Andrew Gillett-Ethnogenesis, A Contested Model of Early Medieval Europe

Ethnogenesis: A Contested Model of Early
Medieval Europe
Andrew Gillett
Macquarie University, Sydney
Abstract
Recent research in late antique and early medieval history has paid much attention
to Ethnogenesis. The historical model associated with this term explains the change
from the classical world to medieval conditions as the effect of ethnic identification
supplanting Hellenistic forms of public discourse. Culturally specific dynamics of
ethnicity, arising from proto-historical northern Europe, are seen as the engines of
change. Recent critiques of the approach, however, see both its methodology and
historiographic assumptions as problematic. This article seeks to clarify the current
debate, to set out the questions of evidence and interpretation for interested
Medievalists, and to draw the attention of non-Medievalists to this historiographic
debate over interpretative models for one of the major revolutions in western history.
History Compass first PODCAST is now available
The podcast is a discussion between Professor Felice Lifshitz, History Compass
medieval Europe editor, and Dr Andrew Gillett, a published History Compass author.
They examine Dr Gillets published essay,Ethnogenesis:A Contested Model of Early
Medieval Europe and ask: What is ethnogenesis? What are the questions of evidence
and interpretation for interested Medievalists? How do we draw the attention of
non-Medievalists to the historiographic debate over interpretative models for one
of the major revolutions in western history? Click here to launch the podcast:
http://www.gabcast.com/casts/1696/episodes/1168944449.mp3 (mp3 file, 14.4 MB,
20 minutes 33 seconds).
The Early Middle Ages, as the qualified name of this periodisation suggests,
serves scholarship largely as a time of transition, not as an epoch in its own
right. Study of the Early Middle Ages explains, in one way or another, the
loss of the classical world of city-states and universalising empires (in the
Mediterranean) and the passing of prehistory (in northern Europe); and
the rise of the true, High Medieval period of European kingdoms.
Non-medievalists pass through this period on their way elsewhere: to the
history of one or the other of Europes nation states or cultural groups; of
Blackwell Publishing 2006
History Compass 4/2 (2006): 241260, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00311.x
the Christian Church; or of the development of social and cultural practices.
In a backhanded way, early medievalists are thereby oddly empowered: they
are the keepers of explanations of the coming-into-being of the medieval,
pre-modern world, against which, in turn, modernity defined itself. Whether
as a stage in an evolutionary development or an archaism to be rejected, a
forebear or a foil, the Early Middle Ages are a necessary frame for the
historiography of later periods.
Unlike historical periods such as classical Athens, early Islam or
Renaissance Italy, models of the Early Middle Ages (at least prior to the
Carolingian period) rarely depict the period as self-defining, one which itself
generated its characteristic features. It is fundamentally a period of continuities
and terminations of the past; its traits are permutations of features from earlier
cultural and political forces. Three precursors conventionally vie for primacy
as the force that shaped the post-imperial world, either through domination
or disappearance: the Roman empire, the Christian Church, and the
barbarians of northern Europe. The particular mix of these Hellenistic,
Judeo-Christian and Germanic traditions their triumphs, declines or
transformations (as advertised in academic titles) provides the distinctive
flavour of individual depictions of the period. It is the selection of which
of these traditions most flourished or wilted, and how and why this occurred,
that provides explanatory models for the change from Antiquity to the
Middle Ages. For example: currently there is lively discussion on the fate
of Roman cities and their Hellenistic urban patterns in the post-imperial
period. Was the early medieval landscape starkly denuded of this fundamental
element of the ancient world, thus explaining a yawning cultural and
economic poverty? Or did communities throughout the western
Mediterranean maintain urban facilities and rhythms from Roman times,
thus transmitting a fundamentally Hellenistic, albeit Christianised, cultural
framework?
1
This is an example of how alternative discernments of the
survival or collapse of one of these three antecedent cultures, here the Roman
empire, shape our view of the nature of early medieval Europe.
This article concerns another current explanatory model of the post-imperial
West, one that locates the engine of change in the past of the Germanic
world, rather than in Roman or Christian Antiquity. Ethnogenesis theory
is convenient shorthand for a particular body of work that interprets the transi-
tion from classical to medieval culture as driven not by economics, religion
or warfare, but by ethnicity. The role of ethnicity as a social and political force
in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages has received increasing and valuable
attention in recent scholarship.
2
The creation of ethnic groups has traditionally
been a major topic of research of Germanic studies, in particular in Germanic
philology and archaeology; Germanic archaeology is currently undergoing
a radical and very welcome revolution in its approach to this study.
3
Amidst these various discussions, the particular theory discussed here has
arguably achieved the highest profile of current approaches to ethnicity in
the early Middle Ages, certainly in English-language studies; it is the approach
242 . Ethnogenesis
Blackwell Publishing 2006 History Compass 4/2 (2006): 241260, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00311.x
most non-early medievalists are likely to associate with the term Ethnogenesis,
and publications presenting this framework now may be expected to be
familiar to many medievalists and to be encountered by students at an early
stage of their studies.
4
This model proposes that particular dynamics of ethnic
identity-formation pre-dated the hegemony of Roman imperialism and
Hellenistic culture; they served as the dominant ideological bond for societal
cohesion in proto-historical European cultures. Muted by Roman domination,
these ethnic dynamics revived in the course of the late antique/early medieval
period, when they surmounted classical political ideologies, becoming the
basis for the formation and maintenance of both peoples and states in
early Europe. Elements of Roman and Christian traditions that can be seen
as having been appropriated by these ethnic discourses are also incorporated
into the Ethnogenesis model.
5
Usually described as originating in the 1960s in German and Austrian
scholarship on Germanische Altertumskunde (the study of Germanic Antiquity),
6
this paradigm has now become widely accepted and integrated into the fields
of Late Antiquity and early medieval history as an accepted mode of
understanding the shift from Roman empire to western kingdoms. It has
been welcomed as a new conception of the barbarian neighbours and
successors of the western Roman empire, more nuanced than past models,
and freed from an intellectually unacceptable framework of biological
determinism and essentialism linked to past and present racialist views.
This rise of Ethnogenesis to the status of orthodoxy has been accompanied
by surprisingly little debate, particularly when compared with other substantial
changes in contemporary understanding of the ancient and medieval worlds
(such as the recent discussions on Roman and post-Roman frontiers, Roman-
ization and feudalism).
7
Yet the impact of this new model is questionable.
Discussions that cite Ethnogenesis as background to the study of other topics
in the period are often themselves unaffected by the model.
8
Such
contradictory practices indicate at least a lack of clarity about Ethnogenesis,
notwithstanding its current high level of acceptance. Much about the model
is misunderstood, not least the belief that it is substantially new, rather than
an evolution of a venerable tradition of European scholarship. Debate over
Ethnogenesis in recent scholarship is not about whether one model of ethnic
discourse or identity-formation should be substituted for another; nor does
it revisit discussions in the social sciences on whether or not ethnic identity
is a societal construct (settled in the affirmative by current anthropological
thought). Rather it is a much broader question that treats issues fundamental
for the discipline of historical studies: issues of epistemology and our means
of knowing about past belief; issues of methodology and interpretative
frameworks within which to position our sources; and issues of modern
historiography and the trajectories of scholarly traditions. Was early Europe
a collection of rival, ideologically motivated ethnic communities; or is early
medieval public life better imagined in terms of post-Roman religious and
governmental practices? How do we choose?
Ethnogenesis . 243
The Ethnogenesis model
Ethnogenesis, now used as a technical term in early medieval studies, is a
word borrowed from the discipline of anthropology. A mid-twentieth-century
neologism, the word ethnogenesis is a label not of a particular theoretical
model, but of an observable phenomenon: the emergence of new social
groups that identify themselves or are identified by outsiders as having a
cohesive identity, an ethnic group in anthropological terms. Anthropology
proceeds from observing this phenomenon to the search for explanation of
its causes; that is, to theoretical models. The term Ethnogenesis is used in
discussions of a variety of theoretical attempts to explain the phenomenon,
just as the term Evolution is used in divergent models of that concept.
9
(Two variants of the neologism have gained currency in Anglophone
social sciences, ethnogenesis and ethnogeny. Here, the Anglicised
ethnogeny will be used to refer to the phenomenon of group formation
more or less a translation of the term while capitalised Ethnogenesis will
be reserved for the current Medievalist theories under discussion.)
Usage of the term Ethnogenesis in late antique/early medieval studies is
somewhat less precise, for in this scholarship the word refers not only to the
objective phenomenon of group formation, and to the processes involved
in making it happen, but also to theoretical models of these processes; the
term collapses together both phenomenon and interpretation. The author
identified as the formulator of this contemporary model, the German scholar
Reinhard Wenskus (in his 1961 Stammesbildung und Verfassung: Das Werden
der Frhmittelalterlichen Gentes) rarely used the term ethnogenesis, speaking
instead of Gentilismus; this was a personal neologism, used to render the
older term Volkstum without its obvert nationalistic sense (Wenskus derived
Gentilismus from Latin gens; this latter word, which has meanings ranging
from family to people, is used as a technical term in Ethnogenesis
discussions for its particular constitution of early medieval peoples). The
use of the anthropological term Ethnogenesis in medieval studies was
disseminated by the important Austrian historian Herwig Wolfram, who
has been crucial to developing Wenskuss thought.
10
The Ethnogenesis model has evolved considerably since Wenskuss book
and Wolframs adoption of his model in the 1960s.
11
What follows seeks to
address its core elements, noting major points of change. The model proposes
that the central, defining characteristic of the northern European barbarian
groups was a political and cultural process of self-identification. Group
identity as Goths,Franks,Langobards and so on was not fixed and simply
hereditary, but had to be generated and reified by the efforts of elites the
nobility of the barbarian groups, and particularly the royalty in order for
the diverse individuals who constituted their followings to accept that they
were members of one group, and that they owed loyalty to that groups
leaders. What we see in our sources as Goths and other peoples were in
fact polyethnic assemblages, groups of variegated provenance fused by
political and cultural means. This process did not occur only once in the
244 . Ethnogenesis
history of each people but, in order to maintain efficacy, had to be reiterated,
as generations passed and events threw up changing conditions. Wolfram
labelled this model of research historical ethnography, the study of a
recurring process of ethnic self-identification and redefinition.
12
In this broad outline, this model accords with now-conventional,
constructionist anthropological and sociological views of the nature of ethnic
group identity: a socio-political construct, utilising one or more elements
(language, physiognomy, social memory and cultural practices) as a
touchstone for a largely manufactured self-definition, and often deployed
for political or economic advantage; the impetus for the manufacture and
upkeep of this construct comes often from social elites (though recent
anthropological work has retreated from starkly instrumentalist models,
which locate the generation of ethnic identity exclusively in the political
strategies of elites). The Ethnogenesis model, however, was not produced
by this broad thrust in the social sciences throughout the late twentieth
century but developed parallel to it, from foundations that antedate the
development of current anthropological thought by some generations.
13
What distinguishes Ethnogenesis models from those proposed by the
social sciences (apart from the question of epistemology, addressed below,
which necessarily differs between contemporary studies and those dealing
with the remote past) is its specific template for processes of ancient Germanic
group-formation. In this model, three interrelated factors combine to first
produce ethnogeny and subsequently sustain group cohesion: military success
by war-leaders; a myth of the groups origins, identified with its ruling
dynasty; and a vehicle to perpetuate that myth across generations. Firstly,
the military success of war-leaders is central: victorious warriors attract
followings drawn not only from their own original groups but also from the
remnants of other peoples, especially those defeated in past battles. The
constitutions and identities of peoples constantly shift over time depending
on the fortunes of their leaders. In part the attraction of victorious war-leaders
is economic, the prospect of participating in future successes, but the more
fundamental attraction in this model is charisma, the projection of leaders
supra-human qualities.
Secondly, these war-leaders consolidate their authority by projecting their
charisma back in time. Casting themselves as members of long-lived dynasties,
they lay claim to authority not only on the contingency of present,
potentially transitory, military success; but also on their lineage, portrayed
as uniquely and divinely favoured. These dynastic claims bolster their
reputation as leaders, but more importantly serve to merge the multiple
identities of their current polyethnic following into the ethnicity (or gens)
of the noble leadership. The claims of dynastic succession are communicated
through oral narratives, what are called the origin myths (origines gentium)
or tribal sagas of the dominant group. These narratives are structured around
the (mythical) deeds and succession of its royal dynasty. Floating individuals,
accepting the identity of their leaders as their own in order to secure
Ethnogenesis . 245
membership of a successful group, do so by accepting these narratives and
the myth of direct, group descent. The royal dynasty precedes and generates
group identity; ethnicity is essentially an exclusive attribute of the social
elite, conferred for their advantage onto the mass of their satellites. The
narratives have a fundamentally religious aspect. In the original form of
Ethnogenesis theory, the authority of the dynasty originates, ultimately, in
descent from northern European divinities, one of the guises of Odin, similar
to the sacral kingship of some Near Eastern and Hellenistic royalties. More
recent modifications see a broader range of potential mythic referents that
could be used as bases for construction of mythic authority, including
appropriations of Greco-Roman discourses, although it is fair to say that the
latter are acceptable candidates only when they can be construed as
approximating Germanic models of ethnic narrative.
14
Extant, written
sources from the early Middle Ages are seen as preserving only recensions
of these postulated ancient oral narratives.
Military success is the fundamental driving force for ethnic group
formation, and origin myth the way of turning current success into the basis
for dynastic authority. Continuity of this identity over time was achieved
by what is called in earlier works the Traditionstrger (bearers of tradition),
the third key element in the Ethnogenesis model. Originally, these
tradition-bearers were an inner-circle of elite members of the group the
nobility that identified itself with the group identity and constituted a
narrower and more direct descent-group than the varied lesser followers.
In recent modifications, the dynamics of communication are carried out not
exclusively by these human agents but also by the momentum of barbarian
ethnic discourse itself, manifested intermittently in our textual sources as
ethnic narratives.
15
The communication of this ideology now commands
an increasing share of discussion in the Ethnogenesis approach. This on-going
process is understood as one in which communication was constant, as each
ethnic identity was continually reasserted against not only Roman imperial
ideology but also other, competing ethnicities.
16
Critiques
Ethnogenesis theory is a product of studies within the field of Germanic
Antiquity, but it has features that recommend it more widely throughout
medieval studies. It problematises the nature of the barbarian groups that
feature in late antique/early medieval history in a manner drawn directly
from Germanic studies, but unfamiliar to the traditions of other,
non-Germanicist scholarship. Rejecting biological determinism, it aligns
with contemporary anthropological thought in seeing ethnic groups as
socially and politically constructed, and more generally with late twentieth
century interest in the nature of identity. Most importantly perhaps, it offers
an explanatory model of change from classical to medieval cultures that is
amenable to these current wider interests: Hellenistic modes of thought
246 . Ethnogenesis
were supplanted by new ideologies, reconstructing individual and group
identity along ethnically based lines hence the fragmentary national map
of early medieval Europe was the product of ethnic discourses.
What objections are there to this model? Before outlining current
critiques, it may be informative to look more broadly, not at the
Ethnogenesis model itself, but at one gauge of its impact on recent studies.
In the eleven stimulating essays of the recent volume Late Antiquity: A Guide
to the Postclassical World, the first reference work devoted exclusively to Late
Antiquity as a coherent field, the West hardly figures except in one chapter,
on Barbarians and Ethnicity.
17
A student new to the area could be forgiven
for concluding that topics of other chapters in the volume, such as Sacred
Landscapes, Religious Community and even War and Violence, did not
figure significantly in early medieval societies. By the same token,ethnicity
(as opposed to identity based on religion or other identifiers) appears to be
a category of identity associated exclusively with the western barbarians, not
a factor in eastern societies.
18
This underscores a perceptible shift in recent
scholarly attitudes: despite the avowedly inclusive scope of Late Antiquity
(in its broad, North American sense), the emphasis on Ethnogenesis as
an explanatory model for western developments has facilitated a subtle
detachment of the post-imperial West from the rest of the late antique world;
it is sidelined as a society fixated with ethnic self-identification. Rather than
explaining developments in the post-imperial West within the broader
context of Late Antiquity, the Ethnogenesis model in fact reinforces very
old conceptions of European history: the fundamental processes which shape
and characterise early Europe are seen as indigenous, arising from its own
deepest pre-history; they are not shared with those that shaped the eastern
Mediterranean and Middle East.
To understand the problems presented to historical discussion by the
Ethnogenesis approach, it will be helpful to step back from its own terms
of discussion, in order to contextualise its argument both historically and
historiographically.
19
The topic can be approached at four levels, explored
(briefly) below in increasing order of significance: historical and evidential
(whether extant evidence actually supports the theory); methodological and
epistemological (the relationship between sources and model); historiographic
(the place of the Ethnogenesis approach in modern scholarship); and
meta-historical (the underlying narrative and philosophy of history from
which specific models and methodologies emanate).
First, historical: much of the action of the Ethnogenesis model, the early
formation of groups and generation of traditions, occurs before the barbarian
peoples registered in Greco-Roman written sources, therefore beyond
historical record. In lieu of written sources from the proto-historical period,
the theoretical model is based on philological, not historical, arguments; that
is, the use of Germanic linguistic sources (e.g. personal and group names,
the extant portions of the Gothic translation of the Bible) as evidence from
which to reconstruct ancient concepts, fossilised in the language when
Ethnogenesis . 247
recorded in historical periods. Such use of language as a palaeontological
medium is by no means confined to Germanic studies. The nature of the
topics on which it can shed light, however, is inherently restricted. It cannot,
for example, be used as a basis for the reconstruction of complex political,
constitutional ideas, such as literary sources might reveal to us.
20
More profitable for discussion is evidence from the historical period. To
choose one central element: the importance (as described above) of success
in war as the lodestone for leaders to attract followers willing to subsume
their disparate backgrounds into the dominating ethnic identity. Among
early medieval leaders, several stand out as candidates for such a role: Geiseric,
the Vandal conqueror of Roman North Africa (428477); Theoderic, the
Gothic ruler of the imperial heartland of Italy (c. 474 525); Clovis, the
Frankish subjugator of the Roman dioceses of Gaul (c. 481511); and Alboin,
the Lombard victor in Italy (c. 561 572). The military, political, and
administrative successes of none of these leaders extinguished particularist
identities among their followings. In all their kingdoms, discrete and in
some cases fissiparous barbarian ethnic identities are attested.
21
These
contradictions of the Ethnogenesis model are not simply a matter of debatable
historical evidence. Contemporary multi-cultural societies know well that
assimilation is not the same as absorption: minorities can fully participate in
the public life and culture of their host, and identify with the dominant
ethnic group, yet retain a separate ethnic identity over generations. The
examples above demonstrate these complex dynamics in the early medieval
West. The Ethnogenesis model does not accommodate this evidence.
Secondly, methodological: the Ethnogenesis theory examined here is
essentially philological, both in the restricted sense of the linguistic
palaeontology mentioned above, and in the broader sense of use of literary
texts. It is from the point of view of textual scholarship, and concern for
the necessity to analyse written works as texts before mining them as sources,
that most reservations about the Ethnogenesis approach arise. The role of
literary texts in the Ethnogenesis model is as witnesses to the origin myths
or ethnic discourses of individual groups. No extant text states that it serves
this purpose. Nevertheless, almost every late antique/early medieval text
and even many earlier, classical texts is liable to citation in the Ethnogenesis
model as evidence for the operation of these functionalist origin myths.
One recent article cites the Christian apologist Orosius, the pagan hoax-text
Scriptores historiae Augustae, and the classicising Procopius, amongst other
works, as evidence for an attempted ethnic narrative about the Amazons.
22
The Ethnogenesis approach regularly homogenises works of such diverse
genre and provenance into a single body of evidence for ethnic beliefs, in
order to search for underlying, northern European ethnic discourses
operating alongside the overt narrative and aims of the text, or even contrary
to them (as contradictions and paradoxes).
The treatment of literary texts is a crucial point of dispute between
advocates of the Ethnogenesis model and its critics, arising from a
248 . Ethnogenesis
fundamental difference in methodological assumptions. Critics of the
Ethnogenesis model insist that written sources need to be analysed as texts,
using traditional means of textual analysis (e.g. genre criticism, source
criticism, historical contextualisation) and current theoretical approaches to
literary analysis (e.g. narratology) in order to establish cultural context and
to analyse authorial purpose.
23
The Ethnogenesis model assesses texts
according to the extent of information they yield on identity-forming
processes:When we look in the sources for traces of the historical processes
of the creation of ethnicity, mostly we find information about warrior groups
and about the stories old men tell recollections of the elders and the
exploits of war bands
24
(this prefaces the discussion of the classicising and
Christian apologetic texts mentioned above). A seam of information, crossing
historical and generic boundaries, is pursued. To researchers in the
Ethnogenesis model, their critics approach to texts reduces the sources to
purely literary exercises;
25
to its critics, the Ethnogenesis approach waives
methodological analysis of sources in order to construct them as conduits
for a predetermined category of information.
26
The central text in this debate is Jordanes Getica, his pseudo-history of
the Goths. The Getica is the only extant late antique/early medieval text for
which a claim can be made that its author had access to sources close to
royalty (namely Cassiodorus lost Gothic History, one of Jordanes named sources),
and which therefore could possibly transmit a genuine elite ethnic ideology.
Whether or not this is a true reading of the work depends partly on questions
of source: whether Jordanes text (composed in Justinians Constantinople
after 551, at the end of the wars on Gothic Italy) passively reflects the form
and content of the lost Gothic History of Cassiodorus (composed in Italy
in the 520s/530s to celebrate the Gothic ruling house). It also depends on
the sources of both Cassiodorus and Jordanes: whether, as seen in the
Ethnogenesis model, they are based on genuine Gothic oral tradition
recollections of the elders or, as both authors explicitly state, on research
in Greco-Roman writings, often about quite different groups of barbarians.
27
Over and above the details of this particular debate, however, the appro-
priation in the Ethnogenesis model of Greco-Roman texts (such as Jordanes)
as the voices of genuine northern European traditions arises from deeper
methodological frameworks within philological Germanische Altertumskunde.
Early modern Germanists, lacking substantial literary monuments from the
ancient culture they wished to reconstruct, sought not only to use
Greco-Roman sources as windows onto Germanic deeds and beliefs from
Mediterranean perspectives, but also to transpose Greco-Roman works into
native Germanic evidence. Tacitus Germania could be removed from its
Roman imperial context, in order to make him a spokesman for northern
peoples; Tacitus became, not a Roman author writing with centuries of
Hellenistic traditions of ethnography behind him, but a transmitter of actual
Germanic views.
28
(Modern criticism has asserted Tacitus true role as
Greco-Roman ethnographer, with limited access to, or interest in, real
Ethnogenesis . 249
Germanic traditions.
29
) Infinitely more sophisticated, current Ethnogenesis
approaches nevertheless proceed from a comparable epistemological starting
point of transforming classical and classicising sources into barbarian ones.
30
Jordanes text is an obvious case of a work appropriated as a Germanic
discourse (as it has been since the sixteenth century) despite explicit Greco-
Roman literary topoi (from classical ethnography), Byzantine attitudes (the
celebration of Justinians victory over the Goths in Italy) and acknowledged
classical sources (an array of Greek and Roman geographers and historians).
More fundamentally, however, the Ethnogenesis approach consistently seeks
to appropriate classical ethnographical writings (works on the history and
mores of foreign peoples) as part of a northern European ethnic discourse
or ethnic narrative.
31
This is intensely problematic. The discourse of classical
ethnography seeks to alienate its audience from the foreign object of its
discussion. To read works informed by this discourse as almost all sources
on late antique barbarians are as a medium of self-identification requires
the wholesale overturning of their textual integrity.
32
This raises a third aspect of analysis of the Ethnographic model: its modern
historiographical context. Ethnogenesis is to be situated historiographically
within the long traditions of the discipline of Germanische Altertumskunde,
not simply of contemporary Early Medieval History; these two academic
fields overlap, but are not identical.
33
The question of ethnogeny, with regard
to the origins of the Germani, has been and remains a legitimate, core issue
in Germanic Antiquity studies.
34
Ethnogenesis discussions in large part
represent the importation of this issue onto the wider stage of medieval
history. Most discussions of the model draw a sharp distinction between the
Ethnogenesis approach and pre-1960s work on the northern barbarians.
Earlier Germanist research is often assumed to have been based on a model
of innate, biological definitions of barbarian peoples, irretrievably tainted
by association with Nazi ideologies; while Ethnogenesis, by contrast,
rejects biological explanations, seeing the identity of peoples as socially
constructed. It is, then, something of a surprise to read reviews of Wenskus
1961 Stammesbildung und Verfassung and note how little sense of novelty is
registered there.
35
Not only were many of Wenskus ideas already in
circulation decades earlier, but the present assumption of many medievalists
that biological models of ethnicity are old, and socially-constructed
models are new, is quite misled. Unsurprisingly in view of its long history,
scholarship in Germanische Altertumskunde has been far more complex than
the simple dichotomy suggested in current accounts, with alternative models,
biological and social, coexisting and competing since the early twentieth
century, neither exclusively involved in or divorced from racialist politics.
Models of Vlker (what we would now call ethnic groups) as being constituted
culturally rather than biologically reach back to the early twentieth century,
in turn developing from earlier precedents.
36
The key term in these
discussions is not ethnicity but Kontinuitt, continuity, of group
identity.
250 . Ethnogenesis
Acknowledging the academic traditions from which the Ethnogenesis
model developed is not to deny the intellectual distance between Wenskus
and his predecessors, and advances between Wenskus and current versions
of Ethnogenesis.
37
It should not be necessary, but for the intemperance of
some reviewers, to state that, of course, rejection of the dark period of
Germanic Antiquity studies underlies the trajectory of contemporary research
in the field. But it needs to be noted that many of the developments from
Wenskus predecessors to now have been strictly within the parameters of
the discipline of Germanic Antiquity, concerning debates not readily
appreciable to other medievalists and scholars, who are often confused about
which aspects of Ethnogenesis theory are recent and which are long-standing
concepts in Germanic Antiquity studies. The heuristic value of this model,
moreover, is to an extent vitiated by indebtedness to the templates of older
Germanische Altertumskunde. This has acted to isolate the discussion from
other current research that could profitably reposition the topic of early
medieval ethnicity outside Germanist parameters. Twenty years of vigorous
Classicist scholarship on the construct of the barbarian in Greco-Roman
ethnographic thought the habits of thought that lay behind our late
antique/early medieval texts have not permeated Ethnogenesis or other
early medievalist discussion. This is a pity, as much that is generally assumed
to be characteristic of early medieval sources, and so is interpreted as revealing
of identity-formation (such as narratives of migration, and the inclusion of
names and items of vocabulary in written texts), in fact becomes readily
explicable when viewed in the context of Greco-Roman ethnographic
traditions, and is informative of quite different, Hellenistic cultural
discourses.
38
Likewise, Ethnogenesis discussions have not interacted
significantly with other current discussions on forms of identity in Late
Antiquity.
39
Contemporary theoretical discourses are employed to support,
not to interrogate, the model.
40
Greater historiographic discussion of this
field of Germanic Antiquity studies by its practitioners, comparable to recent
analyses of Germanic proto-historical archaeology,
41
is a desideratum that
could clarify terms of discussion and contextualise current debate.
Finally, and most importantly, meta-history: the underlying narrative of
the approach, and the choice of explanatory model. The search for processes
of ethnic self-identification and continuity springs from a venerable vision
of history, rather than from the sources. The view that the history of the
post-imperial West is to be understood as shaped by the forces of ethnic
identity, that ethnic discourse became the key to political power,
42
harks
back, however distantly, to Romantic outlooks that saw nations or peoples
as the prime movers of history, a central tenet of early modern Germanic
studies. Though the argumentation is modern, the outcome of this
meta-narrative is the same: the determining processes in early European
history were indigenous, emanating from northern European Germanic
peoples. Early medieval history is, in its essence, a continuation of northern
European proto-history, not of the Roman state that preceded the medieval
Ethnogenesis . 251
kingdoms. The options of Roman/Hellenistic and Christian origins of
thought and institutions are subordinated and appropriated; Livy and the
Old Testament become additional ethnic narratives to be exploited
according to the cultural template of Germanic origin myth.
43
The model
is fundamentally essentialist in its vision of inherent cultural patterns that
replicate themselves over centuries, surviving underground during Roman
imperial domination to re-emerge and mould societies anew in Late Antiquity.
Neither the longevity of this vision, nor its narrative characteristics, is
necessarily an argument against its validity. But it should be recognised that
the meta-narrative of Ethnogenesis is chosen, not dictated by evidence. As
an explanatory model of the changes from Antiquity to the Middle Ages,
the force of ethnic assertiveness is, on the basis of our evidence, at least
questionable. It is not merely that the key agent of ethnic continuity in the
Ethnogenesis model, the indigenous Germanic origin myth, is unattested
and must be reconstructed from Greco-Roman materials. In fact, evidence
for ethnic consciousness and assertiveness in the early medieval period is
rather more chimerical than one might expect. As Kurth recognised long
ago, the ethnic titles of key institutions kingdoms and kingship familiar
to us from modern literature, are ill-attested in the sources; a western king
was a rex, not rex Gothorum.
44
Ethnic titles such as kingdom of the Goths
are literary terminology, reflecting centuries of Greco-Roman thought
conflating geographical regions with ethne, peoples and insouciant of the
autonyms or world-view of foreign peoples. These titles have been in turn
reified in the modern historical imagination by the nationalist context of
early modern scholarship, seeing the post-imperial states as proto-nations.
Similarly, the ethnic titles of many sources Lex Romana Visigothorum and
others are modern editorial and interpretative additions, not original.
45
The ethnic framework of early medieval studies reflects the bent of modern
thought more clearly than the outlook of the post-imperial West.
Quite different templates are available for envisaging the western kingdoms.
The post-imperial kingdoms in Italy, Spain and Gaul occupied geographical
regions that closely replicated the administrative structures of the Roman
imperial dioceses. The ethnic terms used by literary sources to refer to
these kingdoms, such as Frank and Goth, reflect Roman use of umbrella
ethnic categories, employed to simplify diversity. There is a rough parallel
with many post-colonial states of south-east Asia and Africa in the later
twentieth century, established on boundaries reflecting European imperial
possessions and bearing pseudo-ethnic names originating in early modern
European terminology (for example,Indo-China and Indonesia), reflecting
European colonial thought and practices, not autonyms. The extent of the
Roman foundations of the post-imperial West, underscored long ago by
Dopsch, is far from fully excavated.
46
Understanding the period through the
determining role of Roman structures and thought is also a meta-historical
choice that can be overemphasised. But the gap between current portrayals
of early medieval Europe as a patchwork of competing ethnic groups, and
252 . Ethnogenesis
the rather muted evidence for ethnic assertiveness in our sources, suggests
that at this stage in historical studies we should be better employed in seeking
to strip back from our sources the accretions of centuries of European
scholarship, than in providing theoretical foundations for them.
By problematising the group identity of the barbarians that figures in
our sources, Ethnogenesis writings have usefully spurred early medievalists
to join in dialogue with other research on the construction of identity. Work
in this approach has also laudably sought to undercut intellectual support
for recently resurgent extreme nationalism in Europe.
47
Ironically, given
these sincere aims, Ethnogenesis presents a model in which ethnicity is
understood not just as one socio-cultural factor among others, but as a
primary force subordinating all other aspects of late antique/early-medieval
culture, and generating an early Europe of competing, manipulated ethnic
rivalries. It seeks to describe processes that, by their nature, ultimately cannot
be directly attested as is the case for so much research into the more remote
past. It is therefore all the more important, in assessing the value of this
theory, to understand the methodological and historiographic frameworks
underpinning this choice of an explanatory model of historical change.
Notes
1
J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz, The Decline and Fall of the Roman City (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001); B. Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), 87168; G. P. Brogiolo and B. Ward-Perkins (eds.), The Idea and Ideal of
the Town between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 1999); M. Kulikowski,
Late Roman Spain and Its Cities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2004).
2
For Late Antiquity: S. Mitchell and G. Greatrex (eds.), Ethnicity and Culture in Late Antiquity
(London: Duckworth, 2000). For the early Middle Ages: S. Reynolds, Our Forefathers? Tribes,
Peoples, and Nations in the Historiography of the Age of Migrations, in A. Callander Murray
(ed.), After Romes Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1998), 17 36; B. Ward-Perkins, Why Did the Anglo-Saxons Not Become
More British?, English Historical Review, 115 (2000): 51333. For the later Middle Ages: R. Bartlett,
The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 9501350 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1993); S. McKee, Inherited Status and Slavery in Late Medieval Italy and
Venetian Crete, Past and Present, 182 (2004): 3153; McKee, Uncommon Dominion: Venetian Crete
and the Myth of Ethnic Purity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); E. A. R.
Brown, The Trojan Origins of the French and the Brothers Jean du Tillet, in A. C. Murray
(ed.), After Romes Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History (Toronto: University
of Toronto, 1998), 34884; and Brown,The Trojan Origins of the French: The Commencement
of a Myths Demise, in A. P. Smyth (ed.), Medieval Europeans: Studies in Ethnic Identity and National
Perspectives in Medieval Europe (London: MacMillan, 1998), 10318.
3
Twentieth-century culture history approaches, concerned with ascribing different styles of
material items to particular ethnic groups and so tracking the historical movement of those groups
through the distribution patterns of styles, have received serious criticism; the distribution patterns
of styles have instead been interpreted as evidence of interaction and exchange, opening up a new
field of study in the dynamics of contact throughout proto-historical northern Europe. For an
overview of Germanic archaeology: U. Veit, German Prehistoric Archaeology, in T. Murray
(ed.), Encyclopedia of Archaeology: History and Discoveries (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2001),
vol. 2, 57685. For critique of the culture history ethnic ascription approach: B. Effros, Merovingian
Mortuary Archaeology and The Making of the Early Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2003); cf. the reassertion of the association of style and ethnicity in F. Curta, The Making of
the Slavs: History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube Region, c. 500700 (Cambridge: Cambridge
Ethnogenesis . 253
University Press, 2001), 314. For new interpretive approaches: S. Brather, Ethnic Identities as
Constructions of Archaeology: The Case of the Alamanni, in A. Gillett (ed.), On Barbarian Identity:
Critical Approaches to Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages, Studies in the Early Middle Ages (Turnhout:
Brepols, 2002), 149 75; and especially Brather, Ethnische Interpretationen in der Frhgeschichtlichen
Archologie: Geschichte, Grundlagen und Alternativen (Berlin: W. De Gruyter, 2004).
4
Students and researchers are likely to encounter this approach in several recent reference or
introductory works, including P. Geary, Barbarians and Ethnicity, in G. W. Bowersock, P.
Brown, and O. Grabar (eds.), Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press, 1999), 10729; W. Pohl, Conceptions of Ethnicity in Early Medieval Studies, in
L. R. Little and B. Rosenwein (eds.), Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 1998), 1524 (originally appearing in Archaeologia Polona, 29 (1991): 3949). Widely
cited monographs include the English translation of H. Wolfram, History of the Goths, trans. T. J.
Dunlap (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); P. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The
Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). At a more specialist level,
several volumes in the series The Transformation of the Roman World have been an important platform
for bringing the Ethnogenesis approach to the attention of a wide audience: W. Pohl (ed.), Kingdoms
of the Empire: The Integration of Barbarians in Late Antiquity (Brill: Leiden, 1997); W. Pohl and H.
Reimitz (eds.), Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of Ethnic Communities, 300 800 (Brill:
Leiden, 1998); R. Corradini, M. Diesenberger, and H. Reimitz (eds.), The Construction of
Communities in the Early Middle Ages: Texts, Resources and Artefacts (Brill: Leiden, 2003); H.-W.
Goetz, J. Jarnut, and W. Pohl (eds.), Regna and Gentes: The Relationship between Late Antique and
Early Medieval Peoples and Kingdoms in the Transformation of the Roman World (Brill: Leiden, 2002).
5
Useful overviews of the Ethnogenesis approach include: H. Wolfram, Gothic History and
Historical Ethnography, Journal of Medieval History, 7 (1981): 30919; Wolfram, Origo et religo:
Ethnic Traditions and Literature in Early Medieval Texts, Early Medieval Europe, 3 (1994): 1938;
Pohl, Conceptions of Ethnicity; Pohl, Ethnicity, Theory, and Tradition: A Response, in Gillett
(ed.), On Barbarian Identity, 22139; Geary, Barbarians and Ethnicity. For assessments and partial
adoptions of the Ethnogenesis approach: P. Heather, The Goths (Oxford, Blackwell, 1996), 169,
299 303; P. Amory, People and Identity in Ostrogothic Italy, 489 554 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 339.
6
With the publication of R. Wenskus, Stammesbildung und Verfassung: Das Werden der
Frhmittelalterlichen Gentes (Cologne: Bhlau, 1961).
7
Critiques: assembled in Gillett (ed.), On Barbarian Identity, essays by Bowlus, Gillett, Goffart,
Kulikowski, and Murray; Pohl,Ethnicity, Theory, and Tradition, 22139, replies to these critiques.
See also C. R. Bowlus, Ethnogenesis Models and the Age of Migrations: A Critique, Austrian
History Yearbook, 26 (1995): 147 64; W. Goffart, Two Notes on Germanic Antiquity Today,
Traditio, 50 (1995): 9 30; Goffart, Jordanes Getica and the Disputed Authenticity of Gothic
Origins from Scandinavia, Speculum, 80 (2005): 379 98; J. M. Pizarro, Ethnic and National
History, c. 5001000, in D. Mauskopf Deliyannis (ed.), Historiography in the Middle Ages (Leiden:
Brill, 2003), 4387. Before the valorisation of the term Ethnogenesis, the fundamental issues of
source methodology and historiographic context were raised by W. Goffart, Barbarians and Romans,
AD 418584: The Techniques of Accommodation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), ch.
1 (reprinted in Little and Rosenwein (eds.), Debating the Middle Ages, pp. 2544); Goffart, The
Narrators of Barbarian History: Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1988).
8
Two examples among many: the discussions of neither L. M. Bitel, Women in Early Medieval
Europe, 4001000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 4857; nor J. Harries, Legal
Culture and Identity in the Fifth-Century West, in Mitchell and Greatrex (eds.), Ethnicity and
Culture in Late Antiquity, 4557 are shaped by opening references to Ethnogenesis models.
9
Current literature in this field is enormous. Medievalists, though, will read with profit the
judicious overviews in J. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), 433; Hall, Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2002), 929, 3638. In addition to summarising recent developments in anthropological
theory on ethnicity, Hall relates contemporary discussions to early modern scholarly constructs
(e.g. of the Indo-Europeans) which created the framework for key concepts as familiar to
medievalists as to classicists (e.g. Indo-European migrationist theories, whence derive the concepts
of both the ancient Greek Dorian migrations and the Germanic Migrations or Vlkerwanderung of
254 . Ethnogenesis
medieval sudies; also the later scholarly concern with Slavic Migrations). See also Curta, Making
of the Slavs, 14 34 for twentieth-century developments in ethnic theory and their relationship
with early-medieval archaeology.
10
Initially in H. Wolfram, Methodische Fragen zur Kritik an sakralen Knigtum germanischer
Stmme, Festschrift fr Otto Hfler (Vienna:Verlag Notring, 1968), 47390; with greatest impact
in Wolframs original German edition, Geschichte der Goten: von den Anfngen bis zur Mitte des 6.
Jahrhunderts Entwurf einer historischen Ethnographie (Munich: Beck, 1979); rev. ed., Die Goten und
ihre Geschichte (Munich: Beck, 2001) and translated by Thomas J. Dunlap as History of the Goths.
11
Summarised in Pohl, Ethnicity, Theory, and Tradition, esp. 224 5. Earlier stages in
development: Wolfram, Methodische Fragen; Wolfram, Typen der Ethnogenese: Ein Versuch,
in D. Geuenich (ed.), Die Franken und die Alemannen bis zur Schlacht bei Zlpich (496/497)
(Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1998), 60827; Pohl,Tradition, Ethnogenese, und literarische Gestaltung:
eine Zwischenbilanz, in K. Brunner and B. Merta (eds.), Ethnogenese und Uberliefung: Angewandte
Methoden der Frhmittelalterforschung (Vienna: Oldenbourg, 1994), 9 26; Pohl, Introduction:
Strategies of Distinction, in Pohl and Reimitz (eds.), Strategies of Distinction, 115.
12
Wolfram, Gothic History and Historical Ethnography;Wolfram, History of the Goths, 118.
13
A. C. Murray, Reinhard Wenskus on Ethnogenesis, Ethnicity, and the Origin of the Franks,
in Gillett (ed.), On Barbarian Identity, 534; cf. Curta, Making of the Slavs, 1819.
14
For example W. Pohl, Gender and Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages, in L. Brubaker and J.
M. H. Smith (eds.), Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300900 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2436.
15
Pohl, Tradition, Ethnogenese, und literarische Gestaltung; Pohl, Social Language, Identities,
and the Control of Discourse, in E. Chrysos and I. Wood (eds.), East and West: Modes of
Communication (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 12741; Pohl, Gender and Ethnicity.
16
Pohl, Strategies of Distinction; P. Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity,
AD 2001000, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 104.
17
Bowersock, Brown, and Grabar (eds.), Late Antiquity. Dimunition of West: cf. (with regard to
different concerns) Ward-Perkins, Fall of Rome, 1702. Chapter on West: P. Geary, Barbarians
and Ethnicity, 10729.
18
Cf. the index to A. Cameron, B. Ward-Perkins, and M. Whitby (eds.), The Cambridge Ancient
History, vol. 14: Late Antiquity and Successors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
listing ethnic identity in the west but not in the east; under identity, the sub-entry for in western
kingdoms refers back to ethnic identity. The conception of ethnic identity described within
the text is the Ethnogenesis model (p. 262), though without citation to modern studies. Cf. the
index to M. Maas (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005).
19
More specific issues are discussed in the papers by Bowlus, Gillett, Goffart, Kulikowski and
Murray in Gillett (ed.), On Barbarian Identity.
20
For example, A. Gillett, Was Ethnicity Politicized in the Earliest Medieval Kingdoms? in
Gillett (ed.), On Barbarian Identity, 11518 (on the allegedly Gothic constitutional title rex); see
also S. Fanning, Emperors and Empires in Fifth-Century Gaul, in J. F. Drinkwater and H. Elton
(eds.), Fifth-Century Gaul: A Crisis of Identity? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
28897.
21
Geiserics kingdom was formally identified as that of two peoples, the Vandals and the Alani (a
rare case of a royal title qualified by any ethnic association); Gillett, Was Ethnicity Politicized?,
10810; cf. W. Pohl, The Vandals: Fragments of a Narrative, in A. H. Merrills (ed.), Vandals,
Romans and Berbers: New Perspectives on Late Antique North Africa (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 42.
Theoderic: Rugi who had formed part of Theoderics following remained distinct and sometimes
unbiddable in Gothic Italy; Procopius, Wars VII 2.12. Clovis: by the mid-sixth century, at least
one community within Frankish Gaul was still identified as Taifali, a very minor group whose
continued identity can have nothing to do with heroic leadership; Gregory of Tours, Historiae IV
18, 7; other members of Gaul in the time of Gregory of Tours are identified as e.g. Saxons or
Lombards. Alboin: Saxons who had accompanied Albions Lombards into Italy remained distinct
and departed from Italy a decade later; Gregory of Tours, Historiae IV 42,V 15; Paul the Deacon,
Historia Langobardorum II 6, III 67. For the Goths, see further M. Kulikowski, Romes Gothic Wars
from the Third Century to Alaric (forthcoming 2006).
22
Pohl, Gender and Ethnicity, 2436.
Ethnogenesis . 255
23
For example, W. Goffart, Does the Distant Past Impinge on the Invasion Age Germans? in
Gillett (ed.), On Barbarian Identity, 2137; Goffart, Jordanes Getica, 37998; A. C. Murray, Post
vocantur Merohingii: Fredegar, Merovech, and Sacral Kingship in A. C. Murray (ed.), After Romes
Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1998), 121
52. Cf. Pizarro, Ethnic and National History, 4347.
24
Pohl, Gender and Ethnicity, 234.
25
P. Geary, Frhmittelalterliche Historiographie: Zusammenfassung, in A. Scharer and G.
Scheibelreiter (eds.), Historiographie im frhen Mittelalter (Vienna, Oldenbourg, 1994), 53942; Pohl,
Tradition, Ethnogenese, und literarische Gestaltung; Pohl, Memory, Identity, and Power in
Lombard Italy, in Y. Hen and M. Innes (eds.), The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1011.
26
One example: Pohl, Gender and Ethnicity, 279 reads Orosius and Jordanes as reflecting the
contradictions of ethnic narratives that pre-exist and shape their text; no authorial intent or
historical context is acknowledged.
27
Cassiodorus, Variae IX 4; Jordanes, Getica 38; B. Croke,Cassiodorus and the Getica of Jordanes,
Classical Philology, 82 (1987): 11734; Goffart, Narrators of Barbarian History, 389, 867; Goffart,
Jordanes Getica; A. Gillett, Jordanes and Ablabius, in C. Deroux (ed.), Studies in Latin Literature
and Roman History (Brussels: Latomus, 2000), vol. 10, 479500.
28
D. Kelley, Tacitus noster: The Germania in the Renaissance and the Reformation, in T. J. Luce
and A. J. Woodman (eds.), Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1993), 15267; reprinted in his The Writing of History and the Study of Law (Aldershot: Ashgate,
1997), paper II; L. Krapf. The Literary Rediscovery of Tacituss Germania, Res publica litterarum,
5 (1982): 13743.
29
A. A. Lund, Zur Gesamtinterpretation der Germania des Tacitus, Aufstieg und Niedergang der
Rmischen Welt, II 33/2 (1991): 1857988.
30
Cf. A. Gillett,Introduction: Ethnicity, History, and Methodology, in Gillett (ed.), On Barbarian
Identity, 13; Gillett, Was Ethnicity Politicized?, 1158.
31
For example, Pohl, Gender and Ethnicity, 412: when more or less Romanised barbarians
came to rule parts of the Roman empire, they gradually appropriated for themselves the
ethnographic discourse once used to describe and explain their otherness. This assertion that
Greco-Roman texts (such as, in this instance, Orosius) can be read as part of processes of
post-Roman self-identification is unsupported by argumentation. The following passage
(pp. 42 3), on origin myths of descent from Trojans, conflates two different classical discourses:
ethnography, which alienates its audience from its subject, and kinship diplomacy, which seeks
to ally groups construed as sharing descent; C. P. Jones, Kinship Diplomacy in the Ancient World
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
32
A. Gillett, The Mirror of Jordanes: Concepts of the Barbarian,Then and Now, in P. Rousseau
(ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Late Antiquity (forthcoming).
33
For a brief survey of the history of Germanische Altertumskunde: H. Beck, The Concept of
Germanic Antiquity, in B. Murdoch and M. Read (eds.), Early Germanic Literature and Culture
(Rochester, NY: Camden, 2004), 538. Continuity of Ethnogenesis from earlier Germanist
frameworks: Reynolds, Our Forefathers?, 356.
34
For example, A. A. Lund, Die ersten Germanen: Ethnizitt und Ethnogenese (Heidelberg: Winter,
1998), 1135; Brather, Ethnische Interpretationen in der Frhgeschichtlichen Archologie.
35
For example, reviews by J. M. Wallace-Hadrill in English Historical Review, 79 (1964): 1379;
F. Graus in Historica 7, (1963): 18593.
36
For overview of earlier models of the continuity of Germanic peoples: W. Emmerich, The
Mythos of Germanic Continuity, in J. R. Dow and H. Lixfeld (eds. and trans.), The Nazification
of an Academic Discipline (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 3454. For erroneous
views of old and new models: Goffart, Germanic Antiquity Today. For precedents to Wenskus
thought: Murray, Wenskus on Ethnogenesis, 3968, esp. pp. 5354.
37
For overview of developments from the 1960s to c. 2000: Pohl, Ethnicity, Theory, and
Tradition.
38
Gillett, Mirror of Jordanes.
39
For example, R. Miles (ed.), Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1999);
Mitchell and Greatrex (eds.), Ethnicity and Culture in Late Antiquity.
256 . Ethnogenesis
40
Gillett, Ethnicity, History, and Methodology, 1516; Murray, Wenskus on Ethnogenesis,
3941.
41
For example, H. Hrke, Archaeologists and Migrations: A Problem of Attitude?, Current
Archaeology, 39, (1998): 1945; Hrke (ed.), Archaeology, Ideology and Society: The German Experience
(Frankfurt: P. Lang, 2000); H. Steuer (ed.), Eine hervorragend nationale Wissenschaft (Berlin: De
Gruyter, 2001); H. Fehr, Volkstum as Paradigm: Germanic People and Gallo-Romans in Early
Roman Archaeology since the 1930s, in Gillett (ed.), On Barbarian Identity, 177200; Brather,
Ethnische Interpretationen.
42
Pohl, Strategies of Distinction, 2.
43
H. Wolfram,Origo Gentis: The Literature of Germanic Origins, in Murdoch and Read (eds.),
Early Germanic Literature and Culture, 3943.
44
G. Kurth, Francia et Francus, in tudes franques (Paris: H. Champion, 1919), vol. 1, 68 137;
Gillettt, Was Ethnicity Politicized?.
45
Most obviously Gregory of Tours Historiae (not History of the Franks); but also a range of
pre-Carolingian legal and other texts; Gillett, Was Ethnicity Politicized?, 90.
46
A. Dopsch, The Economic and Social Foundations of European Civilization (1923; English trans.,
New York: Fertig, 1969).
47
Geary, Myth of Nations, 140.
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