Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of rulers
- Terminology and vocabulary
- List of abbreviations
- Map of Ostrogothic Italy
- Introduction: Studying the barbarians in late antiquity
- 1 Ethnicity, ethnography and community in the fifth and sixth centuries
- 2 The Ravenna government and ethnographic ideology: from civilitas to bellicositas
- 3 Individual reactions to ideology I: names, language and profession
- 4 Complementary and competing ideals of community: Italy and the Roman Empire
- 5 Individual reactions to ideology II: soldiers, civilians and political allegiance
- 6 Catholic communities and Christian Empire
- 7 Individual reactions to ideology III: Catholics and Arians
- 8 The origin of the Goths and Balkan military culture
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1 The inquiry into Gundila's property: a translation and chronology
- Appendix 2 The Germanic culture construct
- Appendix 3 Archeological and toponymic research on Ostrogothic Italy
- Appendix 4 Dress, hairstyle and military customs
- Prosopographical Appendix: A prosopography of Goths in Italy, 489–554
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought Fourth Series
Appendix 2 - The Germanic culture construct
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of rulers
- Terminology and vocabulary
- List of abbreviations
- Map of Ostrogothic Italy
- Introduction: Studying the barbarians in late antiquity
- 1 Ethnicity, ethnography and community in the fifth and sixth centuries
- 2 The Ravenna government and ethnographic ideology: from civilitas to bellicositas
- 3 Individual reactions to ideology I: names, language and profession
- 4 Complementary and competing ideals of community: Italy and the Roman Empire
- 5 Individual reactions to ideology II: soldiers, civilians and political allegiance
- 6 Catholic communities and Christian Empire
- 7 Individual reactions to ideology III: Catholics and Arians
- 8 The origin of the Goths and Balkan military culture
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1 The inquiry into Gundila's property: a translation and chronology
- Appendix 2 The Germanic culture construct
- Appendix 3 Archeological and toponymic research on Ostrogothic Italy
- Appendix 4 Dress, hairstyle and military customs
- Prosopographical Appendix: A prosopography of Goths in Italy, 489–554
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought Fourth Series
Summary
The distribution by their lord of due reward to the brave is straight out of heroic poetry, and Cassiodorus' Latin rhetoric surely hides a thoroughly Germanic event designed to preserve ties of lord and follower.
The above quotation appears in a scholarly journal published in 1995, but it could just as well have appeared in 1895. The techniques are Victorian: “seeing through” a written text to the rude oral reality, ignoring late antique social models in favour of subsequent medieval social models, and appealing to a common sense (“surely”) of European nationalist notions, based in the Victorian era on race, in the modern era on ethnicity.
Germanicist philological historiography uses presumed oral sources to trace a warlike, nomadic culture from Tacitus to Beowulf, from the Goths and Burgundians of the fifth century to the Nibelungenlied and Icelandic sagas of the thirteenth. It is alive and well. The following is a necessary brief survey of recent research that re-evaluates the origin of cultural traits traditionally considered “Germanic,” including language, religion, law and naming traditions. The related challenges to using archeological evidence as a key to ancient culture or ethnicity are discussed in appendix 3.
The language/culture-based antithesis “Roman–Germanic” is the philologist's translation of the ancient ethnographic antithesis “Roman–barbarian.” It is no less simplifying or artificial than its classical equivalent. Today, the evidence demonstrating diversity within the Roman Empire itself militates against grouping together all the barbarian groups as a single cultural entity in the late antique Mediterranean.
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- People and Identity in Ostrogothic Italy, 489–554 , pp. 326 - 331Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997