In a 1998 roundtable discussion, historian Ian Wood pithily said that there were more than two ethnic groups in Early Medieval Gaul, responding to a comment by fellow scholar Giorgio Ausenda. Much discussion surrounds Franks and Romans, but the ethnic landscape was indeed much broader, and extreme fluidity was the norm: strategies of identification prevailed over any biological sense of ethnicity. Samuel Rowe takes a historical, historiographical and analytical look at how ethnic identities coexisted and evolved in the 6th century.
Samuel Rowe is a Medieval History MPhil student at the University of Cambridge, writing a dissertation on the Romanness of Merovingian kings. His main research interests are on the history of representations of identity, especially ethnic identity, but also other types such as gender or racial identities, mostly in the early medieval world. Follow Samuel on Twitter (now “X”) @SamuelRowe12.
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