IMC 2014: Sessions

The papers of this session take a fresh look at the social and political function of historiographical texts and their relevance for the construction of barbarian identities in the late and post-Roman West. Pia Bockius examines the Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus, challenging the traditional view of Ammianus's stereotypical depiction of a binary opposition between Romans and Barbarians, arguing instead that he carefully modulated his stance towards Barbarians according to the criterion of the well-being of the Empire. James Harland discusses the image of the Saxons within the works of Sidonius Appolinaris and Gregory of Tours. He suggests that although we may detect some coherent patterns in the representation of the Saxons in late antique sources, this had less to do with the peoples represented than with the shifting geopolitical and religious mentalities of the authors and societies that imagined them. Kilvilcim Yavuz's paper confronts the famous story of the Trojan origins of the Franks with new questions. Examining textual and manuscript evidence, it will consider the place and significance of the Trojan origins in Frankish politics, the shifting meaning of Trojan descent between the Merovingian and the Carolingian periods, as well as the question of how the narrative itself was transformed through centuries of use. The final paper by Philipp Dörler will focus on the History of the Goths written by the Spanish bishop Isidore of Seville, contrasting the uses of the Roman and the Biblical past as a resource of identification for the Visigothic kingdom.