Under the Merovingian Dynasty (481 AD-751 AD) in early medieval France, royal political assemblies were used to fulfill a wide variety of functions of state. More importantly, however, they served as the primary venue for interaction between the king and the noble class he ruled over. Throughout the period, kings and nobles used assemblies to shift the balance of power in their own favor. Sometimes, by using regencies of young kings for instance, aristocrats managed to gain power over their rulers. Others, kings managed to shift the balance back and reassert their full authority. The Merovingian kingdoms moved through cycles of waxing and waning levels of centralization. When a king died with multiple potential heirs, the kingdom was often split into three or four separate political units. At these moments, the kingdoms were divided and decentralized. When a king’s brothers and his heirs died, however, the kingdom reconsolidated into a single unit, requiring greater centralization to govern. In these moments of centralization, the power struggles of assemblies offered more permanent gains, which the aristocratic class exploited to gradually increase their relative status, until the distribution of power reached a point where the forbears of the great king Charlemagne managed to replace the Merovingians and become kings themselves. The effects of assemblies on Merovingian government and kingship allowed and led to the birth of the Carolingian dynasty. More even than this, the very fact that the Carolingian's used assembly politics to attain power affected how they in turn governed, thus shaping the history of Europe for centuries to come. Using close readings of narrative, legal, and formulary evidence, I argue both that Merovingian assemblies functioned as an outlet for royal-aristocratic competition, as well as the increased impact this competition had during centralized moments in Merovingian history. 

This presentation focuses on the question of how mythic vengeful mothers in Medieval Europe were percieved with special attention paid to Grendel's Mother from Beowulf. The first portion of the presentation will be dedicated to a historiography of Grendel's mother, including articles from scholars such as JRR Tolkien, Jane Chance, and Christine Alfano. This provides context for the body of the presentation, which focuses on the question of why Grendel's mother is percieved as so terrifying to both the author of Beowulf, and Beowulf scholars. In order to answer this questions, Grendel's mother is analyzed next to other revenge-seeking women in Icelandic epics in order to demonstrate how unusual she is. Using these works, we can see that ultimately Grendel's mother is terrifying not because she is a monster, but because she posses and uses a kind of power that cannot be mascuinized: the power that comes from maternal love. Unlike other Valkyrie figures, Grendel's mother cannot be temporarily made masculine in order to enact vengence, because she is already defined by motherhood, which is inherenly feminine, while other more accepted Valkyrie tend to be young maidens, who then return to womanhood by getting married when their task is complete. Grendel's mother assumes a power which is inherently feminine, which directly threatans the assumption on which patriarchal society is based: power is masculine. It is for this reason that she is portrayed and considered to be so frightening by scholars and the author alike.