In this substantial work Walter Goffart treats the four writers who provide the principal narrative sources for our early knowledge of the Ostrogoths, Franks, Anglo-Saxons, and Lombards: Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon. The University of Notre Dame Press is pleased to make this book available for the first time in paperback. Winner of the Medieval Academy of America's Haskins Medal for 1991, The Narrators of Barbarian History treats the four writers who are the main early sources for our knowledge of the Ostrogoths, Franks, Anglo-Saxons, and Lombards. In his preface to this paperback edition, Goffart examines the questions his work has evoked since its original publication in 1988 and enlarges the bibliography to account for recent scholarship.
Walter Goffart is professor of history emeritus at the University of Toronto.
Title: Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550800), The: Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon (Publications in Medieval Studies)
Author: Walter Goffart
ISBN: 9780268029678
Binding:
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Publication Date: 2005-11-11
Number of Pages: 536
Weight: 0.7260 kg
A work of considerable importance. [Goffart's] insistence that these Dark Age historians were literary figures, who had specific goals in mind, and moulded their narratives to suit their ends, is crucial. So too is the notion that the works by these historians, and not the information they contain, are our real incontrovertible 'facts.' . . . His thesis ought radically to transform our approach to the early middle ages. -- Canadian Journal of History