Introduction

Summary

Early medieval art in the post-Roman West often falls between two stools, that of archaeology and that of art history, often taken for neither fish nor fowl by the respective fields of study. This is particularly true for art and material culture deriving from archaeological contexts, most importantly furnished burials from the mid-fifth to the early eighth centuries. While archaeologists and art historians coming from the more ‘classical’ tradition focus on the legacies of Mediterranean art in Christian late Antiquity and Byzantium, medieval art historians tend to engage with the ‘renaissance’ of classical traditions from the Carolingian period onwards. On the other hand, early medieval archaeology (in German also called frühgeschichtliche Archäologie) mostly neglects the art historical, visual, or aesthetic perspectives on the archaeological record, attending more to political history, elites, identity, economy, environment, or landscape. Only few engage with the visual world of the early Middle Ages, and if so, mostly from a formalist and iconographic point of view. While there has been a recent interest in images, ornamentation, and the human figure in ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England and Scandinavia,¹ Merovingian Europe has been largely untouched by the debate. This book tries to bridge these gaps, shifting perspectives with an archaeology of art in the Merovingian world.