| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Ancient and Medieval

Alexander Callander Murray, editor. After Rome's Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History. Buffalo N.Y.: University of Toronto Press. 1998. Pp. xii, 388. $55.00.

Most festschriften are depressing works, consisting largely of papers extricated from remote recesses of desks, often years old and hastily refurbished at short notice, or rapidly run up to satisfy a determined editor. This volume bears none of the marks of this debased genre. It is a classic and a worthy tribute to a scholar who has given so much to the study of late antiquity and its Nachlass over the past forty years and more. Walter Goffart's bibliography contains some of the most penetrating and formative studies of the difficult and often rebarbative sources for European history in the period A.D. 300 to 700 and later. This volume in his honor contains work of appropriately high quality by a distinguished cadre of historians, who clearly felt they were on their mettle. The result is a volume packed with interest and insight, excellently edited and well produced. The book is not merely a graceful tribute; it is a successor to Goffart's own The Narrators of Barbarian History (1988) and his collection, Rome's Fall and After (1989). There is an excellent balance of contributions, from the early ethnoi to notions of national identity in sixteenth-century France. In between there are excellent treatments of Cassiodorus's Variae, heresy in Gregory of Tours, war and Christian writers, sacral kingship, power structures in Lombard Italy, Carolingian monasticism, Claudius of Turin, and Benjamin of Tudela. Only a brief, selective review of these riches can be attempted. . . .

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