First Among Abbots: The Career of Abbo of Fleury

by Elizabeth Dachowski

Abbo of Fleury was a prominent churchman of late tenth-century France - abbot of a major monastery, leader in the revival of learning in France and England, and the subject of a serious work of hagiography. This book presents a picture of this multifaceted man with an emphasis on his political alliances.

299 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Elizabeth Dachowski was born in Illinois, but grew up in New Orleans, where she attended public schools. She graduated from Indiana University with a BA in Geography and from the University of Minnesota with an MA and PhD in Medieval History. Since then she has taught world history, western civilization, ancient history, medieval history, and early modern history at a number of institutions of higher education. She has been at Tennessee State University in Nashville since 1999, where she is a tenured Associate Professor of History.

Elizabeth Dachowski's book First Among Abbots, the Career of Abbo of Fleury grew out of her dissertation research but had its roots in her earlier interests. She read voraciously as a child and early developed an interest in medieval history and literature. Among modern authors she admired the work of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and was impressed with their accomplishments as scholars not just their imaginative writing. She is fortunate to have received a solid grounding in both French and Latin while in high school; both of these languages made subsequent research much easier.

Research on First among Abbots, the Career of Abbo of Fleury took the author to France and England, where she made use of medieval manuscripts in Orleans, Paris, Montpellier, Dijon, and London. She also visited the abbey of Fleury, where Abbo spent most of his career, and the village of La Reole, where he met his death. Few traces of Abbo's time remain but the lay of the land has not changed much in the past thousand years.