M atthew B ryan G illis . Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire

In this important and welcome study, Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire: The Case of Gottschalk of Orbais, Matthew Bryan Gillis provides the first focused analysis of the disputes surrounding the ninth-century Carolingian heretic Gottschalk of Orbais. Gottschalk was a rarity in the Carolingian world, as most heretics were distant in time or space to the political and religious centers of Northern Europe. Studies of him, however, have tended to focus on his theological views in a limited way, or they have focused on nationalist Germanic resistance to religious and political oppression, since he was a Saxon in the generation after Charlemagne’s conquest of the region. In Heresy and Dissent, Gillis attempts the rarest of tasks: to understand the intellectual development of an individual over time. Taking cues from trends in microhistory and in intellectual history, Gillis deftly uses Gottschalk’s aberrant position to cast fresh light on the workings of the world in which he operated. Here, the Carolingian world takes on darker hues than one might expect after a generation of more positive scholarship on the period from Rosamond McKitterick, Janet L. Nelson, and many others: the “regime” (as Gillis calls it) was coercive, authoritarian, and harsh. In Gottschalk’s persistent refusal to be “corrected,” however, we encounter networks and practices in which people quietly supported and encouraged dissent against Carolingian episcopal, abbatial, and political hierarchies.

Ancient history · Dissent · Empire · Heresy · Political science · Politics · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies