This is the fourth volume in a six-book subseries of the larger Brepols project on Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, which is edited by the distinguished early medievalist Yitzhak Hen. The larger project is, to some extent, an expansion and continuation of the long-standing exploration of early medieval identities that has come to be associated with Walter Pohl and a large, loose network of similarly inspired scholars. This subseries is an outgrowth of a research cluster on Visions of Community: Comparative Approaches to Ethnicity, Region and Empire in Christianity, Islam and Buddhism (400-1600 CE) funded by the Austrian Research Fund and housed in the Institute for Medieval Research of the Austrian Academy. In this fourth volume, co-editor Pohl provides a long and valuable final chapter that successfully teases out common threads among the volume’s ten disparate contributions and brings some intellectual coherence to the project. The challenge to which Pohl rises here is greater than in other volumes of the subseries, because the geographical scope of this collection is so extensive: we range from Tang and Song China to Alfonsine Asturias via Japan, Iran, South Arabia, Constantinople and Lotharingia. It is a lot to take in.
The volume is, it will be clear, a product of the Eurasian turn in late antique and medieval historical studies that began in the early aughts and has really taken root in the past decade. This is a more capacious and ambitious scholarly approach than the East/West comparative history that preceded it in the 1990s. That pioneering work discovered a lot of fruitful material to think with, mainly in the comparison of the Roman Empire and Han China, and particularly in terms of opening up research questions that were commonplace in the study of only one of those polities to consideration in the other. On the other hand, as any attempt at comparing vastly disparate cultures is prone to do, conclusions drawn from the comparisons tended to be fairly reductive and obvious. After all, pre-modern empires, however ambitious their strategies of documentation, rationalization and control, were subject to identical tyrannies of distance and communication speed that could not be overcome with the technologies available. The Eurasian turn has developed a historiography that is less explicitly comparative, more sensitive to fundamental problems of cultural difference, but also aware that, confronted by similar challenges, the civilizations of the transcontinental landmass produced parallel responses that are worth thinking about in a context wider than that of any single cultural zone.
Hence volumes like the present one. The reductive commonality here is that pre-modern Eurasian cultures all used historiography to reflect identity, but also to shape it, and that the challenges of doing this were substantively different during periods of imperial consolidation and periods of imperial dissolution or division. More subtly, as Pohl’s conclusion shows, once we move away from such Weberian ideal types as, say, Chinese historiography, or Christian Latin historiography, and turn instead to specifics, we begin to see that different ways of making truth claims, and different strategies for creating identities and alterities, are actually ranges of tendencies and that gauging the parameters of those tendencies opens up new avenues of seeing our sources. Pohl reminds us, as he has been increasingly careful to do in recent years, that we should not exaggerate the malleability and flexibility of group identities given the evidence of real cohesion in some of them, and that identity is best used as a heuristic concept, something with which we can evaluate the almost infinite range of particularities. One stresses this intellectual perspective because it illuminates how one whole aspect of early medieval studies has developed and matured--anyone who averted their gaze from acrimonious debates over ethnogenesis three decades ago and stopped paying attention should now feel confident in returning to the scholarly conversation, which is, as this subseries demonstrates, thoroughly constructive even when conclusions (and methodologies) differ.
Collective volumes are difficult to review usefully even when one knows their subject matter well. In a collection like this one no one will have specialist knowledge of more than one or two of the regions and periods covered in the ten contributions. That is a fundamental strength, in that it encourages readers to try something new, to move outside intellectual comfort zones, and to do so without the kind of commitment that is required to read a monograph far removed from one’s own subject. And in that respect, this volume works: I suspect that historians of China will find reading Yannis Stouraitis on theScriptores post Theophanem, or Simon MacClean on late Carolingian and early Ottonian historians, as valuable as a late Romanist like myself found Q. Edward Wang on “national history” in Song China. That said, let me draw attention to the chapters here most likely to be of specialist interest to readers of this journal.
Randolph B. Ford offers a comparison of the treatment of barbarians in the Wars of Procopius (c. 500-c. 565) and the Jinshu of Fang Xuanling (578-648). Though they were written a century apart, they addressed similar political circumstances in the sense that each was the first major work produced after a successful attempt at reunifying imperial territories that had been divided during phases of imperial dissolution. Both deploy traditional ethnic stereotypes of imperial enemies, both sustain the stark ideological binary of Roman or Chinese versus barbarian, and both show that these rhetorics are largely absent in discussions of what political actors did and why they did it.
Sarah Bowen Savant, drilling down on one facet of the argument in her New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran (2013), examines the way in which the writing of history could be a way of forgetting, of consigning to oblivion, certain pre-Islamic elements of Iranian history and smoothing out individual historical figures, for instance individual Sasanian shahanshahs, into representative icons. Michael Cook’s short contribution looks at one story from al-Tabarī’s tenth-century History, written in Arabic, and Niẓām al-Mulk’s eleventh-century Book of Government, written in Persian. Cook draws out the degree to which the sense of incompatibility between Iranianness and Islam was attenuated, if not eliminated, by the passage of time. Read in tandem, these two contributions make clear how wide the range of historiographic responses can when a culture suffers a major systemic shock, such as mass conversion cannot help but be.
The Byzantine contributions, Emmanuel C. Bourbouhakis on the Macedonian renaissance of historiography and Iannis Stouraitis on the anonymous six-partScriptores post Theophanem, are each in their way exemplary, though are likely to be hard going for those who have not read Photius, the ConstantinianExcerpta, or the Scriptores. They are both effective explorations of the way authority over the present can be claimed by making claims of authority over the past--in Photius and the Excerpta by curating, shaping and rebuilding the actual textual residue of that past, in the Scriptores by erasing the historian’s identity and creating something much closer to an official record than either Greek or Latin historiographies tended to produce. Moving westward, Simon MacLean takes up the concept of “the Lotharingians” in late Carolingian and then Ottonian historiography, latching onto the Lotharingians as a sort of new people, the creation of political formation which survived as an (ethnic) identity even though the political unit that was Lotharingia existed only briefly. He argues persuasively that Lotharingian identity only makes sense in the late/post-Carolingian context, as part of the dynastic contestation over the Rhenish middle ground between eastern and western Frankish (and then Saxon) kingdoms. Thus under Louis the Child a focus on Lotharingians results in the writing of Zwentibald out of history, while under Henry the Fowler, Lotharingianness denies the region its Frankish identity, allowing it to be claimed for the Saxon kings. Across the Pyrenees, Matthias M. Tischler considers the historiography of tenth-century Asturias and teases out the development over time of a particular northern, anti-Islamic identity as the kingdom develops.
Finally, as already noted, Pohl’s conclusion does a very good job of pulling out such commonalities as there are among the contributions, while also providing a summary overview of the salient differences among history written in the Chinese tradition; the South Asian; the Persian and Islamic; the Byzantine; and the western Latin: as a precis of the status quaestionis it is both accessible and accurate and highly recommended. As to the volume as a whole, whether or not a particular contribution has something new to say to specialists, each has a great deal to say to those in proximate and analogous fields, which is surely worth as much as again plowing furrows with which one is too familiar.