Thursday, October 20, 2011

More Merovingian

As some of you have discerned I've been reading a great deal on the Long Haired Kings, the Frankish Kings. In some of my reading I came across this passage that explained how those keeping records, both at the many courts and in monasteries and the like took paper from the Roman period...tax documents, legal papers, books, what have you...and scratched out the ink and reused the paper. Its one of the reasons that we don't have a great deal of demographic information on the late Roman period. It occurs to me that perhaps we could take these more medieval texts and with modern technology read what is under it....yesterday Peter sent me this interesting article.

Archimedes Lives!

3 comments:

GrayPumpkin said...

That is some pretty exciting stuff, loves stories like this.
I've done some reading on Merovingian world as well, other than Greary's Before France & Germany, which I've read and found fascinating, is there any other books you would recommend?

Troll Lord said...

I've just finished up two books on the period, The Merovingian Kingdoms 450-751 by Ian Wood and The Origins of France From Clovis to the Capetians 500-1000 by Edward James.

The former books is very comprehensive but he spends a great deal of time discussing the source material we have for the period; and then explaining various interpretations of that material as offered by other historians. This is interesting but I prefer more decisive/conclusive history...he might not KNOW the answer, but he has an opinion. I would like to hear it.

The second book is smaller and a much easier read with much more readily available information.

GrayPumpkin said...

Thanks for the info.

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