This chapter introduces how the study of the Merovingian kingdoms has developed since the sixteenth century. Merovingian history is not easily or self-evidently presented in the source material; it has had to be recovered and reconstructed. The historiographical survey is therefore important to understanding how writers and scholars have put that history together. It highlights some of the key political, confessional, theoretical, and methodological issues that have shaped how the period is interpreted, from the Magdeburg Centuriators of the Reformation to the Monumenta Germaniae Historica’s self-consciously ‘scientific’ approach to editing sources.

The final chapter provides an examination of how the Merovingian world was shaped by opposition to paganism, heresy, Judaism, and, at the end, the new Islamic world of the Arab caliphate. The Franks (or at least some of them) had started as pagans themselves in the fifth century, and stories of conversion created important reminders of the journeys to salvation. Whether ‘real paganism’ is easily identifiable in stories or grave goods we may doubt. Similarly, the presence of heresy or Judaism can seem ambiguous when the sources are interrogated. But the creation of Frankish Christianity relied on its contrasts and those fed to it by the Byzantine Empire. Through Merovingian accounts of religious conflict we can discern how the Frankish kingdoms saw their place in the wider world.

This chapter explores how identities were forged and developed under the Merovingians, from the creative fiction of ‘Frankishness’ to more personal identities defined by gender and social status. It examines how identities can appear different through stories, laws, dress, and language, highlighting the importance of how people defined and presented themselves according to need and circumstance. It takes seriously the contention that identity formation fed into discourses of power because they structured hierarchies and issues of inclusion and exclusion.

A short epilogue brings together the themes of the book, inviting us to look at the period not as a ‘Dark’ or ‘Golden Age’ but as a period of great complexity and transformation. As Gregory of Tours himself wrote: many things happened, both good and bad.

This chapter reveals how Aboriginal people adopted and integrated alphabetic script into their art, recognising the potential of this kind of knowledge transmission and blurring the categories imposed on their pasts. Focusing on the biography of artist Narlim, we reveal how he integrated alphabetic script into his art at times, experimenting with different forms of communication.

This chapter turns to intergenerational historical memory and the function of rock art as both archive and mnemonic as the art’s own communicative power. Through the biography of Josie Maralngurra, we reveal the art’s function in passing historical knowledge to the next generation at its production, content, through evoking memory and its speaking to future generations. Rock art is a means of transferring knowledge in the present to future generations; a living practice as well as ancient record.

We conclude that this First Nations archive is a repository of a different kind, for a different kind of history, grounded in a different kind of time, beyond the limited pasts which most academic historians and archaeologists are used to knowing. Scholars must therefore rely on deep partnerships and reciprocity with First Nations communities to approach these knowledges.