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Description of  The Merovingians: Kingship, Institutions, Law, and History (Variorum Collected Studies)

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 the scholarly tendency to primitivize Merovingian governance, its underlying institutions, and the broader culture upon which these rested. Read more