Strategies of Identification: Ethnicity and Religion in Early Medieval Europe ed. by Walter Pohl and Gerda Heydemann (review)

In Strategies of Identification, editors Walter Pohl and Gerda Heydemann have collated six articles on ethnicity as it relates to Christianity in early medieval Europe, alongside an Introduction detailing methodological strategies to deal with identification as outlined by Pohl himself. The Introduction and five of the papers are in English, with one paper in German.

Pohl recognises identification as a basic cognitive mechanism for sorting. Identification, as such, is shaped by similarities and differences between humans expressed through conceptual devices such as ethnicity, where individual identity (itself a collection of a variety of cultural personae) is linked to or subsumed within a variety of social groups. These social identities are paradoxical in the sense that they represent continuity on one hand, and continual adjustments on the other. The methodical question then becomes how to (re)construct relevant cultural models for ethnicities that are, in a sense, both fluid and set within contexts obfuscated by the passage of time. Pohl proposes that ethnicity depends on agency between the individual and the various social groups and that this agency, as discourse, can be studied: ethnicity is not a ‘given’; ethnicity must be studied in a broader context; ethnicity is a result of social practice; ethnic identities matter in different contexts. Nothing is really added here to the current consensus in this approach, but the methodological clarity that Pohl brings to the ‘slippery’ concept of ethnicity as identification is a rewarding read. The interaction between ethnicity, political power, and Christianity forms the theme for the rest of the volume.

The first chapter, in German, is Richard Corradini’s examination of Augustine’s use of the peregrinus or the pilgrim moving within the City of Man (as represented by Babylon, Jerusalem, and Rome) to define a ‘utopian’ form of ethnicity based on Christian values, rather than the common trope of identifying ethnicity through gens or tribe, and ultimately, in a Judaeo-Christian sense, as a Chosen People. In her contribution, Gerda Heydemann examines Cassiodorus’s attempt to (re)define the ambiguity within Christian interpretations of tribe or gens. Focusing on his Expositio psalmorum, Heydemann argues that Cassiodorus attempted to move current interpretations away from an equivalence between the identity of the ‘saved’ and a particular gens. While Augustine set aside gens and gentes in favour of a Christian populus, Cassiodorus made no distinction, proposing that Christianity was also a gens.

Using eighth-century Merovingian hagiographies, specifically Arbeo of Freising’s vitae of Emmeram of Regensberg and Corbidian of Freising, Maximilian Diesenberger explores the use of ethnic stereotypes in mapping out competing visions of the political (or ecclesiastical) order in Bavaria. Marianne Pollheimer then explores a series of ninth-century Carolingian sermons by Hrabanus Maurus, written for Haistulf, Archbishop of Mainz. Within these sermons, the Biblical concept of shepherd (pastores) and sheep (oves) is examined, as it developed in the Carolingian period. Ethnicity, however, does not appear to be fully integrated into the argument.

Helmut Reimitz follows with an analysis of the meanings behind de vobis sum and homo ignotus within a context of competing constructs of Frankish identity in the sixth and seventh centuries, specifically those of Gregory of Tours and the compilers of the Fredegar Chronicle. He proposes that these ‘cultural brokers’ mediated different forms of ethnicity to construct their competing visions: for Gregory, Christian identity was key to the integration of the Merovingian kingdoms, and, thus, he did not give the gens francorum a particularly prominent place in his histories; for the compilers, the gens francorum, as descendants of the Trojans, Romans, and Macedonians, were a superior offering among the Christian gentes, and, thus, an aspirational ethnic identity. Lastly, Clemens Gantner explores the changing ethnic perception of the East Romans as Greeks through the examination of papal letters in...