IMC 2011: Sessions

Session 308: Beyond the Invasion Narrative: The Roman World and Its Neighbours in Late Antiquity, II - Changing Minds?

Organiser:	Guy Halsall, Department of History, University of York
Moderator/Chair:	Guy Halsall, Department of History, University of York
Paper 308-a	Ethnicity and Its Discontents (Language: English) Walter Pohl, Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, Universität Wien
Paper 308-b	Ta(l)king Up the Law: Rethinking Roman-Post-Roman Legal Practice in the West (Language: English) Caroline Humfress, Department of History, Classics & Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London
Paper 308-c	Shifting Identities and Marriage in Ostrogothic Italy (Language: English) Tommaso Leso, Dipartimento di Studi storici, Università Ca' Foscari, Venezia
Abstract	This session looks at developments in the mentalités of the late antique world in ways which attempt to move beyond the paradigms that assign all change to incoming barbarians. Walter Pohl's paper responds to recent polemic against the deployment of ethnicity and identity as a means of explaining change, without invoking the traditional Völkerwanderung. The other papers, by Humfress and Leso look at two related areas: the law and ideas of marriage, to see how dynamics within the late Roman world and its relations with the world beyond the frontier helped to shape the precise changes detectable.