Dr%20Matthew%20Kempshall: List of publications

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This study offers a major reinterpretation of medieval political thought by examining one of its most fundamental ideas. If it was axiomatic that the goal of human society should be the common good, then this notion presented at least two conceptual alternatives. Did it embody the highest moral ideals of happiness and the life of virtue, or did it represent the more pragmatic benefits of peace and material security? Political thinkers from Thomas Aquinas to William of Ockham answered this question in various contexts. In theoretical terms, they were reacting to the rediscovery of Aristotle's Politics and Ethics, an event often seen as pivotal in the history of political thought. On a practical level, they were faced with pressing concerns over the exercise of both temporal and ecclesiastical authority — resistance to royal taxation and opposition to the jurisdiction of the pope. In establishing the connections between these different contexts, this book questions the identification of Aristotle as the primary catalyst for the emergence of ‘the individual’ and a ‘secular’ theory of the state. Through a detailed exposition of scholastic political theology, it argues that the roots of any such developments should be traced, instead, to Augustine and the Bible.

This essay seeks to reevaluate the traditional characterization of the Vita Karoli Magni as the first secular biography of the middle ages, a work which self-consciously used Suetonius in order to adapt the written traditions of hagiography and shape a distinctively "imperial" ideal of Carolingian kingship. Instead, it reconstructs the context of Ciceronian rhetoric to which Einhard is known to have been familiar and with which the writing of history and res gestae was closely associated. An awareness of the general rules of epideictic, deliberative, and, above all, forensic rhetoric, it is argued, sheds considerable light not just on Einhard's influential fusion of biography with annals but on the status of the text as an implicit critique of Louis the Pious. Focusing on the generally neglected presence of Charlemagne's will in the text, the essay locates at least the genesis of Einhard's composition in the disturbed politics of 828-829, thereby tying it born to the Epitaphium Arsenii and to Einhard's own Translatio et miracula sancti Marcellini et Petri as evidence of vocal and articulated opposition to Louis's political and ecclesiastical activity.