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Dissertation Information for Hans Josef Hummer

NAME:
- Hans Josef Hummer

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (1997)

ADVISORS:
- Patrick J. Geary

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Carol Lansing
- Christopher Stevens

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Monastic property, family continuity and central authority in early medieval Alsace and southern Lotharingia

Abstract: This dissertation explores the relationship between aristocratic families, monastic property and the construction of central authority in Alsace and southern Lotharingia between 650 and 950. Central to the study is the position of monasteries in a flexible system of property transfers, both from laity to religious institutions and from monasteries to suppliants, which facilitated the creation and maintenance of horizontal and vertical bonds. In the late seventh and early eighth centuries, families and religious institutions in Alsace existed in a close, symbiotic relationship at the local level. Families could use monasteries to institutionalize their continuity with descendants by ensuring the transmission of their property to the next generation or could tap the archival memory of monasteries to claim property donated by ancestors. From the late eighth century, the enormous landed wealth of monasteries inevitably attracted the attention of central powers, primarily the expanding Carolingian royal family, who simply took advantage of the flexible potential of ecclesiastical grants to petitioners and adapted them to royal interests. As a result, they were able to reward royal supporters with property and project central authority into regional areas with as little disruption of local sensibilities as possible. Central interference in local process, however, had a transformative effect on the relationship between monasteries and their neighboring families. With the support of Carolingian rulers, who ultimately guaranteed their rights and immunities, monasteries began after 785 to assess a rent on a much more regular basis in return for grants of ecclesiastical property, transforming a relationship that had been primarily social and political into one that was more impersonalized and fiscal. By the mid-ninth century, when Charlemagne's grandsons struggled to partition the Carolingian Empire, monasteries were used to consolidate and mobilize the support of their associated families toward the broader goal of advancing the interests of the east Frankish king, Louis the German, to the west into Alsace and southern Lotharingia. When the Carolingian polity began to come apart in the late ninth century aristocratic families reasserted themselves around the same monasteries their ancestors had patronized in the early eighth. The relationship between family and monastery, however, had been transformed. Aristocrats constructed comital lordships around monasteries and now lorded over them as heritable family possessions.

MPACT Scores for Hans Josef Hummer

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-10-14 06:08:52

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Students under Hans Josef Hummer

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None