Belief and Religion in Barbarian Europe c. 350-700

269 Pages·2013·2.44 MB·English

by  Marilyn Dunn

Belief and Religion in Barbarian Europe c. 350–700
Belief and Religion in Barbarian
Europe c. 350–700
Marilyn Dunn

Contents
Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
2 Intuitions of Divinity
3 Constructing ‘Arianism’
4 Approaching the Macrocosm
5 Bringing God to Mind
6 Rest In Peace
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Abbreviations
AASS Acta Sanctorum AHR American Historical Review
Annales ESC Annales, Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations
GC Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Confessors
GM Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Martyrs
DLH Gregory of Tours, Decem Libri Historiarum
(‘History of the Franks’) HL Paul the Deacon,
History of the Lombards MGH Monumenta
Germaniae Historica VP Gregory of Tours, Life
of the Fathers ZKG Zeitschrift für
Kirchengeschichte
Acknowledgements
First of all, I would like to thank Ben Hayes, formerly of Continuum Publishing,
who provided unfailing support when I was writing my previous book, The
Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons and who commissioned this volume. I am
also grateful to Claire Lipscomb and Michael Greenwood for their help in its
early stages and to Ian Buck, Charlotte Loveridge and Dhara Patel for seeing it
through to production.
I want to take this occasion to express my warmest thanks to Tony Goodman
and Brenda Bolton for their encouragement and support throughout. I am also
deeply grateful to Judith George, who read the whole manuscript and made sage
suggestions for its improvement.
The work for this volume took place in the national libraries of France, Italy,
Spain and Portugal and in regional libraries and museums in all these countries.
Further research and writing was mainly carried out in two great libraries:
Glasgow University Library and the National Library of Scotland. I am greatly
indebted to the staff of both. In particular, I want to thank the DDS department
of the former, whose labours extend the vast range of materials available in GUL
even further; and most of all the Reading Room staff of the latter who have
looked after me so very well over the years. Thanks too to Rachel Douglas and
Nikki Macdonald for their supportive intellectual companionship at Table B of
the NLS Reading Room.
I dedicate this book to Michael Baron, without whom it would not have been
completed.
MD
1
Introduction
From the late fourth century onwards, Germanic peoples entered the Roman
Empire in large numbers. The first to do so were groups of Tervingi and
Greuthungi, who were permitted to cross the Danube in 376, followed by further
groups of Greuthungi in 386 and 405/6. All were fleeing Hunnic attack and
hoped to find greater security inside the imperial frontiers.1 In December 405, a
‘huge body’ of peoples from the interior of Germania crossed the Rhine: Sueves,
Vandals and Alans.2 The Sueves moved south, settling ultimately in north-
western Iberia, while the Alans and Vandals who reached Iberia about the same
time would cross over into Africa in the 420s. Beyond the Rhine, the Burgundes
were also subject to Hunnic pressure: victorious against a Hunnic army in 429,
they were then defeated by the Roman general Aëtius and his Hunnic allies in
the 430s and were resettled within imperial frontiers.3 Salian Franks, who
unsuccessfully helped defend the Empire against some of these incursions would
themselves move within its frontiers where a Frankish state would begin to
emerge in north-eastern Gaul later in the fifth century.4 In the 450s, Gothic
groups escaping Hunnic hegemony entered imperial territories: first the Balkans
and then Italy. And in the late 560s, not long after the Gothic state created in
Italy in the 490s had been destroyed by the armies of the East Roman Empire,
the Lombards began to move into Italy.
This book is concerned with belief and religion among the ‘barbarians’ who
settled and created states in Western Europe: Tervingi and Greuthungi, who
eventually became the Visigoths of southern Gaul and Spain; Sueves,
Burgundians and Franks; the Balkan groups who became Italian Ostrogoths; and
the Lombards. Who the ‘barbarians’ were, where they originally came from and
the manner in which they settled in Western Europe has been much discussed.5
Historians have increasingly focused in recent years on questions of ethnicity.
This is no longer regarded as a simple matter of belonging to a particular descent
group.6 We are now told – rather as we are told of gender – that ethnicity is
multi-layered, performative, situational and dynamic.7 The process by which
Visigoths and Ostrogoths emerged in the fifth century is complex, controversial
and still unclear: Peter Heather writes of the emergence of these Gothic
‘supergroups’ as a result of military activity; ‘proper’ migration; the adhesion at
different times of minorities of Huns, Alans and Taifali (recruits were not
refused); social status, both claimed and recognized; and ‘the overriding press of
circumstance’.8 Such observations are confirmed by the discovery of individuals
in Germanic cemeteries with dental traits characteristic of Hunnic populations:
in one Burgundian cemetery excavated in the 1970s, one-third of the skeletons
exhibited such enamel formations. This seems to indicate a mixture of Hunnic
and Burgundian populations before the Burgundes were settled in the Empire.9 If
this is the case, it seems that the written sources afford only very limited
indications of the way major population groups were formed (or dissolved) in
this period.
In these debates over the issues of ethnogenesis, ethnicity, identity and state
formation in ‘barbarian’ Europe we can find some discussion of aspects of
religious history of the ‘barbarians’ and their conversion to Christianity; and
religion is examined in a number of recent volumes devoted to the study of
individual peoples.10 Scholars have also produced a few brief studies of
conversion; and we are still indebted to older classic works such as that of E. A.
Thompson on the Goths in the time of Ulfila, which examines both the pre-
Christian religion and the conversion of this people.11 The conversion of the
Germanic peoples has also featured in several major books in English covering
the religious history of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Richard
Fletcher and Peter Brown have treated it as part of their broader canvases – the
conversion of Europe up to the fourteenth century and the ‘triumph and
diversity’ of the ‘rise of western Christendom’.12 Non-Christian Germanic