Author Description

This book is a major reevaluation of the traditional view of early Germanic kinship structure and the large body of evidence from Antiquity and the early Middle Ages which has long been thought to support its major assumptions. The book is about kinship, but also, directly and indirectly, about other aspects of the period: law, association and social organization, family institutions and the barbarian and Roman heritage of the early Middle Ages. It is its principal aim that from a re-examination of kinship will come a greater understanding of some of the central documents of barbarian social and legal history.