EMA 20.6 | Einhard, Holy Relics, and the Piety Gap That Never Existed

Описание: Charlemagne's biographer Einhard sent agents to steal saints' bones from Roman crypts — and wrote about it with pride. This video examines Einhard's relic acquisition as a window into Carolingian attitudes toward saints, miracles, and the supernatural, revealing that while the Carolingian Renaissance widened the literacy gap between elites and ordinary people, it produced no corresponding gap in belief.

Key concepts covered:

• Einhard as Charlemagne's biographer and founder of the monastery at Seligenstadt
• The northward flow of relics from Rome alongside classical manuscripts — twin commodities of the Carolingian Renaissance
• Translatio (translation) as the formal transfer of saints' remains, not linguistic translation
• Peter Brown's concept of "the very special dead" — saints understood as having active will and agency even after death
• How a sealed tomb meant a saint's refusal, and an opened tomb meant consent
• Miracles as evidence of saintly approval: cures for paralysis, blindness, and disease at Seligenstadt
• The hunchbacked peasant episode and what it reveals about shared belief across social classes
• The Carolingian literacy gap: literacy rates in 875 were hardly greater than in 775
• The central argument — elite literacy rose dramatically, but supernatural conviction held steady at every level of society
• Why intellectual sophistication and supernatural belief coexisted without tension in the Carolingian mind

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SOURCE MATERIALS
The source materials for this video are from    • 20. The Early Middle Ages, 284--1000: Inte...