Roman identity is one of the most interesting cases of social identity because in the course of time, it could mean so many different things: for instance, Greek-speaking subjects of the Byzantine empire, inhabitants of the city of Rome, autonomous civic or regional groups, Latin speakers under ‘barbarian’ rule in the West or, increasingly, representatives of the Church of Rome. Eventually, the Christian dimension of Roman identity gained ground. The shifting concepts of Romanness represent a methodological challenge for studies of ethnicity because, depending on its uses, Roman identity may be regarded as ‘ethnic’ in a broad sense, but under most criteria, it is not. Romanness is indeed a test case how an established and prestigious social identity can acquire many different shades of meaning, which we would class as civic, political, imperial, ethnic, cultural, legal, religious, regional or as status groups. This book offers comprehensive overviews of the meaning of Romanness in most (former) Roman provinces, complemented by a number of comparative and thematic studies. A similarly wide-ranging overview has not been available so far.
Author(s): W. Pohl, C. Grifoni, C. Gantner, M. Pollheimer-Mohaupt
Series: Millennium-Studien / Millennium Studies
Publisher: De Gruyter
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: 597
City: Berlin
9783110598384
9783110598384
Contents
Abbreviations
List of figures
Preface and acknowledgements
Aspects of Romanness in the early Middle Ages
Introduction: Early medieval Romanness – a multiple identity
Transformations of Romanness: The northern Gallic case
Compelling and intense: The Christian transformation of Romanness
The Late Antique and Byzantine Empire
Romans, barbarians and provincials in the Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus
A stone in the Capitol: Some aspects of res publica and romanitas in Augustine
Remarks on linguistic Romanness in Byzantium
Byzantine Romanness: From geopolitical to ethnic conceptions
The City of Rome
‘Romanness’ and Rome in the early Middle Ages
The post-imperial Romanness of the Romans
The Roman past in the consciousness of the Roman elites in the ninth and tenth centuries
Italy and the Adriatic
Looking up to Rome: Romanness through the hagiography from the duchy of Spoleto
Rome and Romanness in Latin southern Italian sources, 8th–10th centuries
Between Rome and Constantinople: The Romanness of Byzantine southern Italy (9th–11th centuries)
Dalmatian Romans and their Adriatic friends: Some further remarks
Gaul
‘Roman’ identity in Late Antiquity, with special attention to Gaul
Roman barbarians in the Burgundian province
Histories of Romanness in the Merovingian kingdoms
Romanness in Merovingian hagiography: A case study in class and political culture
Roman law as an identity marker in post-Roman Gaul (5th‒9th centuries)
From subordination to integration: Romans in Frankish law
The Iberian Peninsula
Goths and Romans in Visigothic Hispania
‘Made by the ancients’: Romanness in al-Andalus
Northern peripheries: Britain and Noricum
Walchen, Vlachs and Welsh: A Germanic ethnonym and its many uses
Four communities of pot and glass recyclers in early post-Roman Britain
Romanness at the fringes of the Frankish Empire: The strange case of Bavaria
From Roman provinces to Islamic lands
When not in Rome, still do as the Romans do? Africa from 146 BCE to the 7th century
Romanness in the Syriac East
Bibliography
Index
