Between Seligenstadt and St. Bavo's Abbey, Ghent: Making a Collection out of Einhard's Letters
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The letter collection of Einhard, biographer of Charlemagne, is preserved in a unique but badly damaged manuscript dating from the third quarter of the ninth century. This manuscript was most probably copied out in St. Bavo's Abbey in Ghent between 853/60 and 879, though contrary to the general assumption, the letter collection itself was not compiled at St. Bavo's. In this paper, I argue that the collection probably originated as a letter-formulary in Seligenstadt, where Einhard spent the last years of his life. The core of the collection (letters 1-54 in the manuscript) appears to have been assembled around 834 or 835, possibly by Ratleik, who served Einhard as notary from 827 at the latest. This would explain why most of the letters in the collection date from the period after 828. In Einhard's last years, several more of his letters were added to the collection (letters 55-64). Shortly after Einhard's death (840), a copy of this collection was sent to St. Bavo's, where a number of letters that were neither sent by nor addressed to Einhard were added (letters 65-70). In the third quarter of the ninth century, this manuscript served as a model for the extant copy, which is probably to some degree selective. I also argue that, essentially, Einhard's letters owe their survival to their potential to be used as models for practical correspondence. As the letters are, in fact, anonymous (Einhard's name is systematically abbreviated to its initial letter), they were not assembled as a letter collection of the "great Einhard," but as a collection of epistolary models. A comparison with Alcuin and his letter collections shows that in the Carolingian period, Einhard had neither the authority nor the reputation of his contemporary.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".