Charles the Simple’s Sense of the Past: The Genealogia Dictata a Karolo Rege and the Roots of a King’s Identity

The issue of an individual’s identity is notoriously difficult for the early middle ages.  Even assuming we could agree on a definition of “identity” and its constituent elements, it is not at all clear that definition and elements would apply to early medieval societies, which were so different from our own in their emotionalities, family structures, and memory practices, to say nothing of their quite possibly different understandings of “individuality” itself.  There is also the even more obvious difficulty of sources: we simply do not have the quantity of sources from the early middle ages to speculate about the identity of individuals, while the quality of those sources (their formulaic nature, adherence to traditional formulas, and transmission through ecclesiastical filters) makes them anything but transparent reflections.  This is all the more reason to examine one of the most surprising sources to have survived from the period: the Genealogia Dictata a Karolo Rege, a genealogy transmitted by Charles the Simple’s favored canons of Saint-Corneille of Compiègne.  As its title indicates, it purports to have been dictated by the Charles the Simple himself.  I will argue that the genealogy’s idiosyncrasies support the likelihood that it was, in fact, Charles who transmitted the information in the genealogy, and that these same idiosyncrasies give us a window into Charles’ understanding not only of his past but also of his destiny and purpose as he himself understood them.   Accordingly, they reveal a king whose contentious policies that led ultimately to his deposition can only be understood in terms of his identity, forged from his understanding of his and his family’s past.