In this volume, Paul Fouracre and Richard Gerberding provide a collection of narrative sources in English translation for a specific and clearly defined period in the history of the early medieval West, namely that period between the death of the Merovingian King Dagobert I and the advent of the Carolingian mayor Charles Martel. The collection, which is aimed at both scholars and students, consists primarily of saints' lives: the Lives of Balthild and Audoin, the Deeds of Aunemund, the Passions of Leudegar and Praejectus, and the Life of Gertrude -- bracketed at the beginning and at the end by historiography -- excerpts from the Book of the History of the Franks and from the Earlier Annals of Metz.
This having been said, it is important to note that this is a source collection with a mission. Fouracre and Gerberding make it clear that they intend the collection to help rescue the period between 640 and 720 from its reputation as one of transitional chaos, leading from the destruction of effective Merovingian rule by self-centered local and regional aristocrats to the Carolingian-led restoration of centralized order (p. ix). In other words, rather than trying to demonstrate how a series of minority Merovingians led to the infamous "do-nothing kings" -- a narrative that is largely the creation of Carolingian ex post facto revisionism -- they use late Merovingian sources to demonstrate the factors that "made child kingship possible here and nowhere else in Europe" (p. 56). The focus of the sources and the way the translators present them is therefore overtly political, not simply in the sense of using them to show how a narrative of political events for the period can be reconstructed, but rather to understand how the late Merovingian world functioned politically on its own terms, as a steady-state political society worth studying in its own right.
In an extensive introduction, Fouracre and Gerberding set the stage by placing late Merovingian history in an interpretative framework that challenges the idea of a natural opposition of interest between the center and the periphery. The late Merovingian political "system" (a word they use frequently) was based instead, they suggest, on cooperation and consensus between and among kings and aristocrats. The members of the Frankish aristocracy processed their competition for political power through factional conflict, with the various factions grouped around individual Merovingians. Fouracre and Gerberding argue that the politically active groups in Merovingian society recognized and understood this system as the political order that would best achieve the ideals of internal stability and peace abroad. In their own words, "a properly functioning system had a Merovingian on the throne reigning in concert with the great of the realm" (p. 80), "the great" meaning the leaders of the aristocratic faction on the "in" at a given time at a given Merovingian court.
The historian can see this system, according to Fouracre and Gerberding, in a visibly intense preoccupation in the Merovingian sources with counsel and consensus, with factional conflict, and with the control of sanctity that represented a crucial weapon in the struggle for political power. The hagiographic works that they have selected, they suggest, show these preoccupations most clearly. All of the saints whose lives appear translated in this volume played major, even decisive roles in the narrative of late Merovingian political history. Their lives display the characteristic ways that sanctity interacted with the political assumptions, imperatives, and tactics of the Frankish elite, as well as the attempts by individual hagiographers to justify the actions of their subjects within the context of factional conflict by providing evidence of divine favor (pp. 26-28).
In order to provide a historiographical framework for the hagiography, Fouracre and Gerberding begin the collection with the last eleven chapters from the Book of the History of the Franks. This text presents an image of vigorous barbarian kingship only beginning to be tempered by Christian ethics. This contrasts markedly with the image of rulership presented by the final selection, Part I of the Earlier Annals of Metz, from the early ninth century. Fouracre and Gerberding have included this bit of Carolingian historiography in order to show how radically different the Carolingian image of Christian rulership was from that presented by the Merovingian sources, and to what degree the traditional view of the late Merovingian period as one of chaos and weak kingship depends on Carolingian efforts to control the past (see inter alia p.17 and pp.347-348).
The extensive introductory and explanatory material with which Fouracre and Gerberding surround their translations is a scholarly tour de force. The introduction, seventy-eight pages long, provides a readable and comprehensive introduction to the entire field of early medieval history in general and Merovingian studies in particular. Fouracre and Gerberding not only discuss the hagiography and other narrative texts forming the basis of the collection (with a sane treatment of the impact of postmodernism on the study of hagiography, pp. 39- 41); they also treat the non-narrative evidence for the period, such as charters and archeology, and provide an extended essay on Merovingian Latin. The extensive footnotes offer the student a gateway to the essential specialized literature in English, French and German. A teacher could do far worse than introduce undergraduates or graduate students to Merovingian history through this introduction. In addition, Fouracre and Gerberding have prefaced each translated text with an extended commentary that is generally much longer than the text itself. These commentaries summarize all of the available information about the texts and their subjects from all available sources, as well as the translators' position on questions of manuscript tradition and dating. The introduction and individual commentaries together, designed as they are to support the editors' interpretation of late Merovingian political history, make it clear that the collection is designed not only as a tool for students but also as part of the ongoing scholarly debate about the period.
The translations themselves are written in a clear and readable English. Fouracre and Gerberding indicate where they have departed from a literal translation, or what position they have taken in ambiguous passages, in an extensive critical apparatus. Together with the surrounding commentary, the texts provide generally persuasive support for the editors' theses as outlined above. The arguments advanced by the volume turn late Merovingian political society from a chaotic anomaly into a society that shares a great deal in common with those that followed it (cf., for example, the arguments for aristocratic consensus advanced by Janet Nelson in her recent biography of Charles the Bald, or Karl Leyser's picture in his Rule and Conflict of aristocratic competition in the tenth century East Frankish kingdom grouping itself around individual Ottonians).
If there are any weaknesses in the collection, they are first that Fouracre and Gerberding occasionally apply their model of the "proper" political order in an overly systematic fashion. For example, in their description of the Grimoald affair of the 650's, in which the Neustrians deposed and executed the Austrasian mayor Grimoald for putting his own non-Merovingian son on the Austrasian throne, Fouracre and Gerberding cast the Neustrian response as a reflection of Neustrian outrage at Grimoald's violation of the proper order (p. 81). Another, perhaps more cynical, interpretation would see the incident as less reflective of the Neustrian aristocracy's loyalty to the center and more as an expression of competition between equally ambitious aristocratic parties, with the Neustrian party exploiting the propaganda value of an appeal to Merovingian legitimacy. Second, in the individual commentaries Fouracre and Gerberding so thoroughly cast and digest the texts as sources for understanding the "system" underlying late Merovingian political life that the interpretation tends to determine in advance how a student would read and understand the text. An instructor might want to assign the texts without commentary at first, in order to give students a chance to bring unfettered imagination to their reading.
These points notwithstanding, this source collection makes the debates over late Merovingian political history and some of the important sources driving them accessible to a wide audience. It will undoubtedly be seized upon by instructors (and has been by this one) as a teaching tool for courses on the early Middle Ages or seminars on the Merovingian period, and by scholars seeking concentrated access to the most recent scholarship.