History Frankish Identity And The Framing Of Western Ethnicity 550 850

This pioneering study explores early medieval Frankish identity as a window into the formation of a distinct Western conception of ethnicity. Focusing on the turbulent and varied history of Frankish identity in Merovingian and Carolingian historiography, it offers a new basis for comparing the history of collective and ethnic identity in the Christian West with other contexts, especially the Islamic and Byzantine worlds. The tremendous political success of the Frankish kingdoms provided the medieval West with fundamental political, religious and social structures, including a change from the Roman perspective on ethnicity as the quality of the 'Other' to the Carolingian perception that a variety of Christian peoples were chosen by God to reign over the former Roman provinces. Interpreting identity as an open-ended process, Helmut Reimitz explores the role of Frankish identity in the multiple efforts through which societies tried to find order in the rapidly changing post-Roman world.

Re-evaluates the political integration and Christianization of Saxony following its violent conquest (772-804) by Charlemagne.

An examination of the barbarian laws in Carolingian Europe, contributing to debates concerning written law, kingship and ethnic identities.

Multi-disciplinary approaches shed fresh light on the Frisian people and their changing cultures.

This book examines the political and social effects brought about by the establishment of Columbanian monasteries in seventh-century Gaul.

This book revisits the idea of a 'Feudal Revolution' in Europe between 800 and 1100, examining the causes of profound socio-economic change.

This volume contains work by scholars actively publishing on origin legends across early medieval western Europe, from the fall of Rome to the high Middle Ages. Its thematic structure creates dialogue between texts and regions traditionally studied in isolation.

The inhabitants of early medieval Britain and Ireland shared the knowledge that the region held four peoples and the awareness that they must have originally come from 'elsewhere'. The Origin Legends of Early Medieval Britain and Ireland studies these peoples' origin stories, an important genre that has shaped national identity and collective history from the early medieval period to the present day. These multilingual texts share many common features that repay their study as a genre, but have previously been isolated as four disparate traditions and used to argue for the long roots of current nationalisms. Yet they were not written or read in isolation during the medieval period. Individual narratives were in constant development, written and rewritten to respond to other texts. This book argues that insular origin legends developed together to flesh out the history of the insular region as a whole.