The life of an aristocratic Carolingian man involved an array of behaviors and duties associated with his gender and rank: an education in arms and letters; training in horsemanship, soldiery, and hunting; betrothal, marriage, and the virile production of heirs; and the masterful command of a prominent household. In Be a Perfect Man, Andrew J. Romig argues that Carolingian masculinity was constituted just as centrally by the performance of caritas, defined by the early medieval scholar Alcuin of York as a complete and all-inclusive love for God and for fellow human beings, flowing from the whole heart, mind, and soul. The authority of the Carolingian man depended not only on his skills in warfare and landholding but also on his performances of empathy, devotion, and asceticism.

“[I]ntelligent, well written, and provocative . . . In the Carolingian era, Romig argues in this stimulating new study, the discourse surrounding perfect masculinity was concerned less with a set of traits and behaviours than it was with ‘a profound cultural valuation of love, emotional sensitivity, and care for others’ . . . The conclusion artfully draws together the analytical strands of the study and suggests some of its implications for the rest of the Middle Ages and beyond.”—Early Medieval Europe

“[T]his book is a tremendous contribution to how we think about early medieval Europe. It shows how words and ideas move history, how important it is to always remember that the periods we study were populated by real live human beings who cared about things, and how important it is to forsake scholarly pieties and return ad fontes in order to listen to what they really were trying to say to their own time.”—The Medieval Review