For a long time, the only claim the western Netherlands had to participation in the 5th-century adventus Saxonum was based upon a handful of Anglo-Saxon pots in three cemeteries in the Rhine estuary. Recent research, however, dates these pots to the 6th century, thus beyond the initial period of migrations from Old Saxony (Niedersachsen) to Britain. Together with other differences in material culture, this clearly reveals a contrast to developments in the terpen area of Friesland and Groningen. The internal partition in the Lex Frisionum into three parts also points to regional differences (see further Knol and IJssenagger, and Nijdam, this vol.). Even within the region of West Frisia, the modern provinces of North and South Holland, regular archaeological distinctions can be found. Bazelmans (2009, 332–3) has already pointed to the fragmented ethnicity the different coastal regions must have had, following the crisis in habitation they all went through between the late 3rd and early 6th century ad.

At the same time there were some shared characteristics in the Frisian coastal region, such as brooches of the Domburg Type (Deckers, this vol.). How does this all add up to a coherent picture of the habitation history of the Dutch west coast in the Migration Period? In this paper a general outline is presented of the recent research of both authors as part of the former ‘Frisia Project’, taking an interdisciplinary approach (Dijkstra and van der Velde 2011; Dijkstra 2011; de Koning 2003; 2012).

An introductory warning about geographical terminology is required, however. In German studies present-day Friesland is called ‘West Frisia’, to distinguish it from the German East and North Frisia (e.g. Bos 2001, 490 and map 1). This is confusing, because in the Early Middle Ages the littoral of the western Netherlands was known as Frisia as well, and its inhabitants as Fresiones or Fresiones occidentales (West Frisians). The name Holland did not come into regular use until c. 1100, reserving the name West-Friesland for the northernmost part of Holland until the present day (Blok 1969). Consequently we prefer to refer to modern Friesland as Middle Frisia (Fig. 4.1).

This chapter considers the possibility that some performance records may refer to situations in which one of the two usual foundations of drama—text and action—appears to be lacking. I do not mean merely that records of the text or action have not survived, but that one of these elements was not a part of the original performance. There is an inherent difficulty in discussing such a possibility, since in many cases it requires the analysis not of what is contained in the documents, but of what is missing. Argumentum ex silentio is always a problematic proposition, and I will constantly emphasise the thin ice on which I am treading. We must be constantly aware that ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’, as well as understanding that proving a negative is notoriously difficult if not, as some logicians would have it, impossible. My purpose here, though, is not to prove the existence of drama without text or action, but to put forward the possibility that this may be the most likely explanation of some situations that seem otherwise puzzling or inexplicable. It is hardly surprising that the thin evidence on which this discussion is based leads inevitably to a post-positive viewpoint of these texts, by which it is understood that a comprehensive view of the past is simply not possible. Such a viewpoint is articulated more fully by Claire Sponsler in her essay in this volume.

A brief survey of ‘drama’ as it appears in standard dictionaries and descriptive sources brings to light several assumptions about the nature of the genre. Two expectations predominate: drama is ‘a composition in prose or verse’, a phrase often expanded to ‘a literary composition’. Second, it is ‘adapted to be acted upon a stage’ or ‘intended to be acted upon the stage’. These expectations do not, of course, always apply to the reality of performance, whether in the Middle Ages or the twenty-first century. Examining their implications somewhat more closely, it is clear that the most significant result of categorising drama as a ‘composition’ or ‘literary composition’ is the assumption that it is centred on a text; since that text is both ‘composed’ and ‘literary’, the suggestion seems strong that it pre-exists performance.

There is little doubt that close links existed between communities on both sides of the southern North Sea in the centuries following the Migration Period. From an archaeological perspective, the numerous sceattas produced in the Low Countries in the late 7th and 8th centuries ad and found in considerable quantities in England are undeniable evidence of this (Metcalf and Op den Velde 2010), as are the technical and stylistic correspondences between high-status dress items such as the ‘royal’ disc-on-bow brooches found in the northern Netherlands and England (e.g. Olsen 2006; Nicolay 2014 and this vol.). These frequent contacts are corroborated by historical evidence, for instance confirming the central position of the ‘Frisians’ in long-distance trade (Lebecq 1983) or the diplomatic interaction between the Warni, an aristocratic group living in the Rhine estuary, and Anglian royalty in the 6th century (Dijkstra 2004, 397; Dijkstra and de Koning, this vol.; Pestell, this vol.).

However, overseas interaction amounted to more than lively diplomatic and economic exchanges; moreover, the archaeological evidence for such interaction is not limited to the core areas of social, economic and political development around the southern North Sea, most notably Friesland, East Anglia and Kent. The present paper approaches this ‘North Sea Culture’ from another perspective. It takes as its main area of study a more peripheral region, coastal Flanders, and considers its relations with both the North Sea region and the hinterland. Furthermore, it focuses on ‘lowly’ categories of material culture belonging to the domestic sphere, far away from the halls of kings and warlords.

Generally speaking, most of the archaeological evidence from the Merovingian Period (ad 500–750) is found in the eastern part of coastal Flanders, an area broadly corresponding to the Carolingian administrative unit of the pagus Flandrensis. Two major landscape-types can be discerned in this region. Along the coast lies the present-day polder area, which prior to the 10th–11th century consisted of an unembanked coastal wetland crossed by tidal channels. By the 7th–8th century, large parts of it were naturally silting up to supra-tidal levels, forming extensive saltmarshes and salt meadows. On its landward side, this area is bounded the Pleistocene cover-sand region.

As a classical poet, Camões was necessarily an imitative poet—one who willingly sought in a spirit at once respectful and bold to enroll his poem in recognized and admired anterior tradition. In the very opening phrase of the Lusíadas he acknowledges his principal allegiance. It is to the Æneid of Virgil, and it is followed by literally hundreds of other Virgilian echoes and borrowings. Of course, he was familiar as well with the “modern” epic poets of Italy, Boiardo and Ariosto. From Ariosto in particular he had learned much, but the prominent, explicit, and early reference to him in the Lusíadas (I, xi) seems hardly that of a respectful disciple. The inventor of Adamastor denigrates the adventures of Rodamonte and Rugeiro as fantásticas, fingidas, and mentirosas (fantastic, made-up, and lying)! The superiority of his own work, implicitly, rests upon the historicity and truth of its epic matter. The question of the comparative truth claims of different modes of poetry is a significant one in the current context as well.

What poems had he studied in preparing Sôbolos rios? Most obviously, of course, he had studied the psalm itself. The incipit Sôbolos rios bears the same relationship to the phrase Super flumina that the incipit As armas e os barões bears to the phrase Arma virumque. In the cultural and religious context of his age, “studying the Bible” included as a matter of course acquiring familiarity with the exegetical tradition, that is, with the textual penumbra of “spiritual” or allegorical interpretation that was the work of many centuries of earlier commentary. But there are in his poem so many obvious echoes of or borrowings from secular poets both pagan and Christian that Sôbolos rios might be regarded as a kind of emblem of his life-long literary education. Any serious analysis of Camões's enterprise must necessarily include a consideration of his complex relationship to his “sources.”

There are in Camões numerous traces of the great giants of the late medieval canon—Virgil, Augustine, Boethius, Dante, Petrarch and others. In subsequent chapters I will frequently make reference to such major authors in the great tradition, but it is necessary to begin with two texts that have largely fallen into oblivion.

This book attempts an introduction to a very beautiful and complex poem written in Portuguese by Luís de Camões in the latter part of the sixteenth century. The poem, which has no authorial title, is sometimes called Sôbolos rios (after its incipit) or Babel e Sião (“Babylon and Jerusalem”) after the binary images around which it is constructed. As neither Portuguese literature nor sixteenth-century poetry has been a prominent subject of my earlier published work, I perhaps owe my reader some explanation of how the book has come about. Humanistic study, at least in my experience, is seldom linear. Much more often it is erratic in the old Latin sense that suggests digression and divagation, a wandering from one's original, ideal perception of a broad, straight path to explore the byways, and then the little lanes and alleys into which they branch. A great deal of my own long scholarly life has been taken up with exploring things that I came to believe, in the course of pursuing some original intention to which I had committed myself, were preliminary necessities to its achievement.

One of the subjects on which I have expended scholarly energy in the past is the history of the Franciscan movement in the Middle Ages. (This topic, incidentally, began in digression. I was trying to understand the “background” to the antimendicant satire prominent in such important vernacular poets as Jean de Meun and Geoffrey Chaucer.) The Franciscan Order, which played such a major role in the religious life of late medieval Europe, was destined to play a major role in the religious history of the Americas as well. Christopher Columbus himself was animated by a number of distinctively Franciscan ideas and attitudes. Some public lectures I gave on this topic indirectly led to an invitation to serve as one of the guest curators of a major public exhibition at the Library of Congress (“The Continuing Voyage”) marking the Columbian Quincentenary in 1992.

The experience was pleasant and memorable, but the task presented me with a considerable challenge as well as an opportunity, for I felt obliged to undertake an extensive course of reading in a number of large subjects concerning which I knew very little.

Any attempt to demonstrate the exegetical nature of Camões's project must inevitably involve some close readings of specific textual passages—readings that are unlikely to be fully satisfying without considerably more preparation. One obvious place to begin is with the poem upon which Camões's own poem is most clearly dependent: the psalm Super flumina. Like many great poets, Camões was first a great reader. Contemporary literary criticism has adopted a grandiose neologism—intertextuality—to denote the phenomenon of an author's commerce with anterior literary tradition. In the old Latin literary vocabulary the term most frequently used was imitatio, a word of far greater denotative range than its modern English reflex. As a poet of tradition, Luís de Camões is a conspicuously “imitative” or “intertextual” writer. The opening lines of Sôbolos rios engage with at least two very famous earlier texts, the Consolatio philosophiae of Boethius and the Commedia of Dante Alighieri. Among the great poets of classical Latinity with whom Camões has commerce, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid are conspicuous. His development of the theme of Orpheus is built upon texts in Virgil and Ovid as already engaged by Boethius. Petrarch is in his poem, which also includes an actual citation, in Castilian, of his much-admired Juan Boscán.

In a subsequent chapter I shall attempt a more comprehensive demonstration of his “art of intertextuality” in Sôbolos rios, as it involves a rich tradition of anterior secular poetry. But there are more pressing preparatory tasks, the first of which is to consider some implications of his most fundamental “intertextual” engagement—with what was universally in Camões's age called the sacred text (meaning the Bible), and indeed with its most literarily privileged pages. The Book of Psalms is a unique bridge or conduit, channeling the poetic life of ancient Israel into the liturgical life of the medieval Church. The Psalms kept ever vivid in the Church's memory a poetic history of God's marvelous dealings with his people of old, and offered prophetic promises of interventions yet greater to come.

For this reason, it would be nearly impossible to exaggerate the importance of the Psalms in the creation of the medieval literary imagination. For the better part of a millennium professional ascetics had a near monopoly on the skills of literacy and the arts of their cultural transmission.