ABSTRACT
The Carolingian period saw an attempt to create an overall uniformity of thinking, writing and experience of life in an overwhelming set of ways and through an extended territory, stretching from Frisia to Catalunia and Italy, and from the Atlantic Ocean to Istria. This task was particularly hard: since the seventh century each of these regions had developed independent customs, written laws and cultural traditions. This chapter focuses on the acts produced by episcopal assemblies, which are by far the richest contemporary source for details about procedures of debate and decision-making. It examines some particularly anxious moments, when discord at many levels and on many topics threatened to burst into open revolt and opposition. Unanimity was an object and a tool of competition or conflict, as were the councils themselves. Shifting uses of the vocabulary of unanimity and an increasingly decisive role of conciliar activity were two elements around which bishops elaborated their new group identity in the 820s.
