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Faculty Profile

The areas of Professor Murray's research interests are Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, with particular reference to the Late Roman Empire, Merovingian Gaul and Anglo-Saxon England.  His work largely concerns the social, institutional, and legal history of the period and its medieval and modern historiography. He is the author of Germanic Kinship Structure: Studies in Law and Society in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (1983); editor of After Rome’s Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History (1998); and translator/editor of From Roman to Merovingian Gaul: A Reader  (2000) and Gregory of Tours: The Merovingians (2006).  Articles include institutional studies on the Merovingian grafio (Speculum, 1986), centena or hundred (Traditio, 1988) and immunity (Speculum, 1994). He has also written on the dating of Beowulf (Colin Chase, 1983), so-called “Germanic and sacral kinship” (Murray, 1998), the historiography of “ethnogenesis” theories as applied to the Germanic peoples (Andrew Gillet, 2002), and the new MGH edition of the Merovingian diplomas (Journal of Medieval Latin, 2005).