All month long we will be featuring speaker’s abstracts for the upcoming Equine History Conference: Why Equine History Matters.
The Symbolic Equine in the Early Medieval Gallic-Germanic Borderland
Julia F. Crisler, UC Santa Barbara
In the late-seventh century, Dado, bishop of Rouen, penned a biography of his close friend, the recently deceased Bishop Eligius of Noyon-Tournai. This vita aided in propelling Eligius to sainthood, known as Éloi in France and Flanders, where he became inextricably linked with several miracles involving horses. Roughly a century-and-a-half before Eligius performed these equine-centric miracles, the pagan Childeric I was buried, surrounded by three pits containing the bodies of twenty-one horses in the same site where Eligius would later be revered. Meanwhile, the Late Roman Empire was importing a great deal of their stock horses from this region of Northern France. This paper explores this turbulent migration period and the role that horses played in the
formation of medieval identities, particularly in the border region between Germania and Gaul. The study will utilize not only written sources but will make extensive use of archaeology and art history to elucidate the importance of the horse and its symbolism to Romans, Gauls, Geramanics, and Steppe immigrants, as well as the many hybrid cultures that remained rooted in an equestrian base in Early Medieval/Late Antique Northern Gaul.