clastic cause met much opposition, but also some support, in the West. The Libri Carolini against images, written at the Emperor's order (whether or no Alcuin had a hand in them is not settled), are the work of a well-read man who draws interesting illustrations from pagan mythology and contemporary works of art. Claudius, Bishop of Turin, was also a hot Iconoclast in deed and in word. We have only extracts from the treatise he wrote, but we have replies to it from an Irishman, Dungal, and from Jonas of Orleans. Dungal, who quotes the Christian poets very largely, especially Paulinus of Nola, prefixes to his books some fragments from Claudius, and says that the whole work was one-third as long again as the Psalter: he seems to think that this aggravates the offence.
The middle of the ninth century saw two more great disputes. One is that on Predestination, in which the monk Gottschalk, who took the most rigid view, was forcibly silenced, scourged, and imprisoned by Hincmar of Rheims, and written against by John the Scot and Paschasius Radbert of Corbie, to name only two of a large group. Radbert was a man of very wide reading and had one of the best libraries of the time at his command. He is one of the very few who quote Irenaeus Against Heresies. The other dispute concerned the Eucharist. Radbert is here again to the fore, in defence of the view which, developed, is the faith of Rome. Ratramn, also of Corbie, wrote in a strain which made the Reformers of the sixteenth century claim him as an early champion on their side.
We have other interesting matter from Ratramn's pen; a treatise against the errors of the Greeks, and a letter to one Rimbert, who had inquired what was the proper view to take of the race of Cynocephali, tribes of dog-headed men believed to inhabit parts of Africa. St Christopher, it is not generally realised, was of this race, and the conversion of one of them is also related in the eastern Acts of SS. Andrew and Bartholomew. Ratramn, who does not cite these examples, answers Rimbert with good sense. If what is reported of the Cynocephali is borne out by facts, they must be looked upon as reasonable and redeemable beings.
The controversy with the Greeks is the fifth and last of these to be mentioned here. Besides Ratramn's book, there is an important contribution to it by Aeneas of Paris.
To Hagiography the Carolingian Renaissance gave an immense stimulus. The founding of a multitude of abbeys and the building of great churches and the stocking of them with relics of ancient martyrs, begged, bought or stolen from Rome, were operative causes. Einhard's story of the translation of SS. Marcellinus and Peter is one classic to which relic-hunting gave birth, Rudolf of Fulda's about St Alexander is another, this last because passages from the Germania of Tacitus are embodied in it. There was, besides, the natural wish to possess a readable life of many a patron saint whose doings had been forgotten or else were only chronicled in barbarous Latin of the seventh century. Lives
