Frankish

The Frankish tradition covers the Germanic peoples who settled Roman Gaul in the late fifth century and the civilisations that descended from them — the Merovingians, the Carolingians, the Capetian kingdom of France, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation insofar as it inherited Carolingian forms, and the long French and Low Countries cultural tradition into the present. It overlaps with Germanic at the eastern edge and with Anglo-Saxon at the Channel, but its centre is the regnum Francorum and what grew from it.

What the tradition produced is, among other things, much of what we mean by “the medieval West.” The Carolingian Renaissance recovered classical learning and standardised the Latin script we still use. The Frankish church reorganised European monasticism. The university of Paris codified the scholastic method. The Gothic cathedral was a French invention before it was anything else. The vernacular literature of the chanson de geste, the troubadour and trouvère traditions, and eventually the Pléiade poets carried French into one of the major literary languages of Europe.

We cover the Merovingian and Carolingian periods, the Capetian and Valois kingdoms, medieval French literature and architecture, and the long arc into modern French and Low Countries cultural life.