I. N. Wood

"The centuries immediately following the collapse of Roman rule in what is now France are an extraordinarily tangled time that is frequently dismissed as no more than a chaotic prelude to Charlemagne and the Carolingian Dynasty. Ian Wood's aim is to demonstrate that there was more to Merovingian France than fratricidal kinglets, murderous queens, corrupt bishops and otherworldly monastic saints."

The Franks were the most successful of all the barbarian peoples to establish a kingdom in the aftermath of the collapse of the West Roman Empire. Among their victims were their immediate neighbours, the Alamanni, who were swalowed up in the course of Frankish expansion. Partly because of the collapse of the Alaman kingdom, the Alamanni have received little attention from Anglophone scholars in the past, and this volume is therefore a welcome consideration of Franks and Alamanni from a series of perspectives, historical, archaeological, and linguistic.