ABSTRACT
We have looked in several of the preceding chapters at two related questions: first, how far there was a continuation of Roman organisation and Roman society after the end of the Roman Empire in the west, and how far something quite new and more barbarian emerged; and, secondly, how great the dominance of the Christian Church in Western Europe was, especially from the fourth century onwards, and what forms that domin ance took. In this final part, we shall ask those questions of what, for want of a better word, we shall call the culture of early medieval Western Europe, as represented in the forms of it which we can most readily approach with the evidence available to us, that is, scholarship, literature, art, and architecture. This is not a peripheral area of study, but rather one which can be regarded as central to our concerns. For culture in this sense gives us at least the possibility of penetrating the ways in which con temporaries, or at least those groups of contemporaries who produced it or benefited from it, actually thought and felt. How far did they think of themselves as heirs of the Roman Empire? How far did they see the world in essentially Christian terms?
