James T Palmer on the Early Middle Ages and Other Things
Merovingian Gaul – Gaul after the ‘Fall of Rome’ – was terrible. All that anarchy and violence and illiteracy and moral decline. Just read Gregory of Tours’ Histories. Sadly for some people, most historians of the Merovingian period don’t really buy into that any more. They even think Gregory was a sophisticated writer, or they… Continue reading What’s Wrong with Merovingian Medicine?
Last week I spent an enjoyable three days at a mammoth conference in Vienna: “Making Ends Meet: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the End of Times in Medieval Christianity, Islam and Buddhism”. It is not often that you get medievalists in a room comparing Western and Byzantine Christendoms, different Muslim cultures, Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism, and Shintoism… Continue reading Finding New Apocalypses
First a confession: while I was genuinely looking forward to this conference, for various reasons I was unable to attend the first day, so I can only offer a partial account of what happened. Nevertheless, when I did arrive on Day Two, Roger Collins assured me over coffee that Day One had been very good… Continue reading Seventh Century Colloquium: Report
