Q: How hard was it to work out a chronology of Merovingian history? A: Very hard. I have pointed out before that the shift from Merovingian to Carolingian historical writing involved a significant change. Carolingian histories frequently used AD-dates for orientation, even recording the year in some chronicles when no events were recorded. Merovingian histories, by contrast, frequently didn’t use much more universal than what the year of the reigning king was and more frequently skipped years. There are a good number of Carolingian copies and appropriations of Merovingian histories. In very fe ..read more

The Pactus legis Salicae is often considered important for understanding the Merovingian world. Some of its earliest versions include the claim that it was originally promulgated by “the first king of the Franks” – usually interpreted as Clovis – and therefore it is bound up with traditions about the origins of the Frankish kingdoms. It was long thought to represent a distinctive and old “Germanic” legal tradition that developed separately from Roman models. At one point, early in the nineteenth century, it was intended to be edited and published as an early key text for the Monumenta Germania ..read more

What makes something in the past important? In 541, a great pandemic began. The deadly bacterium Y. pestis found its way to Pelusium on the eastern side of the Nile delta. It spread swiftly, devastating the Roman imperial capital of Constantinople within the year. Another year and it had reached Britain and Gaul. Although each outbreak petered out, plague returned again and again for over a century. Many hundreds of thousands died. How to assess the pandemic is becoming one of the big historical fights of recent years. Scientific evidence shows conclusively that it was Y. pestis and we know th ..read more

In 1893 the great Merovingianist Bruno Krusch published a little-noticed Gesundheitskalendar “of the Merovingian period.”[1] He had found it in the library in Laon in a Carolingian manuscript most likely from the city (MS 426 bis = Bischoff, Katalog, no. 2117). If it is “Merovingian,” that would be interesting. There isn’t a whole lot known about healthcare in Gaul in the period. The most famous Merovingian medical text – and for some people the only one really – is a work by the legate Anthimus called On the Observance of Foods. That text offers dietary advice to King Theuderic I (d. 533/4 ..read more

There are few surviving manuscripts or fragments of late antique medical books. One that recently caught my attention was an early seventh-century fragment described as containing the Pseudo-Hippocratic Letter to Maecenas (now Munich, BSB, clm 29688). It is described in Codices Latini Antiquiores as being written in an unremarkable uncial coming ‘most likely from Italy’, although it was used for a long time as a fly-leaf for a book in St Emmeram’s in Regensburg. In many ways the fragment is not very exciting and mostly deals with the health benefits of vomiting. The Letter of Maecenas certainl ..read more

One of the most well-known manuscripts of the Carolingian world is St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 878 – a vade mecum (notebook) compiled over a number of years by Walahfrid Strabo (d. 849). It provides a fascinating window into the possibilities for learning in the first half of the ninth century, with a variety of short texts and extracts on grammar, calendrical science and medicine. One particular medical text raises some interesting issues about the transmission of medical knowledge. This is a letter about diet, the humours, and the changing seasons. It usually circulates in Latin as ..read more

One of Bede’s most celebrated works is his On the Reckoning of Time (725). It is a work that is often characterised a schoolbook that sets out how to calculate that pesky movable Easter and to situate that calculation within the crossfire of natural laws, human custom, and divine mystery. It is also partly polemical as it (sometimes very sharply) criticises people, apparently including people within his own monastic environment, who held alternative ideas or who just couldn’t count. Unusually for an early medieval work, we can not only identify most of the sources, but we think we have some se ..read more

Pro-tip: if a manuscript is catalogued as containing ‘extracts from Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies’, check if it really is that. Years ago, in a couple of related manuscripts in the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence, I found that a text described as ‘mostly from Isidore’ was actually a Lombard revision of Irish computistical and cosmological material from 747 (= Computus Amiatinus). Very little of it was actually Isidorian.[1] Around the same time, Cinzia Grifoni discovered that a text in St Gall catalogued as ‘excerpts from Isidore’ was actually a copy of the rare Recension 3 of Pseudo-Met ..read more

What did it mean to be a person in the Middle Ages who had a ‘profound ignorance of nature’? Neil deGrasse Tyson recently commented about how the word ‘disaster’ was ‘prescientific’ and pertained to a time when ‘misfortune was commonly blamed on cosmic events’. This was illustrated by the famous image of people standing amazed and pointing at Halley’s Comet in 1066 as an omen of the bad things to come. How typical of those medievals that they blamed a comet! Comets are actually a bad example of ‘bad pre-science’ (not that he actually said otherwise). Comets are a bit random. Okay, Halley’s Co ..read more

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of leading a week of the Reading Group for our Institute of Transnational and Spatial History. They had been discussing how they had not had any engagement with writing about premodern history, and my week was their second go at changing that. This was great for me: I like working with many of my modernist colleagues, and it is not always easy to find frameworks in which we can actually talk without just talking at cross-purposes intellectually. Indeed, when the Institute was first founded, some colleagues were not sure that modernists and premodernists ..read more