This volume investigates the ways in which people in the early Middle Ages used the past: to legitimate the present, to understand current events, and as a source of identity. Each essay examines the mechanisms by which ideas about the past were subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) reshaped for present purposes. As well as written histories, also discussed are saints' lives, law codes, buildings, Biblical commentary, monastic foundations, canon law and oral traditions. This is the first book to investigate systematically this important topic.

This volume investigates the ways in which people in the early Middle Ages used the past: to legitimate the present, to understand current events, and as a source of identity. Each essay examines the mechanisms by which ideas about the past were subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) reshaped for present purposes. As well as written histories, also discussed are saints' lives, law codes, buildings, Biblical commentary, monastic foundations, canon law and oral traditions. This is the first book to investigate systematically this important topic.

This study investigates the place of the royal court and the operation of patronage in several European kingdoms in the early Middle Ages. It seeks to identify the roots of later medieval developments, and especially of the Carolingian Renaissance, in the centuries immediately succeeding the period of Roman rule.

A major re-evaluation of one of the most important liturgical manuscripts of late Merovingian Francia.

Bringing together the scholarship of historians, archaeologists, art historians, and manuscript researchers, this volume analyses written accounts, archaeological findings and artefacts to provide new perspectives on the Merovingian world's connections with the Mediterranean, North Africa, and Spain.