Inventing paganism in eighth-century Bavaria
By Jonathan Couser
Early Medieval Europe, Vol18:1 (2010)
Abstract: This article examines the hagiographies of Saints Emmeram and Corbinian and the synod of Neuching from eighth-century Bavaria. It argues that the references to pagan survivals in these texts are misleading, in the absence of other evidence of paganism in the region. Rather, since these texts were composed in a narrow window of time from 769–774, this anxiety reflects concerns aroused by pagan uprisings in neighbouring Carantania, which were only suppressed in 772. Thus, the texts’ authors ‘invented’ paganism in their own culture as their perceptions of the dividing lines between Christianity and paganism grew sharper.
Introduction: Our vision of the Christianization of medieval Europe has changed drastically over the last generation. It was once possible to see early medieval Germany as a land of virgin paganism, into which missionaries like Amandus, Willibrord and Boniface boldly brought an alien Christian gospel. This vision was framed in terms derived from the missionary movements of western Christendom in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Recent scholarship has made this image untenable. The work of Lutz von Padberg, for instance, has stressed the cultural similarities between Christian and non-Christian peoples of Europe, which made possible the incorporation of the latter into Christendom. Ian Wood’s study of the hagiographies of missionary figures, our main sources of information on Christianization, has shown the extent to which these accounts are literary constructions, used by Christians to discuss missionary agendas, rather than direct reflections of actual activities. Archaeology and careful analysis of the written sources have shown evidence of the presence of Christianity in many ‘mission fields’ long pre-dating the arrival of missionaries themselves. Personalities like Columbanus or Boniface, once presented as exemplary early medieval missionaries, now appear more like ‘reformers’ and ‘consolidators’ of existing Christian communities.
Early medieval Bavaria is a striking example of the shift from narratives of mission and conversion to those of reform and organization. Scholarly opinion up to the mid-twentieth century generally thought that Christianity virtually disappeared from the former Roman provinces of Rhaetia and Noricum in the sixth and seventh centuries. Post-war historians, however, particularly following the lead of Friedrich Prinz, moved toward seeing a strong continuity of Christianity in the area. Thus, Bavaria’s re-entry into European Christendom in the eighth century now seems like a process of reorganization and reform rather than of mission and conversion.
The continuity paradigm has carried the field, but it leaves a lingering question: what to make of those sources which older scholarship took as evidence of paganism? If there was no great mission converting the Bavarians to Christianity, why did Bavarian authors sometimes write as though there had been? These sources betray an anxiety on the part of the Bavarian Christian leadership of the eighth century that their people had been entangled in actual paganism in the recent past, and that some current practices might still be tainted by demonic influences. These texts do not, in fact, reflect memories of actual militant paganism in the region. Significantly, all of them were written within a narrow time frame, between 768 and 772. This article will argue that such sources indicate a shift in the mentalities of the Bavarian clergy, particularly expressed by Bishop Arbeo of Freising, as the clergy developed a missionary agenda and encountered setbacks in the pursuit of that agenda. These setbacks caused Arbeo and the other clergy to re-imagine their own past and thus to invent a pagan past for their own people.
Gender relations in Saxony seem to have been more balanced than in other places in Europe and ordinary families, like Hathumoda’s and Liutbirga’s, seem to have played as much of a role in the process of Christianization as missionary bishops and Benedictine monks. Both Gandersheim and Wendhausen were family foundations built on family land. They were blessed by the clergy, but otherwise independent. Moreover, as much as monks like Agius of Corvey wanted all cloistered women to become nuns, aristocratic Saxon families preferred the more flexible status of canonesses, who took no permanent vows, could own property and could leave the cloister at will. At least in the first generation or two, the abbesses were daughters of the founding couple. Other women of the family also lived there: some their whole lives, some until they were married, and others after they were widowed, like Hathumoda’s mother Oda, who spent the last decades of her life at Gandersheim. The firm establishment of this particular way of life in the later ninth century led to its blossoming in Ottonian Germany, where abbesses, queens and canonesses played key roles in the religious, cultural and even political life of the Reich.
