James T Palmer on the Early Middle Ages and Other Things
One of my ambitions for 2019 is to make some serious progress with a new project provisionally entitled Merovingian Worlds. And, I thought, a good way to make some progress would be have a semi-regular feature on Merovingian ‘things’. Books, jewellery, charters, relics – whatever. A good place to start, my thoughts continued, would be… Continue reading Merovingian Things 1: The Fredegar Manuscript
It is important to go and look at medieval manuscripts. Charles West reminded us about this yesterday in a blog post about his new project, ‘Turbulent Priests’. He had been in Brussels examining an twelfth-century manuscript of a text based on Pseudo-Isidore, and he had been struck by the marginal notices which had never really… Continue reading King and Mayor, 699 (Fun with Merovingian Dates 2)
Charlemagne died 1200 years ago yesterday. Despite the great emperor lacking ‘brand recognition’ (apparently – although he was mentioned in Dr Who) people got excited. Some of these people were in Aachen, which made sense because that’s where he is buried. Some of them were in Frankfurt, where there was singing but no emperor. In… Continue reading Charlemagne’s Death Day
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
