ABSTRACT
Among the most quintessentially Carolingian sources are capitularies, texts containing legal materials divided into chapters and usually issued by rulers and bishops. Ecclesiastical leaders became partners in endeavoring to create and sustain a Christian empire because they benefitted from Carolingian patronage and because they saw in such an undertaking a means to carry out their pastoral duties. Children and youth appear relatively frequently in the corpus of Carolingian capitularies, but few scholars have studied these instances and no one has examined this information on childhood in a comprehensive manner. A thorough analysis of all instances of children and youth in royal and episcopal capitularies would require a far longer work than this short piece. This chapter provides some representative examples. Children composed a part of the Carolingian reforms because they were a means to achieve those goals but also because they were "good to talk with".
