career cannot …
Roman Barbarians
In this book Yitzhak Hen, a well-known specialist in the history of Frankish culture, presents a vigorous defence of the sophistication of ‘barbarian’ kings by emphasising the way in which many of them were concerned to patronise groups of scholars and intellectuals at their courts. This is framed as a rebuke to those who persist in seeing the post-Roman era as a cultural Dark Age, and to anyone who may be tempted to regard Charlemagne as the fir…
Legislation and politics in late Carolingian Italy
This article considers some overlooked evidence for royal legislation in the dying days of the Carolingian empire, a series of charters known as the Ravenna constitutions. These documents, which deal with the status of Italian freemen, are often analysed as sources for social history but rarely as texts in their own right. Reconstructing the context in which the charters were issued enables us to cast light on political events and royal self‐repr…
Anchoress and Abbess in Ninth-Century Saxony
Although most of the main Carolingian narrative sources have benefited from English translations over the last 20 years, hagiography has been less well served. Frederick S. Paxton is therefore to be thanked for making these two difficult texts (three, in fact, since Hathumoda's Life is accompanied by a long poetic Dialogue on her death) accessible to a wider readership in plain and readable English. The Lives can both be dated fairly closely to t…
The Carolingian World
At its height, the Carolingian empire spanned a million square kilometres of western Europe - from the English Channel to central Italy and northern Spain, and from the Atlantic to the fringes of modern Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. As the largest political unit for centuries, the empire dominated the region and left an enduring legacy for European culture. This comprehensive survey traces this great empire's history, from its origins a…
Recycling the Franks in Twelfth-Century England
In the Middle Ages, even more so than today, history writing could be an act of political engagement. In an era without formal representation, the ability to persuade audiences of particular views of the past could be a significant weapon for those seeking to gain rhetorical leverage in political disputes. Yet “useful” history could be compiled from existing works as well as written from scratch. Because of the technologies of transmission in the…
Morality and Masculinity in the Carolingian Empire, by Rachel Stone
Journal Article Morality and Masculinity in the Carolingian Empire, by Rachel Stone Get access Morality and Masculinity in the Carolingian Empire, by Rachel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2012; pp. xvii + 399. £60). Simon Maclean Simon Maclean University of St Andrews Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 533, August 2013, Pages 919–921, https://doi.org/10.1093…
Shadow Kingdom
The lost realm of Lotharingia presents an excellent case‐study with which to explore the last years of the Carolingian Empire in the ninth century and the emergence of its successor kingdoms in the tenth. Following the political history of the kingdom from its creation in the reign of King Lothar II (855–69) through the end of the empire in 888 and across the conflict‐ridden map of tenth‐century Europe reveals some of the key dynamics of the post…
The Carolingian Past in Post-Carolingian Europe
Ottonian Queenship
This is the first major study in English of the queens of the Ottonian dynasty (919-1024). The Ottonians were a family from Saxony who are often regarded as the founders of the medieval German kingdom. They were the most successful of all the dynasties to emerge from the wreckage of the pan-European Carolingian Empire after it disintegrated in 888, ruling as kings and emperors in Germany and Italy and exerting indirect hegemony in France and in E…
Writing Ottonian Queenship I
This chapter turns to Adelheid, the second wife of Otto I, remembered as one of the most powerful queens of the Middle Ages. I begin with a discussion of the sources for Adelheid’s career, which is very well documented compared to the queens covered in previous chapters. I argue that this proliferation of evidence after 961 is not a coincidence, and that it relates to a deliberate attempt by the Ottonians to emphasize Adelheid’s status as a means…
Queens and Dynasties in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries
This chapter provides an introduction to the problems of interpreting early medieval queenship, and explains the core arguments of the book. Existing historiography is summarized and the main sources are described. The chapter offers a survey of the key elements of Carolingian queenship in the mid and late ninth century, and explains how Ottonian queenship differed. The argument is that whereas Carolingian queenship was defined around fairly stab…
Kingship and Justice in the Ottonian Empire
The Ottonian family (919–1024) is remembered by posterity—not unproblematically—as the first great royal dynasty of ‘German’ medieval history. It has not always, however, been a topic of particular interest to those working in Anglo-American academia. Karl Leyser’s 1979 book Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society is usually reckoned to have been the real starting point of modern Anglophone interest in the subject, which has intensified in…
The Edict of Pîtres, Carolingian Defence Against the Vikings, and the Origins of the Medieval Castle
The castle was one of the most characteristic features of the western European landscape in the Middle Ages, dominating social and political order from the eleventh century onwards. The origins of the castle are generally assigned to the ninth and tenth centuries, and the standard story begins with the defensive fortifications established against the Vikings during the reign of the West Frankish king Charles the Bald (843–77). In this article I a…
Socially Engaged Art, Experimental Pedagogies, and Anarchiving as Research-Creation
Archives, as repositories of culture and knowledge, are closely linked to colonial power, control, hegemony, and conquest. In recognizing the limitations and problems of conventional archives, scholars and artists offer counter-archiving as a method of interrogating what constitutes an archive and the selective practices that continuously erase particular subjects. Unlike static, stable, and linear colonial archives, counter-archives are grounded…
Der Umwelt begegnen
Journal Article Der Umwelt begegnen: Extremereignisse und die Verflechtung von Natur und Kultur im Frankenreich vom 8. bis 10. Jahrhundert, by Stephan F. Ebert Get access Der Umwelt begegnen: Extremereignisse und die Verflechtung von Natur und Kultur im Frankenreich vom 8. bis 10. Jahrhundert, by Stephan F. Ebert (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2021; pp. 344. €68). Simon Maclean Simon Maclean University of St Andrews, UK [email protected] Searc…
The date and context of the Astronomer's Life of Louis the Pious
The Astronomer's Life of the emperor Louis the Pious (814–40) is a canonical source for scholars of Frankish history. It sits at the centre of recent debates about the nature and tone of Carolingian political discourse, and about the crisis of the empire in the 830s. Yet the date and precise context of the text's composition have hardly ever been debated. The consensus position, codified in Ernst Tremp's definitive 1995 edition, is that it was wr…
History (20 works) · Medieval Literature and History (18 works) · Ancient history (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Political science (16 works) · Art (15 works) · Politics (13 works) · Empire (12 works) · History (12 works) · Law (11 works)