HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

CHAPTER TWOETHNIC AND NATIONAL HISTORY CA. 500–1000Joaquín Martínez PizarroIntroductionThe works usually studied under the heading of ethnic histories,some of which are among the most widely read productions of theearly Middle Ages, do not belong to one genre or share a commonapproach to their subject. They continue to be treated as a grouponly because scholars have done so for a long time, describing whatthey call origines gentium as a distinct genre of historiography, withantecedents in classical ethnography, that was taken up across Europein the early medieval period by writers moved by ethnic self-awareness. 1No matter that the texts show none of the common formal characteristicsthat distinguish a literary genre, or that among the mostfamous works of the group, one, the History of Gregory of Tours, isclearly a universal history in the tradition of Orosius, while another,Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, follows faithfully the generic model forchurch history set by Eusebius of Caesarea: somehow, these textswere thought to be bound by ideological and emotional factors thatwent much deeper than any literary considerations. Since all of themwere concerned, to some extent, with the early history of Germanictribes, the national passions of nineteenth- and twentieth-centuryEurope became implicated in their study from very early. The questionto which the ethnic histories were believed to hold the answerwas that of the role of Germanic culture in the formation of medievalEurope, vis-à-vis the Roman Empire and its overwhelming legacy.However, nationalism alone will not explain the misunderstandingsand distortions to which these works have been exposed. Scholarshiphas been haunted by other agendas, among them a yearning for culturalotherness that is as old and as powerful as the need for national1Grundmann (1965), 12–17.