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The studies collected here cover a period of about 33 years, from 1986 to 2019, and represent a sustained effort to understand the institutions of the Merovingian kingdom and its history. There has long been a predisposition to cast the Merovingian period in the dark colours of barbarism or to treat it with reference to personal relationships and archaic institutions. The present volume, instead, recognizes the Merovingian world not as an archaic, primitive intrusion on the Mediterranean civilization of the Roman Empire but simply as a participant in the wider commonwealth that existed before and remained after the dissolution of the western imperial system; in so doing, it serves to refute ...
Including such remarkable accounts as Attila the Hun's meeting with the Pope, Queen Balthild's life, and Gregory of Tours' vivid descriptions of what happens when daily life is enmeshed with politics, From Roman to Merovingian Gaul documents events that are both remarkable in themselves and that demonstrate what made this era of history distinct.
Gregory, bishop of Tours (573-594), was among the most prolific writers of his age and uniquely managed to cover the genres of history, hagiography, and ecclesiastical instruction. He not only wrote about events (of the secular, spiritual, and even natural variety) but about himself as an actor and witness. Though his work (especially the Histories) has been recycled and studied for centuries, our grasp of an even basic understanding of it, never mind Gregory’s significance in the history of the late antique West, has hardly yet attained a definitive perspective. A Companion to Gregory of Tours brings together fourteen scholars who provide an expert guide to interpreting his works, his period, and his legacy in religious and historical studies. Contributors are: Pascale Bourgain, Roger Collins, John J. Contreni, Stefan Esders, Martin Heinzelmann, Yitzhak Hen, John K. Kitchen, Simon Loseby, Alexander Callander Murray, Patrick Périn, Joachim Pizarro, Helmut Reimitz, Michael Roberts, Richard Shaw.
This collection of essays deals with a broad range of issues within the study, past and present, of the early Middle Ages. Subjects include war, power, ethnicity, gender, Charlemagne and Carolingian history. The book is largely concerned with reading the sources, both medieval and modern, and interpreting their narrators.
Georgius Florentius Gregorius, better known to posterity as Gregory, Bishop of Tours, was born about 538 to a highly distinguished Gallo-Roman family in Clermont in the region of Auvergne. Best known for his 10-book Histories (often called the History of the Franks), Gregory left us detailed accounts of his own times as well as those of the early Merovingian kings, known as the "long-haired kings," who united the Franks and took control of most of Gaul in the late fifth and early sixth century. Although he is one of the most important historians of pre-modern times, the complex, apparently disconnected, elements of Gregory's work are often difficult for today's readers to understand. This se...
"The book explores the place of the Merovingian kingdoms in Gaul within a broader Mediterranean context. Their politics and culture have mostly been interpreted in terms of a local phenomenon, but as this book shows, the Merovingian kingdoms had complicated and multi-layered political, religious, and socio-cultural relations with their Mediterranean counterparts, from Visigothic Spain in the West to the Byzantine Empire in the East. The papers provide new insights into the history of the Merovingian kingdoms in their late-antique and early-medieval Mediterranean context, examining subjects from the formation of identity to the shape and rules of diplomatic relations, social, legal, and relig...
Now available in paperback, 'Lady with a Mead Cup' is a broad-ranging, innovative, and strikingly original study of the early medieval barbarian cup-offering ritual and its social, institutional, and religious significance. Medievalists are familiar with the image of a queen offering a drink to a king or chieftain and to his retainers, the Wealhtheow scene in Beowulf being perhaps the most famous instance. Drawing on archaeology, anthropology, and philology, as well as medieval history, Professor Enright has produced the first work in English on the warband and on the significance of barbarian drinking rituals.
Great Christian Jurists and Legal Collections in the First Millennium is a systematic collection of essays describing how Christian leaders and scholars of the first millennium in the West contributed to law and jurisprudence and used written norms and corrective practices to maintain social order and to guide people from this life into the next. With chapters on topics such as Roman and post-Roman law, church councils, the papacy, and the relationship between royal and ecclesiastical authority, as well as on individual authors such as Lactantius, Ambrosiaster, Augustine, Leo I, Gelasius I, and Gregory the Great, this book invites a more holistic and realistic appreciation of early-medieval contributions to the history of law and jurisprudence for entry-level students and scholars alike. Great Christian Jurists and Legal Collections in the First Millennium provides a fresh look, from a new perspective, enabling readers to see these familiar authors in a fresh light.
Ethnicity has been central to medieval studies since the Goths, Franks, Alamanni and other barbarian settlers of the Roman empire were first seen as part of Germanic antiquity. Today, two paradigms dominate interpretation of barbarian Europe. In history, theories of how tribes formed ('ethnogenesis') assert the continuity of Germanic identities from prehistory through the Middle Ages, and see cultural rather than biological factors as the means of preserving these identities. In archaeology, the 'culture history' approach has long claimed to be able to trace movements of peoples not attested in the historical record, by identifying ethnically-specific material goods. The papers in this volume challenge the concepts and methodologies of these two models. The authors explore new ways to understand barbarians in the early Middle Ages, and to analyse the images of the period constructed by modern scholarship. Two responses, one by a leading exponent of the 'ethnogenesis' approach, the other by a leading critic, continue this important debate.
This is the first book to investigate how people in the early middle ages used the past: to legitimate the present, to understand current events, and as a source of identity. Each essay examines the mechanisms by which ideas about the past were - sometimes - subtly reshaped for present purposes.