Numismatic Literature，Roberts, James N., The Silver Coins of Medieval France, 476-1610 AD, South Salem, New York, 1996, 587 pages, hardcover with dust jacket, described by the author as a "field guide" to the series. It makes identifying coins easy by arranging them into "sensible groups" of related types, rather than chronologically or geographically. These groups are based on relationships between designs, not simple arbitrary groupings. Crossing the boundaries of royal and feudal, this book relates imitative local coinages to their prototypes, including related coinages beyond the borders of France in Flanders, Luxembourg, Alsace-Lorraine and Savoy. A series included in this work, not always covered by others, is the Merovingian coinage of the 5th to 8th centuries. Series covered include not only good silver but billon (base silver) as well. Over 7,300 illustrations intelligently placed make this book simple to use, and hundreds of maps - one for each basic type - show numismatists the geographical dispersion of related types. Each entry also carries cross references to at least one source.
