Chapter 3, ‘The Mines and the Court’ is set both in the Ore Mountains and at the court of Dresden under August of Saxony (1553–1586). It offers a broader picture of the vibrant intellectual life in mining cities, illustrated here by the example of Annaberg. Local officials and technicians developed remarkable skills in arithmetic and geometry, on which rulers came to rely to map their realms and tame their capricious landscapes. I focus on the careers of two dynasties of practitioners, respectively subterranean surveyors (the Öders) and reckoning masters (the Rieses). After both patriarchs contributed to the economic rise of the city, their descendants became versatile engineers and courtiers of the Saxon Electors. They collaborated with university professors and instrument-makers, using their skills all over the Electorate and beyond, temporarily turning the court of Dresden into a centre of practical mathematics.

Chapter 4 highlights the ways in which urban Assyrian intellectuals took advantage of Law 251 in their dealings with the state. In their magazines and clubs, they used accepted narratives to argue for greater cultural, political, and administrative rights. This campaign was pursued subtly in the press, but more vocally in popular culture. Assyrian intellectuals and singers also engaged with Arab and Kurdish intellectuals, contributing to a hybridized Iraqi sphere that cut across sectarian and ethnic divides, contributing to Assyrian intellectual discourses that extended far beyond Iraq’s borders.

Flodoard’s The Triumphs of Christ, an epic history of Christianity narrated in almost 20,000 lines of hexameter, is one of the longest and most remarkable poems to have survived from the early Middle Ages. It has been highly neglected by both historians and literary scholars, however, who have tended to look upon it as a simple compilation and versification of earlier Christian historiography and hagiography. The fundamental argument of this chapter is that this characterisation is unjust, and that the Triumphs is in fact a work of considerable innovation that sheds light on education, literary culture and intellectual life in the tenth century. An examination of the structure, content and sources of the poem demonstrates that Flodoard conceived the poem as a continuation of the biblical epics of late antiquity. I then explore the implications of this for why Flodoard composed the work and what it reveals about his notions of history and history-writing. By using the Triumphs as a window onto Flodoard’s intellectual activities and networks, I suggest that the early tenth-century Latin West was not the literary desert it is often portrayed as.