The man and the legend

It is not often that a book’s blurb gives any idea of what’s inside, but Helen Castor’s endorsement — ‘a masterclass in the practice of history’ — is as good a description of this brilliant new biography of Charlemagne as we are likely to get.

The broader contours of the life will be familiar to many readers, but what we have here — pace Janet Nelson — is less the ‘old-fashioned’ biography that she claims but a wonderfully generous sharing of knowledge that combines the conversational tones of the ideal classroom with the intensity of the trained anatomist, poised, knife in hand, to reveal the musculature beneath the skin.

Of course, the one thing that the anatomist cannot do is to bring the corpse back to life; but Nelson needs no reminder of that.  There are historians who would argue that a biography of Charlemagne is simply not possible; and while her book goes a long way to refute the idea, she is the first to recognise that the moment one begins ‘to feel at home’ with him is the moment ‘to feel wary’. His values and priorities ‘are not ours’, she warns: ‘The experience of finding the early Middle Ages strange… is, for readers as well as writers of books about the period, the beginning of wisdom.’

It is not just the ‘cultural distance’ that is the challenge — the absolute ‘otherness’ of a man who was equally at home ravaging Europe or thrashing out the theological niceties of the ‘Adoptionist’ heresy — but the nature of the evidence about Charlemagne’s life. Within 20 years of the emperor’s death, Einhard had written his enduringly readable Vita Karoli Magni; but for the modern historian, suspicious of Einhard’s bias and his silences, and starved of the kind of direct insights that a later period might produce, the answers have to be sought among the charters, letters, capitularies, papal records, annals — ‘official’ and ‘independent’ — and surviving physical remains that provide the patchy and sometimes ‘treacherous’ evidence.