Pubspeaks

December Pubspeak Report: Charlemagnia Rules

By Mary Lee Kingsley, WIW Member

Too bad for those of you who missed out on the December 13’s  WIW Pubspeak organized by WIW Board member John Curry at La Madeleine’s in Bethesda, Md.

Our dark-paneled room with a welcoming fire and long wooden tables lacked only mounted boars’ heads and a strategically positioned halberd to make it the Compleat Medieval Hunting Lodge. Perfect for hearing about the King of the Franks in the year 800 – nearly 1,207 years to Christmas Day when un-holy Pope Leo III crowned Karl as Holy Roman Emperor. Inspired by the engaging rhetoric of Jeff Sypeck, medievalist professor-turned-author of Becoming Charlemagne: Europe, Baghdad, and the Empires of A.D. 800 (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2006), it only took the merest eye-squinting to imagine the wine carafes as flagons of mead.

We enjoyed ourselves so unmistakably that a distinguished dinner patron, resembling the late Maurice Chevalier (famous for “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” in the 1958 movie Gigi), approached from the hallway, curious if something special was going on. His crestfallen expression upon being told “yes” earned him a twenty-minute loan of the book.

For Sypeck had just concluded his talk on Becoming Charlemagne. A measure of success was how unpardonably long his audience detained him with queries and conversation, all of which he endured with good humor and nary a hint of fatigue despite this being his “last talk of 2007.”

It’s easy to tell why Sypeck rates high with his students at University of Maryland University College. He makes ancient history as juicy as gossip, using au courant references and choice tidbits that render the forgotten memorable. He reels off examples of how the past lives on: a little piece of the ninth century at Washington National Cathedral, for example, courtesy of a long-ago monk named Walahfrid the Squinter, whose seminal book on gardens inspired a portion of the Bishop’s Garden that includes the stone baptismal font. And, speaking of fonts, the ubiquitous Times Roman font? Its lowercase letters originated in Carolingian Minuscule, the elegant script developed at Charlemagne’s behest to replace the “palsied chicken-scratches” of the Merovingian Dynasty. “Not that you’d ever hear that from Microsoft,” says Sypeck drily.

The image of a kindly professor, bespectacled and tweedy, Sypeck refuses to take himself with the seriousness so often associated with academics. He had the HarperCollins editors all laughing, he said, with his description of wanting to write “the sort of book my mom would read and want to finish.” As much as he enjoyed researching and writing a middle-school-level book on Charlemagne for an educational press, Sypeck saw potential in a wider audience where he could be truer to the era’s, er, Byzantine atmosphere and include more of its lurid details (a disclosure guaranteed to send any seventh-grader scrambling for the unexpurgated adult version). “There’s a tremendous interest out there in accessible but not dumbed-down information about obscure periods like the early Middle Ages.”

He got that right. Becoming Charlemagne is headed for a second printing in hardcover (in paperback as of December 18) and already in e-book form (although its 3% sales so far bears watching, given the advent of Amazon’s Kindle and similar electronic reading devices).

Sypeck invested two years just to write and rewrite his proposal and get it accepted. Since publication, he has exhausted himself making Becoming Charlemagne accessible to diverse groups from Massachusetts to Louisiana—museums, libraries, bookstores, even a gourmet tea salon (“now THAT was interesting,” he says, warmly. “I'm simply amazed by all of the places this book has taken me and the terrific people I've met along the way”).

Reviews have been glowing, although Sypeck is not one to let acclaim go to his head despite additional kudos like radio interviews, C-Span appearances, and being named in Washingtonian as one of “40 People Under 40 to Watch.” The time spent earning an M.A. in Medieval and Byzantine Studies at Catholic University (“a two-year boot camp for Latin”) probably saw to that. “The Washington Post didn’t review it,” he says, shrugging off a mantle of praise from the most respected names in the business including Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews.

Notice of Sypeck’s apt turns of phrase illuminating the so-called Dark Ages has spread well beyond the trades. In a recent online posting of “Some New Webstops” [2Blowhards, Nov. 29, 2007], the pseudonymous Michael Blowhard writes, “…Jeff Sypeck is the author of an excellent recent book about Charlemagne. Evocative, informative, and beautifully scaled, it's first-class intellectual entertainment. As a blogger, Jeff loses none of what makes him a remarkable nonfiction book author: he's friendly, perceptive, and humorous; he puts on no airs; yet he's completely unapologetic about the pleasures and benefits of brains and knowledge. That's a nice, and all-too-rare, combo.”

In truth, Sypeck’s blog Quid Plura? (loosely translated, for those of us who missed our shot at Latin bootcamp, as “What remains to be said?”) should carry a warning label for its potentially addictive qualities. Jeff Sypeck is the sort of person banned from Fort Belvoir Trivial Pursuit tournaments for winning too much.

The author’s itinerary for 2008 already includes an April appearance at genealogical Ür-society The Order of the Crown of Charlemagne in the United States of America, as a guest per “the kind invitation of the president-general, who has, via e-mail, been a real friend of this book.”

How do they know if they even want to be related to the legendary figure? “That’s the 1200-year paradox of a ‘Charlemagne for All Seasons’,” says Sypeck. Even the nomenclature is rarely understood. Charlemagne is not a name but a title; Karl or Charles the Great rendered in Latin as Karolus Magnus. From Napoleon crowning himself emperor and Hitler’s emulation of “the first Reich,” to Europeans naming an award for peaceful unification, an unlikely mix of fans over the centuries have evoked the name of Karl to promote ends as diverse as chalk and cheese. But with Sypeck on a crusade (yes, the crusaders too were on the Carolingian bandwagon) to bring insight out of confusion, we have reason to hope for illumination. Quid Plura? Indeed.

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