The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751

Ian Wood's The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450 to 751, published by Longman in 1994, is a standard scholarly history of the Frankish Merovingian dynasty, covering its political and religious history including the Christianization of the Franks. Wood is an established historian of early medieval Europe. Its strength is that it remains a widely assigned and cited synthesis of a period documented by fragmentary and difficult sources. Its limit is that scholarship on the Merovingian period has continued to develop since 1994, particularly on questions of ethnic and religious identity formation, so a claim resting on more recent archaeological findings should be checked against newer work as well.