Rome's Fall and Europe's Rise:
A View from Late Antiquity
Ward-Perkins, Bryan. The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. viii, 239. $30.15 (hb), $16.95 (pbISBN-13: 978-0192805645 (hb); ISBN-13: 978-0192807281 (pb).
Heather, Peter. The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xvi, 572. $45.00 (hb), $19.95 (pb). ISBN-13: 978-0195159547 (hb), ISBN-13: 978-0195325416 (pb). Also published as The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History. London: Macmillan, 2005. Pp. xvi, 572. ISBN 978-0333989147 (hb), ISBN-13: 978-0330491365 (pb).
Noble, Thomas F. X., ed. From Roman Provinces to Medieval Kingdoms. Series: Rewriting Histories. New York: Routledge, 2006. Pp. xxvi, 402. $104.95 (hb), $33.95 (pb). ISBN-13: 978-0415327411 (hb), ISBN-13: 978-0415327428 (pb).
Goffart, Walter. Barbarian Tides: The Migration Age and the Later Roman Empire. Series: The Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Pp. x, 372. $69.95. ISBN-13: 978-0812239393.
Smith, Julia M. H. Europe after Rome: A New Cultural History 500-1000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv, 384. $35.00 (hb), $27.00 (pb). ISBN-13: 978-0199244270 (hb), ISBN-13: 978-0192892638 (pb).
Wickham, Chris. Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. xxviii, 990. $50.00. ISBN-13: 978-0199212965
In this day and age of Late Antiquity, where do the Fall of Rome and the Origins of Europe stand? From the beginnings of modern scholarship, both, along with Biblical and ecclesiastical history, have been major engines driving the Western historiographic enterprise, classic foci of European self-understanding. The two themes of research, although often pursued by separate practitioners, have always been complementary, Rome's extinction providing the tabula rasa necessary for the establishment of (western) European nations. How do these topics now relate to some three decades of thought and research into the cognate field of 'Late Antiquity'? This younger cousin has claims, at least as the term was popularized by Peter Brown's 1971 The World of Late Antiquity, to absorbing within its remit both areas of research, Rome's Fall and Europe's first Rise, along with the fields of their eastern contemporaries, Sasanian Iran, early Byzantium, and early Islam. [1] The 'Late Antiquity' outlined by Brown, which has now influenced two generations of scholars, is a historiographic vision framed in large part in reaction to these older paradigms. Brown's 'Late Antiquity' is not a denial of the historical events we understand by the rubrics of Fall and Rise, but it displaces their centrality to the conception of the period between the Roman monarchy of the Severans and the medieval monarchies of the Carolingians and 'Abbasids. In principle, neither the eschatology of the classical world nor the teleology of Europe's Rise to domination motivate this discussion. This 'Late Antiquity' also inherently contests the unilinear vision of history that undergirds European Classicism: the claim that the West was the rightful heir of classical Greece and Rome, albeit via the drawn-out probate of the medieval millennium. Increasingly, both Byzantium and early Islam appear as wardens and improvers of the Hellenistic inheritance. [2] A third characteristic of this scholarship is its approving assessment of the period it treats: new forms of mono- or polytheistic spiritual expression, and late adaptations of Hellenistic practices, are seen as creative cultural products rather than as corrosions of Classical culture. [3]
Influential as Brown's 'Late Antiquity' has been, however, it has not recast the Academy. Research and publication under the rubrics of pre-existing conceptions of the period have continued vigorously (as the works to be discussed below show [4]). 'Late Antiquity,' a relative newcomer as an academic field (by comparison at least with the half-millennium of scholarship that weighs upon several of its constituent disciplines), has contributed an additional register of thought, rather than a fundamental reorientation, a scaffolding that straddles venerable scholarly edifices each of which simultaneously continues to be sustained by its own academic momentum. Indeed, the ambitions of this view of 'Late Antiquity' to a longitudinal embrace, from York to Naqsh-i Rustam between the third to early ninth centuries, have been tacitly curtailed by the currency of a second usage of the term in publication titles and discussions, a 'restricted Late Antiquity.' This sense of the term is more or less an alternative to the periodisation 'Later Roman Empire' adopted in English historiography almost a century earlier by J. B. Bury and consolidated by A. H. M. Jones' magisterial survey of that name, equivalent in scale to the French Bas-Empire though less pejorative: the shorter period from Constantine to Justinian, focusing on the dynamics of the imperial Dominate and the rise of Christianity. [5] This version of 'Late Antiquity' is Roman-focused, in contrast to the periodisation inspired by Brown that aspires to look across traditional Roman frontiers, both cadastral and cultural (albeit sometimes apologetically acknowledging that the disproportionate quantities of available Roman sources inevitably command the greater portion of attention). The 'restricted' usage preserves the discrete separation of older fields; post-imperial western Europe, Islam, and Byzantium after the sixth century tend to appear, if at all, as its envoi. [6] Whether in any particular instance 'Late Antiquity' has a 'longitudinal' sense, a 'restricted' sense, or no specific temporal limitation at all is largely a matter of individual authorial preference, not often articulated, [7] though broadly the first usage tends to be regarded as North American and the second as British (and to a lesser extent continental European).
Notwithstanding these divergent usages, there has never been, as far as I am aware, a sustained debate about whether it is valid, or useful, for multiple areas of study to have been appropriated from the purviews of Classicists, Patristic scholars, Medievalists, Orientalists, and others, and to have been recombined under the rubric of 'Late Antiquity' (in its longitudinal sense); or to discuss what the component fields of 'Late Antiquity' should rightly be. To be sure, overview accounts and review articles have helped shape the parameters of the field, and individual studies have been peppered with isolated reflections and authorial asides about the boundaries of 'Late Antiquity.' Most importantly, there is an on-going debate about the validity of the whole periodisation of 'longitudinal Late Antiquity' and its cultural and spiritual emphases, which has generally been illuminating rather than recriminatory. The terms of engagement can be summarized--crudely but at least with brevity--as a belief, by scholars who emphasize economic and material evidence and the West, that 'Late Antiquity' wrongly does away with real historical discontinuities and decline; and the defence, by those who emphasize religious and literary cultural evidence and the East, that 'Late Antiquity,' freed from unprofitable restrictions of thought, has excavated whole new registers of past human experience. [8] This is a debate about whether 'longitudinal Late Antiquity' and its emphases are useful or not; it leaves open the question, for those who accept the validity of the periodisation, of what its constituent elements should be. Noticeably, the post-imperial West, to the extent that it features in these discussions, figures mainly as evidence for the case against 'Late Antiquity'; alongside the voices of Byzantinists, scholars of late paganism, and historians of religious practice who advocate the value of 'longitudinal Late Antiquity,' there have been fewer cases put by early western Medievalists. [9] Probably the most regular (though still intermittent) attention to whether any one specific prior historical periodisation belongs within this framework has concerned early Islam, still seen by some as the terminus of the Classical or post-Classical worlds, by others as the apogee of Antiquity and so the capstone of 'Late Antiquity.' [10] There has been little enough historiographic exchange from western Medievalists about the same issue: whether 'Late Antiquity' is just an evocative term with which to badge topics that fall ambiguously at the cusp of 'the Later Roman Empire' and 'the Early Middle Ages,' or whether it meaningfully describes a distinctive historical periodisation in which the West participated. [11] The success of several recently launched journals and book series suggests that 'Early Medieval' remains a preferred conceptualization for European self-description, at least for publishers but probably also for a majority of scholars. [12] In part, this label reflects the use of familiar terminology that is meaningful to academic professions, publishing lists, and more popular traditions of European identity; in part, the simple parallelism of different scholarly communities. But there are also conceptual factors that actively maintain borders between newer and older disciplinary frameworks, and preclude or curtail the West's participation in 'Late Antiquity,' not only in its 'restricted' sense but also in its more embracing 'longitudinal' one. Some of these factors are presented explicitly as reassertions of an older consensus, particularly the influential assessment of A. H. M. Jones that the late Roman empire was a healthy state; its dissolution, under external pressures, can only be understood as the forced termination of a distinctive historical period ("The Decline of the Ancient World," Jones' alternative title). Other limiting approaches also reinforce long-standing scholarly projects; though cast in modernizing terms that assimilate with the tenor of much work in Brown's sense of 'Late Antiquity' (including the privileging of ideology and cultural dynamics as subjects of research, and the use of constructionist theoretical modeling as an interpretive methodology), they sustain much older conceptualizations of history. Instances of both such factors are discussed below.
The contested ideal of a non-Eurocentric, non-lapsarian 'Late Antiquity' is nonetheless a useful meter for gauging the state of thought in the two 'constituent' fields considered here, Rome's Fall and Europe's first Rise. Interaction between the older and newer constructs sheds light on both. Having at the outset demurred on the centrality of Rome's Fall and Europe's Origins, how does a mature 'Late Antiquity' now deal with these issues? To some critics, 476 is the ghost at the banquet of 'Late Antiquity,' and early medieval Europe the poor cousin in the late-antique scholarly world after the fifth century. Rome's Fall and Europe's various national origins constitute fundamental narratives that have long been invested with explanatory force; can 'Late Antiquity' do without these narratives, or some substitute? If not, do its claims to meaningfully straddle the end of Rome fall over? 'Late Antiquity,' meanwhile, intrinsically challenges the traditional autonomy of the topics of Fall and Rise, once regarded as self-evidently areas of key historiographic investigation, by demanding attention to cultural transitions that do not coincide with these cruces, and to broader contexts not implicated in Europe's ultimate nationalistic destiny. Can these venerable topics be pursued, in isolation from lateral fields of research, without compounding the complex, often dubious socio-political forces that have long motivated them? If these classic topics can now be understood as in fact part of the same historical and cultural continuum as other developments in 'Late Antiquity,' can research into them validly be furthered without first deconstructing the academic traditions that had formerly defined their status as autonomous fields of research?
The following survey of recent publications seeks to observe how these issues play out in current research. Each of these works offers an expansive interpretation of either Rome's Fall or the nature of post-imperial western Europe. Even those that are not primarily concerned with Rome's Fall incorporate interpretative accounts of it as a causal explanation for what came afterwards, and the discussion here will focus on those interpretations (while endeavouring also to give an overview of the books' main purposes). Though all of these works employ the phrase, none primarily cast themselves within the framework of 'Late Antiquity' in either its 'longitudinal' or 'restricted' senses; these are works of Medieval or Ancient Historians. But all intersect with major aspects of recent 'Late Antique' studies. Two of the approaches represented here (by Goffart and the main views presented by Noble) have come to be regarded as major, if not the main, components of 'Late Antiquity' studies specifically concerning the West; they are the early-medievalist discussions with which students of the late Roman empire or the early Byzantine and Islamic East are most likely to be familiar. [13] One (Wickham) embraces almost the same temporal and geographic span as 'longitudinal Late Antiquity,' not because the author has adopted this periodisation but because his approach advances a pre-existing trajectory of economic and social research that was instrumental in helping scholars conceive of the Mediterranean world as a coherent 'Late Antique' system. Another (Smith) pursues lines of interpretation of the early medieval West laid out by Peter Brown and can be read as complementing his account. But it will be convenient to begin with the works (by Ward-Perkins and Heather) that most directly addresses the field of 'Late Antiquity' by offering a critique its validity.
ROME'S FALL
One reaction to the displacement of 'End of Antiquity' narratives by a wider-ranging 'Late Antiquity' has been the reaffirmation, indeed amplification, of the central importance of western Roman imperial collapse. British scholarship in particular has produced noteworthy statements defending and continuing a trajectory of earlier research that focuses on the loss of Roman imperial unity and of Classical social and cultural structures. [14] The influence of A. H. M. Jones's monumental Later Roman Empire, and his verdict of a basically healthy empire debilitated only by external forces, remains strong (so much so that it would be possible for readers of the following works to assume that Jones represents the sole norm of scholarship before dissention began in the 1970s, rather than one aspect of an already multifarious field).
Two important statements of this reaction are Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, and Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians. Ward-Perkins and Heather argue not only that the institutional collapse of the western Roman empire was more calamitously destructive than is now usually presented, but also that it represents a vertiginous break in history; rather than being incorporated as one aspect of a wider narrative of historical development, Rome's Fall necessitates the division of western history into 'before' and 'after' the caesura. Their emphasis on catastrophe is signaled by their similar main titles, deliberately echoing only the second half of Gibbon's dyad Decline and Fall. Gibbon placed culpability for imperial collapse primarily on Roman shoulders, the internal "decline" of "immoderate greatness." [15] But for Heather, the Roman Empire collapsed not from systemic faults but because of external factors--the barbarian invasions, an "exogenous shock"--admitting neither preexisting destabilization from factors internal to the Roman empire, nor voluntary participation by imperial authorities in the processes of change. [16] Ward-Perkins' more nuanced discussion acknowledges the dangers of certain in-built factors in the Roman empire's Mediterranean-wide system, the fragility of economic specialization, but only as nerve points on which the stress of external pressures would tell; causation for collapse rests firmly on hostile barbarian forces (Ward-Perkins, pp. 136-37). For Heather in particular, the events of Rome's Fall were absolute: an unforeseen reversal of earlier imperial history, not an outgrowth of it. And a terminal reversal: western Nachleben to Rome are barely addressed here, though both Ward-Perkins and Heather themselves are historians of Medieval Europe as well as Late Rome (cf. Heather, pp. 438-39). It is what ends with Rome's Fall, not what continues into the post-Roman West, that concerns them.
What did end with Rome's Fall, according to Ward-Perkins and Heather, were the foremost features of classical Antiquity: a complex social system and a series of lifestyles supported by an advanced material culture. Their accounts are uncompromisingly secularist, as Ward-Perkins acknowledges (Ward-Perkins, pp. 172, 179), valuing highly the material Hellenistic lifestyle and the stable political unity of the Roman empire, explicitly in opposition to the spiritual thought-world seen to dominate the scholarship of 'Late Antiquity.' Ward-Perkins' early chapters deploy selected historical exempla to demonstrate the ill health of the fifth-century Roman empire and to set the scene for describing how much was lost: almost a whole urbanized culture, its physical infrastructure and the advantages it brought to its citizens (summarized, with pointed bluntness, as 'comfort'), and the complex networks of exchange that provided items of everyday life not only across the vast territory of the Roman world but also (and in some ways more impressively) down through the layers of late Roman social divisions (Ward-Perkins, Chapter 5). Heather's account focuses not on material context but on the Roman socio-political network in which governmental structures and the aristocratic elite reinforced each other to sustain a system that provided an impressive degree of unity to a vast territory (Heather, Chapter 10). For both, the losses of material lifestyle and political unity overshadow whatever may have survived.
Ward-Perkins explicitly positions his essay as a reaction to major trends he associates with 'Late Antiquity' (Ward-Perkins, Chapters 1 and 8). He identifies three characteristics of scholarship in 'Late Antiquity' as misdirecting discussion. One is the emphasis on religiosity--the 'Late Antiquity' of the Holy Man (personified by Peter Brown and exemplified in the University of California Press "Transformation of the Classical Heritage" series). To Ward-Perkins, this focus, though legitimate in itself, inadvertently devalues the cessation of physical culture by directing attention towards the continuity of spiritual culture throughout the period. A second is 'constructivist' interpretative frameworks that explain traditional material indices of collapse--including de-urbanization and the end of widespread building in stone--as choices consciously made by social elites for social strategies (e.g. Ward-Perkins, pp. 150-51; cf. Wickham, below). For Ward-Perkins, any element of choice in these changes was at most only making the best of a bad lot, when significant loss of facilities is manifest. The third concern is the study of 'barbarian' culture and interaction with Roman institutions, here conflating Walter Goffart's "techniques of accommodation" thesis with the thrust of recent work on 'ethnicity' exemplified by several volumes of the Brill "Transformation of the Roman World" (TRW) series (not a congenial mix; see below). Both approaches, to Ward-Perkins, generate a sanitized image of "the Euro-barbarian," which deflects attention away from the scale of damage done to the Roman system by the barbarian presence, and obscures barbarian culpability for fifth-century disasters. Ward-Perkins sees the construct of 'Late Antiquity' as having been useful in shifting away from the traditional western Euro-centrism and valorization of imperialism implicit in study of the period, but, at the same time, as guilty by omission of a "modern mirage of an accommodating and peaceful fifth century" (Ward-Perkins, p. 31). One might say that, in this view, 'Late Antiquity' serves a purpose at the level of meta-history in helping to identify ways in which aspects of traditional interpretations have been shaped by broader cultural agenda, but that at the level of historical representation it does not provide a faithful analogue to what the evidence suggests of the period itself. Heather, more focused on telling a narrative to a general audience (for whom he briefly introduces the framework of 'Late Antiquity'; Heather, pp. xii-xiv), also structures his argument explicitly as a rejection of views that detract from the admired political unity of the Roman empire. Heather opposes models that either locate the cause for Rome's Fall within the society and politics of Rome herself (Gibbon's moralising "immoderate greatness" and, more importantly, economically-based critiques of the twentieth century), or which see conscious imperial policy behind processes traditionally seen as 'decline' (Goffart's theory of a taxation-based model of co-option and settlement of barbarian groups).
Though issue can be taken with Ward-Perkins's account of the period and recent scholarship, his views are a welcome sampling of the reception of recent 'Late Antiquity' scholarship, reflecting understanding of the changed scholarly landscape not only by one senior scholar (who, inter alia, played a significant role in the TRW project), but also, one suspects, by many peers. [17] He rightly observes, for example, that the 1999 Bowersock-Brown-Grabar Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World, the first reference work for 'Late Antiquity' (in its longitudinal sense), nearly omits the West from consideration. Ward-Perkins suggests that this absence amounts to de facto recognition by the editors that Rome's Fall did in fact constitute a "discontinuity," removing the West from the 'Late Antique' world after the fifth century, and thus effectively invalidating claims to be able to write, as Peter Brown put it, "the entire history of the religious and cultural revolution associated with the end of the ancient world without invoking an intervening catastrophe and without pausing, for a moment, to pay lip service to the widespread notion of decay." [18] (Ward-Perkins, pp. 170-71 and 214 n. 4). Doubtless this de facto relegation of the West was not the intent of the Guide editors (not least in view of Brown's important vision of the early medieval West, The Rise of Western Christendom [19]), but it is nevertheless true that by its presentation the Guide confirms popular views that the West slid out of the ambit of the 'post-classical' world and into the arms of a 'Germanic' medieval culture. [20] (I return below to this effect, by which the West seems not to be a locus of 'Late Antique' research other than for certain particularist and exceptionalist themes.) Proponents of 'Late Antiquity' need to take Ward-Perkins' observation on board. It suggests that either this de facto situation be acknowledged, and the history of the West definitively partitioned into Roman and Medieval, as has often (but not always) been the case in European scholarship (and as Ward-Perkins and Heather advocate); or, if the fifth-century West is not to be seen as the end of a story, that greater efforts need to be made in order to articulate the pre-Carolingian West into the narrative of the wider world of the Mediterranean, Iran, and their hinterlands to the eighth centuries.
Heather's political and social account offers a narrative of termination, firmly separating Ancient from Medieval History along the fault-line of 476. The book is aimed at the general reader--the style is eminently readable (and entertaining), little background knowledge is assumed, and issues of scholarly debates are outlined pithily but without dragging the narrative or congesting the endnotes. Though subtitled "New History" (echoing Zosimos' own narrative of termination?), this account is unlikely to challenge the prejudices of its general readers. The dramatic emphasis on a definitive cessation of the Ancient World through the agency of 'the barbarians' sits comfortably with popular views of the period (as sampled by television documentaries and first-year teaching); while given nuance and depth by Heather's authoritative discussion of recent research, popular perception of the 'barbarian assault on civilization' will be little disrupted. The emphatic stress on termination affects not only the western, proto-medieval half of the empire, but also the East. Though the continued existence of the eastern half of the Roman empire is addressed in the problematic issue of why the West 'fell' but not the East, Byzantine continuity is less significant than western collapse: Byzantium is "best understood as another successor state rather than a proper continuation of the Roman Empire" (Heather, p. 431). This is a debatable view, especially for the period prior to the Islamic conquest, when Constantinople directly controlled the rich swath of eastern and southern Mediterranean hinterlands, understood now as a region enjoying an almost constant boom through and beyond the period of the West's fragmentation. [21] The role of the view of Byzantium presented here is to elevate 476 as the universal end of Antiquity, East and West.
Ward-Perkins uses narrative sources thematically as a preliminary to his central analysis of a systemic collapse of empire-wide interchange and material production under external pressure. Heather's account, by contrast, is centred on narrative, unrolling a single, unifying thesis, an expansion of his 1995 English Historical Review article, "The Huns and the End of the Roman Empire in Western Europe." [22] Here, sequence and causation of politico-military events explain a world-historical shift. The institutional collapse of the Roman empire in the West, Heather argues, was irreducibly the product of the arrival of the Huns from central Asia in the late fourth century and their continued pressure through to the collapse of Attila's hegemony in the early 450s. Hunnic pressure repeatedly pushed into Roman territory groups of hostile barbarian groups, which were larger and more sophisticated than Rome's tribal neighbours of earlier centuries as a Darwinian result of prolonged exposure to Roman militarism. These incursions weakened Roman power by catastrophic defeats of the army (not only at Adrianople in 378, but also in the West) and by forcible settlement within western territories, drastically reducing the imperial taxation base and so further reducing the army. All political developments (as well as cultural and economic collapse) were the more-or-less direct consequences of these events. The 'social contract' between the institution of the empire and the land-owning elite, the small minority in whose interests the imperial system operated (a relationship well brought out by Heather, and the major contribution of this account to 'barbarian invasion' narratives), was broken when the elite found itself obliged to switch allegiance to new overlords now better placed to act as local protectors. The end of the Roman empire (and so of Antiquity), then, was caused by external forces, in which Roman authorities played no intentional role. The argumentative function of the first part of the book, an introduction to the politics and society of the later Roman empire and its northern- and central-European barbarian neighbours up to the late fourth century (again, a useful survey of recent scholarship on the Roman empire), is to provide the empire with a clean bill of health. None of the internal illnesses suggested by earlier scholarship (economic and population decline, excessive and harsh taxation, oppressive totalitarian rule) is allowed to stand, forcing blame for imperial collapse back onto the dramatic external forces which take centre stage in the latter parts of the book: "When [political developments among Germanic groups] interacted with the exogenous shock that was the arrival of the Huns, the supergroups that would tear the western Empire apart came into being"; "Without the barbarians, there is not the slightest evidence that the western Empire would have ceased in the fifth century" (Heather, pp. 459, 449; cf. Wickham, p. 80).
Narrative history writing, the ordering of chronological and causal sequences of happenings, is an important but infirm device in the historiographic toolkit. It is exceptionally rare, for any period of pre-modern history, that the survival of sources has been so fortuitous that we can actually follow step-by-step the developments of key turning points, and are able to witness (rather than deduce) broad structural forces being made manifest in specific events; certainly not for all the long century of Rome's imperial fragmentation, with its complex array of disparate testimonia. Our reasonable substitutes for comprehensive minutiae tend either to be interpretive frameworks of greater or lesser complex theoretical modeling, with which we attempt to align extant evidence into a meaningful pattern; or leaps of argumentation that bridge gaps in narrative by drawing on analogous evidence or by extrapolating probabilities from a general vision of the historic period, approximating the type of information provided by actual sources, and so enabling us to articulate a causal sequence of events supported by logic and likelihood if not evidence. The products of both approaches are, at best, provisional; the artifice of patterns and weaknesses of argumentative analogies are not improper but have to be acknowledged or risk calcifying into obstructions to our engagement with what actual survives from the past, the texts and artifacts that serve us as evidence. With a subject such as Rome's Fall, so often reduced to familiar, flowing narratives, it can be difficult to keep in mind how shattered and ill-matching the assemblage of evidence is, how improbable that we can make "all the pieces fit" a single interpretation. Despite his formidable erudition and firm grasp of the sources, Heather's underlying thesis is vulnerable in its dependence on argumentative scaffolding. The Huns are presented as the causa remota for successive waves of destructive barbarian incursion into Roman territory for the whole of the six decades between their appearance in historical sources ca. 376 and Attila's fall in the early 450s. Heather mounts circumstantial evidence in support of this view, but it remains a fact that no written source supports this picture of the Huns as a major force before the 440s, or connects them with, for example, the entry of Radagaisus's Goths into Italy in 405. [23] This causal role for the Huns is accompanied by the venerable model of the 'Germanic' barbarians of Late Antiquity as politically more developed and composed of larger-scale units than their earlier counterparts, a construct long used in Germanic studies to explain the timing of barbarian victory over Rome, in the late fourth/fifth centuries rather than at an earlier date of Roman-barbarian interaction. Like the constancy of Hunnic pressure, it is a modern attempt at causation, not a fact. No contemporary shows awareness of such a change (quite the opposite, since classicising Greco-Roman writers almost invariably equate current barbarian peoples with ancient ones), and several recent surveys of written and material evidence for European barbarian political and military organisation throughout the Roman imperial period raise reasonable doubts about its historicity. [24] To these models of barbarian dynamics, Heather brings numerical assessments of the relative strength of barbarian 'invaders' and the Roman army, in order to demonstrate that barbarian groups presented serious challenges to Roman military control, not sideshows. Despite Heather's skill in discussing these figures, there remains no firm way of assessing the real size of Roman military forces in the fifth century (or indeed earlier), and surveys of numbers of barbarian groups are sheer guesswork. [25] Much of Heather's discussion of events and Roman socio-political structures is excellent (e.g. his lucid discussion of the Vandal occupation of North African provinces and consequential taxation impacts on the imperial fisc), but the overall thesis, of the empire undercut by the shockwaves of unprecedented Hunnic and Germanic assaults, cannot be supported by these substitutes for evidence; they are signs of the excessive demands of an overriding thesis.
Wrangles over the value and use of evidence are the daily fare of historians. Quotidian debate can and should continue through discussion, pro and con, of the specific interpretations put here. Orosius, Hydatius, and Salvian, all deployed here as contemporary witnesses to a lachrymose passing of Civilization, all also complain bitterly of the evils of Roman imperial rule. [26] Sources for the Gothic settlement in southern Gaul ca. 418 describe them as the initiative of the imperial government, prima facie evidence for the active participation of Rome in the processes of its Fall. [27] Fifth- and sixth-century sources that address the cessation of the western emperorship in 476 blame the Senators of Rome, not barbarians (or even unruly generals). [28] The one barbarian group that is consistently and clearly regarded as inimical to Roman imperial interests in the sources is the new Carthaginian threat of Vandal North Africa, which appears here only as an accessory after the fact. [29] Most jarringly, the explanatory role given by Heather to the violence of 'barbarians' in the late Roman West as the vehicle of change sits poorly with the airy dismissal of violence caused by endemic usurpation and civil warfare under the late Roman empire (Heather, p. 131). [30] None of these clusters of evidence necessarily tells us 'the truth,' but they are prominent in the textual evidence for the period and disturb 'barbarian invasion' narratives such as presented here; we cannot assume that we know better than our sources and overrule them by subordinating their testimony to our better judgement.
Of wider interest than these specific debates, however, are the historiographic implications raised by Ward-Perkins' and Heather's core arguments, of which I would raise two. Readers may infer from these works that until ca. 1971 a consensus existed on the nature of Rome's Fall, which was disrupted, albeit with good intentions, by the new model and interests of 'Late Antiquity'; as a result, the fundamental message of the former consensus has been lost, and only now is it being restored. Matters were not so unified before 1971, nor could they have been when this temporal period was the subject of so many over-lapping historical disciplines: Classics, multiple national histories, Patristics and Church history, Germanische Altertumskunde, Medieval history. Long before 1971, Henri Pirenne had dismissed the role of Rome's fifth-century political splintering as the termination of Antiquity, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges had charted the evolution of Roman administrative forms into Merovingian practices, Alfons Dopsch had furthered Germanist work on Roman impact on northern barbarian societies, while Henri-Irénée Marrou had brought to life that creative nature of post-Constantinian Christianity which became the springboard for one of the main features of Peter Brown's 'Late Antiquity.' Within the context of this range of scholarly approaches, it is entirely legitimate to revisit and seek to advance a Jonesian view of Rome's Fall and to foreground changes in material environment that separate ancient from medieval conditions; but the formidable emphasis on termination as the traditional, more-or-less 'common sense' view, from which recent scholarship has strayed, is a function of interpretive isolationism. Debate over this core issue of modern scholarship has to deal with its own historiography, and will not benefit from foreshortening of its own background. Secondly, Ward-Perkins' and Heather's accounts of Rome's Fall seemingly present so definitive an end as to forestall further conversation. Was there really so total a caesura, temporal and geographic, in Civilization? The implication of this finality is that classical and Hellenistic models of thought and practice cannot serve as means to understand early medieval conditions; something new took their place.
An unintended consequence of this logic is exemplified by some of the recent early-medieval scholarship presented in Thomas F.X. Noble's edited book From Roman Provinces to Medieval Kingdoms. The main focus of this book is also a reaffirmation of an academic tradition that pre-dates the rise of 'Late Antiquity,' in this case the Germanist philological reading of the events of the late Roman empire and early Middle Ages as the intrusion of northern European modes of thought and politics into the western Mediterranean world. Though the focus of this volume may seem very different from Ward-Perkins and Heather, even inimical--here are the 'Euro-Barbarians' that Ward-Perkins decries--they are linked. The connection is partly because of the traditional model of causation: the catastrophic tabula rasa after classical civilization falls, filled by the intruding non-Hellenistic, 'Germanic' culture, here expressed as 'ethnic ideologies.' But there are also similar assumptions about sources and modern historiographic context, though more accentuated in the approach advocated in Noble. Elements of the period that dominate written sources, in particular religious culture and institutions and the Hellenistic literary frame of our texts, are relegated to the status of peripheral aspects in order to highlight features, terminal or innovative, seen as defining the period; and scholarly background is foreshortened, obscuring the degree to which a received model drives the interpretive framework at hand. In fact, Ward-Perkins is disarmingly frank about his acceptance of a venerable historical model and use of current research to reinforce and extend it; not so the works promoted by Noble.
From Roman Provinces to Medieval Kingdoms is a selection of articles and book chapters by some fifteen different authors from the last two and a half decades, framed by a series of editorial introductions aimed at introducing non-specialists and students to current research topics in the early medieval period. The title might suggest a focus on administrative development, but in fact this collection foregrounds current work on ethnicity--here meaning self-identification of northern European, 'Germanic' peoples, the 'barbarian' settlers--as the most compelling issue of current research (Noble, ed., Introduction esp. pp. 3-4 and papers in Part One by Geary, Wolfram, Pohl, and Wood). 'Ethnicity' is the subject of the first and longest of the three sections of the book as well as most of its main Introduction, and will be the focus of the comments that follow here (two shorter, less homogenous Parts of the book deal with a variety of other issues, only one of which is administrative practices; some excellent selections appear there [31]).
The model of 'barbarian' ethnic identity, of Goths and other 'Germanic' peoples, advanced in the first half of the book is the 'Ethnogenesis' approach vigorously promoted by a stream of German- and English-language publications over the last decade and a half (perhaps most visibly in several volumes in the 'Transformation of the Roman World' series [32]), which now seems to have attained the status of an accepted model (e.g. Smith, pp. 260-67; Wickham, pp. 82-83). In brief, this model asserts that the ethnic identity of northern European peoples was not fixed and inherent in these populations themselves; instead, it was malleable and invested in the charisma of the elite leadership or, at one remove, in 'ethnic discourses,' origin myths and such narratives, manipulated by those elites as means to attract and consolidate followings. 'Ethnicity' displaced Hellenistic ideologies (i.e. the dominance of Roman imperialist discourses) as the foundational means by which the cohesion and control of communities was achieved; this model therefore seeks to define the nature not only of proto-historical peoples but also of the early medieval kingdoms established in the former western Roman provinces. Evidence for this ideology is adduced from Latin and Greek literary sources, none of which is a direct attestation of these postulated processes but many of which are claimed as incorporating recensions of non-Hellenistic, northern European 'ethnic discourses.' Conceptually prior to the elaboration of this model, however, is the more important proposition of this view of history: that 'ethnicity' itself constituted the dominant politico-ideological force that shaped early Europe, and that 'ethnic discourses' must therefore be the primary framework for our reading of the post-imperial West. Most of the papers in the main part of this book present this model in various aspects.
The significance or otherwise of ethnic identity in the Roman-to-medieval transition, and the methodological issues surrounding the 'Ethnogenesis' approach, are indeed topics of active current debate, if not the main focus of early medieval research suggested here. TMR readers may pursue this current discussion elsewhere if inclined. [33] For the record, this reviewer makes no pretence to be non-partisan in the debate. Noble does, which is unfortunate for in fact the non-specialist reader is not offered an overview of recent historiographic issues but an induction into one particular approach. The opportunity for someone outside the current debate to present students with case studies in live issues of methodology and philosophy of history--the discipline of History in action--is missed, overlooked by the desire to agglutinate incompatible approaches into "a comprehensive and balanced explanation" of the period. In selecting articles for inclusion, real debate is avoided. Patrick Amory, perhaps the most important scholar to apply contemporary theories of ethnicity to early medieval 'barbarian' peoples and certainly the most rigorous and comprehensive in his use of sources, is explicitly omitted for being "too extreme" (Noble, ed., p. 13). [34] Only one response is included to the views presented here as a new consensus (Noble, ed., Chapter 4: Goffart, a supplement to an earlier, important article not included here); a braver collection would have included any of several other articles that specifically address the historiographic context or methodology of the 'Ethnogenesis' approach. [35] (The most telling critique actually appears in the second Part of the book; it is not insignificant that it in fact predates all the articles that appear in Part One of the volume. [36])
As an essentially historiographic collection, intended to outline current major trends in research, this volume is problematic precisely because of a lack of historiographic depth; its presentation precludes rather than encourages reflection on modern scholarly traditions as a means of advancing critical understanding of the early medieval period. The editor keenly asserts radical change, both within the time-period addressed and, more importantly, in recent scholarship, invoking the currency of 'Late Antiquity,' current problematisations of 'ethnicity,' and 'Post-Modernism' in order to cast the last two decades of scholarship as a historiographic watershed that condemns much previous work to irrelevance. Notwithstanding this buzz of excitement, it would have been both more accurate and more useful to have provided these articles with a historiographic context of somewhat over a century, for rather than breaking with earlier scholarship, many of the topics addressed here, particularly the main emphasis on 'ethnic' identity, are better seen as the most recent developments in approaches of such longevity. Despite the academic ageism assumed here, there need be no inherent fault in developing ideas mooted in generations past; certainly this is the case for important topics broached in the latter two Parts of the book, including Roman continuities in Merovingian Gaul, barbarian 'accommodation' through Roman legal mechanisms, and historiographic debate over 'Romanist' and 'Germanist' interpretations, all of which are discussions set in train by the mid- or late-nineteenth century. But the valorisation here of "Barbarian Ethnicity and Identity" and of the 'Ethnogenesis' interpretation is justified by the editor largely on the grounds that this approach allegedly eclipses older views and, more importantly, is fundamentally informed by current critical thought. Neither claim has substance; if novelty is important to the credentials of this interpretation, it is on weak ground. Contrary to common assumptions, modern scholarship on proto-historical, 'Germanic' peoples prior to the last two decades was not been based exclusively on biological and racial models or equivalents to 'primordialist' notions of ethnicity; these were largely nineteenth-century developments, fusing Romantic thought and liberal-democratic agenda with strands of classical ethnography, but not exclusive models even then. [37] Early modern work, often undertaken under the shadow of state authority (Hapsburg, Swedish, Danish), tended naturally to assume that political leaders--kings--were the point around which what we now call 'ethnic identity' congealed. Views of 'ethnicity' as a cultural variable, open to elite manipulation, appear casually in unexpected places:
Modern nations are fixed and permanent societies, connected among themselves by laws and government...[whereas the] German tribes were voluntary and fluctuating associations of soldiers.... The same communities, uniting in a plan of defence or invasion, bestowed a new title on their confederacy.... A victorious state often communicated its own name to a vanquished people. Sometimes crowds of volunteers flocked from all parts to the standard of a favourite leader; his camp became their country, and some circumstance of the enterprise soon gave a common denomination to the mixed multitude.
So Gibbon, in 1776. [38] Fuller consideration of how the unity of early medieval peoples may have been manufactured by elites through the cultural media of religion and myth developed especially in the early twentieth century [39] --without, however, necessarily elevating 'ethnicity' to an ideology on par with Christianity or Roman imperial discourses. By collapsing the scope of historiographic discussion to our generation, the editor fails to grasp the issues of historical philosophy at stake, and misrepresents the evolution of a long-established interpretative agenda as a radical reversal. A lax presentation of more general historiography does not help. [40]
The works re-presented here valorise the 'ethnicity' of early medieval European peoples as a fundamental political and cultural force, albeit as a constructionist not primordial phenomenon but one nevertheless northern European in origin. In two celebrated contributions, modern nationalistic uses of ethnic 'pseudo-history' are rightly disdained (Noble, ed., Chapter 1: Geary), and models of fixed visual signs as ethnic markers are dismissed, in line with a wider rejection of Tracht as a modern construct (Noble, ed., Chapter 6: Pohl). But in place of the discourses thus critiqued, both authors reify an equally old model of early Europe as a zone of competing, manipulated ethnic identities. It is a shame to see the 'Early Middle Ages' ghettoised as a period fixated with 'ethnic identity,' a traditional focus of research presented as a novelty. It is important to underscore that, implicit in these discussions of the constructed nature of ethnicity, 'ethnicity' itself is being promoted as the fundamental force in the break-up of the classical world and the formation of Europe. This is a highly contestable view, not one that can be assumed silently. [41] It is not self-evident in cultural artefacts of the period. Our main written sources tend to be uninterested in ethnic identification, notwithstanding the enthusiastic interpretations often imposed on them by modern scholarship; or else they perpetuate classical ethnographic discourses, rather than introducing novel ones. Judeo-Christian and Hellenistic models of 'ethnicity' are far more evident than indigenous northern-European ones in Late Antiquity. [42] It is possible that 'barbarian' elites in the former Roman territories may have acquired a sense of cohesion and self-identity that amounted to an 'ethnic' sense (though it is deeply problematic to judge which group-labels in our sources transmit self-identification and autonyms, which reflect Greco-Roman ethnographic objectifications, and how a distinction is to be made), but there is much more evidence for Christian conceptions of rulership and 'peoples' shaping such consciousness than for input from northern European 'ethnic discourses.' [43] The written evidence used to advance the views presented by Noble's collection is derived from texts not only written in Greek and Latin languages but more importantly framed by Hellenistic and Biblical literary discourses; time and again, late Roman examples of classical ethnography, a discourse of alienation and exclusion, are appropriated as 'back-formations' of discourses of ethnic self-identification, explicitly or otherwise northern-European in origin (e.g. Noble, ed., Chapters 3: Wolfram on Jordanes, and 7: Pohl, on texts that mention Amazons). 'Ethnicity' might be expected to be of wide interest in 'Late Antiquity' studies, both because of the coincidence of modern interest in the phenomenon with the rise of this field, and because the post-classical period features prominent candidates for ethnic politics: groups such as the Armenians and Copts whose identities survived in the shadow of powerful neighbours, or the 'Arabic' ethnic cohesion asserted as an element of a new imperialism. [44] But the study of western early medieval 'ethnicity' here has little interest in these potential comparanda, or in the nature of the sources through which we study the period. Instead it is engaged in constructing those sources into attestations of a non-Hellenistic ethnic dynamic that overwhelmed classical discourses. Aspects of the early medieval West that might be expected to articulate study of the region with both its classical past and its eastern contemporaries (e.g. its Hellenistic and Biblical culture) are thus turned into expressions of European exceptionalism and cultural essentialism, a distinctive 'ethnic discourse' that detaches the West from 'Late Antiquity.' The editor's own contributions compound long-standing Eurocentric interpretations of the period. [45] In current scholarship, the valorization of 'ethnicity' as a driving historical force is a more significant block to full membership of the post-imperial West into the framework of 'Late Antiquity' than are terminal perspectives of Rome's Fall.
A hefty portion of the consternation expressed by reactions against 'Late Antiquity' revolves around two books by Walter Goffart: his 1980 Barbarians and Romans A.D.418-584: The Techniques of Accommodation and his 1988 Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D.550-800): Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon. [46] It is timely that the thesis of the first book, and some implications of the latter, are revisited and advanced by Walter Goffart in Barbarian Tides: The Migration Age and the Later Roman Empire. Barbarians and Romans offered a model for barbarian settlement in the West based on reallocation of portions of imperial taxation; more broadly, this model was predicated on the evidence for imperial participation and direction of events commonly seen as 'barbarian invasions,' and a vision of empire-and-outsiders not as mutually destructive but as fundamentally collaborative, by virtue of imperial exploitation of barbarians, in the perpetuation of the empires' interests (both Ward-Perkins and Heather, above, reply directly to this model). Narrators of Barbarian History, in its discussion of the historical context, authorial strategies, and genre criticism of major early medieval historical texts, sought to build up a more mature picture of four major authors than most of them had generally enjoyed; but its analysis implicitly undercut many traditional and current foundations of philological 'Germanic Antiquity' studies. Texts long deployed as repositories of Germanic beliefs were elucidated by their Greco-Roman and Christian contexts (the first Part of Noble, ed., above, contains subsequent attempts to reappropriate Greco-Roman texts for northern European 'ethnic ideologies'). The new retractatio, longer but more approachable than the somewhat dense and technical Barbarians and Romans, updates key arguments in response to earlier critical reception. It also, importantly, enlarges on the historiographic implications of these arguments: the impact of these specific issues on how the period should be conceived.
Goffart's earlier books were not intentionally part of the 'project' of 'Late Antiquity' in any Brownian sense. He wrote as a Medievalist, critiquing frameworks of interpretation inherited from the historiographies of late-Roman and Germanic studies (both scholarly fields remain present in the sub-title here). [47] His ideas, particularly about the settlement of barbarian peoples through Roman administrative processes, became part of the 'Late Antique' matrix in the 1980s and '90s, in part because they crossed the fields of several disciplines tributary to 'Late Antiquity,' in part because his alternative to a catastrophic, conflict-driven caesura were read as analogous to Brown's de-centering of Rome's Fall. Goffart's views have formed one of few genuinely western foci for 'Late Antique' discussions. They have, however, often been confused with the 'Ethnogenesis' views discussed above, however incompatible these approaches are, on the slim basis that both seem to be saying new things about the old topic of 'barbarians' (cf. Ward-Perkins, above [48]). Clarification of these views can only advance discussion. (Although Goffart only rarely and casually invokes 'Late Antiquity' as a context of his study, it is striking that support for his settlement thesis is given by analogous arrangements under early Islamic and Byzantine military funding arrangements; Goffart, p. 313, n. 15; Wickham, p. 84-85.)
Goffart demands attention to modern historiography as much as to source criticism and historical analysis. The context for his Barbarians and Romans in 1980 was not the new model of 'Late Antiquity' but an argument in institutional history put forward in 1844 by a Germanist scholar, Ernst Theodor Gaupp. Gaupp suggested that the barbarian settlers in the new western kingdoms were included into the Roman system by imperial authorities through the mechanism of military billeting (hospitalitas); Goffart argued instead for the use of the taxation system. But the point of departure for Gaupp's view, like Goffart's, was not these technicalities but the nature of Roman-barbarian relations demonstrated by the barbarian settlements. Gaupp turned to an institutional model for an important reason: to explain the fact that the sources for the barbarian settlements show little sign of political or military upset and no substantial disruption of the social structures associated with aristocratic large land-ownership in the West, but rather describe settlements directed by Roman imperial (military) officials. It was these intimations of a systematic inclusion of newcomers into a complex and politically-sensitive structure that sent Gaupp in search of an explanation; he found it in Roman public administration, an explanatory context which Goffart sought to strengthen. Critics (and some supporters) of Goffart have tended, like Heather above, to see him as having introduced a model of "peaceable" barbarian settlement against prevailing views of hostile conquest (cf. citations at Ward-Perkins, p. 193 n. 20). Goffart himself cautions against seeing his model "with a pink glow of idealization" (Goffart, p. 185); its subject, after all, is a form of military funding--hardly a "peaceable" function--not a policy of liberal multiculturalism as critics sometimes seem to think. But a more fundamental and consistent problem with debate on this topic has been conflation of Goffart's model (taxation) with its underlying premises (imperial direction of settlement, Gaupp's starting point). When Goffart's taxation-based model is disputed, as it often has been over twenty-five years, there is usually a double conclusion: an (explicit) evidential conclusion that the earlier, military-billeting model was correct; and an (implicit) interpretive conclusion that this model was really just a legal fiction to preserve a modicum of self-respect by Roman authorities while barbarians appropriated lands from provincials by sheer force; 'billeting' equals 'barbarian invasions with fig leaf' (e.g. Wickham, p. 83). This reading misconstrues and misuses Gaupp; it does not turn back the clock pre-Goffart but overrides Gaupp's initial insight. The complaint of critics with a non-violent land settlement should begin not with Goffart in 1980 but with Gaupp in 1844. Calls to restore a Jonesian understanding of Rome's Fall do not seek to backtrack along a single, linear scholarship, but advocate one relatively recent model against others as old or older. It should be underscored that the line of historical argumentation to which Goffart's "accommodation" thesis contributes, that has seemed to provide so novel or so challenging a contribution to western 'Late Antiquity' studies, predates the American Civil War, the Irish potato famine, and the Revolutions of 1848. What Goffart did was to restore Gaupp's argument from accretions that compromised his premise, find a model that better suited the evidence (since, as he argues here, the Roman military billeting model could not have been transferred to a permanent situation), and establish a broader interpretive context. Intricacies of evidence aside, the scholarly community's grasp of its own historiography is one of the key issues in the debate over Goffart's settlement model.
The premise of Goffart's 1980 settlement thesis, an organised and relatively undisruptive inclusion of selected newcomers under imperial direction, was initially accepted in principle into modern Germanistic studies (Germanist reaction to the premises of Goffart's later discussion of sources, Narrators, is another story). [49] Destructive savagery (of 'barbarian invasions') is a component of Classicists', not Germanists', construction of the Roman empire's neighbours; a cooperative model poses little threat to the bases of Germanisch Altertumskunde. Moreover, acceptance of some Roman influence on 'Germanic' peoples is a long-standing thread of Germanic studies. Not so with Jonesian Classical and Roman scholarship; the conception of the empire's raison d'être as the defence of its own status, and identification of Hellenistic material culture with Roman identity, preclude a model based on governmental participation in the empire's unravelling (as Ward-Perkins and Heather demonstrate). Goffart's views have resonance with another branch of Ancient World studies, the dramatic explosion of new approaches to Roman Frontier Studies from the late 1980s, in which the model of the Roman frontier has shifted from a hermetic seal to a zone of controlled interaction. This reconceptualisation of the nature of the Roman imperial project and of interactions across borders is analogous (not identical) with Goffart's view of Roman-barbarian relations as part of a long-term pattern of imperial exploitation and absorption, rather than a thanatic conflict. [50]
Interaction between discussions of modern historiography, source criticism, and historical analysis is as distinctive an aspect of Goffart's work as his particular arguments. How scholarly approaches have formulated historical topics--the argumentative logic of whole disciplines--inevitably shapes our approach to the sources themselves and thence to the task of historical reconstruction. This consciousness of historiographic frameworks and how they operate, in order to weigh the influence between agenda and methodology and to appreciate conceptual insights as much as to critique disciplinary topoi, contrasts with others' enthusiastic assertions of newness of current models and redundancy of past research. One consequence of Goffart's approach is that Barbarian Tides has a complex and unconventional structure. Rather than mounting a single theme, the book moves between chapters of modern historiographic discussion, source analysis, close historical reconstruction, and broad overview. The goal of this path is not to build a single historical picture but to discuss how we are to understand the period, dealing in succession with an accumulation of issues built up over generations. Goffart's discussion of modern historiography sees peers both critiqued and built upon. The Roman historian Alexander Demandt is used, from respect, as an example of the interlocking Classicist and Germanist discourses of 'barbarian invasion' and subjected to analysis that erodes not the evidence but the argumentative logic of this model (Goffart, Chapter 2; this critique can be read profitably in relation to Heather's narrative). But Goffart's concluding chapters build largely and explicitly on Demandt's construct of a 'military aristocracy' in the late Roman empire and its successors, as a major vehicle for continuity into the early medieval period (Goffart, Chapter 7).
Goffart responds to two looming interpretive frameworks, Classicist and Germanist, by fragmenting the latter and seeing 'barbarian' history not as its own discourse but as part of a pattern of Roman-barbarian (or centre/frontier) interaction. A key event in the fifth-century 'invasions' of the West (the Rhine crossing by the Vandals, Alani, and Sueves in 405/406) is reinterpreted by strict reading of the sources; the histories of seven other barbarian groups, dynamic or inert, is outlined, showing how very different were their experiences of interaction with late Rome; the barbarian 'successor state' par excellence, Theoderic's Italy, is shown to have had no driving ethnic cohesion (Goffart, Chapters 5, 7). These variegated mini-studies, beside elucidating their immediate subjects, demonstrate that the stories of these neighbours and newcomers to the Roman empire cannot be understood as a cohesive and discrete topic: traditional and current 'Germanic' templates, of migration and 'ethnic discourse,' do not provide a meaningful interpretive framework. [51] These subjects become informative when considered in terms of their relationship to the Roman empire. This relationship is understood not as one of fundamental hostility and opposition, but of incremental Roman use and incorporation of the barbarians of Late Antiquity, just as the empire had used and incorporated the barbarians of Hispania and Gaul earlier in its history. The empire's consumption of barbarian manpower provided a 'military aristocracy,' an elite, of indifferent 'barbarian' or 'Roman' background, spread through the late empire and, later, its western successor states, that continued what is seen here as the basic project of the empire: defence and control of territory in the interests of large land-owning aristocracies. The functions of this class, to Goffart, provide an important continuity between late Roman and medieval conditions. In the process, both the western and eastern halves of the Roman empire went through a militaristic "reductionism," squeezing aristocratic otium from a society with room for only two privileged classes, the military and ecclesiastical aristocracies (Goffart, Chapter 8; cf. Wickham, below).
Goffart's model, of an early medieval West that continued the dynamics of the late Roman empire rather than grew afresh from the empire's ashes, will prompt debate. In challenging venerable disciplinary templates, it raises fundamental questions: was the core purpose of the late Roman empire the perpetuation of the military-political superstructure that gave unity to the Mediterranean world (in which case, Rome's Fall was a caesura), or the defence of its socio-economic base, the structures of elite land-ownership (in which case, the western kingdoms were very much uninterrupted continuities)? As Ward-Perkins and Heather state, Goffart's earlier settlement thesis has formed part of the move of 'Late Antiquity' away from catastrophe models. The fuller vision here offers a link across 'Late Antiquity' that articulates the period on a secular, not spiritual, basis, incorporating significant change while rooted in what were undeniably core features of both the Roman empire and the early medieval states, military power and elite land-ownership.
EUROPE'S RISE
Unlike Rome's Fall, and its debates framed as between new and old, scholarship on the early medieval West seems to have become a field of constant renewal. The impact of Michael McCormick's Origins of the European Economy (2001), with its new vision of vigorous exchange leading into the central Middle Ages and the articulation of the Middle Eastern economic expansion under the 'Abbasids with northern and western Europe, is still far from fully worked out. A different, self-consciously novel vision is Julia M.H. Smith's Europe after Rome: A New Cultural History 500-1000. Here the early Middle Ages are presented in terms consonant with the project of a culturally-constructivist 'Late Antiquity'; indeed this volume in many ways complements Peter Brown's own The Rise of Western Christendom by addressing, with a comparable (not identical) approach, a different selection of historical categories. Smith shares both historical framework and philosophical conception with Brown. In its framework of discussion, Smith's Europe is de-centered and non-hierarchical. Insular and Scandinavian regions rank alongside the traditional main players of the early medieval centuries (France, England, and the German regions) as equally important sources of evidence for what Smith dubs "an early medieval 'syndrome'" common to all parts of the West (Smith, pp. 3-4, 296). [52] Hierarchies, of culture and authority, are also stridently rejected. Popes and emperors, and the public ideologies that underwrote their authority, have to wait until the final chapters of the book to receive discussion, in order to stress that these offices and beliefs were not the sole or even the primary sources of power in early medieval societies. The sequence of chapters, running across four main sections, addresses language and physical environment ("Fundamentals," Chapters 1-2), social structures of family and gender ("Affinities," Chapters 3-4), and resources of labour, land, and treasure ("Resources," Chapters 5-6) before reaching the 'formal' ideologies of Christianity, kingship, ethnicity, and imperialism ("Ideologies," Chapters 7-8). These latter public ideologies are discussed as ubiquitous and defining features of the early medieval 'syndrome,' but their significance is circumscribed. Their institutional frameworks are not presented as the sole generators of belief and practice. The worldly manifestation of ecclesiastical and imperial ideologies, the city of Rome (seat of Roman continuity, episcopal prestige, and imperial legitimization), serves not as a centre of authority or a repository of 'superior' culture, but as an ideological touchstone--a resource available to be used symbolically by social elites as far away as Britain and Scandinavia. Each of the earlier registers of discussion, from language to treasure, is presented as itself a site of social or ideological power, not as a passive recipient shaped by the 'formal' public ideologies. These registers of social practice provide venues where figures other than kings and bishops are able to exercise agency in shaping their lives. The public, institutional ideologies balance on top of an already tightly woven mesh of social agency.
This highlighting of 'subaltern' avenues for agency is a function of the underlying philosophy of history championed by Smith, which, even more than the de-centering of empire and papacy, accommodates this account within a 'Late Antiquity' framework. Smith rejects both institutional history and Annales-style analyses of social and environmental forces in favour of an approach based on social and cultural anthropology, described as "comparative ethnography" or "the new cultural history." It is can be broadly characterized as 'constructionist,' analyzing social phenomena (e.g. language change, lordship) in terms of how their participants formed and sustained the patterns of thought needed to support the phenomena, and for what social or ideological purposes people did so, rather than seeing phenomena as social processes that act upon individuals (e.g. Smith, pp. 83-84, on kinship). Smith assertively valorizes the explanatory value of universalist models imported ultimately from the Social Sciences in order to explain regional early-medieval particularities: "[the] purpose [of the model] is to enable questions of general applicability to receive locally specific answers"; the categories of discussion, rather "than merely explaining what happened,...analyse how and why things happened" (Smith, p. 4). Historical agency is devolved to individuals: the approach claims access to "how people gave meaning to their lives and validated their own way of doing things.... By implication, this approach prefers to endow the men and women of the past with agency, instead of understanding historical change as a series of forces, trends, or movements that reduce individuals to passive pawns in the grip of impersonal forces" (Smith, pp. 4, 6). Actual anthropological models are rarely explicitly present in the text (an exception: Smith, pp. 101-2, on honour). Instead, this framework is generally expressed through a series of constructionist interpretations in which individuals deploy 'culture'--the series of resources available to them including social practices such as name-giving, familial and quasi-familial ties, gift-exchange--as means to organize their beliefs and actions.
This recasting of a whole historical period sums up several recent trends in research in the field. It is a bold endeavour, resting upon a wide and profound knowledge of sources and the product of strenuous intellectual effort. Like several of the books discussed above, this work is presented to be accessible to students and visitors from other fields, as well as serving as a statement directed to peers: little background is assumed, the notes cite sources and only intermittently modern studies, and the bibliography is packaged in the form of a usefully annotated 'Further Reading' list. Its arguments will be refreshing and stimulating to anyone approaching the subject from a nationalist historiographic background, in its foregrounding of diversity and the importance of cultural practices alongside more visible political forms, and in providing a model for particular types of historical analysis.
Parallels between Smith's approach and Peter Brown's work are immediately apparent: in the emphasis on diversity (compare Smith's "decentralized" forms of Christianity, pp. 222-23, with Brown's 'micro-Christianities'), in cognizance of cultural anthropology (though Brown has consistently worked in parallel rather than under the shadow of theoretical approaches, e.g. his Body and Society in Late Antiquity vis-à-vis Foucault's history of sexuality), and, the clearest echo, in the emphasis on 'choice' and individual participation in the construction of social phenomena. 'Choice' and 'identity,' terms of great current valence, are given key roles to play by Smith: in the use or rejection of Latin, for example, "early Medieval Europeans were making choices about their own identity" (Smith, p. 15). This emphasis on choice and agency strikes a liberating note, certainly one at odds with popular views of the early Middle Ages as a period of grinding oppression. How valid is it as a historical description? Brown's own use of a constructionist, malleable model of identity as an explanatory model for cultural and political phenomena has raised uneasiness even in sympathetic readers. [53] It is, of course, debatable at what point this constructionist model outgrows its use as a heuristic intellectual tool and becomes itself an end-point. Some examples of 'choice' here cut it fine: if naming practices did not follow "hard-and-fast rules" but instead reflected "deeply ingrained cultural habits" (Smith, p. 88), how much more agency does 'habit' permit than 'rule'? Where does agency give way to social process?
The valorization of a constructionist interpretive model raises questions of epistemology. Anthropologists and sociologists can observe and record their subjects in real time; historians cannot. The use of ancient and medieval literary sources, which operate within their own field of discourse, as means to illustrate contemporary interpretive frameworks, which are themselves the product of specific modern historical and intellectual contexts, is problematic. One is reminded of Phillipe Buc's The Dangers of Ritual (2001), a compelling study of the meeting between medieval textual sources and modern interpretive frameworks that demonstrates the need to critique these intellectual tools as historically-constructed artifacts just as much as the medieval sources to which we apply them. [54] The problem is obliquely recognized but suppressed by Smith in the Introduction. "[S]ensitivity towards language" is advocated, and warning raised of "the uncertain relationship between texts and the historical 'reality' they purport to represent." The 'new cultural history,' however, critiques 'culture' (in this passage, texts) as artifacts "in the service of power"; armed with this recognition, texts can be tamed and made to contribute to the task of "revealing strategies of domination for what they are" (Smith, pp. 6-7). Texts cannot be trusted as direct representations of reality; but they can be trusted to demonstrate the operation of the interpretive model. This methodology is arguably a form of deferred positivism, privileging not types of sources but types of phenomena which sources are permitted to illuminate. It is fed in part by a distrust of literary sources: given that they are not direct windows onto reality and are inextricably tied to all levels of contemporary ideology, they have to be subjugated to an interpretive matrix. (A different view would be to see the literary and ideological frameworks of texts not as deceitful barriers but as themselves opportunities for data.) This book is marketed at a student and general audience, so regular methodological digressions cannot be expected; nevertheless it is hard not to be concerned that confidence in its interpretive framework seems to invest the discussion with a remit to keep at arm's length problems of evidence and interpretation and so gain a direct access to the Past denied to textual evidence.
In the event, specific interpretations of texts and historical events are sometimes held hostage to the demands of argument. Alfred of Wessex is presented as a representative of the "finely calibrated linguistic strategies" of the Anglo-Saxon state for enjoying Old English poetry about both biblical and "traditional Germanic" heroes (Smith, pp. 36-37). His role as patron of a major project to translate Christian Latin works into the vernacular, a key element of that calibration, is unmentioned. [55] Gregory of Tours' account of the marriage of the pagan Frankish king Clovis and his Catholic queen Clothild is presented as an example of 'domestic' processes of conversion to Christianity, in opposition to an alternative model of royal public conversion, "public spectacle, carefully staged" (Smith, pp. 226-228). Gregory's narrative of Clovis is a blend of Old Testament Israelite kings and the Silvester legend, with Clothild taking the part of Constantine's mother Helena, God's vehicle for the royal conversion; Clovis's baptism (here conflated with his conversion) was widely advertised throughout the Frankish kingdom and beyond, a prime example of "public spectacle." [56] No doubt domestic forces were highly important in the quiet spread of Christianity in the early medieval West, as they were in the high and later Roman empire, but an approach more sensitive to literary texts would warn that this is the wrong choice of text to illustrate the point.
The choice of an explanatory model involves not only emphases but also omissions. With the stress on negotiated constructions of social phenomena, at the expense of institutional history, the framework of the state recedes. Amidst the various ways in which ties of kinship were available to be deployed as social resources, one of the most striking, the appropriation and domination of secular and ecclesiastical public offices by aristocratic families, receives no attention. Against the lengthy discussion of gift-giving as a device for kings as well as lesser individuals to "turn...their resources into political advantage," taxation (or landed wealth; see Wickham, below), the basis of much of these resources, receives only passing and uninterested comment. In Peter Brown's late Rome, cultural change stands alongside the brutal realities of the Roman state and taxation machine; Smith's early medieval polities risk being assimilated with older models of purely personal medieval rulership.
Eschewing discourses of decline and institutional growth, Smith generally avoids narrative as a mode of description or means of explanation. Unlike, say, Heather's explicit use of historical narrative as a means to explain diachronic change, Smith's argumentation is interpretive, employing description to assert the synchronic conditions of "the early medieval 'syndrome.'" Rulers--Charlemagne, Otto III, Alfred, Theoderic--walk on stage only to demonstrate particular features of ideology or power, rarely as figures with their own history, rather like the appearance of rulers as epitomes of virtues in medieval Islamic 'mirrors for princes.' The student will need a conventional vade mecum to locate these personages. But is narrative really banished from this mode of presentation? In fact, the text often presumes a kind of accompanying, implied 'infra-narrative' that underlies and sustains the analytical discussion. One example--an obvious choice given the books discussed above--is Rome's Fall. Frequently touched on, never treated frontally, the story of the shift from Roman empire to autonomous kingdoms is historiographically sensitive territory; 'traditional' narratives are reproved as "inappropriate" (e.g. Smith, pp. 29, 256), but no sustained alternative is proffered. The keen student, however, can join the dots, in part with the aid of cross-referencing within the text (e.g. Smith, p. 300 n. 7), to produce a sequence like the following:
When "Germanic-speaking" "war lords" entered Roman territory "in search of new homes," Roman governing structures did not "decay" but became "disaggregated and thinned out," "dissol[ving]" and "coagulat[ing]" around the new "Germanic- speaking elites." Under "warrior kings" such as Theoderic in Italy and Clovis, military prowess "gradually" replaced classical education as the marker of the new aristocracies, and "Germanic" cultural practices--language, marriage practices, naming patterns--dominated, not because of demographic replacement but as the result of "conquest." These "war lords" used "the stories people told themselves," of migration from distant Scandinavia, together with Biblical and classical ethnographic motifs, as "origin legends" to sustain the success of their "ethnically-based kingdoms," and, in the case of the Franks, to dominate other peoples. [57]
In short, Germanic warrior leaders occupied a passive Roman empire, the administrative and cultural structures of which withered away in the face of Germanic politico-cultural traditions of ethnicity as the basis for communities. No part of this infra-narrative, an old Germanist story given new lease of life in recent years, is beyond contest (see Noble, ed., above), but if there is one central problem it is perhaps the substitution of pseudo-technical terminology for narrative as a means of explaining historical change by implication. The term "war lord" is never defined; it suggests destructiveness and survival from plunder rather than rule through state structures, a image that sits oddly with figures such as Theoderic and Clovis, and does little to disguise the term's role as a euphemism for the disapproved label "barbarian." "Germanic," like "Celtic," is firmly and correctly circumscribed in the early pages of the book as a modern linguistic term, not an objective historical culture (Smith, pp. 19-21); unfortunately this sound observation is undercut by the constant use of the term "Germanic-speakers" (and "Germanic-speaking peoples" and "Germanic-speaking elites"), which rapidly fills the simpler term's position as a reified construct. "Origin myths," alleged for "many--indeed most--of the peoples of Europe," become a systemic factor consolidating change, as "successful" kingdoms are credited with indigenous origin myths. The relation of this term to specific texts or other examples of evidence in not explicated, and inevitably Jordanes' Getica is generalized as a model of such politicized ethnic discourses, irrespective of the historical or textual evidence. [58] In each of these cases, a freighted term serves to sketch the nature and impact of historical actors; while this narrative shorthand is substituted for argumentation about the processes of Rome's Fall, the picture of the period that it outlines is much closer to 'traditional' accounts of 'barbarian invasions' than the explicit discussion of the book would suggest.
More fundamentally, the "ethnic policy" central to this view (Smith, pp. 266-67, concerning Theoderic), as well as providing a plot-thread for the infra-narrative underwriting the book, occupies a lofty position in the book's structural progression from "Fundamentals" to "Ideologies," and sits alongside Christianity, kingship, and the image of imperial Rome as a 'peak' ideological construct. This presentation of early medieval culture, in keeping with the 1999 Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World volume, arises from the marriage of the constructionist interpretive framework adopted here with current Germanist philological models. The surface assonance of these approaches has exposed this portrait of the post-imperial West to a philosophy of history that a more rigorously textual scholarship would challenge.
Chris Wickham's Framing the Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean 400-800 confronts close to the whole physical area once covered by the Roman empire, from the post-Constantinian empire to the early decades of the Carolingian and 'Abbasid states. The work captures almost all 'Late Antiquity' in its broadest, Brownian range, geographically and temporally, though the term rarely appears; the focus, ultimately, is on the early medieval Europe, albeit by way of many comparanda. Absent components of 'Late Antiquity' include the non-Roman/Byzantine Middle East, Sasanian and early Islamic Iraq and Iran, excluded for practical reasons from this already very weighty tome (Wickham, p. 5-6); also, as with Smith, the Balkan and central Danubian regions, a more questionable omission in works offering themselves as comprehensive interpretations of Europe. [59] This geographical selection, encompassing the late Roman and early Byzantine empires but only the western provinces of the Umayyad and 'Abbasid caliphates (Africa, Egypt, Palestine, and Syria), is integral to Wickham's argument and methodology, which focus on the Roman empire and the fate of its constituent parts, whether they became autonomous (in the western kingdoms) or formed parts of the Byzantine or Islamic empires. [60] The scope of the book is probably most familiar to many Medievalists from debate on the Pirenne thesis, the context in which the early medieval West has most regularly been regarded as part of a wider, post-Roman world. Although Pirenne himself is addressed late in the discussion here (Wickham pp. 4, 821-23), this is very much a wholesale revision of his model of early Europe's economic relationship to the Roman empire and the post-Roman East. Wickham pays very much more attention than Pirenne to non-western-European areas, but Framing the Middle Ages is likewise predicated on the argument that the social and economic infrastructure of early Europe can only be meaningfully assessed by reference to both Roman precedents and eastern contemporaries. This is a book that will make early Medievalists interested in Coptic Egypt and Anatolian villages, a salutary achievement.
As with the other British studies considered here, Framing the Middle Ages is indebted to A. H. M. Jones, a frequent touchstone. In the tradition of Rostovteff and Jones, this is a social and economic history (but noticeably omitting the third part of Jones' triad, administrative history): an attempt to identify the infrastructure that shaped the functioning of these societies, in terms rarely recognised by individuals of the period. Whereas Jones adopted the finely subdivided structure of British Royal Commission reports, aiming for complete coverage of topics and their evidence, Wickham's broader structure is tailored towards driving several key arguments, and is discursive rather than encyclopaedic in presentation of evidence. Wickham analyses the socio-economic engines of Roman and post-Roman societies (the state, aristocracies including ecclesiastical and monastic elites, and peasantries) in a systematic region-by-region pattern. [61] The vast mass of data for these subjects is processed through a "social theory" interpretive matrix, identifying modes and patterns of goods exchange and of land ownership, and social structures built on those patterns, for each class within each region. Contrast between regions, from the wide-angle view (East, West, and North) to the narrow ("microregionalities"), is a key methodology for identifying their shaping features, and determining what differences were imposed by local topography or other inescapables, what were the result of local choices. (The main statements of methodology are Wickham, pp. 5-14, 694-708, the latter valuable as a 'stand-alone' outline of a theory of pre-modern economic exchange.)
Wickham's core argument is that the fate of the post-Roman regions can be explained by reference to the fiscal system of the late Roman state: the degree to which each region maintained, approximated, or lost the economic patterns generated by the empire's vast taxation regime. [62] Roman taxation (in particular, the extraction of vast quantities of grain from North Africa to the city of Rome, and on a lesser scale from Egypt to Constantinople--here dubbed the "tax spine" of the Roman empire) and redistribution (primarily to the army, very much the largest single element of the Mediterranean economy) created an empire-wide infrastructure for goods exchange, centralised to a significant degree. The scale of this movement facilitated other, collateral patterns of exchange, including commercial trade "piggy-backing" on the movement of goods for fiscal purposes, and patterns of long-distance aristocratic land-ownership that duplicated those of fiscal expropriation, to create an interlocking "Mediterranean world-system." Far from oppressing the economy as was thought in pre-Keynesian times, the "capillary influence of public power" (Wickham, p. 145), generated by the pervasive taxation system that had been created to support the huge Roman army, was the essential undergirding for economic activity, and an intrinsic element of imperial unity: "Whether [long-distance movement of goods] was commercial or non-commercial exchange, it was dependent on the interests of the state, and, in a real sense, it held the empire together" (Wickham, p. 709). The splintering of the Roman empire ended that infrastructural support for the non-fiscal economy. Development of regions thereafter depended on the degree to which Roman-style, taxation-based fiscal systems survived or withered--"[e]ven the weakest tax-raising system...was more coherent than the most organized post-tax system" (Wickham, p. 129)--but the differing situations of each region produced a variety of results. In some regions, taxation-based fiscal systems were maintained (as in Egypt, which continued to provide grain as a form of taxation, first to Constantinople, then under the Umayyad caliphate). In other areas, they were approximated, either by the ability of collateral exchange patterns to maintain momentum for a time without the support of the fiscal system (as, apparently, with North African ceramic trade, until ca. 700) or by levels of elite demand sufficient to constitute a significant market (the aristocracy of northern Gaul, seen by Wickham as the wealthiest of the post-Roman elites). In still other regions, Roman fiscal systems were more or less wholly lost, in places where public power (and the army) depended on landed wealth rather than taxation, thus doing away with the need for fiscal goods-exchange and dismantling the framework for collateral systems (here seen as the case for most of western Europe). The economic flow-ons of fiscal systems were echoed in social structures. Roman aristocracies thrived alongside state centralisation, partially through tapping into the fiscal system, partly from legitimisation by the state; their fate after the fragmentation of Rome generally shadowed that of the state and its fiscal system in each region. Those post-Roman states which maintained some degree of taxation-based fiscal structure were strong and had flourishing aristocracies; those based on land-ownership as the main income of government and for fiscal purposes (i.e. land-based armies) were weak and their aristocracies had reduced social and economic leverage--except where they didn't, the somewhat surprising exception being northern Merovingian Gaul, traditionally regarded as the less Romanised, backward half of the region (Wickham, pp. 168-203). Wickham argues that the very remoteness of the region, from the third century onwards, reduced its exposure to economic harm from the collapse of the unified Roman fiscal system, while the continuity of aristocratic land-ownership on a vast scale created a level of demand and goods exchange that to a degree simulated the capillary influence of imperial taxation. Only the relatively unchanged taxation expropriation of Egypt, coupled with the secure fertility of the Nile, matched northern Gaul for the maintenance of fiscally-stimulated economic activity (Wickham, pp. 133-44, 759-69, 819).
This is an argument most familiar from recent interpretations of the economic nadir of post-Roman Britain, seen as the result of the withdrawal of Roman administration from a fringe area that had not developed its own domestic socio-economic dynamic, with a consequential collapse not only of centralised government but of aristocratic wealth and industry. Wickham extends this analysis to less drastic situations. The two key chapters in mounting this argument are Chapter 3, "The Form of the State," and Chapter 11, "Systems of Exchange." These present the central argumentation and interpretation of evidence that undergird the book: the pictures of political structures of Roman and post-Roman states and their consequential fiscal systems which acted as the determining contexts within which economic and social structures developed or withered; and the synthesis of evidence for large-scale exchange of non-luxury ("bulk") goods, represented by the movements of ceramics, as the diagnostic for assessing the maintenance or loss of centralised "capillary" systems of economic exchange and the relative strengths of states, aristocracies, and peasantries.
With sweeping scope and muscular argument, Wickham comes close to offering a 'theory of everything' (a "frame") for the post-imperial half-millennium, at least with regard to its socio-economic and political aspects (a complementary account of cultural history of the period is promised: Wickham, p. 7). The clear writing style makes the complexity of the economic and archaeological arguments accessible to the non-specialist, and while, unlike Jones' Later Roman Empire, there is no analytical contents page to help the reader navigate the very long chapters (four at or over 100 pages, with minimal sub-headings), there is welcome compensation in the regular enumerative passages that summarise or structure the discussion, in what sometimes becomes a books of lists: two central arguments to the book, three aspects of the western kingdoms that determined how the Roman fiscal system changed, six general features in comparing tax-based and land-based political systems, six criteria for defining an aristocracy, four arguments against the absence of a 'true' aristocracy in northern Gaul in the sixth century, three main differences between Britain and the continent, two key caesura defining patterns of rural settlement, three models for the abandonment of villas, twelve criteria for defining a city, four fundamental parameters for socio-economic change in the post-Roman world, seven overall trends visible in the period (Wickham, pp. 10-12, 84, 146-50, 153-55, 179-83, 306, 442, 478-79, 592, 719, 827-31; a selection only). The methodological and theoretical self-awareness of the discussion and its breadth of scope occasion insightful, somewhat Olympian reflections on modern historiography: the discord of variegated agenda and approaches of European national historiographies that precludes synthesis, the meta-narratives that drive discussions of post-imperial land usage (Wickham, Chapter 2 passim, pp. 259-64, 822-23; Wickham generally demurs to cite author and examples, an appropriate decision for this lengthy book, but how welcome would be an essay from such a senior scholar on the 'state of the discipline' for the patchwork field of Early Medieval Studies).
This major statement of socio-economic factors as the undergirding to developments in early western Europe and its contemporary societies, and as a pathway for our understanding of the period, casts some unconventional light on its subject. The pairing of northern Merovingian Gaul and Coptic Egypt as the two regions of greatest socio-economic continuity and activity links two fields generally well segregated by the academic disciplines of Medieval History and Egyptology. The impact of invasions, barbarian or Islamic, is minimised ("the often contingent crisis," Wickham, pp. 13-14; though tempered at e.g. pp. 84, 719 on the impact of the Justinianic wars and Lombard occupations of Italy) in favour of the determining force of local, regional conditions. Consequently 'ethnicity' is not seen as a significant factor in any process of social change, though the 'Ethnogenesis' model is accepted in principle (Wickham, pp.82-83, 829; neither term rates an appearance in the 45-page index [63]). While the Pirenne debate made long-distance movement of luxury goods the litmus test of economic activity, Wickham argues for more localized, intra-regional movement of bulk goods as the surest sign of significant exchange, and argues for the primacy of material evidence (mostly not available in Pirenne's day) rather than literary sources. [64]. Emphasis on variegated regional conditions as the shaping influences of development underlies the strict dismissal of wider "teleologies": of Roman imperial collapse, of Carolingian ascent, of high-medieval northern European economic growth, of economic "complexity" as a catalyst of collapse (Wickham, pp. 32, 47, 706, 825; for the latter, cf. Ward-Perkins, Chapter 6 and p. 210 n. 25). The same emphasis, together with an equation that asserts the continuing landed wealth of the aristocracy of northern Merovingian Gaul, translate traditional tokens of 'decline' associated with aristocracies--the end of villas and of wide-spread Hellenistic literary culture as social markers--into conscious expressions of choice and social strategy by elites, instead of unwilling attritions of lifestyle (Wickham, pp. 201, 478-93, 595; contra Ward-Perkins, Chapter 5 and above). (A sample assertion of positively-embraced change concerns the rise of new ceramic fine-ware styles in northern Gaul during the "uncertainties" of the late fifth century, which attests to "buyers with sufficient self-confidence to be able to accept innovations"; Wickham, p. 797). The most fundamental transition of the post-imperial aristocracies was the change from a civilian aristocratic lifestyle to an exclusively military ethos as the marker of non-ecclesiastical social elites, seen here not as a consequence of displacement of 'Roman' by 'barbarian' elites (or "Germanic-speaking" ones, in Smith's terms) or by Arab masters (since the change was common to the Byzantine regions also); 'militarization' was a process of largely internal cultural change (e.g. Wickham, pp. 257, 595, 829; cf. above on Goffart's discussion of the late Roman military aristocracy as an outgrowth of imperial governmental policies, and its continuity into medieval societies).
This is a big book, in every sense, and will serve to advance discussion of the post-Roman imperial world in two main ways: by synthesizing the growing amount of material evidence from archaeological work of recent decades with discussion in terms meaningful to non-archaeologists; and in conveniently providing a 'grammar' for discussing current models of economic and social dynamics, distilled from wide erudition in both source materials and socio-economic theory. Like, say, Edward Luttwak's The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, this is book that most, even where they disagree with it, will learn from, because of the presentation of conceptual approaches to its topic and its identification of key issues. [65] Wickham is reserved about 'continuitist' historical approaches (Wickham, p. 11), but the two greatest benefits of this book, it seems to me, are the temporal and geographic continuities it presents. Even though accepting, with reservations, a fundamentally Jonesian narrative of the fifth-century break-up of the western Roman empire, Wickham discusses late Rome and its collapse as part of a historical continuum. The stress on termination in 'Fall of Rome' narratives is bypassed, and implicitly shown to be somewhat pointless in view of the detailed discussions possible about the on-going, albeit changed, infrastructural elements of the Mediterranean economy. Similarly, the constant contextualization of western European regions alongside (most of) the rest of the 'Late Antique' world facilitates an understanding of Europe not in particularist terms but as part of a broader, 'post-Ancient World' network, with parallels and divergences between different regions drawn from a shared set of options. Wickham's topic, of course, is socio-economic factors, but one can hope that the already enthusiastic reception of this book will stimulate approaches that consider other historical phenomena--politics, literary and visual communication, religion, gender relations--within similar contexts, in order to address western Europe, Byzantium, and the Caliphate regularly within the same terms of discussion, and to override the present tendency to marginalize western Europe from 'Late Antiquity' studies. Another gift to the discipline is the focus, in those sections of the book dealing with the Roman empire, on internal differentiation--regional, class, cultural; quite a different picture from the conventional 'Medievalist's Rome,' the monolithic, undifferentiated precursor commonly met in early-medieval studies just as it fragments, a historical construct few contemporary Classicists would recognize.
Like any major work, Framing the Early Middle Ages will generate further debate. Here are three contributions. Firstly, Wickham demonstrates the value of adopting what he describes as "social theory" models, derived from Marx and later theorists, to provide an interpretive framework that enables our fragmentary evidence to speak. In so doing, he adopts an evidential hierarchy, privileging certain phenomena, and the types of sources that illuminate them, as more meaningful than others for describing fundamental social change (Wickham, pp. 11-12). As always, scope exists for informative debate on how the interpretive model should be constructed, but there is little doubt that the approach is a successful historiographic technique. Nevertheless there is a risk of blurring the line between interpretive framework and historical description, of substituting model for evidence. A large portion of the discussion of "Peasantries" is necessarily derived not from written and material evidence for this class, which is exiguous in the extreme, but from the logical implications of social theory models (e.g. Wickham, pp. 535, 572-73). Theoretical models are useful for giving meaning to otherwise amorphous evidence and as heuristic stimuli, but not all readers will find them satisfactory as a primary basis for discussion. In particular, Wickham's optimistic deduction that evidence in certain regions for the diminution of aristocratic wealth and power indicates a corresponding amelioration of the condition of neighbouring peasantries is not wholly convincing (e.g. Wickham, pp. 516, 534): the 'zero-sum' equation seems to belong to a logic different from that which presents high taxation as a stimulation rather than a drag on the economy, and one can visualize situations of pan-societal depression. The model may suggest possibilities for debate, but cannot proceed as if it possesses evidential value.
Secondly, the role of Rome's Fall as an explanatory model. While overtly disparaging 'catastrophe theories' of barbarian invasion, Wickham's portrait of the fifth-century West nevertheless effectively endorses the "exogenous shock" narrative of Heather, agreeing with a clean bill of health for the late Roman state and invoking "any number of barbarian invasions" as causes for fatal disruption of fiscal and economic systems (e.g. Wickham, pp. 36-37 on "invasions"; pp. 80-82 and n. 69, citing Heather; cf. in passing at pp. 326: "Wales was one of the very few parts of the western Roman empire not to have been conquered at any time by Germanic invaders" [66]). This tacit catastrophe model is adopted in order to explain why the governments of post-imperial western kingdoms, in particular Merovingian Gaul, abandoned Roman-style taxation in favour of land-based fiscal systems (land ownership as the source of government income and reward for servants, in particular the army). The consequences of this system are worked out in the chapters on "Aristocracies" and in Chapter 11, including the striking conclusion already mentioned: though the Merovingian state lacked a taxation-based governmental infrastructure, the landed wealth of the elite was "sufficient to compensate for the end of the fiscal system" (Wickham, pp. 794-805, quotation at 804). But how valid is the image of the western kingdoms as effectively tax-free zones? It is not if course a novel suggestion, but a received understanding. One is struck by how little solid evidence there is for the abandonment of taxation presented here; it is largely a case of absence of evidence. [67] As a test case for post-imperial fiscal systems, Vandal Africa is chosen explicitly in preference to Ostrogothic Italy, on the basis that the 60-year period of Ostrogothic rule was substantially shorter than the 100-year Vandal regime (Wickham, pp. 92-93). This choice is problematic: Ostrogothic Italy presents incontrovertibly the most plentiful evidence sources for the period (including, apart from Cassiodorus' Variae, rare western papyri), while the sources we have for Vandal Africa are exiguous and non-documentary; it is not surprising that they do not give evidence for taxation processes (claims that the Vandal kings had run the fisc down can be paralleled with similar accusations against various Roman emperors). Moreover, Vandal Africa cannot be "best example in the fifth century of the quick conquest of a rich province"; it is the only unambiguous example of forceful appropriation of lands without imperial or local consent during the period, and therefore not a reliable point from which to generalise. [68] The argument for Visigothic Spain turns on two documents, one suggesting regular taxation, the other, possibly, not; it is not self-evident that the latter holds the most evidential value. The insignificance of Merovingian taxation is part and parcel of a broader image of a collapse of public administration in post-imperial Gaul, but this image ignores strong evidence from documentary materials for an active system of governmental administration. [69] Landed early medieval fiscal systems are fundamental to the mise en scène of this book and its argumentation; the evidence and modern historiography need to be more fully ventilated.
A third issue is common to both Smith and Wickham (and indeed draws comment from other authors as well): disquiet over literary sources. In similar, brief introductory remarks, both authors characterise the methodological problems posed by literary sources as the Scylla of old-fashioned, loathed positivism (texts as direct windows on historical reality) and the Charybdis of rampant post-modernism (texts as solely self-referential, offering no access to historical reality); naivety or uselessness. Faced with this perilous challenge, both authors duck, adopting "a moderate position," "[getting] round the issue" (Smith, p. 6-7; Wickham, pp. 8-9). The brevity of these discussions is in contrast with the very full explications of the methodologies that inform the authors' Herculean syntheses of historical with social-scientific disciplines, and of quantities of data from divergent source-types. A fear of textuality is a significant problem in English-language early medieval scholarship today, and it cannot but undermine ambitious attempts to analyse antiquity by use of theoretical frameworks designed to examine modern phenomena via synchronic evidence, since written texts make up a large part of the evidence that we pre-modernists use to substitute for the observations of less temporally-challenged scholars. In the event, Wickham's treatment of literary sources largely inspires confidence, but his approach to written texts is defended by a flawed test case (arguing that examples of violence in Gregory of Tours' Historiae, while not necessarily individually accurate, nevertheless retain evidential value because their "rhetorical field" reveals what was thought plausible at the time--a very slippery slope; Wickham, pp. 8-9 [70]), and some key uses of literary sources as evidence not only miss their specific marks but reveal a clunky conception of the relationship between sources, their ancient provenance, and modern historiographic constructs (e.g. the assertion that "All Germanic soldiers whose careers we can track wanted land, or more land, as soon as they could get it," a conclusion shaped by the weary topos of 'barbarian greed' rather than by the sources cited; Wickham, p. 91 and n. 92 [71]). Actually, literary-analysis approaches to ancient texts need not be the maze of self-referentiality that Smith and Wickham invoke (historians should note with some wryness the rediscovery by Literature Studies colleagues of historical context as an interpretive approach in 'New Historicism' [72]). Understanding authors' own writing techniques and their relationship with earlier and contemporary exponents of the genres they employ not only provides a framework for interpreting the data they contain, but also can itself offer a category of evidence into their times. There is a need to lure historians back to the use of written sources with the same level of sophistication and methodological awareness as is increasingly displayed in the use of social-scientific and cultural analyses.
These points are not quibbles, but nor are they intended to obscure the magnitude of Wickham's contribution to early medieval scholarship. Points in Wickham's thesis must be debated (was the Carthage-Rome "tax-spine" really as important to the Roman economy as suggested here, as opposed to the flow of resources sent to the fringe of the empire to maintain border military forces, a fiscal pattern emphasised in Frontier Studies and with very different implications for post-imperial regional economies? [73]) But the most important impact of this book, like McCormick's Origins of the European Economy, will be if it helps ensure that the next generation of Medievalists conceives of the field not as a nationalistic or even European "cultural solipsism" (Wickham, p. 2), but as part of much broader historical interchanges.
* * *
Scholars of Rome's Fall and the beginnings of Europe can do without 'Late Antiquity,' or locate themselves after a 'restricted Late Antiquity,' if they choose, but should they? Was the post-imperial world really so disarticulated? A simple test is to give students a selection of texts from, for example, Gregory of Tours, Cyril of Scythopolis, Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, Bede (in some ways the Late Antique Man par excellence), and al-Tabari. Students come to university study with built-in periodisations, preconceived notions of East and West, of the European medieval 'Dark Ages,' and so forth. But once exposed to evidence for the period, it is difficult to argue convincingly that, regional variations aside, the characters in these narratives did not live in much the same world. Not only a common thought-world: all these authors were citizens of states in which monotheistic beliefs, rooted in Judeo-Hellenistic culture, dominated public life and articulated regional practices into a 'global' cultural bloc dominated by imperial superpowers; at the same time, these beliefs were aligned with the interests of local land-owning aristocracies and monarchial military cliques. This is not to deny real differences between regions or between the Classical and post-Classical worlds, either in intellectual or material culture. Even granting fundamental differences in material conditions, the cultural coherency of the post-imperial world is perhaps all the more impressive if indeed it did coexist with widely diverse material conditions, of economic and demographic boom in parts of the East and material dysfunction in areas of the West.
What would be the benefits to early-medieval European studies of a more serious engagement with a 'longitudinal Late Antiquity'? Any historical periodisation is necessarily artificial, but I think it is arguable nevertheless that periodisation can be useful as a heuristic device, especially where a new framework frees a field of study from restrictions of older delineations (a benefit for which many scholars of 'Late Antiquity' are grateful). Whereas inherited nationalist frameworks are fairly obviously of limited value for the study of the early medieval West--so many parallel narratives describing variations of similar themes--a periodisation that embraces observable phenomena common to a range of times and places can beneficially give context to local evidence and supersede tendentious conceptions (as, indeed, both Smith and Wickham seek to do). Several of the works here are motivated by the need to escape from older, Euro-centric paradigms, but are not necessarily successful in doing so. Smith explicitly describes her vision of early medieval Europe as serving the needs of a post-nation-state Europe, in contrast to the teleological narratives of earlier nationalist historiographies, but why this presentist justification is a more valid purpose of History than superseded ones is not explained (Smith, pp. 256, 294). Geary, in Noble's volume, rightly decries the role of popular and academic visions of History in European nationalist traditions, but subscribes to a model of the early Middle Ages that asserts the shaping role of 'ethnicity' in all levels of public life; that this is a constructivist rather than a primordialist model of ethnicity is important in acknowledging current anthropological understanding, but does not radically affect whether this philosophy of history is a valid analogue of post-classical culture. These approaches re-conceptualize core components of long-standing paradigms, laudably but without fundamentally challenging the terms of discussion; they do not get outside received templates.
Yet 'Late Antiquity' cannot really offer an alternative to traditional western narratives unless it deals effectively with the Fall of Rome, both as a complex of historical events and as a historiographic tradition. More than three decades after the 'explosion of Late Antiquity' initiated by Peter Brown, Rome's Fall and Euro-centric narratives remain the touchstone for what proponents of 'Late Antiquity' seek to disown, a negative stimulus for creativity. In current discussions about the validity and nature of 'Late Antique' studies, early medievalists might be expected to have a special role to play, as exegetes of the materials from which old, unwanted paradigms were formerly constructed. Some of the works considered here present themselves as restatements of older paradigms, others as fundamental new approaches; but in fact all, except Goffart, depend upon an almost identical Classicist-Germanist conception of barbarian intrusion and Roman collapse, not only as a narrative account but as an explanatory, causal factor for subsequent medieval phenomena. [74] This near uniformity rather takes one aback, as the extant evidence for the fifth-century West, fragmentary as it is, allows for a greater range of interpretation than this unadvertised consensus would suggest. But the attention of studies in 'Late Antiquity' away from old 'decline' motifs has meant that those disparaged models have been ignored, not challenged; 'Late Antiquity' has not really done away with the paradigms it sought to escape, which continue to flourish in adjacent fields of Roman and Medieval History, and are perhaps more readily accepted in 'Late Antique' studies than would be happily acknowledged. At present, students of the early medieval West, if they wish to locate their field within a broader historical framework, seem to have the discomforting choice of either ignoring the question of what happened when the political cohesion of the late Roman empire ended; or of returning to catastrophe models and Germanist appropriations of evidence cast as identity politics, that disarticulate the Christian culture of the late Roman empire from the Christian states of the post-imperial, pre-Carolingian West.
Recent debates on the validity of 'Late Antiquity' are couched in antithetical terms: eastern versus western, spiritual and cultural versus economic and political, textual versus material.[75] A potential offered by 'longitudinal Late Antiquity' that seems not to have been realised is the possibility of comparative historiography. Part of what makes study of this part of history so interesting is that it embraces historical periods used either by its constituent cultures, or by modern cultures that claim descent from them, to define themselves as distinct from foregoing or contemporary cultures (Christian and 'pagan,' western and eastern European, early medieval and Carolingian, Classical and Islamic, insular and continental European, 'Arabic' and 'Persian,' and so forth). Such supposed binary oppositions have often, in recent decades, been brought together to be studied profitably under common rubrics. Doing so should necessitate not only comparative historical examination, but also critically appraising the intellectual bases that had formerly constructed them as discrete areas (in a more substantial way than mere caustic dismissals of old accounts).[76] Academic study of Rome's Fall and Europe's Rise is older and more complex than most fields, bearing with it almost five hundred years of modern scholarship from multiple sub-disciplines; correspondingly, it needs critical historiographic self-awareness all the more greatly. [77]
NOTES
[1] Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity: From Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971; rev. ed.1989). Glen W. Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar (eds), Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World (Cambridge MA: Belknap, 1999), esp. pp. vii-x, is an important reassertion of these parameters (with, however, some striking limitations; see at nn. 17-19 below). So too promises to be the recently-announced The Journal of Late Antiquity (Johns Hopkins University Press). Note too the forthcoming Philip Rousseau (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Late Antiquity. Throughout this paper, I use capitals and quotation marks to emphasise that I refer to 'Late Antiquity' and 'Late Antique' as scholarly constructs, the parameters of which remain unfixed; I define my qualified coinages 'longitudinal Late Antiquity' and 'restricted Late Antiquity' in the text, at notes 5-7.
[2] See e.g. G. W. Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan press, 1990), pp. 71-82; Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early 'Abbasid Society (2nd-4th/8th-10th Centuries) (London: Routledge, 1998); María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World (Boston: Little Brown, 2002); Michael Greenhalgh, Marble Past, Monumental Present: Building with Antiquities in the Medieval Mediterranean (forthcoming); and the series Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam (Princeton: Darwin Press).
[3] One recent example from many: G. W. Bowersock, Mosaics as History: The Near East from Late Antiquity to Islam (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2006), p. 122: "The late-antique Middle East was a kind of miracle, and its like has never been seen in that region again."
[4] Works are cited by the name of the author/editor followed by page numbers.
[5] Note however that Bury used the phrase 'later Roman empire' as a corrective to 'Byzantine empire,' with 'later' serving purely as a term of convenience, not as a marker of fundamental change; he regarded the term '[later] Roman empire' as appropriate up to 1453: J. B. Bury, A History of the Later Roman Empire from Arcadius to Irene (395 AD to 800 AD), 2 vols. (1889; repr. Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1966), vol. 1, pp. v-vii; idem, History of the Later Roman Empire from the Death of Theodosius I to the Death of Justinian, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1923), vol. 1, pp. 1-4. A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284-602: A Social, Economic and Administrative Survey, 3 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1964); abridged as idem, The Decline of the Ancient World (London: Longmans, 1966).
[6] Some major examples: Alexander Demandt, Die Spätantike, Handbuch des Altertumswissenschaft III 6 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1989); abridged as idem, Geschichte der Spätantike: Das Romische Reich von Diocletian bis Justinian (284-565 n. Chr.) (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1998); Averil Cameron, The Later Roman Empire, AD 284-430 (London: Fontana, 1993) and eadem, The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, AD 395-600 (London: Routledge, 1993); Peter Garnsey and Caroline Humfress, The Evolution of the Late Antique World (Cambridge: Orchard Academic, 2001); Simon Swain and Mark Edwards (eds.), Approaching Late Antiquity: The Transformation from Early to Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Stephen Mitchell, A History of the Later Roman Empire, AD 284-641 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007); the journal Antiquité Tardive (Turnhout: Brepols); and The Cambridge Ancient History [hereafter 'CAH'], vol. XIII: The Late Empire, AD 337-425, ed. Averil Cameron and Peter Garnsey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and vol. XIV: Late Antiquity: Empire and Successors, AD 425-600, ed. Averil Cameron, Bryan Ward-Perkins, and Michael Whitby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). (In the Cambridge Histories series, other components of the period embraced by 'longitudinal Late Antiquity' are covered by CAH vol. XII [2nd ed.]: The Crisis of Empire, AD 193-337, ed. Alan K. Bowman, Peter Garnsey, and Averil Cameron [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005]; The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. III: The Seleucid, Parthian, and Sasanian Periods, ed. Ehsan Yars-Shater, 2 parts [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983], and vol. IV: The Period from the Arabic Invasion to the Saljuqs, ed. R.N. Frye [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983]; and The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. I: C. 500-700, ed. Paul Fouracre [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005], and vol. II: C. 700-900, ed. Rosamond McKitterick [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995]).
[7] Cf. Fergus Millar, A Greek Roman Empire: Power and Belief under Theodosius II (408-450) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 4: "It is a matter of pure choice, convention, or convenience to what periods we apply the terms 'Late Empire,' 'Byzantium,' or 'Late Antiquity'"; Garnsey and Humfress, Evolution of the Late Antique World: "The term 'late Antiquity,' now in common usage, does not solve the problem of chronological boundaries..." One definition, influential in Coptic and papyrological studies, cuts across even the 'restricted (Constantine to Justinian) Late Antiquity': R. S. Bagnall, Egypt in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. ix: late third to mid-fifth centuries.
[8] Debates and overviews and include: G. W. Bowersock, "The Vanishing Paradigm of the Fall of Rome," Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 49 (1996): 29-43; Averil Cameron, "The Perception of Crisis," in Morfologie sociali e culturali in Europa fra tarda antichita e alto Medioevo, Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull'Alto Medioevo 45 (Spoleto, 1998), pp, 9-31; eadem, "The 'Long' Late Antiquity: A Late Twentieth-Century Model," in T. P. Wiseman, ed., Classics in Progress: Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 165-91; Andrea Giardina, "Explosione di tardoantico," Studi Storici 40 (1999): 157-90; J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz, "Late Antiquity and the Concept of Decline," Nottingham Medieval Studies 45 (2001): 1-11 and idem, "The Birth," below; Garth Fowden, "Elefantiasi del tardoantico?" Journal of Roman Archaeology 15 (2002): 681-86 (a review article on CAH XVI); papers in C. Straw and R. Lim, eds., The Past before Us: The Challenge of Historiographies of Late Antiquity (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004); and several articles in the journal Antiquité Tardive: Warren Treadgold, "Taking Sources on Their Terms and on Ours: Peter Brown's Late Antiquity," Antiquité Tardive 2 (1994): 153-59; J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz, "The Birth of Late Antiquity," Antiquité Tardive 12 (2004): 253-61; Polymnia Athanassiadi, "Antiquité tardive: construction et deconstruction d'un modèle historiographique," Antiquité Tardive 14 (2006): 311-24. Note also discussions on the impact of Peter Brown himself in several publications of the late 1990s marking the anniversaries of publication of his World of Late Antiquity (as at n. 1 above) and idem, "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity," Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): 80-101; Special Issue: The World of Late Antiquity Revisited, Symbolae Osloensis 72 (1997); Journal of Early Christian Studies 6 (Special issue on Brown's "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man") (1998); James Howard-Johnston and Paul Antony Hayward, eds., The Cult of the Saints in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Essays on the Contribution of Peter Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
[9] But one important statement is Lellia Cracco Ruggini, "The Italian City from the Third to the Sixth Century: 'Broken History' or Ever-Changing Kaleidoscope?" in Straw and Lim (eds), The Past Before Us (as n. 8), pp. 33-48.
[10] For brief but stimulating overview: Robert Hoyland, "Writing the Biography of the Prophet Muhammad: Problems and Solutions," History Compass 5 (2007): 591-92 and nn. 53-61 (the debate predates Brown's 'Late Antiquity'). Apogee: Garth Fowden, From Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 138-68 (see also his review of CAH vol. 14, at n. 8 above). Fowden's study, perhaps the most stimulating essay on 'longitudinal Late Antiquity' since Brown's 1971 book, firmly includes early Islam as part of the 'Late Antique'/late-Hellenistic world, and sees state-supported monotheisms as the defining bond of the Islamic and eastern-Christian 'commonwealths' that remained in the wake of fragmentation of the Caliphate and Byzantine imperial unity. He nevertheless omits the post-imperial western kingdoms from his tally of 'commonwealths,' despite, arguably, the same characteristics being dominant in these states also: pp. 14-15, 169. For Islamic continuity from a very different perspective (concerning fiscal structures): Wickham, p. 130.
[11] Professor Celia Chazelle of the College of New Jersey organised a stimulating session on "Opening Borders between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages" at the 2005 Medieval Academy of America conference, Miami; some of the thoughts of this paper arose from the invigorating discussions there.
[12] E.g. Brill's Series on the Early Middle Ages (continuing the former The Transformation of the Roman World [hereafter 'TRW'] series, from 1997); Studies in the Early Middle Ages (Brepols, from 2000); and the journal Early Medieval Europe (Longmans from 1992, Blackwell from 1997). Note also several significant works in the Peoples of Europe series, e.g. on Goths, Huns, Lombards, Franks, Bretons (Blackwell, from 1986), and the Studies in Historical Archaeology series (Boydell, from 1995), both framing post-imperial western history in terms of early medieval European 'peoples.'
[13] See e.g. Peter Heather, "Late Antiquity and the Early Medieval West," in Michael Bentley (ed.), Companion to Historiography (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 69-87; Lester K. Little and Barbara H. Rosenwein, eds., Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), pp. 8-10.
[14] In addition to Ward-Perkins and Heather (following), note also e.g. J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz, The Decline and Fall of the Roman City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
[15] Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley, vol. 2 (London: Allen Lane, 1994), p. 509.
[16] Heather's concluding pages introduce an indirect internal Roman culpability contributing unknowingly to the forces of destruction: the constancy of Roman militarism unintentionally spurred the build-up of neighbouring Germanic societies to a degree of organization at which, prompted by catalytic forces, they could overrun the Roman army: "Roman imperialism was ultimately responsible for its own destruction" (Heather, p. 459). This "pleasing denouement" (cf. Gibbon's barbed "pleasing conclusion," Decline and Fall, ed. Womersley, vol. 2, p. 516) stands at odds with the emphasis of the preceding narrative. Heather's emphasis on "exogenous shock" differs from an earlier Jones-influenced reaffirmation of the significance of imperial decline, by J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz, "The End of the Ancient City," in John Rich, ed., The City in Late Antiquity (Routledge; London, 1992), pp. 1-49; idem, Decline and Fall of the Roman City, seeing decline as resulting from internal institutional decay in combination with barbarian pressure.
[17] TRW: G. P. Brogiolo and Bryan Ward-Perkins, eds., The Idea and Ideal of the Town between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, TRW 4 (Leiden: Brill, 1999); note the editors' introductory comments, about mismatches between the main TRW project and the late-Roman urbanism sub-project, at pp. xv-xvi. Among various personal asides in The Fall of Rome, many readers will warm to the author's reflections on growing up in the household of a renowned British Classicist, at Rome itself, yet nevertheless finding the "self-important and self-satisfied" ancient Romans less appealing than the "chaotic and difficult world" after Rome; Ward-Perkins, p. 3. Non-archaeologists will also appreciate Ward-Perkins' frank discussions of the interpretation of material evidence, particularly of ceramics.
[18] Peter Brown, "SO Debate," Symbolae Osloensis (as at n. 8 above), p. 15.
[19] Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, AD 200-1000, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). Note a shift in Brown's views on western aristocratic attitudes to barbarian newcomers, at pp. 97-101, from idem, World of Late Antiquity, pp. 124-25.
[20] Cf. A. Gillett, "Ethnogenesis: A Contested Model of Early Medieval Europe," History Compass 4:2 (2006): 246-47.
[21] Cf. e.g. Warwick Ball, Rome in the East: The Transformation of an Empire (London: Routledge, 2000): rather than Byzantium being the residue of a western-centred empire, Ball argues that the western Mediterranean was always the rump of the Roman empire, a Hellenistic state focused on Greece and western Asia, and was ultimately sloughed off as an economic and cultural drag.
[22] Peter Heather, "The Huns and the End of the Roman Empire in Western Europe," English Historical Review 110 (1995): 4-41.
[23] For a more sober assessment of the significance of the Huns, with regard to the eastern half of the Roman empire: Millar, A Greek Roman Empire, (as n. 7), pp. 75, 80-82.
[24] Hugh Elton, Warfare in Roman Europe, AD 250-425 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), pp. 15-44 (esp. 43-44); Peter S. Wells, The Barbarians Speak: How the Conquered Peoples Shaped Roman Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 187-88.
[25] See e.g. C. R. Whittaker, Rome and Its Frontiers: The Dynamics of Empire (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 53-54; Elton, Warfare in Roman Europe (as n. 24). How little we know about the late Roman army is suggested by Paul the Deacon, Historia Romana XV.4, on the relocation of troops from Gaul to Italy in 472 (to fight in a civil war), which seems to be evidence for the continued presence of regular troops in the provinces.
[26] Orosius, Historiarum adversum paganos libri VII, III.20, V.1-2, VII.41; Hydatius, Chronica 40 [ed. Burgess] 48 [ed. Mommsen] (the comment may come from an earlier source); Salvian, De gubernatione Dei e.g. IV.4, 6, V.4, 7. Cf. Carmen de providential Dei, PL 51, ll. 63-86 (the ills of the world pre-date barbarian invasion).
[27] Gothic settlement: sources are surveyed in Michael Kulikowski, "The Visigothic Settlement in Aquitania: The Imperial Perspective," in Ralph W. Mathisen and Danuta Shanzer, eds., Society and Culture in Late Antique Gaul: Revisiting the Sources (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 26-27. Note that the emperor Theodosius I, praised as the sort of soldier-emperor who might have preserved the empire from dissolution (Ward-Perkins, pp. 46-47), initiated the policy of barbarian cooption and settlement that led directly to the western settlements.
[28] A. Gillett, "Rome, Ravenna, and the Last Western Emperors," Papers of the British School at Rome 69 (2001): 131-167, at p. 159 and nn. 128-30.
[29] E.g. all three imperial panegyrics of Sidonius Apollinaris presume defeat of the Vandal kingdom to be the primary function of the western emperors. The best account remains F. M. Clover, "Geiseric the Statesman: A Study of Vandal Foreign Policy," (diss., University of Chicago, 1966), though see also idem, The Late Roman West and the Vandals (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993); Elton, Warfare in Roman Europe (as n. 24), p. 267; Antiquité Tardive vol. 10: L'Afrique vandale et Byzantine (2003); Gillett (as n. 28), p. 164.
[30] Cf. Walter Goffart, "Rome, Constantinople, and the Barbarians," in his Rome's Fall and After (London: Hambledon, 1989), pp. 8-9, 18-21; Goffart, pp. 189; Elton, Warfare in Roman Europe (as n. 24), pp. 193-98, 227-33; Kulikowski, "Visigothic Settlement in Aquitania" (as n. 27), pp. 31-32; Stephan Elbern, Usurpationen im Spätrömischen Reich (Bonn: Rudolf Habelt, 1984); François Paschoud and Joachim Szidat, eds., Usurpationen in der Spätantike, Historia Einzelschrift 111 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1997); Brent Shaw, "War and Violence," in Bowersock, Brown, and Grabar, eds., Late Antiquity: A Guide (as n. 1), pp. 149-52.
[31] E.g. the discussions of modern historiographic and archaeological thought by Guy Halsall and Heinrich Härke, the pan-Roman/Byzantinist perspective of Michael McCormick's excellent Eternal Victory, the broad if somewhat begrudging survey of Merovingian literate culture by Ian Wood, and the lucid exposition of both modern interpretive frameworks and the real complexities of Merovingian evidence by Alexander Callander Murray. Differing agenda and approaches jostle in a rather anarchic but potentially fruitful way in the latter reaches of the book; it is regrettable that greater space was not given to these more profitable foci.
[32] I.e. Walter Pohl, ed., Kingdoms of the Empire: The Integration of Barbarians in Late Antiquity, TRW 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1998); Walter Pohl and Helmut Reimitz, eds., Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of Ethnic Communities, 300-800, TRW 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1998); Hans-Werner Goetz, Jörg Jarnut, and Walter Pohl, eds., Regna and gentes, TRW 13 (Leiden: Brill, 2002). Also the series 'Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters' [FGM], e.g.: Walter Pohl, ed., Die Suche nach den Ursprüngen: von der Bedeutung des frühen Mittelalters, FGM 8 (Vienna: Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 2002); Walter Pohl, ed., Integration und Herrschaft: ethnische Identitäten und soziale Organisation im Frühmittelalter, FGM 3 (Vienna: Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 2002).
[33] Debate: A. Gillett, ed., On Barbarian Identity: Critical Approaches to Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002) (papers by Goffart, Murray, Kulikowski, Gillett, Bowlus); cf. TMR review by Bonnie Effros at TMR 03.12.08. Regrettably, the review repeatedly seeks to defend the 'Ethnogenesis' approach from being "characteriz[ed]... as pre- war racial theory," although no such accusation is made by contributors to the volume; the premise that thought on 'Germanic' ethnicity divides simply into pre-1961 "racist works" and post-1961 non-racist thought is deficient, as Murray's important discussion makes clear; cf. Walter Goffart, "Two Notes on Germanic Antiquity Today," Traditio 50 (1995): 9-30. See also Gillett, "Ethnogenesis: A Contested Model" (as n. 20), pp. 1-20; idem, "The Mirror of Jordanes: Concepts of the Barbarian, Then and Now," in Philip Rousseau, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Late Antiquity (forthcoming); Michael Kulikowski, Rome's Gothic Wars from the Third Century to Alaric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 43-70, esp. 52-54; cf. Joaquín Martínez Pizarro, "Ethnic and National History ca. 500-1000," in Deborah M. Deliyannis, ed., Historiography in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 43-47; Florin Curta, "Some Observations on Ethnicity in Medieval Archaeology," Early Medieval Europe 15 (2007): 159-185, pp. 160, 184-85.
[34] Patrick Amory, People and Identity in Ostrogothic Italy, 489-554 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); idem, "The Meaning and Purpose of Ethnic Terminology in the Burgundian Laws," Early Medieval Europe 2 (1993), pp. 1-28; idem, "Names, Ethnic Identity and Community in Fifth- and Sixth-Century Burgundy," Viator 25 (1994): 1-30; idem, "Ethnographic Rhetoric, Aristocratic Attitudes, and Political Allegiance in Post-Roman Gaul," Klio 76 (1994): 438-53. Much academic opinion has swung against Amory's formerly praised work, e.g. Ward-Perkins, p. 201 n. 18; Wickham, p. 83 (though note p. 478 n. 96); John F. Drinkwater, The Alamanni and Rome 213-496 (Caracalla to Clovis) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 2 n. 6; but cf. Whittaker at n. 41 below.
[35] Historiographic context: Goffart, "Two Notes on Germanic Antiquity Today" (as n. 33; the article by Goffart included in Part I of Noble, ed., is in part an extension of this earlier article, and needs to be read against it); Alexander Callander Murray, "Reinhard Wenskus on 'Ethnogenesis,' Ethnicity, and the Origin of the Franks," in Gillett, ed., On Barbarian Identity (as n. 33), pp. 39-68. Methodology: Charles R. Bowlus, "Ethnogenesis Models and the Age of Migrations: A Critique," Austrian History Yearbook 26 (1995): 147-64; idem, "Ethnogenesis: The Tyranny of a Concept,' in Gillett, ed., On Barbarian Identity, pp. 241-56.
[36] Noble, ed., Chapter 9: Goffart (a historiographic critique of Germanist/early medieval scholarship; comments on early expressions of the 'Ethnogenesis' thesis appear at pp. 243 and 256 n. 30, 244 and 257 n. 34) = the first chapter of Walter Goffart, Barbarians and Romans AD 418-584: The Techniques of Accommodation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 3-39; previously anthologised with editorial introduction in Little and Rosenwein, eds., Debating the Middle Ages (as n. 13), pp. 9-10, 25-44.
[37] For the contribution of classical ethnography to modern racist thought: Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), e.g. pp. 8-14, 102-08; for the early modern period: Gordon Lindsay Campbell, Strange Creatures: Anthropology in Antiquity (London: Duckworth, 2006), pp. 142-60.
[38] Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ed. Womersley, vol. 1, Ch.. IX, p. 251. Gibbon concludes his survey of the Germanic peoples: "...the most splendid appellations have been frequently lavished on the most inconsiderable objects"; Chap. 9 ad fin., p. 252.
[39] Murray, "Reinhard Wenskus on 'Ethnogenesis'" (as n. 35), 50-51, 53 and n. 50, 67.
[40] E.g. in the main Introduction, invoking Gibbon and Von Ranke as scapegoats for a homogenous, fusty 'traditional' scholarship (Noble, ed., pp. 2, 7), Gibbon is presented as "plac[ing] particular emphasis on the external factors [contributing to Rome's decline]," more or less the opposite of Gibbon's views (cf. Heather, above; see J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 3: The First Decline and Fall [Cambridge, 2003]), while von Ranke is embarrassingly attributed with the misquotation (history "how it actually happened"), corrected by every reference-work article on him. Ironically, part of what von Ranke considered to be eigentlich in History ("of the Essence," not what "actually happened") was the role of Völker, now rebadged as 'ethnic groups'; he was part of the long tradition of historical philosophy, descending from Herder (or at least influential interpretations of Herder), that formulates 'ethnicity' as the engine of historical development and change, and which remains the driving historical conception behind the 'Ethnogenesis' interpretations promulgated in Noble, ed., Part 1 (for von Ranke, see e.g. Michael Bentley, ed., Companion to Historiography [London: Routledge, 1997], pp. 419-23; for Herder: F. M. Barnard, Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History [Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003], pp. 17-65). Elsewhere, the editor dates the beginning of modern academic interest in the European barbarian to nationalist movements of the nineteenth-century (Noble, ed., p. 5): it was in fact one of the major themes of early modern scholarship from the sixteenth century onwards, associated with Hapsburg, Swedish, Danish, and English expansionism (brief acknowledgement of the historiographic tradition appears at p. 26 n. 46; see e.g. Sonia Brough, The Goths and the Concept of Gothic in Germany from 1500 to 1750 [Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1985]; Thor J. Beck, Northern Antiquities in French Learning and Literature, 2 vols., [New York: Columbia University Press, 1934]).
[41] For the late- and post-Roman world as a period of "ethnic blindness": Whittaker, Rome and Its Frontiers (as n. 25), pp. 213, 217 n. 120 (citing Amory; note his reading of Pohl, "Introduction" to Kingdoms of the Empire [as n. 32], pp. 20, 27 n. 150). For an example of a quite different approach to the question of Roman and 'barbarian' interaction: Ralph Mathisen, "Peregrini, Barbari, and Cives Romani: Concepts of Citizenship and the Legal Identity of Barbarians in the Later Roman Empire," American Historical Review 111 (2006): 1011-40.
[42] E.g. Denise Kimber Buell, Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Aaron Johnson, "Identity, Descent, and Polemic: Ethnic Argumentation in Eusebius' Praeparatio Evangelica," Journal of Early Christian Studies 12 (2004): 24-56; idem, Ethnicity and Argument in Eusebius' Praeparatio Evangelica (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
[43] See e.g. Marc Reydellet, La royauté dans la littérature latine de Sidoine Apollinaire à Isidore de Séville (Rome: École fran�aise de Rome, 1981), e.g. pp. 599-606; Suzanne Teillet, Des Goths à la nation gothique: les origines de l'idée de nation en occident du Ve au VIIe siècle (Paris: Société les Belles Lettres, 1984), e.g. pp. 640-41 (a school of research regrettably sidelined by recent German- and English-language work); Judith Herrin, The Formation of Christendom (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. pp. 30-31, 220-49.
[44] Indeed 'ethnicity' has been recently explored in a variety of ways in other areas of 'Late Antiquity'; some examples include: Stephen Mitchell and Geoffrey Greatrex, eds., Ethnicity and Culture in Late Antiquity (London: Duckworth, 2000); Richard Miles, ed., Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1999); Fergus Millar, "Hagar, Ishmael, Josephus and the Origins of Islam," Journal of Jewish Studies 44 (1993): 23-45; idem, "The Theodosian Empire (408-450) and the Arabs: Saracens or Ishmaelites?" in Erich Gruen, ed., Cultural Borrowings and Ethnic Appropriations in Antiquity (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2005), pp. 297-314; N. G. Garsoïan, "Armenian Historiography in Crisis," in Straw and Lim, eds., The Past Before Us (as n. 8), pp. 49-60. But in several recent survey works of Late Antiquity, the phenomenon 'ethnicity' concerns only the post-imperial West: Patrick J. Geary, "Barbarians and Ethnicity," in Bowersock, Brown, and Grabar, Late Antiquity: A Guide (as n. 1), pp. 107-29; cf. CAH XIV Index s.vv. "ethnic identity." Contrast another politicised ideological construct of Late Antiquity, the Sasanian concept of 'Eran,' based on geographic rather than ethnic concepts: Gherado Gnoli, The Idea of Iran: An Essay on its Origin (Rome: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1989).
[45] Two examples from the main Introduction: (A) The term 'barbarian' was "[in Roman practice] particularly applied to peoples who lived north of the Danube and east of the Rhine" (Noble, ed., p. 10)--i.e. those regarded as 'Germans' by moderns (though not by ancient writers). Compare e.g. the opening sentence of Procopius' Wars: "the history of the wars which Justinian, emperor of the Romans, waged against the barbarians of the East and of the West" (Procopius, Wars I 1.1). In Late as in Early Antiquity, the barbarian remained the 'Persian'--the strategic and ideological challenge to the late Roman state--and there were any number of other non-northern European barbarians in the Roman thought-world (cf. e.g. Laterculus Veronensis, c. 14: "Gentes barbarae quae pullulaverunt sub imperatoribus," in Geographi latini minores, ed. A. Riese [1878; repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1964], pp. 127-29; De proprietatibus gentium, ed. T. Mommsen in MGH AA XI, pp. 388-9). Only the northern European desire for distant ancestry makes the trans-Rhine barbarians of Late Antiquity special. (B) The opening conceit of the book proffers two maps, one of the provinces of the late Roman West, the second of the western kingdoms ca. 530s, as visual demonstration that the "structural changes [from Roman empire to barbarian kingdoms]...could hardly appear more dramatic or fundamental" (Noble, ed., p. 1). The two maps indeed do show the unity of the Roman empire supplanted by multiple jurisdictions (not for the first time). But what one sees when comparing the maps is not radical change so much as suggestive similarity. The borders of Roman regional divisions map closely onto the putative borders of the successor states. Most of the kingdoms look strikingly like the former Roman dioceses, with some reallocations of constituent provinces. To take the most obvious examples, the Ostrogothic kingdom more or less exactly replicates the former imperial Prefecture of Italy and Illyricum (a continuity of which the administration of Ostrogothic Italy was entirely conscious), while Clovis's endeavours reintegrated most of the former Roman dioceses of Gaul (rather than prefiguring the future France). Imperial unity may have gone, but administrative geography appears to have been perpetuated, undercutting claims advertised here for a "startling transformation." (Note, however, that maps of late Roman provincial boundaries, as of the later western kingdoms, are infirm representations; my thanks to Dr Kate Da Costa of the Parabola project on late Roman provinces for this point).
[46] Goffart, Barbarians and Romans (as n. 36); idem, Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D.550-800): Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); the recent paperback edition (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005) includes a new Preface surveying reactions to the original publication: pp. ix-xxxiv.
[47] In this book he explicitly sees the topic of barbarian settlement as part of late-Roman studies, but pushed off the academic agenda in recent years by focus on 'ethnicity'; Goffart, p. ix.
[48] One representative example: Cameron, "Perception of Crisis" (as n. 8), p. 18 and n. 21.
[49] Initial acceptance: e.g. Herwig Wolfram, History of the Goths, trans. Thomas J. Dunlap (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. xi, 295-300; cf. idem, "Neglected Evidence on the Accommodation of Barbarians in Gaul," in Pohl, ed., Kingdoms of the Empire (as n. 32), pp. 181-83. Reaction to Narrators: see n. 46 above.
[50] Benjamin H. Isaac, The Limits of Empire: The Roman Army in the East, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992); C. R. Whittaker, Frontiers of the Roman Empire: A Social and Economic Study (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1994); idem, Rome and Its Frontiers (as n. 25). This interpretation, of course, remains contested.
[51] N.B. Goffart's observation of the commitment of current 'Ethnogenesis' approaches to the premises of much older work; e.g. Goffart, pp. 45-48, 283 n. 53.
[52] Inevitably, given the scale of time and geography concerned, this de-centering is limited in scope. While bringing Irish, Scottish, and Anglo-Saxon materials firmly into the discussion, Smith effectively excludes Byzantine Italy, Slavic eastern Europe, and Islamic and Mozarabic Spain--indeed even the Visigothic kingdom and the post-711 Christian rump kingdoms appear only fleetingly--as well as the Byzantine empire proper. The question to be asked is not so much how different a picture would have emerged from different geographical coverage--the interpretive matrix adopted here would probably not be significantly affected by different data--as whether the existing approach, which tends to commence each sub-topic with the insular evidence, doesn't in fact privilege British conditions and concerns rather than achieving spatial homogeneity.
[53] E.g. John Moorhead, review article on Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 2nd ed., in Journal of Religious History 29 (2005), pp. 74-75.
[54] Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
[55] Incidentally, large-scale translation projects surely qualify as a distinctive feature of 'longitudinal Late Antiquity': one thinks of the Greek-Latin ecclesiastical translators of the fourth and fifth centuries, of whom Jerome and Rufinus stand out from a host of anonymi; the translation of the Bible from the Septuagint or the Hebrew into Coptic, Syrian, Armenian, Gothic, and Arabic; and Greek 'scientific' translations under the Sasanian shahs, part of the inspiration for the explosion of 'Abbasid Arabic translations (Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, as n. 2), not only of Greek works but also of Persian, Indian, Syriac, and Coptic Christian texts.
[56] Gregory's Clovis and Old Testament kings: Martin Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours: History and Society in the Sixth Century, trans. Christopher Carrol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 123-25, 134; Phillip Wynn, "Wars and Warriors in Gregory of Tours' Histories I-IV," Francia 28:1 (2002), pp. 21-28. Publicity: Avitus of Vienne, Ep. 46 (Clovis had advertised his forthcoming Nicene baptism to Avitus and, presumably, other Gallic bishops); cf. Gregory of Tours, Histories II.31.
[57] "War lords": e.g. Smith, pp. 29, 226. Search for new homes: 226. Roman governing structures: 29-30, 90. Warrior kings: 199, 220, 257 (Theoderic). Militarism versus education: 30. "Germanic" dominance in language: 26; in marriage practices: 127; in naming: 90. Conquest: 22. Origin legends: 58, 254-67. Ethnically-based kingdoms: 256.
[58] "Successful" kingdoms and origin myths: there is no evidence for the existence of or political interest in such myths in Frankish Gaul at the time of Gregory of Tours, or in Visigothic Spain at the time of Isidore of Seville (his exiguous excerpta of chronicle references to the Goths and Sueves certainly doesn't qualify), the two most 'successful' kingdoms of their time. Jordanes' Getica as origin myth: the author does not identify himself as a Goth, disparages oral sources, portrays the Goths as alien by virtue of their distant origin, intentionally misrepresents the Visigothic defeat of 507 and Ostrogothic defeat of 540 as terminal, and repeatedly celebrates the destruction of the Gothic regime of Italy by Justinian--with origin myths like these, who needs enemy propaganda?
[59] The other, acknowledged omission is Armenia. The Balkans are passed over, again understandably in view of the sheer scope of the work, for linguistic reasons (Wickham, p. 5). The omission of the Balkans should, however, be noted as a significant one (it would be easy to assume from the discussion here and in Smith that the region was marginal): the Balkans region was integral to the processes of fragmentation of the Roman empire in the fifth and sixth centuries (it is quite wrong to think of 'the break-up of the Roman empire' as a series of events restricted to the fifth-century West), and remained a volatile element in the geo-politics of the Byzantine empire thereafter. Both as a comparandum to western regions and as an element of Byzantine strategic commitments, the region warrants inclusion in future studies working along the lines set out by Wickham. Good overviews are John V. A. Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), pp. 25-93; Florin Curta, Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 500-1250 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 39-110.
[60] Wickham argues that the social and economic structures of these Islamic provinces (and indeed other post-Roman areas) were shaped essentially by regional factors, rather than articulated to a significant degree into a caliphate-wide system; the straddling of political demarcations is therefore of lesser significance.
[61] The coverage runs consistently in the order: North Africa, Egypt, Syria-Palestine, 'the Byzantine heartland' meaning Anatolia/Turkey and the Aegean, Italy, Spain, southern Gaul, northern Gaul, Britain, and Ireland and Denmark--the latter pair never part of the Roman empire but included, as in Smith's account, to demonstrate comparative paths of development.
[62] Earlier statements of this argument include the important article: Chris Wickham, "The Other Transition: From the Ancient World to Feudalism," Past and Present 103 (1984): 3-36.
[63] Welcome though this relegation of 'ethnicity' is, the discussion of 'ethnicity' and 'ethnogenesis' is problematic. Wickham does not define his use of the term 'ethnicity,' and it is unclear whether, in minimising the significance of 'ethnicity' as a cause for changing practices, he in fact refers to 'ethnicity' as an ideological construct (as used e.g. by Smith, above), or actual demographic movement.
[64] Following R. Hodges and D. Whitehouse, Mohammad, Charlemagne, and the Origins of Europe (London: Duckworth, 1983).
[65] Edward N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire from the First Century AD to the Third (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). Though Luttwak's central schema of a succession of single imperial defence strategies has been generally rejected, his analysis of military strategy remains valuable for non-specialists, and the book was largely responsible for generating the explosion of revisionist studies of Roman (and, subsequently, medieval) frontiers; cf. Whittaker, Rome and Its Frontiers (as n. 25), pp. 28-49.
[66] The brief narrative sections describing western collapse contain some unfounded assumptions, e.g. the Vandal occupation of North Africa, which crippled the "tax-spine" of the Roman imperial economy, was "an almost chance disaster: no one took them seriously as a danger [before entering Africa]" (Wickham, p. 87); to the contrary, Roman forces in Spain in the 410s and 420s were preoccupied with attempting to contain the Vandals, and were decimated, along with Gothic auxiliaries from Aquitania, fighting the Vandals in 429, probably in trying to prevent an African crossing; Chronica Gallica ad a. 452, c. 107; Cassiodorus, Chron. c. 1215. See nn. 68, 71 below.
[67] Cf. D. Fernández, "What is the De fisco Barcinonensi about?" Antiquité Tardive 14 (2006), p. 217.
[68] Wickham's use of Vandal North Africa as a test case presumes that his comparanda present essentially similar examples of 'invasion.' But this category of analysis is flawed, comprising as it does radically different forms of military and demographic intrusion: hostile conquest and forcible expropriation by an isolated group (the Vandals in North Africa); imperially-sponsored settlement of coopted groups (Visigothic southern Gaul and Ostrogothic Italy); and annexation of fringe areas by imperial forces (the Islamic western provinces).
[69] Alexander Callander Murray, "Review Article: The New MGH Edition of the charters of the Merovingian Kings," The Journal of Medieval Latin 15 (2005): 254-59; see also Murray in Noble, ed., 376-88.
[70] By the same logic, Gregory's Miracula would be an index to a charmingly eirenic society, and there would be little to choose, on a scale of social violence, between the Gaul of Gregory's Historiae and Ammianus Marcellinus' Rome (cf. T. D. Barnes, Ammianus Marcellinus and the Representation of Historical Reality [Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1998], pp. 107-42). It would be more sound to argue, on the evidential basis of his discernable narrative strategies, that Gregory is a guide to what was regarded as unacceptably shocking in his time; cf. Paul Fouracre, "Attitudes towards Violence in Seventh- and Eighth-Century Francia," in Guy Halsall, ed., Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998), pp. 61-62.
[71] The sentence is support for the depiction of the post-imperial West as a series of basically non-taxing polities (by consequence of droit de guerre) and therefore of the main economic analysis of the book. It gains little support from the texts cited: (1) Cassiodorus, Variae IV.39, V.12, concerning, as Wickham says, the later king Theodahad--an aristocrat allegedly with no military experience (Procopius, Wars V 3.1), his avaricious behaviour is not discernibly different from that of any other unscrupulous Roman land-owner checked by imperial authority; cf. Theodosian Code II.26.1-5, X.1.16; Salvian, De gubernatione Dei IV.4; and note the pithy characterisation of Roman aristocrats as "land-grubbing philistines" by Alan Cameron, "The Last Pagans of Rome," in W. V. Harris, The Transformations ofUrbs Romain Late Antquity (Portsmouth: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 1999), p. 109. (2) Paulinus of Pella, Eucharisticos ll. 309-27 refers not to land seizure by barbarians but to despoliation of moveable wealth--booty--by disgruntled Gothic allies of the failed usurper Attalus, retreating from Bordeaux, in 414/415. Paulinus' lament for lost property is much mis-cited. Apart from this loss from rapina during Attalus' usurpation in southern Gaul, he attributes the diminution (not complete dispossession) of his landed property to "Romanumque nefas contra omnia iura," i.e. to other Roman land-owners, including relatives (perhaps partially the result of imperial proscription for his involvement with Attalus); Eucharisticos ll. 422-30. Far from attesting ruinous barbarian greed, Paulinus, in the lines immediately before those cited by Wickham, asserts that notwithstanding the turmoil caused by Attalus and his Gothic supporters in 414/415, the later settlement of the Goths in southern Gaul ca. 418 is of benefit to Gallic provincials iam 'now,' i.e. at the time of composition, 459/460 (Eucharisticos ll. 303-08, cf. ll. 500-502). The Gothic occupier who offered recompense decades later for land no longer wholly owned by Paulinus was anything but avaricious (Eucharisticos ll. 575-579). (3) Vita Bibiani 4, like both Cassiodorus and Paulinus, shows not land-starved barbarian soldiers but unscrupulous Gothic land-owners seeking to increase their holdings at the expense of neighbours; to attribute their actions to their ethnicity rather than to their economic class is dubious (Goffart, Barbarians and Romans, pp. 96-97 and idem, Barbarian Tides, p. 184 for analysis of property issues; Gillett, Envoys, pp. 143-47 for discussion of text). The assumption that these disparate types of sources all commonly give access to a 'Germanic' cultural predilection for land-hunger, which was different in kind or in historical effect from Roman aristocratic land-greed, is informed by neither the texts nor social analysis.
[72] Paul Hamilton, Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1996); Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, eds., Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
[73] Shaw, "War and Violence" (as n. 30), p. 141.
[74] Not coincidentally, Goffart's is the only study to engage at length with the historiographic framework of his topic.
[75] E.g. articles by Giardina, Fowden, Liebeschuetz, and Athanassiadi in Straw and Lim, eds., The Past Before Us (as n. 8).
[76] For one interpretative model and methodology informed by historiographic analysis of preceding scholarship: Sebastian Brather, Ethnische Interpretationen in der Frühgeschichtlichen Archäologie : Geschichte, Grundlagen und Alternativen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004).
[77] I am grateful for the good advice of the anonymous readers for TMR; viewpoints and errors remaining here are, of course, my own.