| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Ancient and Medieval

Walter Pohl and Helmut Reimitz, editors. Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of Ethnic Communities, 300–800. (The Transformation of the Roman World, number 2.) New York: E. J. Brill. 1998. Pp. vi, 347.

This volume of essays by fourteen international contributors is indicative of rising scholarly interest in the creation and character of ethnic identity. (Just since receiving my review copy of the book, I have randomly encountered other recently published discussions of ethnicity in times and regions as diverse as fifth/sixth-century Western Europe, early Israel, and pre-Hellenistic Macedonia.) In general, this interest is probably spurred by present ethnic political turbulence around the world. Co-editor Walter Pohl makes explicit his view that the issues illuminated in the collected essays have a clear application in the present: "if one deals with today's problems of nationalism, it is not enough to study the history and ideology of the last two centuries. One has to go back to the development of ethnic rhetoric and representation between Antiquity and the early Middle Ages" (p. 14). 1

This book is volume two of a project supported by the European Science Foundation entitled The Transformation of the Roman World. The project is slated to stretch to eighteen edited volumes dealing (through an interdisciplinary approach) with the transition from the late Roman Empire to the early Middle Ages in Western and Central Europe. The preceding volume (also edited by Pohl) is Kingdoms of the Empire: The Integration of Barbarians in Late Antiquity (1997). . . .

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