ABSTRACT
The following pages constitute the “Introduction” to Patrick Geary’s most recent book, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe. Geary is professor of history at UCLA. Here the reader has a chance to see how recent events in European history have had an impact on how both academics and the public have understood Europe’s remote past. One key point is that each generation makes its own understanding of past realities. Another important issue is that the past is not a tidy truth awaiting its discovery by a patient and objective observer. Things happened in the past. That is certain. But past events gain meaning when we moderns interpret and explain them. People living in Europe have all sorts of reasons to construct the past in particular ways. Geary helpfully reflects on the very recent past in this selection. The rest of his book ranges widely over the period from the late eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century to show how different people, in different times and places, have attempted to understand the barbarian peoples, their roles in the transformation of the Roman world, and their alleged roles in the making of the nations of Europe.
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