Carine van Rhijn works at the Department of History and Art History of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on manuscript history, cultural history, the history of religion and the history of knowledge, mostly of the early middle ages. Together with Irene van Renswoude she runs the Anonymous Knowledge Project (https://www.huygens.knaw.nl/en/projecten/anonymous-knowledge-2/), which evaluates the perceived reliability and ‘working’ of knowledge when authors are unknown. After the book on Carolingian priests, she is now working on a book about prognostic texts in early medieval Latin manuscripts.
Until quite recently, scholars agreed that there is not much to know about the beliefs and (religious) behaviour of early medieval illiterate ‘common people’ – after all, they did not write and the archaeology they produced is mostly very hard to interpret. However, what we do have are dozens of manuscripts produced for local priests, who were expected to teach these people what to know and how to behave as good Christians. Usually these books are small, badly written, full of holes and stains, so they have not attracted a lot of research, the more since they are listed as ‘varia’ or ‘canones’ in library catalogues. Once you start looking, however, a whole world opens up through the rich and varied contents of these codices: we learn what priests themselves knew, and what they could, therefore, potentially teach to their flocks. Interestingly, this knowledge was a lot more extensive than just the basic religious subjects: manuscripts for priests are surprisingly varied in contents, and sometimes contain medicinal knowledge, or texts which help predict the future, or basic ‘kitchen table solutions’ for every-day problems. Priest were usually the only literate people in a lay settlement, so these books show how they became experts in more or less anything a lay person might need – and this included writing love letters…