Approaches to community and otherness in the late Merovingian and early Carolingian periods

Abstract

The aim of this study is to examine how contemporary authors approached and understood the communal identity of the inhabitants of the regnum Francorum from the seventh to the early ninth century. In order to do this, the study takes in a wide variety of narrative sources – historical and hagiographical – and addresses issues of both ‘community’ and ‘otherness’, and above all the relationship between the two. To this end, the study explores three related discourses that emerged and developed in this period. The first of these discourse concerned the Franks themselves, especially the way authors imagined a Frankish community composed of a single gens which overcame inherent divisions within the regnum. The second discourse involved the relationship between Franks and non-Franks, and how authors relied on concepts of rebellion and paganism rather than ethnic identity to encourage a sense of exclusion. Crucially, we shall see this was a discourse that only really emerged in the eighth century. The third discourse is represented by a case-study of a specific people – the Frisians that charts how they went from being peripheral pagans at the beginning of the eighth century to being seen as part of the community by the middle of the ninth. Above all, though, we seek to highlight the variety between the different authors who participated in these discourses, emphasising that, while there were over-arching ideas in each discourse, each author interpreted these ideas in an individual way. This provides us with a much more ambivalent picture of community and otherness from the period than we might expect.

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