Overview

Following the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire, local Christian leaders were confronted with the problem of how to conceptualize and administer their regional churches. As Gregory Halfond shows, the bishops of post-Roman Gaul oversaw a transformation in the relationship between church and state. He shows that by constituting themselves as a corporate body, the Gallic episcopate was able to wield significant political influence on local, regional, and kingdom-wide scales. Gallo-Frankish bishops were conscious of their corporate membership in an exclusive order, the rights and responsibilities of which were consistently being redefined and subsequently expressed through liturgy, dress, physical space, preaching, and association with cults of sanctity. But as Halfond demonstrates, individual bishops, motivated by the promise of royal patronage to provide various forms of service to the court, often struggled, sometimes unsuccessfully, to balance their competing loyalties. However, even the resulting conflicts between individual bishops did not, he shows, fundamentally undermine the Gallo-Frankish episcopate's corporate identity or integrity. Ultimately, Halfond provides a far more subtle and sophisticated understanding of church-state relations across the early medieval period.

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9781501739316

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Reviews

Gregory I. Halfond provides an intriguing study on the history of the church in the Merovingian kingdom. He shows convincingly how the formation of the first Catholic kingdom in the post-Roman west engendered a new sense of solidarity among the members of the Merovingian episcopate as well as new ideas about the nature of the church and its relation to the state. -- Helmut Reimitz, Princeton University, author of <I>History, Frankish Identity and the Framing of Western Ethnicity, 550-850</I> Bishops and the Politics of Patronage in Merovingian Gaul shines new light on an important but unevenly treated topic. It will be a valuable addition to reading lists on Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages at all levels. -- James T. Palmer, University of St. Andrews, author of <I>The Apocalypse in the Early Middle Ages</I>

Author Information

Gregory I. Halfond is Associate Professor of History at Framingham State University. His prior publications include The Archaeology of Frankish Church Councils, AD 511–768 and The Medieval Way of War.

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