Europe: Ancient and Medieval (Book Review)

Herwig Wolfram. The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples. Translated by Thomas Dunlap. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press; in association with the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. 1997. Pp. xx, 361. $39.95.

The formation of the barbarian tribes that entered the territories of the Roman Empire in the fourth to the sixth centuries, and the kingdoms that they subsequently created once their migrations had come to an end, are major aspects of what has been termed “the transformation of the Roman world.” The study of tribal formation is in itself complex, and the difficulties of understanding it are enhanced by the fact that our narrative sources for the process come from authors who may have had access to genuine traditions but whose interpretations were influenced heavily by Romano-Greek ethnography. At the same time, while the archaeological evidence is important, it is open to any number of interpretations. What is clear is that the barbarian peoples who entered the Roman world were not purely biological groupings but rather units formed around cultural and religious traditions, and that they were changed through their contact with the Romans, whose world they in turn transformed. In addition to this history, the historiography of the transformation has itself been significant, for it has fed much of the nationalist consciousness of Western Europe and played a particular part in the development of Nazi ideology. Herwig Wolfram juggles dazzlingly both the history and the historiography, although it may be that his careful and often ironic asides about German historical thought will prove too elusive to those not brought up within the German scholarly tradition.1
     Nor is Wolfram’s historical reading always easy to follow, despite the fact that the book is clearly intended for students and that many of the chapter headings (for example, “The Vandals (406–534): A Unique Case?” or “Theodoric (451–526) and Clovis (466/7–511”) are ideally pitched at the undergraduate essay writer. Nevertheless, Wolfram himself warns the reader at the start of chapter one (p. 14) that “a great deal of attention and discrimination” is needed to understand what follows. He is right: what he has to say about “Kings, Heroes, and Tribal Origins” in the first chapter is not easy reading, but it is an important summation of much of Wolfram’s own work on tribal origins and their representation in early medieval sources (ethnogenesis), and as such it repays concentration. Not that this is the only chapter where the reader is challenged by complex argument, but then Wolfram’s understanding of the barbarian impact on Roman world and Rome’s impact on the barbarians is itself extremely complex. To see how much more sophisticated readings of the barbarian migrations have become in the last thirty years, one has only to compare this book with Lucien Musset’s Les invasions: Les vagues germaniques (1965).2
     Wolfram is, not surprisingly, at his best when he deals with subjects that he has already made his own: ethnogenesis, the titles chosen by rulers (intitulatio) and, of course, the Goths, in particular the Ostrogoths. In many respects, this book is, therefore, a return visit to material that Wolfram has already written about (and indeed, the endnotes tend to send the reader to the author’s previous work rather than to the original sources, which is a pity, given how much source material is available in translation for students). Outside the fields that Wolfram dominates, he inevitably relies on others, with the result that discussions of the Vandals, Franks, Anglo-Saxons, and Burgundians are sketchier than those of the Ostrogoths. Nevertheless, some of the sketchiest discussions will prove particularly useful for students. The short overviews of the Slavs and the Avars in the final chapter will doubtless be most people’s introduction to those more shadowy peoples.3
     Although Thomas Dunlap has translated work by Wolfram before, it cannot be said that he or the publishers have served this book well. Frequently place names and personal names have been left in German, or translated into French, rather than into the forms normally known in English: thus Friaul for Friuli, Melanie for Melania, Bretagne for Brittany (though Wolfram himself is not quite accurate in implying that Aremorica and Brittany are coterminous). There are alarming mistakes, which are unlikely to have been Wolfram’s, for example, Transmarisca-Tutrakan is placed on the Rhine (p. 63). And Latin words move in and out of italics at whim. One can only hope that the publishers will soon produce a properly edited version of this book and that a considerable number of minor blemishes will be removed.4

I. N. WoodUniversity of Leeds

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