W. Pohl/G. Heydemann (eds.), Strategies of Identification: Ethnicity and Religion in Early Medieval Europe, Turnhout 2013
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This volume traces the creation of ethnic and
religious identities in the Early Middle Ages in a wide range of sources. How
were identities created in the early Middle Ages and when did they matter? This
book explores different types of sources to understand the ways in which they
contributed to making ethnic and religious communities meaningful:
historiography and hagiography, biblical exegesis and works of theology,
sermons and letters. Thus, it sets out to widen the horizon of current debates
on ethnicity and identity. The Christianization and dissolution of the Roman
Empire had provoked a crisis of traditional identities and opened new spaces
for identification. What were the textual resources on which new communities
could rely, however precariously? Biblical models and Christian discourses
could be used for a variety of aims and identifications, and the volume
provides some exemplary analyses of these distinct voices. Barbarian polities
developed in a rich and varied framework of textual ‘strategies of
identification’. The contributions reconstruct some of this discursive matrix
and its development from the age of Augustine to the Carolingians. In the
course of this process, ethnicity and religion were amalgamated in a new way
that became fundamental for European history, and acquired an important
political role in the post-Roman kingdoms. The extensive introduction not only
draws together the individual studies, but also addresses fundamental issues of
the definition of ethnicity, and of the relationship between discourses and
practices of identity. It offers a methodological basis that is valid for
studies of identity in general.
