Carolingian Culture in Septimania and Catalonia

In the 9th to 11th centuries, Catalonia and the adjacent parts of France, then called Septimania, were a frontier region. To the south, relations with Muslim al-Andalus shifted between armed conflict and cultural exchanges. The rule of the Carolingian Empire in the north gradually gave way to exchange networks of a largely autonomous Mediterranean region with an emerging France. We only begin to realize the impact of Carolingian texts and ideas on the lively monastic and urban culture of this middle ground between Latin Europe and Islamic Spain. Catalonian and French archives are full of unstudied and unknown manuscripts in which Carolingian texts were copied, reworked, commented and transmitted. For the first time, the project will study this rich textual heritage in a comprehensive way. The project parts focus on Bible manuscripts, liturgical and exegetical texts, and historiography. They seek to trace the cultural flows from the Iberian Peninsula to the heartlands of Carolingian reform, and back to Septimania/Catalonia, and their impact on the development of highly productive cultural centres in the area. Septimania/Catalonia was a lively hub of cultural exchanges and adaptation, merging Carolingian innovations with its own Roman and Gothic heritage. This perspective from the margins of the Carolingian world, with its palpably different cultural matrix, will shed new light on the formation and impact of Carolingian culture, which was in many ways formative of medieval European civilisation.

CCSC has addressed the rich and understudied 9th- to 12th-century manuscript heritage from Catalonia and Septimania. It combines wide-ranging and systematic recording of manuscripts, in-depth manuscript studies, research on key texts, and work on questions of cultural transmission and adaptation. A key issue were the cultural contacts and the knowledge transfer between the Carolingian core areas and Septimania/Catalonia, and between these two regions and the Euro-Mediterranean cultures of writing. A central question was which Carolingian texts and manuscripts were used or not used in the region under study, and in what way. How could they help to shape the transformation towards a new religious/political order in the border zone between the Frankish kingdom and the former Gothic lands now largely under Muslim rule? One main achievement of the project was documenting all known manuscripts, identifying the texts ed they contain, and the searching for hitherto unknown textual witnesses. One task was to revise and add to the rather patchy list of Carolingian manuscripts that Bernhard Bischoff had produced, and add what he had not recorded. All manuscripts were accurately described and entered into the database Carolingian Catalonia (CarCat), which currently contains 827manuscript descriptions, and allows tracing all manuscript witnesses of all the texts contained in them. After the project, the database will be hosted at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and made publicly accessible (planned date: autumn 2025). It will also be further updated. In-depth studies concerned several textual genres. One key text under study is the largely unpublished homiliary collection of Luculentius, for which Eulàlia Vernet i Pons and Isaac Lampulanés are about to finish a critical edition. They have also completed studies of several important issues raised by the text. Luculentius' selection of homilies (texts for preaching) allows tracing literate networks and cultural exchanges. The collection has also been analysed from a comparative point of view, for instance in a study of the influence of the Homiliary of Paul the Deacon in Catalonia. A further key text is the De sex aetatibus mundi by Claudius of Turin, a 9th-century historical tractate, for which Patrick Marschner used two hitherto unknown manuscripts in Rome in his edition. The text is also studied in the context of other Septimanian historical works from the period in a forthcoming monograph, among them, the Chronicon Anianense and the Chronicon Moissacense, for which new manuscripts were found. Matthias Tischler has published numerous studies on other aspects of the transmission of Carolingian texts in Septimania/Catalonia. A planned final volume will contain contributions by the entire project team. These studies show how Carolingian textual culture was gradually introduced in a peripheral area, where Visigothic influence had prevailed before, and produced new hybrid forms of book culture.