User:Andrew Lancaster/Goffart should not make people angry

Seeing the sources in perspective:

The language question
This will come in handy: Dennis Green, asked by Peter Heather, confirms that he does not believe West Germanic speakers in the 8th century could have communicated with Gothic speakers....



Pohl, p.47: Für die Zusammenarbeit der Disziplinen ist festzuhalten, dass die von der Philologie rekonstruierten Sprachen, wie eben das Germanische, Abstraktionen sind, die von den Zeitgenossen kaum als Einheit wahrgenommen wurden.

Heather


Much of the opening of this book repeats over and over that there is no consensus anymore, but Heather's concern is (according to his presentation) not Germanic unity or continuity, but almost entirely about whether there were actually large movement of people that helped bring about the fall of the western Roman empire. (Concerning this topic, Heather writes as if in a minority. But his description of the majority is not done with detailed examples from specific authors.)

Looking for comments more specifically relevant to unity and continuity (because they seem so controversial on WP) Heather seems satisfied with the new majority, at least when discussing it in a theoretical way (other authors seem to see his practical descriptions as ignoring the lessons though)...

p.13: On closer examination, the assumption that ancient and modern speakers of related languages somehow share a common and continuous political identity has proved unsustainable. The kinds of national identities that came to the fore in nineteenth-century Europe were created in historical time, and did not represent the re-emergence of something fundamental but long submerged.

pp.13-14: The creation of modern nationalism also required the conscious input of intellecutals, who created national dictionaries, identified national costumes, and collected the dances and folktales which were then used to 'measure' ethnicity

pp.19: Heather explains that in 1961 [Reinhard Wenskus] showed that there was enormous evidence for discontinuity. He continues: p.20:all the Germanic groups at the heart of the successor states to the Roman Empire in this era - Goths, Franks, and Vandals and so on - can be shown to be new political units, created on the march, many of them recruiting from a wide range of manpower sources, some of which were not even Germanic-speaking. The political units formed by the Germani in the first millenium were thus not closed groups with continuous histories [...] There has been much discussion since of the details [...] But all subsequent discussion has accepted and started from Wenskus's basic observations.

p.20: Under the old view of unchanging closed group identities, if group X was suddenly encountered in place B rather than in place A, it was only natural to conclude that the whole group had moved. Once it was accepted that group identities can be malleable, then in principle only a few - maybe even a very few - of group X need have moved to provide a core around whom a population from disparate sources gathered.

Liebeschuetz
TLDR. All arguments are built upon assumption of ONE language even in late antiquity, and secondarily that if there is one language there must be more shared culture. This assumption does not strictly work, and it is not defended, but Liebeschuetz finds it "important" to describe Europe as "a joint creation of Roman and Germans".

KEY POINTS, not easy to connect with generally held beliefs of the field:
 * Says he follows Wenskus and Wolfram, "ethnogenesis" approach, but he clearly thinks their successors like Pohl have gone too far. In effect this means he assumes only a small "kernel" of tradition being transmitted from an original Germanic culture (or, as we will see, cultureS) to the later world.
 * Why he thinks it is important: Toronto criticism deprives "the ancient Germans and their constituent tribes of any continuous identity" and this
 * (1) makes the European history a product of Roman history, not "a joint creation of Roman and Germans" [i.e. implication is only those two, and also that their contributions are comparable].(p.89) Also see p.98 which says the reason the Germanic concept "remains useful even indispensable" is that it remains likely that the "common language and culture of the gentes" made a significant contribution to the new world that was coming into existence under their leadership"
 * (2) makes it hard to understand how the Franks, Vandals, Goths "maintained cohesion and stability" [i.e. (2) is apparently an argument for continuous Frankish, Vandalic and Gothic cultures, but not their unity as ONE continuous culture].
 * Admits that evidence of a common heritage in terms of legends or religion is basically non-existent.
 * Admits that archaeological evidence on its own is also not conclusive evidence.
 * Admits the Germanic peoples seem to have never had any consciousness of a cultural unity.
 * MAIN ARGUMENT? Shared language MUST mean shared culture...
 * (p.95) "I would insist that shared language, even if split into dialects, most have greatly assisted the processes of ethnogenesis which we observe in the Late Roman world."
 * (p.98) "But even if the different gentes did not share a sense of German identity, they did share a language, or at least spoke closely related dialects." Liebeschuetz adds law codes with weregild, and grave goods, as confirming evidence. Then says "
 * [NB. There seems to be no linguists who would say that there was ONE mutually recognizable Germanic language shared by all "Germanic peoples" in late antiquity. (There were at least 3?) This argument again seems to argue for a continuity of Franks, Goths, etc, not ONE Germanic people.]
 * An important repeated concept is the "major gentes": Franks, Goths, Vandals etc. E.g. "It is therefore clear that the sub-groups of Goths, Franks, Vandals etc. did share a sense of kinship and mutual solidarity with other sub-groups of their gens" (p.99)
 * REMARK by Andrew Lancaster. These passages above openly switch between defending the existence of ONE Germanic culture and using evidence and logic which is only about SEPARATE Frankish, Gothic, Vandal etc cultures. To move from "major gentes" to ONE Germanic culture the key is the assumption of one language, but THIS assumption is a non-standard assumption and not discussed, just stated. We need at other sources about that.
 * WEAK BUT LOGICAL CONCLUSION (pp.99-100): "Some traditions, especially language, all the tribes had in common. Others were more specific." [...] "I am not claiming that there was after all a Germanic culture [singular], continuing without interruption from prehistory to modern times, and a fundamental national character (Geist) that was not affected by historical change. My point is rather that we have enough evidence to show that the tribes [plural] of the Age of Migration did have their evolving traditions [plural], and that it is reasonable to assume that these ethnic traditions [plural] made a significant contribution to the making of Medieval Europe."
 * WEAK BUT LOGICAL CONCLUSION (pp.99-100): "Some traditions, especially language, all the tribes had in common. Others were more specific." [...] "I am not claiming that there was after all a Germanic culture [singular], continuing without interruption from prehistory to modern times, and a fundamental national character (Geist) that was not affected by historical change. My point is rather that we have enough evidence to show that the tribes [plural] of the Age of Migration did have their evolving traditions [plural], and that it is reasonable to assume that these ethnic traditions [plural] made a significant contribution to the making of Medieval Europe."
 * Assumption of language unity is the main argument, but he apparently recognizes it is a questionable assumption, and strictly speaking does not demand ONE Germanic people. So why? Because...
 * The term Germanic people which DOES imply ONE Germanic people is "important" to Liebeschuetz because it shows people that later Europe was a "a joint creation of Roman and Germans" (2 peoples).

Goffart: the quotes which make people angry
Refer for example to the list of quotes posted at User talk:Thomas.W: Compare to some other lines:
 * "The prehistoric Germans never existed under that name" (p.20)
 * "The Germanness of the migrations has serious implications: it determines that the described course of events took place in a very distinctive way. The main actors, it tells us, were not peoples disconnected from one another with multiple names and multiple circumstances; instead, the Migration Age was inhabited by a coherant, interrelated, and populous group [singular] engaging in collective endeavors of expansion, population increase, migration, hammering frontiers, applying mounting pressure, and setting off great invasions, waves of movement, and kingdom foundations." (p.4)
 * "The peoples surveyed by Tacitus or those of the Migration Age were fragmented; they did not call themselves Germans but bore particular names, and they did not live in a territory they called "Germany." "(p.5).
 * "At best, they spoke dialects that our linguists call "Germanic", but even that common bond was (as far as we can tell) unknown to themselves until the eighth century."
 * Page 7 there is a listing of 4 "contentions", so this is a good dry summary:
 * 1. Barbarian invasions not a single collective movement: different barbarian groups moved for their own reasons under their own leaders.
 * 2. The pressures on the late Empire did not have a united source, and often came from within
 * 3. The classical Germanic peoples lacked any unity or center, and so they should not be seen as a civilization in the way Rome is.
 * 4. We can not accept Jordanes as preserving an authentic oral tradition about migration from Scandinavia. (Also, we should remember how sensitive the concept of Goths was when Jordanes wrote.)

These are not highly controversial, but this is how Goffart himself describes his argument against the "German(ic)" terminology. Simplest conclusions from a first reading:
 * Germanic languages, defined by modern linguists, are accepted to be a real thing, but not relevant. [We can note that in normal scholarship (1) they are not one language by late antiquity, but a family of languages (2) BEFORE late antiquity it is not clear which tribes spoke what in most cases, but many probably did NOT speak Germanic languages then.]
 * When read properly, Goffart is advising against the use of the name as a useful category, and arguing that it has been used in order to demonstrate "to the Germans of today that they are firmly linked to their ancient ancestors". So it is driven by a "tenacious nostalgia", not the evidence. (p.20)
 * That "Germanic peoples" was not a classical concept in the way it is understood today is not controversial.
 * That there is no evidence of these Germanic peoples seeing themselves as one people during Roman times is not controversial.
 * Concerning Goffart's claims about the aims and practical effects of the concept in historical discourse, compare to Liebeschuetz's own description of his own reasoning, which is driven by what is "important". The two descriptions of the aims of historians using the term seem quite similar.