By 750 CE, church institutions—especially monasteries—controlled roughly a third of Christian western Europe’s land, yet historians still do not know what that meant for local economies during the Carolingian empire’s peak. This project tackles that gap by confronting four methodological problems: regional differences in monastic economies, how leases managed estates and shaped relationships with peasants, imprecise medieval terms for land size, and the interplay between economy, religious institutions, and spirituality. The researchers will create a digital edition of archives from two monasteries—Farfa in Italy and Fulda in Germany—then analyse the documents to ask whether legal contracts with peasants were consistent and reliable, whether agriculture was quantifiably measurable, and how monastic learning influenced land management. This is fundamental historical research with no immediate practical application. But because the vast majority of surviving early medieval agricultural records come from monasteries, the current history of the early medieval economy is largely the history of monastic economies—without acknowledging that fact. By making that bias explicit and systematic, this work could reshape how scholars understand land, power, and daily life in a formative period of European history.
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By 750 CE, about a third of the whole of Christian western Europe was in the hands of Church institutions; and the most significant and coherent of those institutions were monasteries. But we still do not know what this meant in concrete terms, at a local level, for the history of the later 8th and 9th centuries, when the Carolingian empire was at its height. This project will identify the implications for this crucial period of our new understanding of landed power by confronting the four methodological problems it involves: 1) delineating regional differences in monastic economies; 2) interpreting leases as ways of managing monastic estates and of mediating relationships with lay lessees; 3) understanding terminologies of size and scale which were not always intended to be precisely quantifiable; and 4) exposing the mutual, interlocking influences of economy, ecclesiastical institutionality, and religious spirituality and learning that constituted monastic communities in the Carolingian age. Our aim to address these methodological challenges is both innovative and timely, because each of them lacks much systematic study and they have never been considered together. Yet it is urgent that we do so, simply because the vast majority of the evidence that survives for early medieval agriculture was preserved by monasteries and mostly concerned their land (or at least, land that they claimed was theirs). Inevitably, therefore, the current history of the early medieval economy is in fact largely the history of the early medieval monastic economy; but with limited acknowledgement of that fact. Our project meets this core aim by examining in an innovative and fully integrated way two case studies: Farfa in Italy and Fulda in Germany. Our first objective is to turn what survives of their archive from the Carolingian period into a state-of-the art annotated digital edition that reveals rather than conceals medieval practices of archiving. An ancillary aim is therefore to provide an example of archivally-aware editing. On the basis of the digital edition we will analyse the documents to accomplish three objectives in response to our research questions: How far were legal contracts with peasants (leases and similar instruments) consistent and reliable ways of managing estates – and what does this mean for the institutions’ power over their land? How far do the texts show agriculture to be quantifiable in a reliable and consistent way? And to what extent were the management and recording of landed property influenced by monastic learning and spirituality? It is a mark of the project’s originality, but also a risk factor, that is has no significant precedents – either for addressing the three challenges in one project or for making a transalpine, Italian-east Frankish/German comparison of this sort. But it is precisely the three PIs’ proven record both of specific expertise and of overarching synthesis that highlights the value of this British-German collaboration and assures the quality of the projected outputs: the digital edition and three articles.
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