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

Ethnogenesis: A Contested Model of EarlyMedieval EuropeAndrew GillettMacquarie University, Sydney

AbstractRecent research in late antique and early medieval history has paid much attentionto Ethnogenesis.The historical model associated with this term explains the changefrom the classical world to medieval conditions as the effect of ethnic identificationsupplanting Hellenistic forms of public discourse. Culturally specific dynamics ofethnicity, arising from proto-historical northern Europe, are seen as the engines ofchange. Recent critiques of the approach, however, see both its methodology andhistoriographic assumptions as problematic.This article seeks to clarify the currentdebate, to set out the questions of evidence and interpretation for interestedMedievalists, and to draw the attention of non-Medievalists to this historiographicdebate over interpretative models for one of the major revolutions in western history.

History Compass first PODCAST is now availableThe podcast is a discussion between Professor Felice Lifshitz, History Compassmedieval Europe editor, and Dr Andrew Gillett, a published History Compass author.They examine Dr Gillets published essay,Ethnogenesis:A Contested Model of EarlyMedieval Europe and ask:What is ethnogenesis?What are the questions of evidenceand interpretation for interested Medievalists? How do we draw the attention ofnon-Medievalists to the historiographic debate over interpretative models for oneof 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 ownright. Study of the Early Middle Ages explains, in one way or another, theloss of the classical world of city-states and universalising empires (in theMediterranean) and the passing of prehistory (in northern Europe); andthe rise of the true, High Medieval period of European kingdoms.Non-medievalists pass through this period on their way elsewhere: to thehistory of one or the other of Europes nation states or cultural groups; of Blackwell Publishing 2006

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the Christian Church; or of the development of social and cultural practices.In a backhanded way, early medievalists are thereby oddly empowered: theyare the keepers of explanations of the coming-into-being of the medieval,pre-modern world, against which, in turn, modernity defined itself.Whetheras a stage in an evolutionary development or an archaism to be rejected, aforebear or a foil, the Early Middle Ages are a necessary frame for thehistoriography of later periods.

Unlike historical periods such as classical Athens, early Islam orRenaissance Italy, models of the Early Middle Ages (at least prior to theCarolingian period) rarely depict the period as self-defining, one which itselfgenerated its characteristic features. It is fundamentally a period of continuitiesand terminations of the past; its traits are permutations of features from earliercultural and political forces.Three precursors conventionally vie for primacyas the force that shaped the post-imperial world, either through dominationor disappearance: the Roman empire, the Christian Church, and thebarbarians of northern Europe.The particular mix of these Hellenistic,Judeo-Christian and Germanic traditions their triumphs, declines ortransformations (as advertised in academic titles) provides the distinctiveflavour of individual depictions of the period. It is the selection of whichof these traditions most flourished or wilted, and how and why this occurred,that provides explanatory models for the change from Antiquity to theMiddle Ages. For example: currently there is lively discussion on the fateof Roman cities and their Hellenistic urban patterns in the post-imperialperiod.Was the early medieval landscape starkly denuded of this fundamentalelement of the ancient world, thus explaining a yawning cultural andeconomic poverty? Or did communities throughout the westernMediterranean maintain urban facilities and rhythms from Roman times,thus transmitting a fundamentally Hellenistic, albeit Christianised, culturalframework?1 This is an example of how alternative discernments of thesurvival or collapse of one of these three antecedent cultures, here the Romanempire, shape our view of the nature of early medieval Europe.

This article concerns another current explanatory model of the post-imperialWest, one that locates the engine of change in the past of the Germanicworld, rather than in Roman or Christian Antiquity. Ethnogenesis theoryis convenient shorthand for a particular body of work that interprets the transi-tion from classical to medieval culture as driven not by economics, religionor warfare, but by ethnicity.The role of ethnicity as a social and political forcein Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages has received increasing and valuableattention in recent scholarship.2The creation of ethnic groups has traditionallybeen a major topic of research of Germanic studies, in particular in Germanicphilology and archaeology; Germanic archaeology is currently undergoinga radical and very welcome revolution in its approach to this study.3

Amidst these various discussions, the particular theory discussed here hasarguably achieved the highest profile of current approaches to ethnicity inthe early Middle Ages, certainly in English-language studies; it is the approach

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most non-early medievalists are likely to associate with the term Ethnogenesis,and publications presenting this framework now may be expected to befamiliar to many medievalists and to be encountered by students at an earlystage of their studies.4This model proposes that particular dynamics of ethnicidentity-formation pre-dated the hegemony of Roman imperialism andHellenistic culture; they served as the dominant ideological bond for societalcohesion in proto-historical European cultures. Muted by Roman domination,these ethnic dynamics revived in the course of the late antique/early medievalperiod, when they surmounted classical political ideologies, becoming thebasis for the formation and maintenance of both peoples and states inearly Europe. Elements of Roman and Christian traditions that can be seenas having been appropriated by these ethnic discourses are also incorporatedinto the Ethnogenesis model.5

Usually described as originating in the 1960s in German and Austrianscholarship on Germanische Altertumskunde (the study of Germanic Antiquity),6

this paradigm has now become widely accepted and integrated into the fieldsof Late Antiquity and early medieval history as an accepted mode ofunderstanding the shift from Roman empire to western kingdoms. It hasbeen welcomed as a new conception of the barbarian neighbours andsuccessors of the western Roman empire, more nuanced than past models,and freed from an intellectually unacceptable framework of biologicaldeterminism and essentialism linked to past and present racialist views.

This rise ofEthnogenesis to the status of orthodoxy has been accompaniedby surprisingly little debate, particularly when compared with other substantialchanges in contemporary understanding of the ancient and medieval worlds(such as the recent discussions on Roman and post-Roman frontiers, Roman-ization and feudalism).7Yet the impact of this new model is questionable.Discussions that cite Ethnogenesis as background to the study of other topicsin the period are often themselves unaffected by the model.8 Suchcontradictory practices indicate at least a lack of clarity about Ethnogenesis,notwithstanding its current high level of acceptance. Much about the modelis misunderstood, not least the belief that it is substantially new, rather thanan evolution of a venerable tradition of European scholarship. Debate overEthnogenesis in recent scholarship is not about whether one model ofethnicdiscourse or identity-formation should be substituted for another; nor doesit revisit discussions in the social sciences on whether or not ethnic identityis a societal construct (settled in the affirmative by current anthropologicalthought). Rather it is a much broader question that treats issues fundamentalfor the discipline of historical studies: issues of epistemology and our meansof knowing about past belief; issues of methodology and interpretativeframeworks within which to position our sources; and issues of modernhistoriography and the trajectories of scholarly traditions.Was early Europea collection of rival, ideologically motivated ethnic communities; or is earlymedieval public life better imagined in terms of post-Roman religious andgovernmental practices? How do we choose?


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The Ethnogenesis model

Ethnogenesis, now used as a technical term in early medieval studies, is aword borrowed from the discipline of anthropology.A mid-twentieth-centuryneologism, the word ethnogenesis is a label not of a particular theoreticalmodel, but of an observable phenomenon: the emergence of new socialgroups that identify themselves or are identified by outsiders as having acohesive identity, an ethnic group in anthropological terms.Anthropologyproceeds from observing this phenomenon to the search for explanation ofits causes; that is, to theoretical models.The term Ethnogenesis is used indiscussions 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 Anglophonesocial sciences, ethnogenesis and ethnogeny. Here, the Anglicisedethnogeny will be used to refer to the phenomenon ofgroup formation more or less a translation of the term while capitalised Ethnogenesis willbe reserved for the current Medievalist theories under discussion.)

Usage of the term Ethnogenesis in late antique/early medieval studies issomewhat less precise, for in this scholarship the word refers not only to theobjective phenomenon of group formation, and to the processes involvedin making it happen, but also to theoretical models of these processes; theterm collapses together both phenomenon and interpretation.The authoridentified as the formulator of this contemporary model, the German scholarReinhard Wenskus (in his 1961 Stammesbildung und Verfassung: Das Werdender Frhmittelalterlichen Gentes) rarely used the term ethnogenesis, speakinginstead of Gentilismus; this was a personal neologism, used to render theolder term Volkstum without its obvert nationalistic sense (Wenskus derivedGentilismus from Latin gens; this latter word, which has meanings rangingfrom family to people, is used as a technical term in Ethnogenesisdiscussions for its particular constitution of early medieval peoples).Theuse of the anthropological term Ethnogenesis in medieval studies wasdisseminated by the important Austrian historian Herwig Wolfram, whohas been crucial to developing Wenskuss thought.10

The Ethnogenesis model has evolved considerably since Wenskuss bookand Wolframs adoption of his model in the 1960s.11 What follows seeks toaddress its core elements, noting major points of change.The model proposesthat the central, defining characteristic of the northern European barbariangroups was a political and cultural process of self-identification. Groupidentity as Goths,Franks,Langobards and so on was not fixed and simplyhereditary, but had to be generated and reified by the efforts of elites thenobility of the barbarian groups, and particularly the royalty in order forthe diverse individuals who constituted their followings to accept that theywere members of one group, and that they owed loyalty to that groupsleaders.What we see in our sources as Goths and other peoples were infact polyethnic assemblages, groups of variegated provenance fused bypolitical and cultural means.This process did not occur only once in the

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history of each people but, in order to maintain efficacy, had to be reiterated,as generations passed and events threw up changing conditions.Wolframlabelled this model of research historical ethnography, the study of arecurring 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 ethnicgroup identity: a socio-political construct, utilising one or more elements(language, physiognomy, social memory and cultural practices) as atouchstone for a largely manufactured self-definition, and often deployedfor political or economic advantage; the impetus for the manufacture andupkeep of this construct comes often from social elites (though recentanthropological work has retreated from starkly instrumentalist models,which locate the generation of ethnic identity exclusively in the politicalstrategies of elites).The Ethnogenesis model, however, was not producedby this broad thrust in the social sciences throughout the late twentiethcentury but developed parallel to it, from foundations that antedate thedevelopment of current anthropological thought by some generations.13

What distinguishes Ethnogenesis models from those proposed by thesocial sciences (apart from the question of epistemology, addressed below,which necessarily differs between contemporary studies and those dealingwith the remote past) is its specific template for processes of ancient Germanicgroup-formation. In this model, three interrelated factors combine to firstproduce ethnogeny and subsequently sustain group cohesion: military successby war-leaders; a myth of the groups origins, identified with its rulingdynasty; and a vehicle to perpetuate that myth across generations. Firstly,the military success of war-leaders is central: victorious warriors attractfollowings drawn not only from their own original groups but also from theremnants of other peoples, especially those defeated in past battles.Theconstitutions and identities ofpeoples constantly shift over time dependingon the fortunes of their leaders. In part the attraction of victorious war-leadersis economic, the prospect of participating in future successes, but the morefundamental attraction in this model is charisma, the projection of leaderssupra-human qualities.

Secondly, these war-leaders consolidate their authority by projecting theircharisma back in time. Casting themselves as members oflong-lived dynasties,they lay claim to authority not only on the contingency of present,potentially transitory, military success; but also on their lineage, portrayedas uniquely and divinely favoured.These dynastic claims bolster theirreputation as leaders, but more importantly serve to merge the multipleidentities of their current polyethnic following into the ethnicity (or gens)of the noble leadership.The claims of dynastic succession are communicatedthrough oral narratives, what are called the origin myths (origines gentium)or tribal sagas of the dominant group.These narratives are structured aroundthe (mythical) deeds and succession of its royal dynasty.Floating individuals,accepting the identity of their leaders as their own in order to secure


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membership of a successful group, do so by accepting these narratives andthe myth of direct, group descent.The royal dynasty precedes and generatesgroup identity; ethnicity is essentially an exclusive attribute of the socialelite, conferred for their advantage onto the mass of their satellites.Thenarratives have a fundamentally religious aspect. In the original form ofEthnogenesis theory, the authority of the dynasty originates, ultimately, indescent from northern European divinities, one of the guises of Odin, similarto the sacral kingship of some Near Eastern and Hellenistic royalties. Morerecent modifications see a broader range of potential mythic referents thatcould be used as bases for construction of mythic authority, includingappropriations of Greco-Roman discourses, although it is fair to say that thelatter are acceptable candidates only when they can be construed asapproximating Germanic models of ethnic narrative.14 Extant, writtensources from the early Middle Ages are seen as preserving only recensionsof these postulated ancient oral narratives.

Military success is the fundamental driving force for ethnic groupformation, and origin myth the way of turning current success into the basisfor dynastic authority. Continuity of this identity over time was achievedby what is called in earlier works the Traditionstrger (bearers of tradition),the third key element in the Ethnogenesis model. Originally, thesetradition-bearers were an inner-circle of elite members of the group thenobility that identified itself with the group identity and constituted anarrower and more direct descent-group than the varied lesser followers.In recent modifications, the dynamics of communication are carried out notexclusively by these human agents but also by the momentum of barbarianethnic discourse itself, manifested intermittently in our textual sources asethnic narratives.15 The communication of this ideology now commandsan increasing share of discussion in the Ethnogenesis approach.This on-goingprocess is understood as one in which communication was constant, as eachethnic identity was continually reasserted against not only Roman imperialideology but also other, competing ethnicities.16

Critiques

Ethnogenesis theory is a product of studies within the field of GermanicAntiquity, but it has features that recommend it more widely throughoutmedieval studies. It problematises the nature of the barbarian groups thatfeature in late antique/early medieval history in a manner drawn directlyfrom Germanic studies, but unfamiliar to the traditions of other,non-Germanicist scholarship. Rejecting biological determinism, it alignswith contemporary anthropological thought in seeing ethnic groups associally and politically constructed, and more generally with late twentiethcentury interest in the nature of identity. Most importantly perhaps, it offersan explanatory model of change from classical to medieval cultures that isamenable to these current wider interests: Hellenistic modes of thought

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were supplanted by new ideologies, reconstructing individual and groupidentity along ethnically based lines hence the fragmentary national mapof early medieval Europe was the product ofethnic discourses.

What objections are there to this model? Before outlining currentcritiques, it may be informative to look more broadly, not at theEthnogenesis model itself, but at one gauge of its impact on recent studies.In the eleven stimulating essays of the recent volume Late Antiquity:A Guideto the Postclassical World, the first reference work devoted exclusively to LateAntiquity 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 forgivenfor concluding that topics of other chapters in the volume, such as SacredLandscapes, Religious Community and even War and Violence, did notfigure significantly in early medieval societies. By the same token,ethnicity(as opposed to identity based on religion or other identifiers) appears to bea category of identity associated exclusively with the western barbarians, nota factor in eastern societies.18 This underscores a perceptible shift in recentscholarly attitudes: despite the avowedly inclusive scope ofLate Antiquity(in its broad, North American sense), the emphasis on Ethnogenesis asan explanatory model for western developments has facilitated a subtledetachment 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 thanexplaining developments in the post-imperial West within the broadercontext of Late Antiquity, the Ethnogenesis model in fact reinforces veryold conceptions of European history: the fundamental processes which shapeand characterise early Europe are seen as indigenous, arising from its owndeepest pre-history; they are not shared with those that shaped the easternMediterranean and Middle East.

To understand the problems presented to historical discussion by theEthnogenesis approach, it will be helpful to step back from its own termsof discussion, in order to contextualise its argument both historically andhistoriographically.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 andepistemological (the relationship between sources and model); historiographic(the place of the Ethnogenesis approach in modern scholarship); andmeta-historical (the underlying narrative and philosophy of history fromwhich specific models and methodologies emanate).

First, historical: much of the action of the Ethnogenesis model, the earlyformation of groups and generation of traditions, occurs before the barbarianpeoples registered in Greco-Roman written sources, therefore beyondhistorical record. In lieu of written sources from the proto-historical period,the theoretical model is based on philological, not historical, arguments; thatis, the use of Germanic linguistic sources (e.g. personal and group names,the extant portions of the Gothic translation of the Bible) as evidence fromwhich to reconstruct ancient concepts, fossilised in the language when


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recorded in historical periods. Such use of language as a palaeontologicalmedium is by no means confined to Germanic studies.The nature of thetopics 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.Tochoose one central element: the importance (as described above) of successin war as the lodestone for leaders to attract followers willing to subsumetheir disparate backgrounds into the dominating ethnic identity.Amongearly medieval leaders, several stand out as candidates for such a role: Geiseric,the Vandal conqueror of Roman North Africa (428477); Theoderic, theGothic ruler of the imperial heartland of Italy (c. 474 525); Clovis, theFrankish subjugator of the Roman dioceses of Gaul (c. 481511); and Alboin,the Lombard victor in Italy (c. 561 572).The military, political, andadministrative successes of none of these leaders extinguished particularistidentities among their followings. In all their kingdoms, discrete and insome cases fissiparous barbarian ethnic identities are attested.21 Thesecontradictions of the Ethnogenesis model are not simply a matter of debatablehistorical evidence. Contemporary multi-cultural societies know well thatassimilation is not the same as absorption: minorities can fully participate inthe public life and culture of their host, and identify with the dominantethnic group, yet retain a separate ethnic identity over generations.Theexamples above demonstrate these complex dynamics in the early medievalWest.The Ethnogenesis model does not accommodate this evidence.

Secondly, methodological: the Ethnogenesis theory examined here isessentially philological, both in the restricted sense of the linguisticpalaeontology mentioned above, and in the broader sense of use of literarytexts. It is from the point of view of textual scholarship, and concern forthe necessity to analyse written works as texts before mining them as sources,that most reservations about the Ethnogenesis approach arise.The role ofliterary texts in the Ethnogenesis model is as witnesses to the origin mythsor ethnic discourses of individual groups. No extant text states that it servesthis purpose. Nevertheless, almost every late antique/early medieval text and even many earlier, classical texts is liable to citation in the Ethnogenesismodel as evidence for the operation of these functionalist origin myths.One recent article cites the Christian apologist Orosius, the pagan hoax-textScriptores historiae Augustae, and the classicising Procopius, amongst otherworks, as evidence for an attempted ethnic narrative about the Amazons.22

The Ethnogenesis approach regularly homogenises works of such diversegenre and provenance into a single body of evidence for ethnic beliefs, inorder to search for underlying, northern European ethnic discoursesoperating alongside the overt narrative and aims of the text, or even contraryto them (as contradictions and paradoxes).

The treatment of literary texts is a crucial point of dispute betweenadvocates of the Ethnogenesis model and its critics, arising from a

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fundamental difference in methodological assumptions. Critics of theEthnogenesis model insist that written sources need to be analysed as texts,using traditional means of textual analysis (e.g. genre criticism, sourcecriticism, historical contextualisation) and current theoretical approaches toliterary analysis (e.g. narratology) in order to establish cultural context andto analyse authorial purpose.23 The Ethnogenesis model assesses textsaccording to the extent of information they yield on identity-formingprocesses:When we look in the sources for traces of the historical processesof the creation of ethnicity, mostly we find information about warrior groupsand about the stories old men tell recollections of the elders and theexploits of war bands24 (this prefaces the discussion of the classicising andChristian apologetic texts mentioned above).A seam of information, crossinghistorical and generic boundaries, is pursued.To researchers in theEthnogenesis model, their critics approach to texts reduces the sources topurely literary exercises;25 to its critics, the Ethnogenesis approach waivesmethodological analysis of sources in order to construct them as conduitsfor a predetermined category of information.26

The central text in this debate is Jordanes Getica, his pseudo-history ofthe Goths.The Getica is the only extant late antique/early medieval text forwhich a claim can be made that its author had access to sources close toroyalty (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 questionsof source: whether Jordanes text (composed in Justinians Constantinopleafter 551, at the end of the wars on Gothic Italy) passively reflects the formand content of the lost Gothic History of Cassiodorus (composed in Italyin the 520s/530s to celebrate the Gothic ruling house). It also depends onthe sources of both Cassiodorus and Jordanes: whether, as seen in theEthnogenesis model, they are based on genuine Gothic oral tradition recollections of the elders or, as both authors explicitly state, on researchin 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 deepermethodological frameworks within philological Germanische Altertumskunde.Early modern Germanists, lacking substantial literary monuments from theancient culture they wished to reconstruct, sought not only to useGreco-Roman sources as windows onto Germanic deeds and beliefs fromMediterranean perspectives, but also to transpose Greco-Roman works intonative Germanic evidence.Tacitus Germania could be removed from itsRoman imperial context, in order to make him a spokesman for northernpeoples; Tacitus became, not a Roman author writing with centuries ofHellenistic traditions of ethnography behind him, but a transmitter of actualGermanic views.28 (Modern criticism has asserted Tacitus true role asGreco-Roman ethnographer, with limited access to, or interest in, real


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Germanic traditions.29) Infinitely more sophisticated, current Ethnogenesisapproaches nevertheless proceed from a comparable epistemological startingpoint of transforming classical and classicising sources into barbarian ones.30

Jordanes text is an obvious case of a work appropriated as a Germanicdiscourse (as it has been since the sixteenth century) despite explicit Greco-Roman literary topoi (from classical ethnography), Byzantine attitudes (thecelebration of Justinians victory over the Goths in Italy) and acknowledgedclassical sources (an array of Greek and Roman geographers and historians).More fundamentally, however, the Ethnogenesis approach consistently seeksto appropriate classical ethnographical writings (works on the history andmores of foreign peoples) as part of a northern European ethnic discourseor ethnic narrative.31This is intensely problematic.The discourse of classicalethnography seeks to alienate its audience from the foreign object of itsdiscussion.To read works informed by this discourse as almost all sourceson late antique barbarians are as a medium of self-identification requiresthe wholesale overturning of their textual integrity.32

This raises a third aspect of analysis of the Ethnographic model: its modernhistoriographical context. Ethnogenesis is to be situated historiographicallywithin the long traditions of the discipline of Germanische Altertumskunde,not simply of contemporary Early Medieval History; these two academicfields overlap, but are not identical.33 The question of ethnogeny, with regardto the origins of the Germani, has been and remains a legitimate, core issuein Germanic Antiquity studies.34 Ethnogenesis discussions in large partrepresent the importation of this issue onto the wider stage of medievalhistory. Most discussions of the model draw a sharp distinction between theEthnogenesis approach and pre-1960s work on the northern barbarians.Earlier Germanist research is often assumed to have been based on a modelof innate, biological definitions of barbarian peoples, irretrievably taintedby association with Nazi ideologies; while Ethnogenesis, by contrast,rejects biological explanations, seeing the identity of peoples as sociallyconstructed. It is, then, something of a surprise to read reviews ofWenskus1961 Stammesbildung und Verfassung and note how little sense of novelty isregistered there.35 Not only were many ofWenskus ideas already incirculation decades earlier, but the present assumption of many medievaliststhat biological models of ethnicity are old, and socially-constructedmodels are new, is quite misled. Unsurprisingly in view of its long history,scholarship in Germanische Altertumskunde has been far more complex thanthe simple dichotomy suggested in current accounts, with alternative models,biological and social, coexisting and competing since the early twentiethcentury, neither exclusively involved in or divorced from racialist politics.Models of Vlker (what we would now call ethnic groups) as being constitutedculturally rather than biologically reach back to the early twentieth century,in turn developing from earlier precedents.36 The key term in thesediscussions is not ethnicity but Kontinuitt, continuity, of groupidentity.

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Acknowledging the academic traditions from which the Ethnogenesismodel developed is not to deny the intellectual distance between Wenskusand his predecessors, and advances between Wenskus and current versionsof Ethnogenesis.37 It should not be necessary, but for the intemperance ofsome reviewers, to state that, of course, rejection of the dark period ofGermanic Antiquity studies underlies the trajectory of contemporary researchin the field. But it needs to be noted that many of the developments fromWenskus predecessors to now have been strictly within the parameters ofthe discipline of Germanic Antiquity, concerning debates not readilyappreciable to other medievalists and scholars, who are often confused aboutwhich aspects of Ethnogenesis theory are recent and which are long-standingconcepts in Germanic Antiquity studies.The heuristic value of this model,moreover, is to an extent vitiated by indebtedness to the templates of olderGermanische Altertumskunde.This has acted to isolate the discussion fromother current research that could profitably reposition the topic of earlymedieval ethnicity outside Germanist parameters.Twenty years of vigorousClassicist scholarship on the construct of the barbarian in Greco-Romanethnographic thought the habits of thought that lay behind our lateantique/early medieval texts have not permeated Ethnogenesis or otherearly medievalist discussion.This is a pity, as much that is generally assumedto be characteristic of early medieval sources, and so is interpreted as revealingof identity-formation (such as narratives of migration, and the inclusion ofnames and items of vocabulary in written texts), in fact becomes readilyexplicable when viewed in the context of Greco-Roman ethnographictraditions, and is informative of quite different, Hellenistic culturaldiscourses.38 Likewise, Ethnogenesis discussions have not interactedsignificantly with other current discussions on forms of identity in LateAntiquity.39 Contemporary theoretical discourses are employed to support,not to interrogate, the model.40 Greater historiographic discussion of thisfield of Germanic Antiquity studies by its practitioners, comparable to recentanalyses of Germanic proto-historical archaeology,41 is a desideratum thatcould clarify terms of discussion and contextualise current debate.

Finally, and most importantly, meta-history: the underlying narrative ofthe approach, and the choice of explanatory model.The search for processesof ethnic self-identification and continuity springs from a venerable visionof history, rather than from the sources.The view that the history of thepost-imperial West is to be understood as shaped by the forces of ethnicidentity, that ethnic discourse became the key to political power,42 harksback, however distantly, to Romantic outlooks that saw nations or peoplesas the prime movers of history, a central tenet of early modern Germanicstudies.Though the argumentation is modern, the outcome of thismeta-narrative is the same: the determining processes in early Europeanhistory were indigenous, emanating from northern European Germanicpeoples. Early medieval history is, in its essence, a continuation of northernEuropean proto-history, not of the Roman state that preceded the medieval


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kingdoms.The options of Roman/Hellenistic and Christian origins ofthought and institutions are subordinated and appropriated; Livy and theOld Testament become additional ethnic narratives to be exploitedaccording to the cultural template of Germanic origin myth.43 The modelis fundamentally essentialist in its vision of inherent cultural patterns thatreplicate themselves over centuries, surviving underground during Romanimperial domination to re-emerge and mould societies anew in Late Antiquity.

Neither the longevity of this vision, nor its narrative characteristics, isnecessarily an argument against its validity. But it should be recognised thatthe meta-narrative of Ethnogenesis is chosen, not dictated by evidence.Asan explanatory model of the changes from Antiquity to the Middle Ages,the force of ethnic assertiveness is, on the basis of our evidence, at leastquestionable. It is not merely that the key agent of ethnic continuity in theEthnogenesis model, the indigenous Germanic origin myth, is unattestedand must be reconstructed from Greco-Roman materials. In fact, evidencefor ethnic consciousness and assertiveness in the early medieval period israther more chimerical than one might expect.As Kurth recognised longago, the ethnic titles of key institutions kingdoms and kingship familiarto us from modern literature, are ill-attested in the sources; a western kingwas a rex, not rex Gothorum.44 Ethnic titles such as kingdom of the Gothsare literary terminology, reflecting centuries of Greco-Roman thoughtconflating geographical regions with ethne, peoples and insouciant of theautonyms or world-view of foreign peoples.These titles have been in turnreified in the modern historical imagination by the nationalist context ofearly modern scholarship, seeing the post-imperial states as proto-nations.Similarly, the ethnic titles of many sources Lex Romana Visigothorum andothers are modern editorial and interpretative additions, not original.45

The ethnic framework of early medieval studies reflects the bent of modernthought 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 geographicalregions that closely replicated the administrative structures of the Romanimperial dioceses.The ethnic terms used by literary sources to refer tothese kingdoms, such as Frank and Goth, reflect Roman use of umbrellaethnic categories, employed to simplify diversity.There is a rough parallelwith many post-colonial states of south-east Asia and Africa in the latertwentieth century, established on boundaries reflecting European imperialpossessions and bearing pseudo-ethnic names originating in early modernEuropean terminology (for example,Indo-China and Indonesia), reflectingEuropean colonial thought and practices, not autonyms.The extent of theRoman foundations of the post-imperial West, underscored long ago byDopsch, is far from fully excavated.46 Understanding the period through thedetermining role of Roman structures and thought is also a meta-historicalchoice that can be overemphasised. But the gap between current portrayalsof early medieval Europe as a patchwork of competing ethnic groups, and

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the rather muted evidence for ethnic assertiveness in our sources, suggeststhat at this stage in historical studies we should be better employed in seekingto strip back from our sources the accretions of centuries of Europeanscholarship, than in providing theoretical foundations for them.

By problematising the group identity of the barbarians that figures inour sources, Ethnogenesis writings have usefully spurred early medievaliststo join in dialogue with other research on the construction of identity.Workin this approach has also laudably sought to undercut intellectual supportfor recently resurgent extreme nationalism in Europe.47 Ironically, giventhese sincere aims, Ethnogenesis presents a model in which ethnicity isunderstood not just as one socio-cultural factor among others, but as aprimary force subordinating all other aspects of late antique/early-medievalculture, and generating an early Europe of competing, manipulated ethnicrivalries. It seeks to describe processes that, by their nature, ultimately cannotbe directly attested as is the case for so much research into the more remotepast. It is therefore all the more important, in assessing the value of thistheory, to understand the methodological and historiographic frameworksunderpinning this choice of an explanatory model of historical change.

Notes1 J. H.W. G. Liebeschuetz, The Decline and Fall of the Roman City (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2001); B.Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2005), 87168; G. P. Brogiolo and B.Ward-Perkins (eds.), The Idea and Ideal ofthe 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: UniversityofToronto Press, 1998), 17 36; B.Ward-Perkins, Why Did the Anglo-Saxons Not BecomeMore 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: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1993); S. McKee, Inherited Status and Slavery in Late Medieval Italy andVenetian Crete, Past and Present, 182 (2004): 3153; McKee, Uncommon Dominion:Venetian Creteand 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: UniversityofToronto, 1998), 34884; and Brown,The Trojan Origins of the French:The Commencementof a Myths Demise, in A. P. Smyth (ed.), Medieval Europeans: Studies in Ethnic Identity and NationalPerspectives in Medieval Europe (London: MacMillan, 1998), 10318.3 Twentieth-century culture history approaches, concerned with ascribing different styles ofmaterial items to particular ethnic groups and so tracking the historical movement of those groupsthrough the distribution patterns of styles, have received serious criticism; the distribution patternsof styles have instead been interpreted as evidence of interaction and exchange, opening up a newfield of study in the dynamics of contact throughout proto-historical northern Europe. For anoverview 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,MerovingianMortuary Archaeology and The Making of the Early Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 2003); cf. the reassertion of the association of style and ethnicity in F. Curta, The Making ofthe Slavs: History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube Region, c. 500700 (Cambridge: Cambridge Blackwell Publishing 2006 History Compass 4/2 (2006): 241260, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00311.x

Ethnogenesis . 253

University Press, 2001), 314. For new interpretive approaches: S. Brather, Ethnic Identities asConstructions ofArchaeology: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 FrhgeschichtlichenArchologie: Geschichte, Grundlagen und Alternativen (Berlin:W. De Gruyter, 2004).4 Students and researchers are likely to encounter this approach in several recent reference orintroductory 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, inL. 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).Widelycited 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:TheMedieval 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 platformfor bringing the Ethnogenesis approach to the attention of a wide audience:W. Pohl (ed.),Kingdomsof 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 ofCommunities 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 andEarly 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 andHistorical 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 partialadoptions 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: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1997), 339.6 With the publication of R.Wenskus, Stammesbildung und Verfassung: Das Werden derFrhmittelalterlichen 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, AustrianHistory 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 GothicOrigins from Scandinavia, Speculum, 80 (2005): 379 98; J. M. Pizarro, Ethnic and NationalHistory, 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 ofsource 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, TheNarrators of Barbarian History: Jordanes, Gregory ofTours, 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 MedievalEurope, 4001000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 4857; nor J. Harries, LegalCulture and Identity in the Fifth-Century West, in Mitchell and Greatrex (eds.), Ethnicity andCulture 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 thejudicious overviews in J. Hall,Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1997), 433; Hall, Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2002), 929, 3638. In addition to summarising recent developments in anthropologicaltheory 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 tomedievalists as to classicists (e.g. Indo-European migrationist theories, whence derive the conceptsof 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, Makingof the Slavs, 14 34 for twentieth-century developments in ethnic theory and their relationshipwith early-medieval archaeology.10 Initially in H.Wolfram,Methodische Fragen zur Kritik an sakralen Knigtum germanischerStmme, Festschrift fr Otto Hfler (Vienna:Verlag Notring, 1968), 47390; with greatest impactin Wolframs original German edition, Geschichte der Goten: von den Anfngen bis zur Mitte des 6.Jahrhunderts Entwurfeiner historischen Ethnographie (Munich: Beck, 1979); rev. ed., Die Goten undihre 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 indevelopment: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:AngewandteMethoden der Frhmittelalterforschung (Vienna: Oldenbourg, 1994), 9 26; Pohl, Introduction:Strategies of Distinction, in Pohl and Reimitz (eds.), Strategies ofDistinction, 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, 300 900 (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 ofCommunication (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 12741; Pohl,Gender and Ethnicity.16 Pohl,Strategies of Distinction; P.Brown,The Rise ofWestern Christendom:Triumph and Diversity,AD 2001000, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 104.17 Bowersock, Brown, and Grabar (eds.), Late Antiquity. Dimunition ofWest: cf. (with regard todifferent concerns) Ward-Perkins, Fall of Rome, 1702. Chapter on West: P. Geary, Barbariansand Ethnicity, 10729.18 Cf. the index to A. Cameron, B.Ward-Perkins, and M.Whitby (eds.), The Cambridge AncientHistory, 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 westernkingdoms refers back to ethnic identity.The conception of ethnic identity described withinthe text is the Ethnogenesis model (p. 262), though without citation to modern studies. Cf. theindex to M. Maas (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2005).19 More specific issues are discussed in the papers by Bowlus, Gillett, Goffart, Kulikowski andMurray in Gillett (ed.), On Barbarian Identity.20 For example, A. Gillett, Was Ethnicity Politicized in the Earliest Medieval Kingdoms? inGillett (ed.), On Barbarian Identity, 115 18 (on the allegedly Gothic constitutional title rex); seealso 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 (arare 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 ofTheoderics following remained distinct and sometimesunbiddable in Gothic Italy; Procopius, Wars VII 2.12. Clovis: by the mid-sixth century, at leastone community within Frankish Gaul was still identified as Taifali, a very minor group whosecontinued identity can have nothing to do with heroic leadership; Gregory ofTours, Historiae IV18, 7; other members of Gaul in the time of Gregory ofTours are identified as e.g. Saxons orLombards.Alboin: Saxons who had accompanied Albions Lombards into Italy remained distinctand departed from Italy a decade later; Gregory ofTours, Historiae IV 42,V 15; Paul the Deacon,Historia Langobardorum II 6, III 67. For the Goths, see further M. Kulikowski, Romes Gothic Warsfrom 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? inGillett (ed.), On Barbarian Identity, 2137; Goffart, Jordanes Getica, 37998; A. C. Murray, Postvocantur Merohingii: Fredegar, Merovech, and Sacral Kingship in A. C. Murray (ed.), After RomesFall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History (Toronto: University ofToronto, 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 inLombard 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 thecontradictions of ethnic narratives that pre-exist and shape their text; no authorial intent orhistorical 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 Literatureand Roman History (Brussels: Latomus, 2000), vol. 10, 479500.28 D. Kelley, Tacitus noster:The Germania in the Renaissance and the Reformation, in T. J. Luceand A. J.Woodman (eds.), Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, 1993), 15267; reprinted in his The Writing of History and the Study of Law (Aldershot:Ashgate,1997), paper II; L. Krapf. The Literary Rediscovery ofTacituss Germania, Res publica litterarum,5 (1982): 13743.29 A.A. Lund, Zur Gesamtinterpretation der Germania des Tacitus, Aufstieg und Niedergang derRmischen Welt, II 33/2 (1991): 1857988.30 Cf.A. Gillett,Introduction: Ethnicity, History, and Methodology, in Gillett (ed.), On BarbarianIdentity, 13; Gillett,Was Ethnicity Politicized?, 1158.31 For example, Pohl, Gender and Ethnicity, 412: when more or less Romanised barbarianscame to rule parts of the Roman empire, they gradually appropriated for themselves theethnographic discourse once used to describe and explain their otherness.This assertion thatGreco-Roman texts (such as, in this instance, Orosius) can be read as part of processes ofpost-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 seeksto 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 ofGermanic Antiquity, in B. Murdoch and M. Read (eds.), Early Germanic Literature and Culture(Rochester, NY: Camden, 2004), 538. Continuity of Ethnogenesis from earlier Germanistframeworks: 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, TheMythos of Germanic Continuity, in J. R. Dow and H. Lixfeld (eds. and trans.), The Nazificationof an Academic Discipline (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 3454. For erroneousviews of old and new models: Goffart, Germanic Antiquity Today. For precedents to Wenskusthought: Murray,Wenskus on Ethnogenesis, 3968, esp. pp.5354.37 For overview of developments from the 1960s to c. 2000: Pohl, Ethnicity, Theory, andTradition.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?, CurrentArchaeology, 39, (1998): 1945; Hrke (ed.), Archaeology, Ideology and Society:The German Experience(Frankfurt: P. Lang, 2000); H. Steuer (ed.), Eine hervorragend nationale Wissenschaft (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2001); H. Fehr, Volkstum as Paradigm: Germanic People and Gallo-Romans in EarlyRoman 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 ofTours Historiae (not History of the Franks); but also a range ofpre-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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260 . Ethnogenesis


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