Monastic economies in the Carolingian Age – Farfa and Fulda

• Applicants: Dr. Johanna Jebe; Professor Dr. Steffen Patzold
• Subject Area: Medieval History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 566507868

By 750 CE, about a third of the whole of Christian western Europe was in the hands of Church institutions; and the most significant and coherent of those institutions were monasteries. But we still do not know what this meant in economic terms, at a local level, for the history of the later 8th and 9th century, when the Carolingian empire was at its height. This project will identify the implications for this crucial period of our new understanding of landed power by confronting the four methodological problems it involves: 1) delineating regional differences in monastic economies; 2) interpreting leases as ways of managing monastic estates and of mediating relationships with lay lessees; 3) understanding terminologies of size and scale which were not always intended to be precisely quantifiable; and 4) exposing the mutual, interlocking influences of economy, ecclesiastical institutionality, and religious spirituality and learning that went to make up monastic communities in the Carolingian age. Our aim to address these methodological challenges is both innovative and timely, because each of them lacks much systematic study and they have never been considered together. Yet it is urgent that we do so, simply because the vast majority of the evidence that survives for early medieval agriculture was preserved by monasteries and mostly concerned their land (or at least, land that they claimed was theirs). Inevitably, therefore, the current history of the early medieval economy is in fact largely the history of the early medieval monastic economy; but with limited acknowledgement of that fact. Our project meets this core aim by examining in an innovative and fully integrated way two case studies: Farfa in Italy and Fulda in Germany. Our first objective is to turn what survives of their archives from the Carolingian period into state-of-the art annotated digital editions that reveal rather than conceal medieval practices of archiving. An ancillary aim is therefore to provide an example of archivally-aware editing. On the basis of the digital edition we will analyse the documents to accomplish four objectives in response to our research questions: How did monastic economies differ from region to region? How far were legal contracts with peasants (leases and similar instruments) consistent and reliable ways of managing estates – and what did they mean for the institutions’ power over their land? How far do the texts show agriculture to be quantifiable in a reliable and consistent way? And to what extent were the management and recording of landed property influenced by monastic learning and spirituality?

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Partner Organisation: Arts and Humanities Research Council
• Cooperation Partner: Marios Costambeys, Ph.D.