Walter Goffart Quotes

Walter Andre Goffart is a German-born American historian who specializes in Late Antiquity and the European Middle Ages. He taught for many years in the history department and Centre for Medieval Studies of the University of Toronto , and is currently a senior research scholar at Yale University. He is the author of monographs on a ninth-century forgery , late Roman taxation , four "barbarian" historians, and historical atlases.

Two controversial themes in his research concern the Roman policies used when settling barbarian soldiers in the West Roman Empire , and his criticism of the old idea that there was a single Germanic people opposed to the empire in late antiquity, which he believes still influences academics studying the period. Wikipedia

✵ 22. February 1934

Walter Goffart: 11 quotes 0 likes

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Famous Walter Goffart Quotes

“Strange as it may seem to hear it said, there were no Germanic peoples in late antiquity. The illusion that there were can be outgrown.”

Walter Goffart

Source: Quotaes, Barbarian Tides (2010), p. x

“There was no Germanic world before the Carolingian age.”

Walter Goffart

Source: Quotaes, Barbarian Tides (2010), p. 55

“The myth of the Germans before Germany is hard to suppress because, owing to its great age and genesis in the sources themselves.”

Walter Goffart

Source: Quotaes, Barbarian Tides (2010), p. 51

“If Europe has had a supreme invented tradition, that of the Germans before Germany is it-so much so that most people who speak about it do not realize that they are dealing with fiction.”

Walter Goffart

Source: Quotaes, Barbarian Tides (2010), p. 43

“[M]any scholars of today in Europe and the United States still cherish the existence of a "Germanic world" long antedating medieval and modern Germany.”

Walter Goffart

Source: Quotaes, Barbarian Tides (2010), p. 40

“[The] theme-the "early Germans"-is still far from being repudiated.”

Walter Goffart

Source: Quotaes, Barbarian Tides (2010), p. 27

Walter Goffart Quotes

“Germanic collectivity exists in linguistics but never existed anywhere else... [A]n "early Germanic world"... had no existence anywhere until it took form in the minds of scholars in sixteenth-century Europe and was thoughtlessly espoused by everyone else.”

Walter Goffart

Source: Quotaes, Barbarian Tides (2010), p. 25

World

“The main goal of this book is to reform thinking and writing about the barbarians in late antiquity by driving out the anachronistic terms "German" and "Germanic" and the baggage that goes with them.”

Walter Goffart

Source: Quotaes, Barbarian Tides (2010), p. 6

Thinking , Books

“I would be content if "German" and its derivatives were banished from all but linguistic discourse on this subject.”

Walter Goffart

Source: Quotaes, Barbarian Tides (2010), p. 4

“My central concern in the present book is... to liberate barbarian history from the German nationalism that has suffused it ever since the sixteenth century and, in whatever disguises, continues to do so today.”

Walter Goffart

Source: Quotaes, Barbarian Tides (2010), p. ix

Books , History

“What we call the Fall of the Western Roman Empire was an imaginative experiment that got a little out of hand.”

Walter Goffart

Source: Quotaes, Barbarians and Romans, A.D. 418-584(1980), p. 35

Imagination

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