ABSTRACT
No scholar has been more identified with the debate over ethnogenesis than Herwig Wolfram, the recently retired professor of medieval history in the University of Vienna. The material presented here is the “Introduction” to Wolfram’s History of the Goths which appeared in English translation in 1987 after having been published in German in 1979, a date which marks the beginning of the current discussion of ethnogenesis as well as the revival of interest in the work of Reinhard Wenskus (whose Stammesbildung appeared in a second edition in 1977). Although Wolfram is best known for his work on the Goths, he has applied his ideas and methodology much more broadly in his The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples, originally published in German in 1990 and then in English in 1997. Wolfram delves deeper into ethnographic traditions than Geary does, and concentrates on the longer-term past of the problems surrounding ethnic identity and identification. He also explains what he means by the term ethnogenesis, as well as where and how he thinks the term can be used. Finally, Wolfram alerts his readers to some of the connections between Europe’s remote past and complicated present.
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