Review: East and West in the Early Middle Ages: The Merovingian Kingdoms in Mediterranean Perspective, edited by Stefan Esders, Yaniv Fox, Yitzhak Hen and Laury Sarti

This work was supported by funding received from the NSF DBI 1639145.

Debates over the concepts of continuity and change after the end of the Roman Empire have been central to scholarship on the early medieval west for centuries. The articles in East and West in the Early Middle Ages: The Merovingian Kingdoms in Mediterranean Perspective refocus attention away from whether early medieval kingdoms continued or changed formerly western Roman practices or whether continued connections between western Europe and the Mediterranean were simple importations from the East. Instead, the articles, as the introduction by Yitzhak Hen and Stefan Esders suggests, examine the “complicated and multilayered social, cultural, and political relations” the Merovingian kingdoms had “with their eastern Mediterranean counterparts, that is, the Byzantine Empire and the Umayyad Caliphate” (3). These articles consider the wide variety of relations that connected the Mediterranean as a dynamic process: a give and take between...