Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Note on nomenclature
- 1 Neustria, Brittany, and northern Aquitaine
- 2 Redon and environs
- Introduction
- 1 Settlement and society in dark age Brittany
- 2 Neustria and the Breton march
- 3 The Bretons in the Christian empire of Louis the Pious
- 4 Carolingian hegemony and Breton revolts, 840–874
- 5 An anatomy of power
- 6 Churches and learning in Carolingian Brittany
- 7 The end of Carolingian Brittany
- List of manuscripts cited
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge studies in medieval life and thought Fourth series
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Note on nomenclature
- 1 Neustria, Brittany, and northern Aquitaine
- 2 Redon and environs
- Introduction
- 1 Settlement and society in dark age Brittany
- 2 Neustria and the Breton march
- 3 The Bretons in the Christian empire of Louis the Pious
- 4 Carolingian hegemony and Breton revolts, 840–874
- 5 An anatomy of power
- 6 Churches and learning in Carolingian Brittany
- 7 The end of Carolingian Brittany
- List of manuscripts cited
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge studies in medieval life and thought Fourth series
Summary
This book is about the fundamental political and social changes that often occur on the periphery of dynamic and rapidly evolving societies. This familiar theme in European history recurs from the time of Graeco-Roman expansion into the western Mediterranean and its hinterland in the sixth century BC onwards, to colonisation of the Americas and Africa starting in the fifteenth century AD. In the ancient world and the Middle Ages, historians can all too rarely study this process from the point of view of both the aggressor and the periphery, for their problem is most frequently that of literate aggressor and non-literate periphery. Only where one literate culture enlarged its frontiers at the expense of another has it been possible to examine in any detail the new societies which evolved in the wake of aggression and conquest. For the Middle Ages, this has enabled studies to be undertaken of the socio-political structures which emerged around the Mediterranean as Latin Christendom expanded at the expense of Islam in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Long before the Reconquista or the Crusades, however, north-western Europe had evolved a militant, expansionist society with its own moral identity and religious justification: Charlemagne's imperial coronation on Christmas Day, 800, was the consummation of all the Franks' aggressive and ideological inclinations. Just as militarised Germanic tribes with permanent, hierarchical power structures had earlier developed in response to the trans-Rhenine attacks of Rome's imperial armies, so new political entities emerged around the rim of the Carolingian empire.
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- Province and EmpireBrittany and the Carolingians, pp. 1 - 7Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992