HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

ETHNIC AND NATIONAL HISTORY CA. 500‒1000 47only a husk, a thin formal cover in itself unworthy of investigation,and recent attempts to go back to the texts are still waved aside asthe reduction of history to pure literature, to fiction, to “the prejudicesof a few literate churchmen”. 13 Such charges involve a misrepresentationof the aims of scholars such as Walter Goffart, 14 whoseidentification of plots and genres in the ethnic histories concerns onlythe formal organizing principles of each narrative and in no wayimplies a blanket denial of the historical truth of the informationframed by means of these genres and plots.One purpose of the outline that follows is to bring out the heterogeneityof these texts, not an unexpected feature if we keep inmind that the authors of some of them did not belong to the gentesthey wrote about (Gregory of Tours, Isidore of Seville), that somewrote about peoples who had ceased to be sovereign—and withoutnecessarily taking their side ( Jordanes, Paul the Deacon), while othersfocused on particular groups or tribes within the larger nation(Fredegar, the Liber historiae Francorum), and the last author in theseries used the history of his people only as a brief introduction toan account of the larger territorial confederacy by which they hadbeen absorbed (Widukind).Jordanes and the GothsThe author of On the Origin and Deeds of the Goths 15 introduces himself(Getica 266) as a Moesian Goth, the grandson of a Goth whohad been secretary (notarius) to a king of the Alans established inMoesia, and himself a notarius, even though agrammatus, i.e., lackingthe conventional school training in grammar and rhetoric. Jordanesoften refers to Constantinople as “the city” (urbs) and adopts Justinian’sscholarship: cf. Thomas Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918), trans. W. D.Morris (New York, 1983), 32:The Roman West is literary: this separates it from the Germanic—or moreexactly—from the German world, which, whatever else it is, is definitely notliterary.13Pohl (1994), 9; cf. also Wolfram (1994).14Goffart (1988).15Jordanes, Romana et Getica, ed. T. Mommsen, MGH, AA V.1 (Berlin, 1882).