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PAUL FOURACRE and DAVID GANZ (eds.), Frankland. The Franks
and the World of the Early Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Dame Jinty
Nelson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), xvi + 340
pp. ISBN 978 0 7190 7669 5. £55.00
There can be no doubt that Jinty Nelson (in some places the editors
deliberately retain her official name, Janet) is among the most creative,
inspiring, and influential living historians of the Early Middle
Ages. Everybody loves her charming amiability and admires her
ingenious, sometimes provocative, but always profound challenges
to former research. Her extensive and in many respects pioneering
work is well respected. It is therefore not surprising that a conventional
Festschrift might have exceeded all practical bounds. The editors
of this volume, written in her honour on the occasion of her 65th
birthday, were therefore well advised when they decided to include
only a limited number of selected essays on a particular theme which
gives the book—with an ambiguous title!—a strong coherence. In
their introduction the editors present a warm-hearted appreciation of
Jinty Nelson as a colleague and of her wide-ranging work focused on
human interaction, ritual and politics, gender aspects of medieval
history, and the politics and culture of the Carolingian period, in particular,
the reign of Charles the Bald. If Charles has made some headway
towards rehabilitation against the contempt of earlier research -
ers, then this is largely thanks to Jinty Nelson. It is also worth mentioning
that the authors represented in this volume are a mixture of
established and younger medievalists.
The fifteen essays in the volume focus on either Frankish history
or its influence on Britain (or vice versa), and each of them addresses
a different, and mostly new, aspect. Alice Rio (‘Charters, Law Codes
and Formulae’) discusses the different significance of the three genres
of legal sources mentioned in the title, casting interesting glances
at the history of research and emphasizing the importance of the formulae.
It may be significant for our own approaches that formulae
have required new attention over the last few years since they are a
witness to the adaptation of Roman legal and literate structures, es -
pecially in non-Roman regions. Formulae form the link between law
codes and charters at a regional as well as practical level, revealing
how laws were adopted and adjusted in practice. This inspiring essay
may, however, overemphasize their difference from charters repre-
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