Merovingian Religious Architecture

For nearly 270 years, between the end of the Roman Empire and the advent of the Carolingian dynasty, the Merovingian territories experienced an intense flowering of religious construction, which recent archaeology has documented with increasing detail. This chapter sheds light on new research and recent discoveries; however, rather than reviewing all of the sites and studies of Merovingian churches and the contemporary sources mentioning them, it gives some new clues and reflections about so-called Merovingian architecture and the broad vision of an architectural form that was expressed in quite simple but majestic designs. These structures, constructed of stone (or wood), reveal a society progressively Christianized under the leadership of bishops, clerics, and monks, as well as by the Merovingian sovereigns. Without any break with classical antiquity, the Merovingian centuries fit into a continuous legacy that transformed the monumental landscape in both cities and countryside. The various forms of Christian monuments of the fifth to eighth century thus illustrate this heritage, sometimes through an extreme simplification of antique patterns and sometimes through the enrichment of aesthetic forms brought by the arrival of immigrant populations. Within a changing world, religious buildings appear to have been a catalyst for cultural exchanges as places of visibility and gathering, as witnesses of the building fever of the period. Our understanding of religious architecture in Merovingian Gaul is gradually becoming more accurate. We now know an increasing amount about the establishment, planning, forms and sizes, construction techniques, ornamentation, and liturgical and functional content of all these structures. These structures, which were so varied in size and use, reveal extensive artistic plurality.