Archaeology of Frankish Church Councils, AD 511–768 (review)

The first surprise of Gregory Halfond’s new book is that, despite its title, it is not about archaeology, either in the physical, excavation-related sense or in the epistemological, Foucauldian one. Rather, it is “an effort to construct a narrative of institutional history from isolated shards of evidence” (p. viii). The second surprise is that it is unexpectedly successful.

The book can be divided roughly into three sections. The first, comprising the introduction and chapters 1 through 4, deals with Merovingian councils. Here, Halfond makes several important and convincing arguments. After discussing, among other topics, the continuity of the Merovingian council with its late-Roman predecessor, Halfond begins to construct his argument that the church council was indeed an institution: he shows that there was continuity of personnel, protocol, and concerns across the three centuries of Merovingian rule in the old Roman province of Gaul. Here he is addressing, in a focused way, the question of whether our very limited sources from the period after 511 should be read in a minimalist or maximalist fashion, and he comes down firmly on the maximalist side. In chapter 2, “The Physical World of the Frankish Councils,” he sets out to answer questions that few historians have ever considered: how exactly was a council called, who decided where it might meet, how did the attendees get there, who set the agenda, and what actually happened in the week or two that the council was sitting. These are all questions that are crucially important to understanding exactly what a council was, and how it saw itself, but have been very rarely addressed in scholarly literature. Chapters 3 and 4 are concerned with the actual legislation that the Merovingian councils produced. Halfond argues forcefully that the canons produced by the more than fifty councils he examines should be understood as reflections of the social and political reality of the Merovingian world, and that Merovingian bishops meant them to be taken quite seriously. He notes the repetitive nature of some legislation but believes that this was quite intentional; quoting earlier councils, whether ecumenical or Frankish, allowed the bishops to situate themselves in the larger Christian world and to establish their orthodox credentials. Moreover, he detects in the sometimes repetitious canons subtle changes in language and focus, which he says obscures their innovative nature. Finally, he argues that the bishops of Francia worked alongside the Merovingian kings to create a policy that would allow ecclesiastical legislation to have a real force.

The second section of the book, which consists of chapter 5, examines how and to what degree the decisions of Frankish councils influenced the later development of canon law in the high Middle Ages. The final section (and chapter) of the book examines to what degree there was continuity between Merovingian and early Carolingian (or Pippinid) councils. Halfond marshals most convincing evidence to present the following nuanced argument: that, although there were some important changes that marked the rise to power of Charles Martel, his sons, and his grandsons, these changes were “neither unprecedented nor sudden” (p. 198), and almost all of them have Merovingian antecedents. Thus, the author makes an important contribution to recent work on the rise to power of the Carolingians, arguing that they were not so much innovators as wily manipulators of preexisting traditions.

The book has a few shortcomings. The author does not seem to know Peter Godman on the relationship between St. Gregory of Tours and Venantius Fortunatus, nor Albrecht Deim on St. Columbanus. There is an occasional tendency to reify such concepts as church and state; a certain lack of generosity in dealing with the work of earlier scholars with whom the author disagrees might belie the book’s origin as a dissertation. That said, however, The Archaeology of Frankish Church Councils makes a significant contribution not just to our understanding of the institutional history of the Merovingian and...