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There has long been a predisposition to cast the Merovingian period in dark colours of barbarism, or (a variant thereof) to characterize it through personal relation­ships and archaic institutions. The articles collected in this volume, instead, tend to recognize 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 remained after the dissolution of the western imperial system. In the process of arguing particular features of Merovingian institutional history, they serve to refute, for a variety of reasons, the scholarly tendency to primitivize Merovingian governance, its underlying institutions, and the broader culture upon which these rested.

The articles and chapters reprinted 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. The preparation of them here has some­times been a cause of reflection on the course of the field over this period, and of modest remorse, for the at times mordant tone prompted by argument and debate, though more often for the occasional sequential repetition that the serial produc­tion of scholarship engenders. It has also evoked gratitude for the opportunity that university teaching has provided me to pursue a little understood subject over such an extended time and even brought back remembrance of the pleasure and satisfaction that exploring the age through its sources so often provided.