Friendship in the Merovingian Kingdoms

Hope Williard researches the letters, messages, messengers, and travel which enabled medieval people to make and maintain connections with each other. She has held visiting research fellowships in Manchester and Oxford. She currently works as an academic subject librarian and associate lecturer at the University of Lincoln, UK.

• AcknowledgementsIntroductionChapter 1: The Friendly Patron and His ClientChapter 2: Episcopal and Lay Building ProjectsChapter 3: Friendships with Merovingian WomenChapter 4: Writing for RoyaltyChapter 5: Literary Friendships and Elite IdentityConclusionSelect Bibliography

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.