Fill Form 8655 Societies 2024

So today is an exciting day because the papers are due, as the midterm is soon. But most of all, because we're finishing up our talk on the Merovingians. Questions/comments, cat names? So, the Merovingians, remember, are being studied as an example of barbarian kingship and barbarian states in the post-Roman world. Post-Roman meaning that the Roman Empire is gone, but the society is not completely severed from its connections with the Roman tradition. This is most obvious in the church and the survival of Latin learning, bishops, Christianity, and literacy. But even though we seem to be in an environment of rather primitive and Eden-like barbarian kings, I hope that we'll see that within Gregory's narrative, there is evidence of a kind of royal administration and a certain sense of purpose. We are entering a period in which we have to start asking what held society together. This becomes a question when two things start to fail. One is the government, where it's really not clear that there is a government other than powerful people plundering less powerful people. The other factor is when the people themselves don't really believe that there is any force holding their society together, anything that they unconsciously give deference to. So, we're all familiar with what are called "failed states," that is, polities that have an official existence but cannot seem to keep the most basic form of order within their borders, whatever those borders may be. Unfortunate states like Somalia, or no longer, but ten years ago Liberia, Sierra Leone, were examples of failed states. This is a phenomena that has grown in the contemporary world. In the Middle Ages, and here we're talking about the period from the collapse of Roman Authority in the West in the 5th century until at least...