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CHAPTER 9
Goths and Gothic Identity in the Ostrogothic
Kingdom
Brian SwainIntroduction: The Anxieties of Identity
This chapter will pose more questions than it answers. In this it exemplifies
the state of barbarian identity studies, a sub-field of late ancient and early
medieval history marked by sharp interpretive divergences.1 The literature
on this subject is vast and shows no signs of abating.2 It is an energetic and
sometimes acrimonious field.3 Unlike the study of, say, Roman commerce or
hagiography, the question of barbarian identities carries with it a modern
political relevance. One gets from ancient barbarians to contemporary politics
in the following way: just who the barbarian peoples were bears directly on
the nature of their early medieval kingdoms, whose development informs how
we understand the emergence of European nation-states in the later medieval
and early modern periods, which in turn affects our interpretation of the rise
of nationalist movements in the modern age.4 Nationalist ideologies involved
the conviction that some modern states and the supposed cultural distinctive-
ness and ethnic purity of their peoples were rooted in the barbarian kingdoms.
The upheavals that resulted from 19th- and 20th-century nationalism linked
what would otherwise be arcane historical issues to the most pressing debates
of the post-war era. The highly controversial politics of the not-so-distant past,
1 Kulikowski, “Constantine”, p. 347 has noted that the term ‘barbarian’, despite its pejorative
connotations, makes no assumptions about ethnicity. It is an efficient and uncontroversial
way of referring to northern and eastern European, non-Roman social groupings.
2 To preserve space for the exposition of ideas in the text, citation of scholarly literature is
kept to a minimum. James, Europe’s Barbarians, Ch. 5, though, is an excellent synthesis of the
debates.
3 In his concluding comments to a recent volume on early medieval ethnicity, Chris Wickham,
“Conclusions”, p. 552 remarked, “The issue of ethnicity... has been contested a lot, often
fairly unhelpfully—exactly why it is such a hot topic in fifth- and sixth-century studies is
worth a study in itself, for no one in the rest of Late Antique studies gets as upset about any-
thing as do the five or six schools of late antique/early medieval ‘Germanic’ ethnicity.”
4 For a fuller discussion, see Wood, Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages.