Prof. Yaniv Fox

I am a historian of the late antique and early medieval West, focusing primarily on Gaul from the fifth to the eighth centuries. My research has considered questions of identity formation, and particularly religious and social identity in the Burgundian and Frankish kingdoms. My first book, Power and Religion in Merovingian Gaul: Columbanian Monasticism and the Frankish Elites, published with Cambridge University Press in 2014, examined the development of the ‘Columbanian’ monastic congregation. The Irish ascetic Columbanus came to Gaul ca. 591, where he founded three monasteries. Shortly before his death in 615, he founded a fourth in Lombard Italy. These houses grew to become highly influential centers, whose alumni spread Columbanus’s teachings and foundation model throughout Gaul and the neighboring regions. As I argued in the book, Columbanian monasteries were important not only for their new approach to monastic life, but also for the way in which they used elite patronage to build social and political networks. Frankish aristocratic families cooperated with the royal court in the foundation and development of Columbanian communities, which later played a critical role in the projection of Merovingian power and the integration of the Frankish periphery. They likewise served as an efficient lever of social mobility within Gallic society. At its height, this loose amalgamation of coenobitic communities numbered in the dozens, transforming Gaul’s monastic landscape entirely.

As a member of the Center for the Study of Inter-Religious Conversion, I was interested in the religious policies of the royal courts of the Roman successor states. The religious landscape of the post-Roman West was dominated by the conflict between Nicenes and Homoians. While essentially a trinitarian controversy, the rift between the two Christian denominations informed the political and diplomatic constellations of the sixth-century Mediterranean. My work on this topic produced several published articles as well as a contribution to a volume I co-edited with Stefan Esders, Yitzhak Hen, and Laury Sarti, titled: East and West in the Early Middle Ages: The Merovingian Kingdoms in Mediterranean Perspective, published by Cambridge University Press in 2019.

My next project looked at the portrayal of the Merovingian period (ca. 450—751) in the historiographical works of later generations. The deeds of Merovingian kings and queens naturally preoccupied their contemporaries. Authors like Bishop Gregory of Tours (d. 594) and the anonymous writers behind the seventh-century Chronicle of Fredegar and the eighth-century Liber historiae Francorum used the Merovingians to impart a range of moral lessons to their readership. During the Carolingian period, the Merovingians were scapegoated to justify the deposition of their last king by Pippin III in 751, most memorably by Einhard, Charlemagne’s biographer. After the Carolingian period, the Merovingians were rehabilitated and re-enlisted to prop up the dynastic designs of the Capetian kings of France. In early modernity, the Merovingians were employed in the histories of Humanist authors and even in the work of the Jewish historian, Yosef Ha-Kohen. I received an ISF Independent Researcher Grant in 2017 to study this topic and the ensuing monograph—The Merovingians in Historiographical Tradition: From the Sixth to the Sixteenth Century—is currently in production with Cambridge University Press and is expected to be published in the coming months.

Presently, my research focuses on the rhetoric of purity and pollution in heresiological literature. Heresy featured prominently in the writings of ecclesiastical thinkers, even as its relevance as a political question waned in the West. It was nevertheless a useful category for articulating social boundaries, which might explain its enduring attraction. My first engagement with this topic produced a volume I co-edited with Erica Buchberger, titled: Inclusion and Exclusion in Mediterranean Christianities, 400 – 800, published by Brepols in 2019. I continued to focus on this topic as a visiting fellow of the University of Tübingen’s School of Advanced Studies project: Migration and Mobility in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. In September 2021, the research group I organized, Purity and Pollution in Late Antique and Medieval Culture and Society, received a fellowship at the Israel Institute of Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. The research group, which consisted of six scholars from various historical sub-disciplines, reconsidered purity and pollution as fundamental and ubiquitous concepts in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic societies from the sixth to the thirteenth centuries. My own contribution to the group examined heresy in early medieval Gaul and Spain as a ‘pollution of faith’ in heresiological, legal, and narrative sources. The work of the group culminated in an international conference, titled: ‘Sanitized Pasts: Purity, Pollution, and Historical Narrative’, which was held on 4-6 June 2023 and funded jointly by the IIAS and an ISF Research Workshop Grant, for which I am the PI.