%0 Journal Article
%A Scott G. Bruce
%D 2026
%C Berlin, Germany
%I Peter Lang Verlag
%J Mediaevistik
%@ 2199-806X
%N 1
%V 39
%T James T. Palmer, Merovingian Worlds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025, 296pp.
%R 10.3726/med.2026.01.68
%U https://www.peterlang.com/document/1748965
%X The history of the Merovingian kingdoms has benefited from welcome attention in the past decade, as several new books have highlighted their entanglements with polities and cultures beyond the borders of early medieval Francia. Two recent collections of essays – East and West in the Early Middle Ages: The Merovingian Kingdoms in Mediterranean Perspective (2019) and The Merovingian Kingdoms and the Mediterranean World: Revisiting the Sources (2019) – heralded these changes. Both books broadened the traditional scope of inquiry to interrogate the networks that connected sources produced in Merovingian Gaul with literary, intellectual, and religious influences in the eastern Mediterranean. Around the same time, Bonnie Effros and Isabel Moreira curated The Oxford Handbook of the Merovingian World (2020), a magisterial interdisciplinary collection of forty-six state-of-the-question essays on Merovingian history and archaeology. Riding the crest of this momentum, James Palmer’s new synthesis of early Frankish history – Merovingian Worlds – offers a refreshing update to older English language surveys of this period, like Patrick Geary’s Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World (1988) and Ian Wood’s The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450–751 (1993). It provides a lucid history of the post-Roman Merovingian kingdoms on a broad stage that encompasses not only the Frankish heartlands, but also England, Ireland, Italy, Byzantium and beyond. Palmer’s knack for synthesizing scholarship in an accessible idiom, already on full display in his excellent short study Early Medieval Hagiography (2018), is sure to attract a new generation of scholars to the joys and challenges of Merovingian history.