­chapter 5 Writing a Song for Solomon: Song Exegesis for Carolingian Kings

At the Council of Frankfurt and later, central to the Carolingian dynasty’s claim to imperium was Charlemagne’s visible support and defense of correct Trinitar- ian doctrine. The Carolingian dynasty held the throne, went the argument of both Theodulf and Alcuin, by virtue of their kings’ ability to see and recognize the divinity of Christ, supported by a class of learned doctores able to interpret scripture correctly. In this way, the exalted, special nature of Christ, as por- trayed in the Song of Songs’ depiction of the Bridegroom, underpinned a high Christology which, in turn, supported a high, Eusebian conception of Caro- lingian kingship. Early medieval Song exegesis played an instrumental role in conceptualizing the nature of Christ, the relationship between Christ and the church, and within the church itself, the role and duties of the doctores toward the people of God. Biblical exegesis generally, and Song exegesis in particular, therefore, played an inescapable part in Carolingian court life, underpinning royal ideology and court ceremony, inspiring royal patronage of art and schol- arship, and providing models of personal conduct for the ruler to be emulated by the rest of the nobility. The traditional association of the Song of Songs with Solomon, and the importance of Old Testament kingship, and of David and Solomon in particular, to Carolingian political ideology, virtually guaranteed that Song exegesis would have a particular political charge. While the essential core of the ecclesiastical interpretation of the Song re- mained intact, Carolingian doctores adjusted how they framed Song exegesis in order to make it suitable and edifying reading for kings. This chapter will focus on two works in particular: the Enarrationes in Cantica Canticorum by Angelomus of Luxeuil and the Explanatio in Ferculum Salomonis by Hincmar of Rheims. Strikingly, both works were written within only a few years of each other and, significantly, both were commissioned, custom-​made responses by Angelomus and Hincmar to personal requests from two brother kings: respec- tively, from Lothar at some point after his wife Ermengard’s death in 851 and from Charles the Bald between 853 and 856. Both works, I would argue, were intended to encourage kings to meditate upon the nature of their own king- ship, refracted in different ways through the prism of the Song of Songs. Ange- lomus stressed the importance of a king’s understanding of scripture as part of the defense and administration of the realm, common to much of Carolingian

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004389250_007 140 ­chapter biblical exegesis. More particularly, however, Angelomus used the imagery of the Song of Songs to show the transformation of both the church and Christ into transcendent glory by humility and suffering; in so doing, he emphasized the need for the king to have both humility and self-​control to govern rightly both himself and his realm. By contrast, Hincmar’s In ferculum Salomonis was originally an acrostic poem, a sophisticated fusion of word and image popular in the Carolingian court. Al- though the original unfortunately does not survive, Hincmar would have arranged particular words—in​ this case, particular doctrines—in​ such a way as to form the larger image of the ferculum, understood to be the church. Hincmar’s allusion to the Song and its exegesis certainly underscores the extent to which Carolingian doctores used the imagery of the Song to think about the church as a whole. Like Paschasius’s use of Solomon’s ferculum in his preface to De corpore et sanguine Domini, and perhaps directly inspired by it, in his choice of image Hincmar em- phasizes his own membership among the doctores and their role as arbiters of orthodoxy. Moreover, in presenting the work to Charles, as Paschasius had done before him, Hincmar implicitly makes Charles one of the doctores himself with the responsibility of protecting the church, and the entire image of the ferculum of King Solomon a kind of mnemonic device for the orthodox teachings of the church that he particularly wanted Charles to defend.

5.1 The King, the Prophet, and the Book of the Law

If the Franks increasingly viewed themselves as a new Israel, their kings mod- eled themselves after the few upright rulers to be gleaned from the pages of the Old Testament—Josiah,​ Hezekiah, Joseph, and most ubiquitously, David and Solomon—all​ of whom were judged by their ability to live according to the laws of God and to propagate correct worship.1 If, by the 820s, the notion

1 The great learning of the king, whether real or patently false, had been a fixture in Frank- ish court panegyric since the days of Venantius Fortunatus. See Peter Godman, Poets and Emperors: Frankish Politics and Carolingian Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 18, 55, 64–​65; Rosamond McKitterick, “Charles the Bald (823–877)​ and His Library: the Patronage of Learning,” The English Historical Review 95 (1980): 34. For the impact of biblical models on Carolingian kings, see Sassier, Royauté et idéologie au Moyen Âge, 122–40;​ Mary Garrison, “The Franks as New Israel? Education for an identity from Pippin to Charlemagne,” The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Yitzhak Hen and Matthew Innes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 159; T. F. X. Noble, “Tradition and Learning in Search of Ideology: the Libri Carolini,” in The Gentle Voices of Teachers: Aspects of Learning in the Carolingian Age, ed. Richard E. Sullivan (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1995), 238–40,​ and most recently,