ABSTRACT
Notker the Stammerer has always had a bad press. His Life of Charlemagne is one of the most intriguing but also most troubling ninth-century treatises on the position of the Carolingian kings.1 Hundreds of budding medievalists first encounter Notker in the Penguin translation by Lewis Thorpe, where his work is paired with Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne. (I should know – I use this handy paperback every time I teach early medieval history.)2 Notker, thus coupled with Einhard, always suffers in comparison: he was born too late even to have met Charlemagne, unlike Einhard, who knew his emperor intimately, and Notker’s stories of ripe cheeses and painted mice too easily suggest a credulous monk naively repeating fabulous tales. Indeed, the translator Lewis Thorpe is openly dismissive of Notker, calling his work “an anthology of monkish anecdotes,” based on “many twisted and ill-digested borrowings” from earlier writers.3
