On Barbarian Identity: Critical Approaches to Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages (review)

Abstract

Reviews 227 Parergon 20.1 (2003) While her canvas is a relatively restricted one, Freeman has successfully demonstrated her capacity to engage in a close and imaginative reading of some little-studied historical texts. She shows that something interesting can often be drawn from writing traditionally dismissed as monastic curiosity rather than serious historical investigation. Constant J. Mews School of Historical Studies Monash University Gillett, Andrew, ed., On Barbarian Identity: Critical Approaches to Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages (Studies in the Early Middle Ages 4), Turnhout, Brepols, 2003; hardback; 8 colour plates, 12 b/w illustrations; pp. xxiv; 265; RRP EUR60.00; ISBN 2503511686. This important book mounts an aggressive assault on the use of ‘ethnogenesis’ models in the study of the barbarians of classical antiquity in both archaeology and philology/history. The historical critique is focussed on the work of Reinhard Wenskus, whose 1961 Stammsbildung und Verfassung is perceived as the origin of a scholarly community that is represented today by Herwig Wolfram, Walter Pohl and Patrick Geary, among others. The ‘culture history’ approach in archaeology is traced to ‘the work of Gustav Kossinna [1858-1931] and others’ (p. 4). The trajectories traced by the volume interlock in various ways: Section I examines cases of the use of’‘ethnogenesis’ in late antique and early medieval studies; Section II provides three archaeological cases which are primarily examinations of the genealogies of influential theoretical positions; and Section III contains two responses, by Walter Pohl and Charles Bowlus. Walter Goffart’s Section I opener, ‘Does the Distant Past Impinge on the InvasionAge Germans?’is a more informal, less academic piece than other contributions . There is charm in his frank use of anecdotal evidence and conversations with colleagues in his discussion of memory and the status of the distant past, and his insistence on the written Graeco-Roman record as the preserver of all that is known about Germanic peoples is well-argued (the case ofArminius being classic, p. 24). Particularly impressive is his analysis of migrations: ‘[c]ertainly, people moved; action generally involves motion. What matters, however, is not the incidental circumstance of changing places, but the broader occurrences that were going on’(p. 29). The second part of the paper is a more targeted critique of 228 Reviews Parergon 20.1 (2003) the work of Herwig Wolfram, concentrating on his ‘vision of an unbroken, millennial, tradition-rich development of the Germanic/German peoples’ (p. 36). With Alexander Callander Murray’s ‘Reinhard Wenskus on “Ethnogenesis”, and the Origin of the Franks’ the density of the volume increases sharply. The footnotes are often more powerful bearers of significance than the text of the papers, and one of the book’s strengths is the vast array of scholarship which is drawn together for the first time for an Anglophone audience. Murray considers three ways in which Wenskus’ work intersects ‘with the prevailing currents of German historiography’ (p. 54): concern to establish continuity between the Germans of the Roman world and modern Germany and German identity; a political connection (which is somewhat unclear, as the argument draws in the Nazi ideas of Otto Hofler, possibly to taint Wenskus by association); and the insistence that ethnic identity is carried by social and political elites. The final third of the essay uses the Franks as a case study, concluding that authors after Gregory of Tours were unaware of the inherited tradition posited by Wenskus ‘because it was not there’ (p. 67). The contributions of Michael Kulikowski (‘Nation versusArmy?ANecessary Contrast?’) andAndrew Gillett (‘Was Ethnicity Politicized in the Earliest Medieval Kingdom?’) are more closely-plotted case studies, Gillett’s containing a valuable fifteen-page tabulation of official evidence for royal titles in the barbarian kingdoms, which concludes that although some ‘ethnic titles’ (such as rex Francorum) are well-attested, the vast majority of titles are without ethnic designations. The final essay in Section II, Derek Fewster’s ‘Visions of National Greatness: Medieval Images, Ethnicity, and Nationalism in Finland, 1905-1945’, stands alone, in that its subject matter is outside late antiquity. However, it is a lively and informative piece, with eight wonderful illustrations, concentrating on the paucity of evidence for medieval Finland, and the political motivations of...