IMC 2026: Sessions

Just before turning 91, Walter Goffart passed away on Friday 14 February 2025 at New Haven. For more than six decades, Goffart delivered seminal contributions to a wide array of subjects, ranging from Carolingian monastic manuscripts, to Constantinopolitan policy on the “barbarian question”, the mechanics of Late Roman taxation and settlement, or Early Modern cartography. In honour of his intellectual legacy, these sessions approach a variety of quintessential Goffartian subjects.

Session I kicks off with historiography. Already in his Narrators of Barbarian History (1988), Goffart took a fresh approach to four principal authors whom we can count among the first historiographers of the earliest medieval kingdoms (Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon). But he was also always very conscious of the Early Modern foundations of contemporary scholarship on historiography. The current papers will cast new light on two of Goffart’s principal authors, starting with Jordanes in light of the relatively recent discovery of the new fragments of Dexippus. Similarly, the Goffartian notion of Gregory the “Philosopher”, will be approached through the angle of emotions in the bishop’s concept of history. Finally, German historiography on the Völkerwanderung will be re-assessed through the work of seminal Early Modern scholars.