East and West in the Early Middle Ages: The Merovingian Kingdoms in Mediterranean Perspective, ed. Stefan Esders, Yaniv Fox, Yitzhak Hen and Laury Sarti
Paul Fouracre
This last decade has been a good one for the Merovingians, whose rehabilitation now seems complete after twelve hundred and fifty years of being compared unfavourably with their successors supplanters, Carolingians. Two books from 2014 2015, by Yaniv Fox Constance Bouchard respectively, made important case that, when stripped Carolingian denigration, there is much to admire about Merovingian Francia in terms religion, culture political balance. Also recently published Oxford Handbook World (2020), edited Bonnie Effros Isabel Moreira, contributions no fewer than forty-five specialists field. present book sits nicely this sequence. It product joint German–Israeli research project, which studied history cultural, religious engagement across Mediterranean period (late fifth mid-eighth centuries). The volume up twenty-one papers, averaging sixteen pages each. arranged around five themes determined more or less chronologically, thus: ‘Expanding Political Horizons’, ‘Patterns Intensification: 580s’, ‘The Pope as Player’, ‘Religious Cultural Exchange’ ‘Rethinking Late Merovingians’.
The English Historical Review