In This Modern Age: Medieval Studies in Honor of Paul Edward Dutton is a collection of fourteen essays by scholars of the Carolingian era specializing in history, art history, and literature. The volume is divided into five sections, which treat early medieval Latin literary and historiographical culture, images and objects, interpretations of natural phenomena, and the subject of nostalgia. Reflecting Dutton’s pathbreaking work, the contributions all evince the great impact of his teaching and erudition over the past thirty years since the publication of his seminal books Carolingian Civilization: A Reader (1993), The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire (1994), The Poetry and Paintings of the First Bible of Charles the Bald (with Herbert L. Kessler) (1997), Charlemagne’s Courtier: The Complete Einhard (1998), Charlemagne’s Mustache: And Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age (2004), together with his many influential articles. This body of highly distinctive, stimulating, and evocative scholarship has fundamentally transformed Carolingian studies, inspiring younger scholars to enter the field and encouraging established scholars to develop it in new directions.

The essays in this volume individually pay tribute to Dutton in their illumination of diverse aspects of Carolingian intellectual, textual, and visual culture, with its famously idiosyncratic revival of Christian-Roman learning, aesthetics, and ideas. Gathered together, they offer an expression of gratitude for the risks that he took and the generosity that he has always shown.

COURTNEY M. BOOKER is Associate Professor of medieval European history at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He is the author of Past Convictions: The Penance of Louis the Pious and the Decline of the Carolingians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), and co-editor (with Hans Hummer and Dana M. Polanichka) of Visions of Medieval Studies in North America and Europe: Studies on Cultural Identity and Power (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022). He is currently translating Henri-Xavier Arquillière’s influential study L’Augustinisme politique, and writing a book on the chronicle of Nithard and its reception.

ANNE A. LATOWSKY is Associate Professor of French at the University of South Florida, Tampa. She is the author of Emperor of the World: Charlemagne and the Construction of Imperial Authority, 800-1229 (Cornell University Press, 2013, pbk. 2020). She is currently writing a book on the Chronicle of Pseudo-Turpin and its influence on the writing of history.