Abstract

Bona fide historians who prefer secondary sources, especially deceptive ones, to primary sources do not come readily to mind. In modern accounts Charlemagne prospers without the archangel Gabriel as a strategic guide. Anglo-Saxon and Norman tall stories about William the Conqueror have given way to writs, Domesday Book, and the Bayeux Tapestry. Columbus no longer astounds his contemporaries by standing eggs on their heads, and further down the road of time, George Washington's shoulders have flexed free of the burden of Mason Weems's pieties. Yet many twentieth-century historians continue to reprocess as gospel sixth-century legends and didactic fiction that portray the first Prankish king of Gaul as a thoroughgoing barbarian