1 - Francia and the History of Medieval Europe

Summary

Charles Homer Haskins dedicated his great work Norman Institutions ‘to the spirit of France’. From the near-lyrical remarks in his Preface, he clearly had fond memories of working in the French archives, an affection no doubt sharpened by the dreadful carnage taking place in France in the year of the work's publication. It is therefore striking to see how well read Haskins was in works in German, even when it came to writing about Norman institutions in England. This familiarity is yet more evident in both his The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century and the wide-ranging Studies in Medieval Culture. But though his reading of medieval culture led Haskins to consider Latin texts from across England and the Continent (and following the Normans took him, of course, to Sicily and beyond), France remained at the hub of his history.

Like Haskins, but unlike many of their English and French counterparts, American medievalists of the present generation are also widely read in German works, though relatively few of them actually concentrate on Germany. In both North America and Britain over the last fifty years there has been a strong focus on early medieval history, and on the history of Francia in particular. Because the region of Francia did increasingly extend across present-day German-speaking lands, the historical spotlight has moved eastwards with the Franks in the Carolingian period.