Love in the material world: Caritas and the changing face of Carolingian lay discipleship, 8th--10th century

This dissertation investigates the ways in which early medieval thinkers conceived the possibility of performing the extreme philanthropic love demanded of early medieval Christians by their God---a love without limits, not just confined to kin-groups but extended to all---within the "world" of everyday life, a category of space that opposed the carefully-regulated realm of the monastic cloister. It begins with the early Church and ends just after the turn of the first millennium, but primarily focuses on the Carolingian period. During this era of profound cultural change, the Christian religion would permeate daily life to a greater degree than ever before, laying the foundations for the pan-European Latin Christian culture of the High Middle Ages. Using didactic treatises written for the laity as well as narrative histories, biographies, and hagiographies from the period, the study suggests that the Christianization of Frankish culture during the Carolingian period may paradoxically have had a more deleterious effect on love's broader promotion within European secular culture after the ninth century than previous scholarship has recognized. While unlimited love was always thought to be difficult for worldly practitioners, prominent thinkers in the early centuries of the Church had insisted that unlimited love was nevertheless possible for all Christians to achieve. As Christianity permeated more deeply into Frankish culture during the ninth century, however, intellectuals began subtly to exclude laypeople from access to the ideal of unlimited love. Christian writers developed a new model of elite discipleship which ultimately taught laypeople that their capacity to love was limited---that true unlimited love was principally the domain of the clergy and other "professional" religious, who lived ritually, and increasingly physically, beyond the bounds of "normal" secular life. Love and the peace that it engendered became less the responsibility of all Christians in the cultural imagination, and more the duty of special figures who lived separately from the majority of the Christian community.