Friendship in the Merovingian Kingdoms
Venantius Fortunatus and His Contemporaries
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Arc Humanities Press
Published:15th Nov '22
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This book explores how one early medieval poet survived and thrived amidst the political turbulence of sixth century Gaul—with a little help from his friends. Born in northern Italy, Venantius Fortunatus made his career writing for and about members of the Merovingian elite. Although he is no longer dismissed as an opportunistic poetaster who wrote undistinguished flattery for undeserving kings and aristocrats, his work remains unduly neglected. This book reframes Fortunatus as a writer uniquely suited to his times, a professional poet who addressed his contemporaries’ needs and wishes for the prestige and sophistication of Classical culture. His poems and letters enabled his aristocratic patrons to situate themselves in networks, which they made and maintained in order to navigate a post-imperial but not post-Roman world. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of friendship in the Middle Ages and offers a fresh look at the Frankish kingdoms of Merovingian Gaul.
Fortunatus’s corpus of writing provides an important complement to the rather grim impression of Merovingian society we get from Gregory. What Hope Williard has provided us in this fine book is a comprehensive study of a critical aspect of that softer side of Merovingian life: friendship. [...] In some ways, this is a very typical study of Fortunatus: taking sets of poems from the Carmina and assessing them by theme and recipient has been the pattern followed by scholars from Wilhelm Meyer to Michael Roberts. Yet Williard’s focus on friendship shines a new light on the poet that results in a revised view of Fortunatus and his relationships in Gaul, a revised and expanded view of Radegund and her relationships, and above all a fresh perception of the Merovingian world as a whole. Williard shows in this book that Merovingian Francia was a society of friends as well as enemies, of jokes and gifts and exchanges of poetry, and of assassinations and treachery. It was a world whose inhabitants took pleasure in their friends and who were eager to make new friendships and refresh old ones. For this, all scholars of Merovingian Francia are deeply in Williard’s debt.
-- Benjamin Wheaton * Studies in Late Antiquity 8, no. 4 (Winter 2024): 651-ISBN: 9781641890465
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
260 pages
New edition