IMC 2026: Sessions

The world of the Merovingian period is no longer fully silent, as the scholarly attention of the past four decades has revealed the shape of cultural, intellectual, and political developments in the Latin West between c. 500 and 751. And yet, this approach has not substantially considered music in the Merovingian society, despite references to musical performance in narrative sources and music’s role in the liturgy. Moreover, the historiographic silencing of Merovingian music stands in stark contrast to the scholarly volume of the Carolingian period.

These sessions seek to unmute the music and sounds of Merovingian Francia through attention to music as a cultural and institutional touchstone within its historical contexts. Each speaker offers sonorous histories of the Merovingian period, in which music offers unexplored yet fruitful pathways into issues of e.g., kingship, balance between secular and ecclesiastical power, literary creation, performative acts, and the directing of shared social sentiments past and present. Thus, these panels are not of exclusive interest to musicologists, but rather to be considered as part of the larger historiographic turn in shedding light on the prodigious cultural and intellectual spheres of Late Antiquity.

These panels are sponsored by MARGICANTUS (Marie S. Curie Actions, University of Cambridge) project, whose investigations of marginal additions to early medieval manuscripts has uncovered new evidence of a far-reaching Frankish musical ‘ethos’.