Anne A. Latowsky. Emperor of the World

In 2001, Matthias M. Tischler published his monumental 1,800-page study of the textual transmission and reception of Einhard's vita of Charlemagne, Einharts “Vita Karoli”: Studien zur Entstehung, Überlieferung und Rezeption. Tischler's work focused chiefly on the many manuscript copies (134 extant with a complete text) of the diminutive courtier's great Suetonian-inflected biography, on its various codicological contexts and textual recensions, and only then on what this widespread diffusion across space and time implies about the text's myriad readers and copyists. In her superb new book Emperor of the World: Charlemagne and the Construction of Imperial Authority, 800–1229, Anne A. Latowsky takes as a point of departure her astute and important observation that, as popular as Einhard's work was in the medieval West, it was in fact a single episode within the biography that especially captured the attention of numerous authors between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. What Einhard...

Ancient history · Art · Biography · Emperor · Extant taxon · Literature · Classics · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Medieval Literature and History