Jennifer R. Davis is Associate Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies at the Catholic University of America. She earned her PhD in history at Harvard University, following her MA at Harvard and at the University of Cambridge. She has held fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, German Academic Exchange Service, American Philosophical Society, Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, and the American Academy in Rome. Davis is the co-editor, with Michael McCormick, of The Long Morning of Medieval Europe (Ashgate, 2008), and has written numerous articles on early medieval politics, Charlemagne, and Louis IX of France. In her recent book Charlemagne’s Practice of Empire (Cambridge, 2015), Davis examines how the Frankish king Charlemagne and his court held together his vast new empire created during the first decades of his reign. Telling the story of Charlemagne’s rule based on contemporary sources, she offers a new interpretation of Charlemagne’s political practice, freed from the distortions of legend.
In her Academy project, “Per capitularios nostros: Law and its Uses in the Frankish Kingdoms,” Davis turned her attention to the invention of the capitularies, a form of royal law created by the Merovingian Franks. Using manuscript evidence, she examines how these legal sources – a new genre of law in the post-Roman period – were transformed from the sixth to the twelfth centuries. In so doing, Davis investigates how the capitularies were copied and preserved by people throughout the lands conquered by the Franks, and sometimes beyond the Frankish borders, who chose to record them for a variety of reasons. After the fall of the Carolingians, the strongest Frankish dynasty, capitularies that no longer had legal force continued to be copied. These texts, Davis argues, were often used as a way of asserting Frankish identity in a world where the Franks were no longer united politically. By basing her work on approximately 250 surviving manuscripts of capitularies, Davis presents an innovative vision of the use of law, one founded on explicating how and why different communities chose to adapt royal law for their own purposes.
Meet Jennifer Davis
A short portrait filmed at the Hans Arnhold Center, introducing the work and ideas behind this semester in Berlin.
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Fellow Spotlight: Jennifer R. Davis
In her Academy project, “Per capitularios nostros,” Jennifer Davis turns her attention to the invention of the capitularies, a form of royal law created by the Merovingian Franks.
Per Capitularios Nostros: Law and Its Uses in the Frankish Kingdoms
There are more than two hundred surviving manuscripts of Frankish capitularies—royal laws divided into chapters. Though they were produced by kings and courts, they were mostly copied by local authorities who decided to use them for their own purposes. Jennifer Davis’s lecture, the title of which is eponymous with her most recent book, Per capitularios…
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