Talk:Pepin the Short/Old talk

There is only one dubious source for Boniface's having crowned Pippin, AFAIK. The rest of the rewrites were to reduce the panegyric tone and install some accuracy in light of current scholarship. And these days, he's more often Pippin in English. JHK

Really? I have never heard this guy called anything other than Pepin. user:Montrealais

Sorry -- I should have said, "These days." McKittrick, Bachrach, Warren Brown, Timothy Reuter, Janet Nelson, and Patrick Geary (I'm pretty sure) all use Pippin. I think it is a generational thing, but I think that the majority of English-speaking Carolingianists of the past 20 years or so tend to use Pippin (unless their advisors were Francophiles). JHK

Must take exception, even to a scholar. Pepin was born in Belgium, raised in Paris and lived and died in there (Saint Denis.) Given birth, lifelong residence, etc. he is MOST often referred to as Pepin, namely by Marshall B. Davidson, senior Editor of Horizon Magazine, lifelong student of FRENCH history, and author of The Horizon Concise History of France. I can provide numerous other QUALIFIED references. An attempt to rewrite France merely as an offshoot of Germanic rulers is a gross distortion of history. By posting him as Pippin will leave most non-intellects lost while others will believe they have stumbled onto a cartoon. I shall return. ... DW

Uh, I am certainly no expert in these matters, but I didn't think "France" (as we use the word today) even existed in the 8th century. Also, I am confused by DW's opposing "France" to "Germanic," since my understanding was that that territory between the Pyrrenes (however it is spelled) and the Rhine used to be called "Gaul," and it changed to "France" precisely to express its connection to Frankish rulers? Slrubenstein

Thanks, SLR -- you are partially correct. France comes from Francia -- the kingdom of the Franks. so it is, in a roundabout way, named after a Germanic people, many of whom intermixed with the existing Gallo-Romans, as well as local people in many other areas. The thing is, Francia actually stretched to the Danube. And the name got passed down in what is now Germany in the name Franconia. Germany is called Germany pretty much because Conrad, Henry the Fowler, and Otto of Saxony (who wasn't a Saxon per se, but probably a Frank) helped to create the title King of the Germans, as a catch-all that would impose an artificial hierarchy over all the other petty local rulers left in the vacuum of Louis the Child's death. But I digress

DW -- Sorry, but I stand by what I say. The trend in English-language scholarship is towards using the Pippin form. Thhis does not mean that no one uses Pepin -- Suzanne Wemple does, for one. But again, much of that has to do with advisors and generation.

as for Marshall Davidson (I thought it was "E", not "B"), what kind of French historian is he? What is his specialty? It is most likely not Carolingian -- there aren't that many of us, and normally journals like American Heritage (the company that puts out the Horizon series, want generalists, not specialists. What they offer is very bland, mainstream, middle of the road history. It seldom reflects recent scholarship, although it often puts out articles on exciting new discoveries. It's kind of like the "History Channel" (are you familiar with that?) of books -- a good introduction, but hardly rigorous.

and whether or not you like it, the Franks were Germanic. NOT German. What you see as an attempt to somehow rob France of her history is bogus. The fact is that much of this was long consigned to "the Dark Ages", and as such was not given much attention, except in the context of the ideas of nationalism that came to their height between the late 18th and late 19th centuries. The fact that St Denis happened to become the resting place of the kings of France has much more to do with the fact that the Capetians were mostly very astute politicians than it does with St Denis being "French". At any rate, many historians are now attempting to give many Germanic peoples back their own history in their own context. Perhaps it does weaken "National" history, but it certainly helps to demonstrate that much of that is artificially constructed and gets in the way of a more human history. JHK

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We have an ambiguous modifier here:

They had two sons and one daughter who survived to adulthood.

Does this mean that they had two sons who died in childhood and a daughter who survived to adulthood, or that of their children, two sons and a daughter survived to adulthood? - user:Montrealais

Good catch -- the latter -- I'll fix it.

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Well, there's a Marshall B. Davidson who's written 26 books available on Amazon.com (some of which are duplications). all but 2 of those books are about AMERICAN history. 1 of those is "The Horizon Concise History of France", which is NOT what I'd consider a scholarly resource worth mining for Wikipedia. The other, by the way, crosses into my teaching are - a "History of Art from 25,000 B.C. to the Present." This is not a scholar working in the field of early medieval French history, DW.

MichaelTinkler

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The page says "Pippin III (714 - 768) more often known as Pippin the Short" -- if we're using the most common English name for our articles, why is this at Pippin III and not Pippin the Short? -- Sam

--- For me I'd really like to know how short he was, and how that compared with average at the time

He is more commonly called "Pepin" than "Pippin." I'm moving to Pepin the Short. john k 02:55, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

And, all respect to JHK way back when, but whatever the trend in cutting edge scholarship, it certainly hasn't made it to books for wider audiences to call him "Pippin." In terms of reference works, Encarta and Columbia use "Pepin," while Britannica is inconsistent - it uses "Pippin" for the biographical article, but "Pepin" for the section in the History of France article. At any rate, Britannica is often far ahead of common practice in using more "historically accurate" forms. john k 03:14, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)