Roman Barbarians : The Royal Court and Culture in the Early Medieval West

This study investigates the place of the royal court and the operation of patronage through it in several European kingdoms in the early Middle Ages. It seeks to identify the roots of later medieval developments, and especially of the so-called Carolingian Renaissance, in the centuries immediately succeeding the period of Roman rule. For it was in that formative period that Roman and Christian ideas and practices came to be mingled with indigenous Germanic practices, to produce the seeds of what we now call "the medieval civilization".