Cemeteries And Society In Merovingian Gaul

Bundeling van de zeven belangrijkste essays over de sociale interpretatie van de Merovingische begraafplaatsen-archeologie.

The Merovingian era is one of the best studied yet least well known periods of European history. From the fifth to the eighth centuries, the inhabitants of Gaul (what now comprises France, southern Belgium, Luxembourg, Rhineland Germany, and part of modern Switzerland), a mix of Gallo-Roman inhabitants and Germanic arrivals under the political control of the Merovingian dynasty, sought to preserve, use, and reimagine the political, cultural, and religious power of ancient Rome while simultaneously forging the beginnings of what would become medieval European culture. The forty-six essays included in this volume highlight why the Merovingian era is at the heart of historical debates about what happened to Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. The essays demonstrate that the inhabitants of the Merovingian kingdoms in these centuries created a culture that was the product of these traditions and achieved a balance between the world they inherited and the imaginative solutions they bequeathed to Europe. The Handbook highlights new perspectives and scientific approaches that shape our changing view of this extraordinary era by showing that Merovingian Gaul was situated at the crossroads of Europe, connecting the Mediterranean and the British Isles with the Byzantine empire, and it benefited from the global reach of the late Roman Empire. It tells the story of the Merovingian world through archaeology, bio-archaeology, architecture, hagiographic literature, history, liturgy, visionary literature and eschatology, patristics, numismatics, and material culture.

Following the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire, local Christian leaders were confronted with the problem of how to conceptualize and administer their regional churches. As Gregory Halfond shows, the bishops of post-Roman Gaul oversaw a transformation in the relationship between church and state. He shows that by constituting themselves as a corporate body, the Gallic episcopate was able to wield significant political influence on local, regional, and kingdom-wide scales. Gallo-Frankish bishops were conscious of their corporate membership in an exclusive order, the rights and responsibilities of which were consistently being redefined and subsequently expressed through liturgy, dress, physical space, preaching, and association with cults of sanctity. But as Halfond demonstrates, individual bishops, motivated by the promise of royal patronage to provide various forms of service to the court, often struggled, sometimes unsuccessfully, to balance their competing loyalties. However, even the resulting conflicts between individual bishops did not, he shows, fundamentally undermine the Gallo-Frankish episcopate's corporate identity or integrity. Ultimately, Halfond provides a far more subtle and sophisticated understanding of church-state relations across the early medieval period.

Clothing, jewelry, animal remains, ceramics, coins, and weaponry are among the artifacts that have been discovered in graves in Gaul dating from the fifth to eighth century. Those who have unearthed them, from the middle ages to the present, have speculated widely on their meaning. This authoritative book makes a major contribution to the study of death and burial in late antique and early medieval society with its long overdue systematic discussion of this mortuary evidence. Tracing the history of Merovingian archaeology within its cultural and intellectual context for the first time, Effros exposes biases and prejudices that have colored previous interpretations of these burial sites and assesses what contemporary archaeology can tell us about the Frankish kingdoms. Working at the intersection of history and archaeology, and drawing from anthropology and art history, Effros emphasizes in particular the effects of historical events and intellectual movements on French and German antiquarian and archaeological studies of these grave goods. Her discussion traces the evolution of concepts of nationhood, race, and culture and shows how these concepts helped shape an understanding of the past. Effros then turns to contemporary multidisciplinary methodologies and finds that we are still limited by the types of information that can be readily gleaned from physical and written sources of Merovingian graves. For example, since material evidence found in the graves of elite families and particularly elite men is more plentiful and noteworthy, mortuary goods do not speak as directly to the conditions in which women and the poor lived. The clarity and sophistication with which Effros discusses the methods and results of European archaeology is a compelling demonstration of the impact of nationalist ideologies on a single discipline and of the struggle toward the more pluralistic vision that has developed in the post-war years.

The Merovingian centuries were a foundational period in the historical consciousness of western Europe, and their stories were shaped through a process of historiographical adaptation across a millennium. This expert commentary is for scholars interested in early medieval history and historiography.

Roman identity is one of the most interesting cases of social identity because in the course of time, it could mean so many different things: for instance, Greek-speaking subjects of the Byzantine empire, inhabitants of the city of Rome, autonomous civic or regional groups, Latin speakers under ‘barbarian’ rule in the West or, increasingly, representatives of the Church of Rome. Eventually, the Christian dimension of Roman identity gained ground. The shifting concepts of Romanness represent a methodological challenge for studies of ethnicity because, depending on its uses, Roman identity may be regarded as ‘ethnic’ in a broad sense, but under most criteria, it is not. Romanness is indeed a test case how an established and prestigious social identity can acquire many different shades of meaning, which we would class as civic, political, imperial, ethnic, cultural, legal, religious, regional or as status groups. This book offers comprehensive overviews of the meaning of Romanness in most (former) Roman provinces, complemented by a number of comparative and thematic studies. A similarly wide-ranging overview has not been available so far.

Despite a growing literature on identity theory in the last two decades, much of its current use in archaeology is still driven toward locating and dating static categories such as ‘Phoenician’, ‘Christian’ or ‘native’. Previous studies have highlighted the various problems and challenges presented by identity, with the overall effect of deconstructing it to insignificance. As the humanities and social sciences turn to material culture, archaeology provides a unique perspective on the interaction between people and things over the long term. This volume argues that identity is worth studying not despite its slippery nature, but because of it. Identity can be seen as an emergent property of living in a material world, an ongoing process of becoming which archaeologists are particularly well suited to study. The geographic and temporal scale of the papers included is purposefully broad to demonstrate the variety of ways in which archaeology is redefining identity. Research areas span from the Great Lakes to the Mediterranean, with case studies from the Mesolithic to the contemporary world by emerging voices in the field. The volume contains a critical review of theories of identity by the editors, as well as a response and afterward by A. Bernard Knapp.

This volume deals with the neglected problem of the Olsztyn Group. The prosperity and long-distance contact revealed by this cemetery shows that the West Baltic tribes had considerable influence in early medieval Europe, much more than scholars had been ready to admit until now.