The Fall of a Carolingian Kingdom: Lotharingia, 855–869. By CharlesWest. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2023. xv + 236 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978 1 487 54516 1.

Lothar II came to the throne in 855, after the death of his father Lothar I. To stabilize his rule, he married a woman named Teutberga, from a prominent family in the Middle Kingdom, setting aside his existing partner Waldrada. In the long run, this proved to be a bad idea. Lothar's repeated attempts to divorce Teutberga and receive official sanction for his relationship with Waldrada would bring in his extensive clan of royal relatives, the bishops of multiple kingdoms, and the pope. The richness of the material surrounding Lothar II's divorce case has inspired many a historian, to the point that it might be the single most studied event-complex of the later Carolingian period. Concomitantly, an increasing amount of the source material is available in English translation, an endeavour to which Charles West has already contributed notably with his and Rachel Stone's very welcome translation of Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims's De divortio (published as On the Divorce of King Lothar and Queen Theutberga, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). To this, West now adds the current anthology of translated sources concerning Lothar II's divorce and the political world surrounding it. The volume contains twenty-six sources (counting individually the multiple documents translated from the Council of Aachen and summit at Savonnières in 862). These encompass – and please do take the genre classifications here with a pinch of salt – ten letters to various recipients (albeit intended, to various degrees, for public consumption); three synodal records; three royal diplomas, one episcopal charter, and one will; two tracts; a draft speech; an oath; a coronation ordo; and three sources which do not have translated texts, i.e. an entry from the Remiremont Liber memorialis, one of Lothar's coins, and an image from the Sacramentary of Metz. Some of these documents are exceptionally nice to have in English translation. In particular, the 858 round letter from the West Frankish bishops to Louis the German and Emperor Louis II's defence of his imperial title against the Byzantine ruler Basil I are very welcome; and the selection of documents more broadly is well chosen. The quality of the translation is generally high, although there are a few small errors here and there. For instance, in Document 13 (a diploma of Lothar in favour of Teutberga) the final clause of the arenga is missing, translating noverit solertia as ‘let it be brought to the attention of’ strikes me as a little too much of a paraphrase, libera potesta is better rendered as ‘complete power’ than ‘free power’, anulus is translated here as ‘seal’ but in Document 1 as ‘ring’, and the Tyronian notes have been omitted. Sometimes, as well, the translations can read as a bit over-literal. If these seem like nitpicks, that is because they are – notwithstanding minor criticisms such as the above, these are good translations. In particular, in the middle documents and especially Document 12, West works with the somewhat leaden material of earnest Carolingian prose to evoke the stakes of late Carolingian politics in a way which is not merely informative but genuinely exciting. This brings us onto the commentary and analysis. Here, West has finely judged the degree of contextualization needed, and the introductory essays and footnotes carry precisely the right amount of information needed to gain an understanding of a given source without overwhelming the reader with detail. This also allows West to bring in the non- or semi-textual sources mentioned above, a welcome introduction which will allow students in particular to wrestle with the problems surrounding the use of Carolingian numismatic and art historical evidence. The overall thrust of West's presentation pushes in two directions. First, he argues against the opposition of ‘power struggles’ and ‘law and morality’ (e.g. p. 7); and second, he argues that the dissolution of Lothar's kingdom was not simply the contingent result of his premature death from disease in 869, but a result of his and his advisers' mismanagement of a rapidly evolving ideological framework (e.g. pp. 202–3). The first of these is a point well made and well taken, although it does need to be tempered with a little dose of cynicism: in Document 5 and its commentary, we do in fact see the power-political ends dictating the ideological means, as Lothar's court threw out mutually contradictory justifications for the royal actions in the hope that one of them might stick (see pp. 52–3). If I remain unconvinced about the second point, moreover, it is owing to the documents themselves: the 858 letter mentioned earlier (Document 2) is a reminder that while Lothar's situation could have deteriorated like his cousin Pippin II of Aquitaine's had (a comparison West brings up on p. 202), it could have improved just as Charles the Bald's had done between the mid-850s and mid-860s. Equally – and this is also perhaps the main omission from the selection of documents chosen – the idea that Lothar's kingdom died with him in 869 (p. 182) could have used a bit more historiographical salt, being as it is a point where debate has not settled. Uses of ‘Lotharingian-ness’ were neither consistent nor uncontested, but they do keep cropping up into the tenth century and even beyond. Discussion of the politics of representation underpinning something like the 909 diploma of Louis the Child that refers to ‘the magnates of the Lotharingian realm’ (proceres regni Lothariensis) as a coherent political action group would have been a satisfying cap to the work (Die Urkunden Zwentibolds und Ludwig des Kindes, ed. T. Schieffer, MGH diplomata regum Germaniae ex stirpe Karolinorum 4 (Berlin, 1960), no. 70, p. 206). The Fall of a Carolingian Kingdom is to be thoroughly applauded. It is a well thought-out and well-translated selection of important texts, which convey to the reader the drama of the multipolar Carolingian world of the late ninth century. It will find a fixed place on historians' bookshelves and rightfully earn West the gratitude of students and researchers alike.

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