Courtney Booker

I currently have three research projects in progress.

1.
In my first book, Past Convictions: The Penance of Louis the Pious and the Decline of the Carolingians (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), I examined the various representations of an event customarily viewed as the first serious political crisis for the Carolingian realm: the ritual divestiture and penance of Charlemagne's son, Emperor Louis the Pious, in 833. Perhaps the most exciting result of this research was the revelation of a "dramatic consciousness" present in the Carolingian imaginary – that classical drama, despite its disappearance as a performed art, had a formative influence upon historiography and processes of interpretation in the ninth century.

Picking up where Past Convictions left off, my new book project, Phantoms of Performance: History, Drama, and the Carolingian Pursuit of Truth, explores the increase in allusions to drama under the Carolingians and develops what I suspect are its rather significant implications with respect to the writing of history. How did people in the Middle Ages understand hypocrisy? Was dramatic rhetoric employed only as a cliché with a negative connotation of duplicity (following its traditional use by the Church Fathers)? How did a hermeneutic informed by drama influence the emplotment and representation of events more generally? How does it do so today?

2.
Another research project investigates the theft, concealment, and "repatriation" to France between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of what the French nation had come to believe to be its earliest and most precious literary monument – the allegedly unique manuscript of the lay Carolingian author Nithard's Historiae (or "Histories"), a text that contains the first extant witness of the French language. I contend that the history of this manuscript's movements reveals much about the intimate relationships of art, property, and other material objects to the delineation of cultural heritage and the formation of national identity. This project also seeks to remind scholars that the manuscripts they use have histories of their own that cannot be separated from the texts they contain.

3.
A third project is an English translation of the Latin texts of Agobard of Lyons. As bishop of Lyons from 816 to 835, Agobard was an outspoken "southerner" who constantly sought to have a voice in Carolingian court politics to the north. To this end, he penned several letters, entreaties, and admonitions over the course of his career to Emperor Louis the Pious and his courtiers, urging them to take action against matters ranging from the "impious practice" of the judicial ordeal to the "malignant effects" of associating with Jews to the "unseemly and iniquitous" conduct being increasingly displayed by the emperor himself. In short, Agobard's extant texts, which vary in both content and intended audience, provide a nearly unparalleled lens through which to observe the political and religious, the social and economic, and the prosaic and arcane world of ninth-century Europe.