Carolingian Ecological Sovereignty: Theology, Empire, and Nature

This book explores how the project of making themselves and others into better Christians intertwined with controlling nature in the imperial ideology and political practice of the Carolingian empire. During the early Middle Ages, the ecological was political—as it is today. For the Carolingians, the governance of nature was integral to the making of empire, which for more than a century (ca. 772–888) stretched across much of western Europe. This book shows how correctio, the project of forming a properly Christian society, extended beyond doctrine and discipline to encompass the natural world itself. Carolingian rulers and writers treated landscapes, animals, and human communities alike as subjects of reform, imagining empire as a space where creation could be ordered, corrected, and directed toward salvation.