East and West in the Early Middle Ages

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 and supplanters, the Carolingians. Two books from 2014 and 2015, by Yaniv Fox and Constance Bouchard respectively, made the important case that, when stripped of Carolingian denigration, there is much to admire about Merovingian Francia in terms of religion, culture and political balance. Also recently published is the Oxford Handbook of the Merovingian World (2020), edited by Bonnie Effros and Isabel Moreira, with contributions by no fewer than forty-five specialists in the field. This present book sits nicely in this sequence. It is the product of a joint German–Israeli research project, which studied the history of cultural, religious and political engagement across the Mediterranean in the Merovingian period (late fifth to mid-eighth centuries). The volume is made up of twenty-one papers, averaging about sixteen pages each. It is arranged around five themes determined more or less chronologically, thus: ‘Expanding Political Horizons’, ‘Patterns of Intensification: The 580s’, ‘The Pope as a Mediterranean Player’, ‘Religious and Cultural Exchange’ and ‘Rethinking the Late Merovingians’

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