Courtney Booker

Professor

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Graduate Student Supervision

Doctoral Student Supervision

Dissertations completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest dissertations.

Temporality, authority, and "ancient Christianity" in the Carolingian era (2021)

This dissertation examines the powerful, pervasive influence of the past – especially that of “ancient Christianity” and the Latin Church Fathers – on understandings of time, temporality, authority, and the relationship of past to present in the Carolingian era (ca. 751–888), as well as the diverse uses of that past by Carolingian writers, compilers, and readers. The Carolingian reforming project (reformatio, or correctio) was inherently concerned with the social and spiritual improvement of the temporal world, particularly by bringing the present age into closer alignment with the “traditional” Christian past. For eighth- and ninth-century reformers, the defining, paramount virtues of that “ancient Christian” past and the orthodox tradition running through it were concord and consensus among authorities. Carolingian ecclesiastical and lay leaders sought to facilitate and engender these same virtues in the Christian society of the present and anticipated future.The Carolingian reformatio, it is argued here, was imbued with a distinctive sense of “progress toward the past,” bolstered by texts inextricably associating the Church Fathers with authority, orthodoxy, and the essential harmony and continuity of the “ancient Christian” tradition. The imperium Christianum that the Carolingians sought to create, “reform,” and ultimately perfect was fundamentally rooted in an idealized vision of “ancient Christianity” and of the Church Fathers as a special type of timeless authorities – fashioned through the Carolingians’ own purposeful, pragmatic connections of antiquity with authority.

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Master's Student Supervision

Theses completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest theses.

Beati patres: Uses of Augustine and Gregory the Great at Carolingian Church Councils, 816-836 (2015)

The Carolingian renovatio of the earlier ninth century was marked by an intensified interest in “the teachings of the ancient fathers.” Where the Church Fathers had long served as indispensable sources for biblical interpretation and exegesis, the reform agenda of the Church councils between 816 and 836 saw these Fathers employed increasingly as authoritative guides to the ordines, the orders of Christian society. Chief among these patristic authorities was Augustine of Hippo (354–430), whose influence in the early Middle Ages has often been cast as ubiquitous and all-encompassing by modern historians. To be sure, Augustine was an important source for the Carolingian reforms. Yet, rather than presuming that his nominal impact was all-pervasive in ninth-century political and ecclesiastical discourses, I shall endeavor to show both the great utility and the discursive limits of Augustine’s name, and the authority tied to it, within the conciliar texts of this period. Despite the purportedly thorough Augustinianism of the Carolingian reforms, “Augustine” is often present via later, patristic mediators, the most significant and formidable among them being Pope Gregory the Great (540–604). Gregory was arguably the ultimate Augustinian mediator for the Carolingians (and beyond), but his great innovation was the development of an adaptable language of hierarchical, spiritual, and political authority, a mode of admonition particularly well-suited to the aims of the Carolingian reform program.

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Adversus paganos: Disaster, dragons, and episcopal authority in Gregory of Tours (2013)

It is commonly assumed that, in the early Middle Ages, those phenomena which modern readers might recognize as “natural disasters” were instead interpreted as divine punishments resulting from human sin. The appropriate response to such phenomena thus involved individual and collective penance. This thesis investigates one particularly inscrutable account of a “natural disaster” recorded by Gregory of Tours in Book 10 of his Histories: a catastrophic flood of the Tiber River that was followed by an outbreak of pestilence at Rome. The flooding was accompanied by striking "signa" and ominous portents: the corpse of a dragon was washed downstream together with several serpents. The calamity not only destroyed church property but also claimed the life of Pope Pelagius II. I conclude that Gregory’s description of these events indeed confirms the notion that calamities readily construed by modern readers as natural disasters were seen in the late sixth century as divinely ordained punishments. Yet Gregory’s interpretation of the disasters befalling Rome is also quite complex; the dragon and serpents, I conclude, represent the pagan god Asclepius, and thus form part of a complex interpretive framework drawing upon pagan historiography and the works of Christian apologists. Through this interpretive framework, Gregory sought to reveal the immediate causes of Rome’s divine punishment, the logic behind Pelagius’ death, and the appropriate or ideal role of “the good bishop” or “good shepherd”—represented in this instance by Gregory the Great—in providing succor and ameliorating the effects of a punishment wrought by God.

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