The lecture summarises the results of an interdisciplinary study carried out over the last decade which is now finished and going to be published in the course of this year. It deals with a list that contains the names of 174 men who had sworn an oath of fidelity in Carolingian Italy. Following some introductory remarks on Carolingian practices of list-keeping, the paper's first part will discuss the manuscript (St. Paul, Stiftsbibliothek, IV, 1) into which the list was pasted at some time in the 9th century, in particular its provenance, contents and function, before investigating into the layout and structure of the list. The third part will be a prosopographical and onomastic study of the names contained in the list which will hopefully allow, in the paper's final part, to provide a more precise historical context for the drafting and function of the list and to clarify the purpose behind its incorporation into the manuscript.
Stefan Esders did his PhD in Ancient History at the University of Freiburg in 1993 with a dissertation on Roman law in Merovingian Gaul. Following postdoctoral positions in Göttingen and Münster, he was appointed lecturer in ancient and medieval history at the University of Bochum, where he defended his habilitation thesis on oaths of fidelity in the late antique and early medieval period in 2004. He has been professor of late antique and early medieval history at Freie Universität Berlin since 2006. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, in 2013, a fellow in the Humanities Council Program in Medieval Studies of Princeton University in 2019 and became a member of the Academia Europaea in 2021. Part of his work focuses on early medieval law and on its manuscript transmission, while he is co-edtor of the new MGH edition of the Carolingian capitularies from 814 to 840 to be published later this year.