Clemens Gantner

October 15, 2018 | Clemens Gantner | HI Research Blog |

The current blog entry is dedicated to the relations of Louis II of Italy (840-875) with the Byzantine Empire in the earliest phase of his reign in Italy.

Louis¹ was the oldest son of Emperor Lothar I (840-855) and thereby a great-grandson of Charlemagne. He was born in approximately 825: It is indeed strange that we know...

Walter Pohl

October 1, 2018 | Walter Pohl | HI Research Blog |

Thirty years ago, my first book came out: it was about the Avars, written in German and had a good 500 pages, about 150 of which were footnotes. In spite of that, the book still sells.¹  In many respects, writing it had been a venture into the unknown: far beyond the Latin and Greek world with which I was familiar, into the Central...

Patrick S. Marschner

September 15, 2018 | Patrick Marschner | HI Research Blog |

The Case of Post-Conquest Christian-Iberian Historical Writing

Throughout the entire European Middle Ages, biblical texts not only prescribed laws or told stories about hope, salvation and the history of God’s Chosen People. The Bible was also a guide to interpret, understand and depict the post-biblical history of...

Katharina Winckler

September 1, 2018 | Katharina Winckler | HI Research Blog |

Early Medieval Bavaria is a peculiar case in the studies of sixth- to ninth-century Europe: the region disappears almost completely from our written sources at the beginning of this period, but re-emerges from the middle of the eighth century onwards with a sudden (and astonishingly large) amount of written evidence,...

Rutger Kramer

August 1, 2018 | Rutger Kramer | HI Research Blog |

When, sometime in the early ninth century, the monk Riouuen crossed the river Vilaine to celebrate mass in the church of the monastic community of Redon, he was hardly aware that he crossed a boundary of historical, political, and social significance. At the time, Redon, now a sleepy provincial town in the present-day département ...

Fernando Ruchesi

July 15, 2018 | Fernando Ruchesi | HI Research Blog |

The development of social cohesion in the fifth century

When we hear about the “barbarians” and the period of the “fall of the Roman Empire” for the first time, we normally think about two things: Firstly, that these peoples (the northern neighbours of the Romans) were homogeneous and self-recognised entities, that is,...

Clemens Gantner

July 1, 2018 | Clemens Gantner | HI Research Blog |

On the new collaborative volume edited by Walter Pohl, Clemens Gantner, Cinzia Grifoni and Marianne Pollheimer-Mohaupt.

In the coming days, the volume ‘Transformations of Romanness: Early Medieval Regions and Identities’ is about to appear as part of the De Gruyter Millennium Studies Series – in fact it is going to be on sale...

Thom Gobbitt

June 15, 2018 | Thom Gobbitt | HI Research Blog |

The early medieval Lombard laws comprise legislation issued in the name of various Lombard kings, from Rothari in 643 CE through until Aistulph in 755 CE, edited in the nineteenth century as the Edictus Langobardorum (Bluhme, ed., 1868). These laws comprise one of the many ‘barbarian’ law-codes that were written and used across...

Walter Pohl

June 1, 2018 | Walter Pohl | HI Research Blog |

Are you interested in medieval history, or in the way in which the study of the past helps to explain modern problems with identity and ethnicity? Then this blog offers you regular research reports and news on many aspects of medieval identities, on their construction and significance. ‘Identity’ is in many respects a problematic term....