This exquisitely researched monograph, thirty years in the making, skillfully blends two prominent approaches to the study of the early medieval past today: the examination of post-Roman ethnicity and identity led by the circle of scholars around Herwig Wolfram in the 1980s and 1990s and now Walter Pohl in Vienna; and what one might call manuscript studies, the movement propounded most passionately by Rosamond McKitterick in Great Britain to subvert the critical editions and explore how a study of the actual writing, rewriting, and use of early medieval texts illuminates the distinctive culture of early medieval Europe.

Helmut Reimitz's work examines the interaction of various iterations of Frankish identity with “western ethnicity” (i.e., a vision of “the world as one divided among Christian peoples” [2]) and explores the contours of ethnicity through an examination of historical narratives and their labyrinthine manuscript traditions. For Reimitz, identity is a “toolkit” that “can be used to develop a dense array of strategies involving groups, individuals and their interrelationships” (4–5). He further distinguishes “ethnic identity”—the “collective identity” of distinct peoples—from “ethnicity,” the “larger social whole to which [peoples] were connected” (7). Throughout the study, Reimitz depicts authors and copyists as “cultural brokers” who linked the “interplays of local and extra-local influences to a larger social whole” (19). With these intellectual tools, he charts the development of Frankish identity from its narrower expressions, tied to a particular people, to a more general political designation during the later Merovingian and Carolingian periods (even if more provincial versions persisted).

The book is divided into three chronological parts covering the sixth century, the seventh and early eighth centuries, and, finally, the century roughly between 750 and 850. Part 1, “Communities of the Middle Ground in Sixth-Century Gaul,” is organized primarily around an examination of Gregory of Tours and his History (ca. 590). Many of Reimitz's insights here are built on the swelling corpus of Gregory studies, which has depicted the bishop as a self-interested participant in his own histories. Surprising is how little attention Gregory paid to Roman or Frankish identity. He proposed instead “a radical Christian vision of the world” (43) derived loosely from the histories of Eusebius and Jerome, in which the foundations of his own society were based not on the discontinuous destinies of particular peoples, but on their common future within an ever-unfolding pastoral history of the celestial church in Gaul. This downplaying of Frankishness was, the author argues, a “deliberate strategy” (87) to combat the “increasing use of the Frankish name for political legitimacy” (121) at about the time Gregory wrote his history. Reimitz also points out, however, that this was true of other contemporaries and of the Frankish kings themselves, who, for most of the sixth century, maintained equidistance from all groups within their kingdoms, leaving us to wonder whether Gregory's choices were deliberate or derivative.

Reimitz has a much richer manuscript tradition to explore in part 2, “Countermyths: The Search for Origins in the Merovingian Kingdoms.” After the recentralization of the Merovingian kingdoms in the early seventh century, a more political, collective Frankish identity came to be expressed in historical writing. This included new manuscripts of Gregory's History, now purged of chapters and entire books to eliminate the most parochial elements, and their subsequent use in the composition of a new work, the Chronicle of Fredegar, a “chain” of older chronicles revised and then resumed to create “the most ambitious historiographical synthesis of [Christian] Roman-Frankish history” (222) and thereby express for the elites in the eastern parts of the realm an “overarching [Frankish] identity in the Merovingian kingdom” (235). This broader vision contrasted with the early eighth-century Liber Historiae Francorum, which projected a more exclusive identity belonging to the Paris-basin elites, who envisaged themselves as a people of God chosen to rule the realm.

Part 3 explores “The Reforms of Frankish Identity under the Carolingians.” For the first time one encounters a court-centered Frankishness amplified in the mid-eighth-century Continuations to Fredegar's Chronicle, in various minor annals, and preeminently in the semiofficial Royal Frankish Annals. Again, Reimitz takes readers into a world roiling with historiographical innovation as the royals, the elites, and the denizens of various regions coopted, transformed, and supplemented preexisting historical works, interweaving local and general notions of Frankish identity with wider conceptions of church and Christian empire. For the first three decades of the ninth century, the Carolingians managed to define a common Frankish identity, but tensions between wider and narrower notions of Frankishness, as well as between Frankish identity and the identities of subordinate peoples, left Europe a “conglomerate” of ethnic identities “belonging to a common world divided among Christian peoples” (441).

This study is admirably attentive to the “discourses” of medieval writers, but it also possesses its own (modernist) discourse, which is detectable in the depiction of medieval writers as “brokers” working in “historiographical workshops,” processing “cultural resources” with “tools,” deploying “deliberate strategies,” and, especially, conducting “experiments.” Moreover, the sheer physicality of manuscripts can make the conclusions drawn from them seem more obvious than they perhaps are. Reimitz frequently presents differences among manuscripts or between authors, for example, as evidence that a “fiercely contested” “debate” was taking place somewhere—but was that necessarily the case? It is at these moments that the study might have made more of its brief treatment in chapter 8 of indigenous conceptions of history as biblical exegesis. After all, in a world where people, names, and events could have multiple and contradictory meanings, might it be that the differences among medieval writers were generated not so much by “debates” as by a sense that history revealed the paradoxical will of an inscrutable deity?

These reflections merely testify to the stimulating nature of the research on display here. This dense and absorbing monograph is a tour de force of learning, a potent demonstration of how the laborious investigation of manuscripts can illuminate big questions, and a major contribution to understanding the formation of early European civilization. Just as important, the richness of Reimitz's work lays indispensible groundwork for subsequent inquiry and research for years to come.