Migrations and Conquest: Easy Pictures for Complicated Backgrounds in Ancient and Medieval Structures
In case that only very few written sources survived this century, what will be known of our social, political, economic, cultural, or intellectual identities in a far future? Archaeologists excavating the ruins of present-day Europe in the distant future could discover structures confusing to them. The remains of our material culture could be interpreted by our future colleagues as those of a unified world in the northern and parts of the southern hemispheres. Or, as another possibility, would Europe be defined as an American colony or vice versa? Would the models generated be sophisticated enough to describe the complex structures of present-day societies? Could archaeologists or historians believe in migrations and decline, conquering westerners, and conquered, decadent easterners and southerners? Could great American invasions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries become an explanation if the industrial areas and more modern city structures of Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York appear mightier than those in Europe? Or would our future colleagues believe in a massive Chinese takeover at the beginning of the twenty-first century due to the millions of plastic objects with Made in China on them? Or would they have learned from our discussions and intellectual evolutions in this field of study and try to avoid simple explanations? These considerations have been inspired by Chris Wickham. Wickham tried to criticize simple ethnic identifications of archaeological material and put it like this cum grano salis: And indeed, a man or a woman with a Lombard-style brooch is no more necessarily a Lombard than a family in Bradford with a Toyota is Japanese; artefacts are no secure guide to ethnicity (Wickham 1981, 68). The famous German archaeologist Volker Bierbrauer did not like this too much and considered Wickham’s idea as a joke (Bierbrauer 2004: 48 and note 23).
The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550-800): Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon
The first major historians of medieval Europe composed histories of the Goths, Franks, Anglo-Saxons, and Lombards. They are the main witnesses to the long epoch--sometimes called "the Dark Ages"--that their writings span, and they have nourished patriotic pride in the modern nations whose origins they are thought to narrate: Jordanes in Germany and Italy, Gregory of Tours in France, Bede in Britain, and Paul the Deacon in Italy. In a book that brings out the conscious creativity of these four writers, Walter Goffart focuses on their goals, scrutinizing what each of them was doing and for whom. The historians are examined one by one, as called for by the circumstances of their lives, the individuality of their works, and the critical writings each has occasioned. Their opinions and literary talents are taken as seriously as the information they convey. Professor Goffart's findings about their writing and what moved them to produce it clarify a delicate chapter in the history of historical thought and provide new insights into social, religious, and literary life at the dawn of the Middle Ages.
Old English Manuscripts in the Early Age of Print: Matthew Parker and his Scribes
Covering the first dedicated program in the study of and publication of Anglo-Saxon texts, my dissertation examines the sixteenth-century origins of medieval studies as an academic discipline. By placing recent scholarship on media, materiality, cognition, and intellectual history in conversation with traditional paleographical methods on medieval and renaissance manuscript culture, I argue for a new way of understanding how early modern scholars studied and presented the medieval past. I take as my focus a corpus of emulative Anglo-Saxon manuscript transcriptions produced under Elizabethan Archbishop Matthew Parker. Equal parts facsimile and edition, these transcriptions are a unique example of early modern scholars navigating the often competing demands of late sixteenth century manuscript and print culture. This dissertation is, in part, an attempt to catalogue and document the extent of Parkerian Anglo-Saxon manuscript transcriptions. Temporally displaced from their source texts, Parker and his scribes directly modified many of the medieval manuscripts they recovered by editing, rebinding, cropping, and annotating them according to their own interpretive desires and publication needs. These transcriptions place Parker’s early modern scribes into the textual community of early medieval scribal culture, but their printed manuscript editions are an attempt to bring medieval documents into contemporary discourse. They developed new typefaces modeled on manuscript exemplars and attempted to reframe the printed version of a medieval text as an authoritative surrogate