THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES are hard to define as a period. As far as the literature and culture of the German-speaking countries are concerned, however, we might try to refine the term in various ways. We might, for example, refer to the Old High German period, which is a philological designation for the earliest stage of the German language, implying a period starting in about A.D. 500, when phonological distinctions between the ancestors of English (representing Low German) and modern German (representing High German) began to assert themselves, and ending around 1050, when a further set of distinctive sound changes within the High German dialects began to make themselves felt. Alternatively, we might choose an historical-dynastic designation and speak of the hegemony of the Franks, or of the Carolingian, Ottonian, and Salian periods. Neither the linguistic nor the dynastic definition is entirely satisfactory. The former would imply a restriction to High German only, ignoring continental Low German, and in any case, Old High German is a shorthand term for a number of different dialects that have, however, some shared features; furthermore, the German language was not written down until around 750. Cultural changes do not, in any case, always coincide with linguistic ones. Most important, though, the focus on the German language is itself a distortion, since most of the written literature in the geographical territory and in the period with which we are concerned is in Latin.