For God, king and country: the personal and the public in the Epitaphium Arsenii.

Abstract

Paschasius Radbertus's Epitaphium Arsenii is a lively and polemical dialogue that takes us straight into the controversies within the court-connected and competitive elite of the 850s. The latter's membership, ecclesiastical as well as secular, measured each other against the yardstick of public service, and used failure to live up to this as a means of attack. On the one hand, the Epitaphium is a highly personal text, aimed at a restricted audience; on the other, it addresses the shared values of the Carolingian political leadership. This was not a world dominated by ‘the Church’, but one in which many ‘churches’ (monasteries) and their abbots actively participated in the political arena.