Central Politics: Kings, Their Allies and Opponents

Abstract

For over a decade, early medieval historians have eagerly awaited Ian Wood's detailed synthesis of Merovingian history. Since the death of Michael Wallace-Hadrill in 1985, Wood has been the leading British historian of Francia and has written over two dozen finely tuned articles on late antique and early medieval Gaul. Unlike his compatriot Edward James,' whose point of departure is the archaeological record, Wood has concentrated on the written sources of the period, particularly on narrative, epistolary, and legal texts. Wood's Vorstudien have distinguished him from most North American, British, and Continental historians of the period in two ways. First, unlike the vast majority, who take the seductive histories of Gregory of Tours as their primary point of reference in approaching Merovingian history, Wood cut his teeth on a dissertation focusing on Avitus of Vienne and the Burgundian region.2 As a result he is able to present, particularly for the late fifth and early sixth centuries, an image of the crucial first generation of the Frankish kingdom not primarily derived from the very late and highly constructed versions of Gregory. Second, most of his early studies have been precise, text-critical examinations of the circumstances within which the rare Merovingian narrative texts were composed, relating their contents to the specific contexts of their composition. The result often is to cast into doubt not only the facile conclusions of previous historians but the very possi-