Professor Allen is currently studying the writings, library, and circle of Lupus of Ferrières. A selection of ca.130 documents survives in an original manuscript (Paris, BnF, lat. 2858) compiled from Lupus’s archives shortly after his death (after June 862). The letters are a key source for the history of books, libraries, and the movement of scholars and learning in the ninth century. He is finishing a fresh edition, commentary, and translation of Lupus’s letters and related documents, relating the letters to events, recovered persons, and extant manuscripts or indirect evidence of them. He is also beginning a new project with Prof. C. Veyrard-Cosme (Paris) to re-edit the letters of Einhard (d. 840) from the seriously damaged mid-ninth-century manuscript that preserves the bulk of them (Paris, BnF, lat. 11379). As with the Lupus manuscript, new imaging techniques allow for the better and fuller recovery of Einhard’s words and meanings.
Recent Publications
- “The letter as mirror and prism: Lupus of Ferrières and Einhard. [With a new critical edition of Einhard’s De adoranda cruce],” for La Lettre-Miroir dans l’Occident latin et vernaculaire du Ve au XVe siècle, ed. C. Veyrard Cosme, D. Demartini, and S. Shimahara (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, in press).
- “Writing to Bishops in the Letter-Book of Lupus of Ferrières,” Epistola I, ed. T. Deswarte, Colloques de la Casa de Velázquez (Madrid, in press).
- “Zeichen der Vernetzung: Klassiker als Kreuzpunkte der vernetzten Gelehrsamkeit.” In Handschriften und Papyri: Wege des Wissens. Exhibition catalogue, edited by D. Mairhofer, B. Palme, and D. Shanzer, 51-60, and 126 (no. 31), 132–34 (no. 37). Vienna, 2017.
- Ed. (with W. Otten), Eriugena and Creation. Turnhout: Brepols, 2014.
- Frechulfi Lexouiensis episcopi Opera omnia. Ed. Michael I. Allen. 2 vols. (1. Prolegomena – Indices; 2. Textus). Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaeualis 169, 169A. Turnhout: Brepols, 2002.