Description
Book SynopsisThis book offers the first full English translation of two major sources for the Merovingian kingdoms: the formularies of Angers and Marculf (sixth and seventh centuries). These collections of model legal documents, compiled by scribes as an aid to the composition of future documents, constitute an important source of evidence on government, legal practice and social life during the Merovingian period, both at the local level (for Angers) and at the level of the kingdom’s elite and the entourage of the king (for Marculf). They illuminate aspects of life which would often have been considered too trivial to be worth mentioning in narrative sources, and can include instructions dealing with subjects as diverse as appointing a bishop, making a gift, borrowing money, divorcing, selling an infant child, confiscating property from a rebel, writing Christmas greetings, and settling disputes over murders, thefts or kidnappings. As well as presenting the translations, the introduction also gives a brief outline of the characteristics of this type of source as a whole, with the aim of putting these texts into perspective and providing a methodological handle for them.
Trade ReviewRio has given us here is not only a set of translations, but also a work of scholarship that makes the formulae vastly more accessible to students and to professionals.
Warren Brown, Early Medieval Europe 19 (2)Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements Abbreviations
- Introduction
- The scope of this book The scope of formulae
- The problem with formulae
- Authorship and audience: what the manuscript evidence can tell us The language of formulae
- Formulae and the written word
- Formulae and surviving documents
- Dating formulae: original collections vs. manuscript tradition Local context and diffusion
- To conclude
- A note on this translation
- Part One: The Formulary of Angers
- Introduction
- Translation
- Part Two: The Formulary of Marculf
- Introduction
- The scope of the collection
- Date and place of origin
- Marculf and Landeric
- Dating the collection
- Marculf and St Denis
- A note on the printed editions
- Translation
- Book One
- Book Two Supplement
- Additamenta: additional texts from the manuscripts of Marculf
- a, b, c: three more texts from the manuscripts ofMarculf
- Appendix I: The original date of the Angers collection: the state of the question
- Appendix 2: The gesta municipalia
- Appendix 3: The Marculf collection: manuscripts and editions
- The manuscript tradition
- Editions of Marculf and the hierarchy of manuscripts
- Map
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
