These sources are wide-ranging in style and scope, including works from Roman historians such as Ammianus Marcellinus and Orosius, Antique and Early Medieval chronicles, a selection of Saints' Lives, excerpts from Gregory of Tours, and numerous poems, letters, and legislative and legal documents.
This is a great starting point for someone wondering what original source material is available for the period. It also provides the reader with something of a "feel" for how life was conducted in Western Europe during the 5th-7th centuries. I found it excellent for showing me which primary sources I wanted to study further, such as Sidonius, Fredegar and Ammianus. It is also a very good counter to anyone characterizing the early medieval period as a "dark age" - one devoid of any written works.
So rather than meekly accept what modern historians had to say, I searched and found translations of the works of some of these authors on the web , such as Cassiodorus, Zosimus, Sulpicius Severus and the Church Fathers, Bishops Eusebius, Socrates Scholasticus, and Hermias Sozomen. But there were two difficulties with this - firstly, there were few interpretive notes about what I was reading; and secondly their descriptions of the events were very frequently second hand and quite often merely passing observations.
The first original sources I bought were the Penguin Classics translations of the works of Ammianus Marcellinus (The Later Roman Empire - ISBN 0-14-044406-8) and of Gregory of Tours (History of the Franks - ISBN 01-14-044295-2) both of which are well translated, interesting to read, and which had many useful explanatory notes. But they only cover a limited period of the history of what was to become France after the fall of the western Roman Empire. So it was a great pleasure to acquire this book by Alexander Callander Murray which provides easy to read translations and useful notes of the most important primary sources for the entire period from when the Franks made their first appearance in Gaul in the 3rd century AD to the end of the Merovingian monarchy in the 8th century AD.
There are 113 extracts from original sources grouped in 17 chapters, each of which mark a significant event or group of eventswhich took place during this period.
Chapters 1-2 deal with the events of the 3rd and 4th centuries which includes the campaigns of the Emperor Julian in Gaul as described by Ammianus Marcellinus, while Chapters 3 - 8 deal with the period up to the last Visigothic kings as described by a variety of late Roman authors and early chroniclers.
Chapters 9 - 11 deal with the founding of the Merovingian monarchy by Clovis, son of Childeric, the King of the Salian Franks, and his immediate successors, the principal source for which was Gregory of Tours. Chapters 12-16 cover the later kings and the decline of the monarchy under Chlothar III, Theuderic II, and Childeric II during the middle of the 7th century when the territory of the dynasty was starting to split up into its component parts, the principal sources being the later chroniclers who modelled themselves on Gregory. The final chapter includes records of some the events leading up to and after the deposing of the Merovingian dynasty by the true founder of the Carolingian dynasty, Charles Martel, the grandfather of Charlemagne.
Each chapter starts with a helpful review of what is known about the author of the source, and there is useful supplementary information at the back of the book in the form of Genealogies, and a dozen maps showing the political boundaries of France, and Western Europe during the various periods of time, which I found most helpful in determining who was doing what to whom and where.
I found the best way to read this book was in small doses! The texts themselves are often very amusing, sometimes scurrilous, often quite matter of fact about the most brutal and lurid activities of the kings and their nobility, but usually informative, and rarely boring. The one exception to this, perhaps, was Chapter 15 on Frankish Law which I found was a bit dry, although those texts do shed light on the thinking of the Merovingian kings, in the times when they were forced to think about the interests of their subjects when it impinged upon their own selfish interests. And the overwhelming impression one gets of the Frankish kings is how self centered they were! The texts also show the often bizarre reasoning the monarchs and the nobility were prepared to use in order to justify their actions, and there are many wondrous tales told which are hard to believe in terms of what we know in these days, but which certainly throw light on the credulity of people at that time..
In summary, I enjoyed this book, all 678 pages of it, and it completely met my expectations. I would certainly recommend it to anyone who is interested in supplementing their knowledge of the period by reading the original sources, be they students of this particular period or the general reader like myself.
Winner: The 2001 Margaret Wade Labarge Prize for Medieval Studies
Including such remarkable accounts as Attila the Hun's meeting with the Pope, Queen Balthild's life, and Gregory of Tour's vivid descriptions of what happens when daily life is enmeshed with politics, From Roman to Merovingian Gaul documents events that are both remarkable in themselves and that demonstrate what made this era of history distinct.
Comments:
"This admirable collection of primary sources is so copious that it will prove instructive to senior professors as well as beginning undergraduates.
The amazingly wide choice of readings, introduced by brief, astute, unpretentious comments, lays out before us the astonishing spectrum of writings documenting what is still often, but wrongly, called the 'Dark Ages'. The collection is unusually homogeneous: the editor who selected the contents also translated almost all of them from the original latin. The translations read well and are rendered exceptionally accurate by Professor Murray's deep learning in late Roman and Frankish institutions.
Nowhere in the western part of the Roman Empire was continuity from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages so sustained and observable as in Gaul. The connection between the Roman and Merovingian periods was not seamless, but close to being so. The sources gathered and presented by Alexander C. Murray provide an engrossing, inspiring, and readable record of a decisive historical period." -Walter Goffart, University of Toronto
Alexander Callander Murray is a member of the Department of History and Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, where he teaches at the Erindale Campus. He is author of Germanic Kinship Structure: Studies in Law and Society in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (1983), editor of After Rome's Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History (1998), and has written articles on Merovingian administration and office-holding, and on the dating of Beowulf.