practical”—a line often quoted in discussion of the mirrors but with which very few scholars have agreed.28 Most interpreters have in fact assumed, with rather astonishing uniformity, that the mirrors could only have been received as problematic. At best, these scholars argue, the mirrors espoused a form of Christianity that would have been completely incongruent with the general character of Frankish secular values—values that included glory in war, hunting, conspicuous wealth, and sexual virility.29 Heinrich Fichtenau summed up this view with the dramatic claim that throughout the ninth century and until the mid-tenth century at the earliest, anyone who wished to lead a particularly devout Christian existence had to embrace an ideal of living that stood in “stark contrast” to the traditional Frankish way of life. Most, he suggested, were forced to choose a path of “lesser evils,” of marriage and almsgiving, of endowing churches and monasteries, and of doing private penance for the sins of the flesh that they could not or would not conquer.30 Pierre Riché believed that the incongruence between Christian and secular Frankish values was in fact so great that it created a lay “anxiety complex”—widespread fear throughout the lay world about whether they could possibly achieve salvation as the lowest members of a society “dominated” by the clergy.31
Other scholars, taking perhaps an even more skeptical position, have regarded the mirrors as largely toothless, featuring little in the way of focused advice or specific liturgical teaching. Janet Nelson has described the mirrors’ advice to the laity as “at once too specific and too vague” and “often banal.”32 Rachel Stone, who has conducted the most careful and extensive readings of the mirrors to date, recently quipped that Alcuin’s De virtutibus et vitiis is so bland that it “seems … to assume an audience less of ‘spiritual athletes’ than ‘spiritual couch-potatoes.’ ”33 Rafaele Savigni, merging the major themes of these scholarly positions into one all-encompassing theory, has argued that the corpus of lay mirrors therefore suggests two different and quite contradictory orientations with regard to laypersons in ninth-century ecclesiology: one “ascetic-monastic” (and therefore too strict and out of touch), the other focusing more on almsgiving and the channeling of violence (and therefore too banal and a conciliation to the “warrior” values of secular society).34
Reading the mirrors for their explicit and implicit ideological function frees us from this interpretative quagmire. It allows us namely to see how these texts would have served writers and readers within their historical moment and why they would have made perfectly logical sense to them. Focusing on the ideological messages of these texts suggests that actually there was no contradiction between the Christianity that the mirrors espouse and Carolingian secular life, as scholars have presumed. Nor do they represent a concession of “true” Christian values in favor of “lesser” forms. They do not call for monastic withdrawal from the world, nor do they “impose” a foreign set of “clerical” values upon a refractory or anxious warrior culture. Instead, they articulate exactly the ideology of worldly Christian masculinity that Gregory the Great explained in his Regulae pastoralis liber—an ideal of masculinity within which caritas allowed men to perform their allegiance to the Kingdom of God symbolically, providing them access to correct knowledge of right and wrong and, with it, divine authority. The crucial innovation of these texts is that they explicitly extended this authority to laymen as well as men “in religion.”
In other words, we must change the way in which we read the lay mirrors and understand what they can reveal about the cultural forces that produced them. Paulinus and Alcuin did not simply write books of practical (or impractical) advice. They wrote ideological narratives of their world. These narratives explained, both directly and by implication, the correct order of God’s creation and the role that Carolingian aristocratic men were destined to play within it. They articulated and framed connections between lay aristocratic masculinity, secular prosperity, and divine sanction as completely natural, rendering normative the aristocratic cooperation and moral rectitude for which Admonitio generalis called. In the end, it ultimately matters little, therefore, how widely these texts may or may not have been read and digested in their moment. They are significant because they codify the completely constructed logic that authorized Carolingian aristocratic power at the turn of the ninth century. This logic enabled Carolingian men to wield that power whether they were consciously aware of its ideological foundations or not.
Paulinus and Eric
Paulinus was Aquileia’s Patriarch, a title granted to that episcopal see during the sixth century as a means of demarcating its autonomy and primacy among the other powerful sees of the region, including the strongholds of Ravenna and Rome.35 It was a position, in other words, of highest spiritual authority. Yet in writing his Liber exhortationis for the most powerful secular lord in that region, Paulinus was still writing as a subordinate. We must always remember that Carolingian society was not the society of the European High Middle Ages. Charlemagne allied with the papacy and the episcopacy, but the arms of Carolingian spiritual power worked for the laity, not the other way around. Lay magnates enlisted their learned priestly and monastic brothers because they were their trusted advisors. Part of the solemn duty of “professional” religious leadership was to teach worldly lords how Christianity pertained to their lives and, of equal importance, how better to make their religion do work for them, both personally and in their contributions to the empire.
If Liber exhortationis ever had an opening epistle, we no longer have record of it. The text itself is extant in some thirty manuscripts that collectively date from the ninth through the fifteenth centuries. Only one, from the mid-ninth century, attributes authorship to Paulinus.36 Furthermore, it states only that Paulinus wrote for a friend in saeculo militans (“serving as a warrior in the secular world”). We know that Eric of Friuli was by far the most likely original recipient of the text from other evidence of the close relationship between the two men.37 We also have a corroborating document that reveals not only something of the power dynamic between them but that Eric very likely requested the little book completely of his own volition. There is little in the document to suggest that he was driven by feelings of inferiority, as Riché believed. Instead, his diction implies straightforward and pragmatic interest.
The clarifying document is a letter addressed to Eric of Friuli, not from Paulinus but from Alcuin. This letter responds to a request from Eric for spiritual advice and suggests that Eric may have asked Alcuin about these matters first before eventually turning to Paulinus.38 In the letter, Alcuin obsequiously thanks the duke for deigning to visit him in his humble home, praying for God’s protection of the duke against all enemies, worldly and otherworldly. He entreats Eric to observe God’s precepts so that he may rule in prosperity and be deemed worthy of this divine protection. Finally, Alcuin closes by saying that he would write more “about the observation of Christian pietas” if Paulinus (to whom Alcuin humbly refers as his own teacher) were not already at hand to do so.39
Alcuin’s fawning diction is no doubt epistolary convention, and thus we need not read into its abject deference too strongly. Yet the fact that he chose this language in the first place demonstrates something of the hierarchy of power between the two men. Eric is the superior in the exchange. Furthermore, Eric is actively seeking knowledge not out of submission to spiritual authority but rather via its enlistment. Eric was a warrior, yet he was also clearly educated in letters and Christian doctrine. Liber exhortationis teems with quotations from a wide array of patristic authorities: Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job, the De vita contemplativa of Julianus Pomerius (d. c. 500), and the Admonitio ad filium spiritualium of Basil the Great (d. 379), along with significant references to the Old Testament Book of Psalms, several books of the prophets (particularly Isaiah), the New Testament Gospels (particularly Matthew and John), and the letters of St. Paul.40 Paulinus not only used these texts but also counted on his reader to understand them. Liber exhortationis is an erudite, philosophical tract for, we must presume, an erudite, philosophical man. It is only to be expected that, as such a man, Eric would seek out all the resources at his disposal in order to ensure his continued power and authority.41
Because this mirror (and the mirror of Alcuin, which I discuss in the following section) is frequently quoted without a great deal of regard to structural