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Moduin, Modoin, or Mautwin (, Modoinus, c.770–840/3) was a Franks churchman and Medieval Latin poet of the Carolingian Renaissance. He was a close friend of Theodulf of Orléans, a contemporary and courtier of the emperors Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, and a member of the Palatine Academy. In signing his own poems he used the pen name Naso in reference to the cognomen of Ovid. From 815 (or earlier) until his death he was the Bishop of Autun.
Moduin may also have been the abbot of Moutiers-Saint-Jean in the Diocese of Langres.
The two books of Moduin's Egloga, about the value of poetry, are traditionally dated to 804–10, before the poem Karolus Magnus et Leo Papa usually attributed to Einhard.See Peter Godman (1985), Latin Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press), 190–97, for the first part of the Egloga ("Poetry and the new age") in both Latin and English. He shows, 196, that lines 87–8 do not imply that Alcuin (†809) was dead when the poem was written. For the full poem, see MGH, Poetae latini, I, 385ff. "Nasonis Ecloga". Stella (2004), after Peter Dronke, supposes that Moduin is the author of the Karolus Magnus et Leo Papa (or De Karolo rege et Leone papa, as Schaller has shown the textual title to be). The Egloga are modelled after the of Virgil and Calpurnius and likewise designed as a vehicle for praising the emperor, the Augustus. The poem is a lively debate between two unnamed men—a young poet, the puer, and an old poet, the senex—that mirrors Virgil's Tityrus and Meliboeus. The identification of the young poet with Moduin himself is purely speculative.Godman, 190.
The first book begins with the youth's unsophisticated attempts to praise his older counterpart and to laud the "rebirth of 'golden Rome'". This last attempt has been often misread as a "manifesto of the Carolingian Renaissance", but in fact the senex ridicules it.Godman, 25 and n45. Cf. also Schaller. It contains, nonetheless, some of the most explicit "renaissance" imagery of the period: Aurea Roma iterum renovata renascitur orbi ("Golden Rome is reborn and restored anew to the world!").G. W. Trompf (1973), "The Concept of the Carolingian Renaissance," Journal of the History of Ideas, 34(1), 21. The Latin and the translation are from Godman, 192–3. Peter Godman writes that with conclusion of the first book of Moduin's Egloga "Carolingian poetry achieves a new self-awareness."
Moduin's other poem, less impressive than the first and less "expertly written",Richard C. Dales (1992), The Intellectual Life of Western Europe in the Middle Ages (BRILL, ), 91. was composed to comfort Theodulf when the latter was in exile; this after Theodulf had written him a letter describing the political dissension then racking the empire in terms of a bird allegory borrowed from his earlier poetry.Godman, 15. Moduin eventually advises Theodulf to throw himself on "Caesar's" (i.e. Charlemagne's) mercy.
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