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Andrew Gillett Ethnogenesis A Contested Model of Early Medieval Europe PDF
Andrew Gillett Ethnogenesis A Contested Model of Early Medieval Europe PDF
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.
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 Europe’s nation states or cultural groups; of
© Blackwell Publishing 2006
242 . Ethnogenesis
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?
© Blackwell Publishing 2006 History Compass 4/2 (2006): 241–260, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00311.x
244 . Ethnogenesis
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
© Blackwell Publishing 2006 History Compass 4/2 (2006): 241–260, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00311.x
Ethnogenesis . 247
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), 87 –168; 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 Rome’s 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): 513–33. For the later Middle Ages: R. Bartlett,
The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950 –1350 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1993); S. McKee, ‘Inherited Status and Slavery in Late Medieval Italy and
Venetian Crete’, Past and Present, 182 (2004): 31–53; 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 Rome’s Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History (Toronto: University
of Toronto, 1998), 348–84; and Brown,‘The Trojan Origins of the French: The Commencement
of a Myth’s Demise’, in A. P. Smyth (ed.), Medieval Europeans: Studies in Ethnic Identity and National
Perspectives in Medieval Europe (London: MacMillan, 1998), 103–18.
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, 576–85. 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. 500 –700 (Cambridge: Cambridge
© Blackwell Publishing 2006 History Compass 4/2 (2006): 241–260, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00311.x
254 . Ethnogenesis
University Press, 2001), 31–4. 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 Frühgeschichtlichen
Archäologie: Geschichte, Grundlagen und Alternativen (Berlin: W. De Gruyter, 2004).
4 Students and researchers are likely to encounter this approach in several recent reference or
Historical Ethnography’, Journal of Medieval History, 7 (1981): 309–19; Wolfram, ‘Origo et religo:
Ethnic Traditions and Literature in Early Medieval Texts’, Early Medieval Europe, 3 (1994): 19–38;
Pohl, ‘Conceptions of Ethnicity’; Pohl, ‘Ethnicity, Theory, and Tradition: A Response’, in Gillett
(ed.), On Barbarian Identity, 221–39; 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), 33–9.
6 With the publication of R. Wenskus, Stammesbildung und Verfassung: Das Werden der
Kulikowski, and Murray; Pohl,‘Ethnicity, Theory, and Tradition’, 221–39, 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. 500 –1000’, in D. Mauskopf Deliyannis (ed.), Historiography in the Middle Ages (Leiden:
Brill, 2003), 43–87. 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 418 –584: The Techniques of Accommodation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), ch.
1 (reprinted in Little and Rosenwein (eds.), Debating the Middle Ages, pp. 25–44); 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, 400 –1000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 48 –57; nor J. Harries, ‘Legal
Culture and Identity in the Fifth-Century West’, in Mitchell and Greatrex (eds.), Ethnicity and
Culture in Late Antiquity, 45–57 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), 4–33; Hall, Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2002), 9–29, 36–38. 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 Völkerwanderung of
© Blackwell Publishing 2006 History Compass 4/2 (2006): 241–260, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00311.x
Ethnogenesis . 255
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” Königtum germanischer
Stämme’, Festschrift für Otto Höfler (Vienna:Verlag Notring, 1968), 473–90; with greatest impact
in Wolfram’s original German edition, Geschichte der Goten: von den Anfängen 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
in Gillett (ed.), On Barbarian Identity, 53–4; cf. Curta, Making of the Slavs, 18–19.
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, 300– 900 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 24–36.
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), 127–41; Pohl,‘Gender and Ethnicity’.
16 Pohl, ‘Strategies of Distinction’; P. Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity,
different concerns) Ward-Perkins, Fall of Rome, 170– 2. Chapter on West: P. Geary, ‘Barbarians
and Ethnicity’, 107–29.
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
Gillett (ed.), On Barbarian Identity, 115 –18 (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),
288–97.
21 Geiseric’s 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?’,
108 –10; 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 Theoderic’s following remained distinct and sometimes
unbiddable in Gothic Italy; Procopius, Wars VII 2.1 –2. 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 Albion’s 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 6–7. For the Goths, see further M. Kulikowski, Rome’s Gothic Wars
from the Third Century to Alaric (forthcoming 2006).
22 Pohl,‘Gender and Ethnicity’, 24–36.
Scheibelreiter (eds.), Historiographie im frühen Mittelalter (Vienna, Oldenbourg, 1994), 539–42; 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), 10–11.
26 One example: Pohl, ‘Gender and Ethnicity’, 27 –9 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): 117 –34; Goffart, Narrators of Barbarian History, 38 –9, 86 –7; Goffart,
‘Jordanes’ Getica’; A. Gillett, ‘Jordanes and Ablabius’, in C. Deroux (ed.), Studies in Latin Literature
and Roman History (Brussels: Latomus, 2000), vol. 10, 479–500.
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), 152–67; reprinted in his The Writing of History and the Study of Law (Aldershot: Ashgate,
1997), paper II; L. Krapf. ‘The Literary Rediscovery of Tacitus’s Germania’, Res publica litterarum,
5 (1982): 137–43.
29 A. A. Lund, ‘Zur Gesamtinterpretation der Germania des Tacitus’, Aufstieg und Niedergang der
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
Germanic Antiquity’, in B. Murdoch and M. Read (eds.), Early Germanic Literature and Culture
(Rochester, NY: Camden, 2004), 5– 38. Continuity of Ethnogenesis from earlier Germanist
frameworks: Reynolds,‘Our Forefathers?’, 35–6.
34 For example, A. A. Lund, Die ersten Germanen: Ethnizität und Ethnogenese (Heidelberg: Winter,
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), 34 –54. For erroneous
views of ‘old’ and ‘new’ models: Goffart,‘Germanic Antiquity Today’. For precedents to Wenskus’
thought: Murray,‘Wenskus on “Ethnogenesis”’, 39–68, esp. pp. 53–54.
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);
Archaeology, 39, (1998): 19–45; Härke (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, 177–200; Brather,
Ethnische Interpretationen.
42 Pohl,‘Strategies of Distinction’, 2.
43 H. Wolfram,‘Origo Gentis: The Literature of Germanic Origins’, in Murdoch and Read (eds.),
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