Interrogating the ‘Germanic’: A Category and its Use in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

Description

Any reader of scholarship on the ancient and early medieval world will be familiar with the term 'Germanic', which is frequently used as a linguistic category, ethnonym, or descriptive identifier for a range of forms of cultural and literary material. But is the term meaningful, useful, or legitimate? The term, frequently applied to peoples, languages, and material culture found in non-Roman north-western and central Europe in classical antiquity, and to these phenomena in the western Roman Empire’s successor states, is often treated as a legitimate, all-encompassing name for the culture of these regions. Its usage is sometimes intended to suggest a shared social identity or ethnic affinity among those who produce these phenomena. Yet, despite decades of critical commentary that have highlighted substantial problems, its dominance of scholarship appears not to have been challenged. This edited volume, which offers contributions ranging from literary and linguistic studies to archaeology, and which span from the first to the sixteenth centuries AD, examines why the term remains so pervasive despite its problems, offering a range of alternative interpretative perspectives on the late and post-Roman worlds. Contents List of Contributors Introduction: The ‘Germanic’ and its Discontents The Marriage of Philology and Race: Constructing the ‘Germanic’ Rome and Its Created Northerners Re-inventing the ‘Germanic’ in the Early Modern Era: Omnes Germani sunt, contra fabulas quorundam The Balloon that Wouldn’t Burst: A Genealogy of ‘Germanic’ What Can Cultural Anthropology Do for Medievalists? A Methodological Discussion of Ethnicity Applied to Late Antique and Early Medieval History From Rhetoric to Dialectic: The Becoming ‘Germanic’ of Visigothic (Legal-)Literature, and (Postulating) the End of a ‘Truth’ Sidonius Apollinaris’s Use of the Term Barbarus: An Introduction A Habitus Barbarus in Sub-Roman Britain? A Farewell to Arms: Germanic Identity in Fifth-Century Britain Germanic or Slavic? Reconstructing the Transition from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages in East Central Europe Linguistic Labels and Ethnic Identity (Proto-)Germanic Alliterative Verse: Linguistic Limits on a Cultural Phenomenon The Limits of Obligation and Friendship: Hrothgar, Beowulf, and the ‘Germanic’ Ideal Index