Patrick J. Geary is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of "Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World" (Oxford); "Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages; Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium" (Princeton); and "The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe" (Princeton).