ABSTRACT
Notions of collective liability animated the entire conflict: vengeance for the deaths of Clotild's parents was taken by their grandson on their slayer's son, Sigismund, and on Sigismund's wife and children; vengeance for Sigismund's death was taken on Chlodomer by Burgundian followers of Sigismund's brother Godomar. It also shows that feuding ideology was so capacious and manipulable and that feuding practices could incorporate so many different strategic considerations and goals other than revenge that the Merovingianm feud could have constituted “one of the key structures in which the competition for power, the struggle for dominance, was played out.”. The relationship between God's feuds with humans, on the one hand, and human feuds, on the other, was thus subtle and complex. Mediated by a specific, yet highly flexible, schema for configuring politics and experiencing several different kinds of conflict, the feud was a process into which multiple strategies could be enfolded.
