Michael Kulikowski | |
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Born | September 3, 1970 |
Nationality | American |
Academic background | |
Education | |
Doctoral advisor | |
Influences | Walter Goffart |
Academic work | |
Discipline |
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School or tradition | Toronto School |
Institutions | |
Main interests | Late Antiquity |
Michael Kulikowski (born September 3,1970) is an American historian. He is a professor of history and classics and the head of the history department at Pennsylvania State University. Kulikowski specializes in the history of the western Mediterranean world of late antiquity. He is sometimes associated with the Toronto School of History and was a student of Walter Goffart.
Kulikowski is a son of English-born computer engineer Casimir Alexander Kulikowski,and a grandson of the Polish-born inventor Victor Kulikowski. At an early age,he aspired to be a French Floutist. Then,he took his interest in World History in another direction,in another country - first Canada,then the USA. [1] [2] He received his BA (1991) from Rutgers University,and his MA (1992) and PhD (1998) from the University of Toronto. He also gained a Licentiate of Mediaeval Studies (canon law) from the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in 1995. [3] At the University of Toronto,Kulikowski was a student of Walter Goffart. [4] Among his fellow students of Goffart were Andrew Gillett. [5] After gaining his PhD,which was completed not with Walter Goffart,but with T. D. Barnes, [6] Kulikowski taught at Washington and Lee University,Smith College,and the University of Tennessee. Since 2009,Kulikowski has been Professor of History and Classics and Head of the History Department at Pennsylvania State University.
Kulikowski's first book,Late Roman Spain and Its Cities,was published in 2004. He next work,Rome's Gothic Wars,was published in 2006,and is an introductory textbook on the relations between Goths and the Roman Empire in the 3rd and 4th centuries AD. [7] In his review,Bryan Ward-Perkins described it as a "sensible,clear and uncontroversial introduction to the subject,which deserves to be included on any student reading-list" (alongside Peter Heather's "different take on the same events") which "does indeed introduce the reader to the problems of evidence,and,above all,to the essence of modern debate". [8]
Kulikowski is the author of numerous articles,which range from the dependability of the Notitia Dignitatum [9] as a historical source or ethnic self-identifications [10] to examination of the careers of various late Roman individuals and the problem of the Germanic as a historical category in late antiquity. [11] He is the editor of the forthcoming Landmark Ammianus Marcellinus.
Certainly, in time, after being told repeatedly that they were in fact Goths... was [there] no question in anyone's mind that they were indeed Goths.
Kulikowski is sometimes seen as a member of the so-called Toronto School of History, which is associated with his former professor Walter Goffart. [7] Kulikowski advocates purging scholarly discourse from discussion of Germanic peoples, and replacing the term "Germanic" with "barbarian". [13] [14]
In Rome's Gothic Wars (2006), Kulikowski denies that the history of the Goths can be reliably traced earlier than the 3rd century AD. [4] He considers all archaeological, linguistic and literary evidence used to propose such earlier histories of the Goths to be completely dependent upon the 6th-century Getica by Jordanes, and therefore of little value. [15] [16]
According to Kulikowski, the Goths were mostly of non-Gothic descent, being a population formed from a "large number of [non-Gothic] indigenes and a small number of [Gothic] migrants under the pressure of Roman imperialism, and in the shadow of the Empire". [17] While this is a fairly common view among modern scholars, he has gone so far as to state that the Roman categorization of this large multicultural group would have influenced it to see itself as one people, named after the most important group within it, the Goths. Critics such as Ward-Perkins find this description exaggerated, because it implies the Romans manipulated the ethnic identity of their neighbours, which he believes to be impossible. [4]
Kulikowski believes that the history of the Goths and other "barbarians" should be "understood entirely as a response to Roman imperialism". [3] He labels previous works on the Goths by Peter Heather, Herwig Wolfram, and Volker Bierbrauer as "extreme", "neo-romantic", "bizarre" and "outlandish", and believes they "lack theoretical rigour". [18] [19] [20] Kulikowski also disagrees with Heather in the assumption that the Huns caused the fall of the Western Roman Empire, describing this idea as "simple, elegant and wrong". [21]
Like Goffart, Kulikowski has been critical of the popular ethnogenesis theory associated the Vienna School of History, and in the English-speaking world with Patrick Geary, and to some extent Peter Heather, which proposes that a Gothic ethnicity formed several times around noble families who carried a single Gothic tradition. He considers it "a way to bring long-distance migration from the Germanic north in by the back door". [14] [22] On the other hand, he has written that the Viennese theory "has undoubtedly killed off essentialist views of barbarian tribal identity, an excellent result". [23] Kulikowski charges that old German nationalist and even Nazi influences continue to influence scholarship on the Goths up to the present day, particularly through the theories of Gustav Kossinna. [24] He considers much of what is written about Goths to be "Germanist fantasy" derived from this legacy. [22] [25] He writes that Heather in particular "comes perilously close to recreating the old, volkisch notion of an inherent "Germanic" belief in freedom." [26]
Alaric I was the first king of the Visigoths, from 395 to 410. He rose to leadership of the Goths who came to occupy Moesia—territory acquired a couple of decades earlier by a combined force of Goths and Alans after the Battle of Adrianople.
The Goths were Germanic people who played a major role in the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the emergence of medieval Europe.
Jordanes, also written as Jordanis or Jornandes, was a 6th-century Eastern Roman bureaucrat, widely believed to be of Gothic descent, who became a historian later in life.
The Ostrogoths were a Roman-era Germanic people. In the 5th century, they followed the Visigoths in creating one of the two great Gothic kingdoms within the Western Roman Empire, drawing upon the large Gothic populations who had settled in the Balkans in the 4th century. While the Visigoths had formed under the leadership of Alaric I, the new Ostrogothic political entity which came to rule Italy was formed in the Balkans under Theodoric the Great.
The Visigoths were a Germanic people united under the rule of a king and living within the Roman Empire during late antiquity. The Visigoths first appeared in the Balkans, as a Roman-allied barbarian military group united under the command of Alaric I. Their exact origins are believed to have been diverse but they probably included many descendants of the Thervingi who had moved into the Roman Empire beginning in 376 and had played a major role in defeating the Romans at the Battle of Adrianople in 378. Relations between the Romans and Alaric's Visigoths varied, with the two groups making treaties when convenient, and warring with one another when not. Under Alaric, the Visigoths invaded Italy and sacked Rome in August 410.
The Heruli were one of the smaller Germanic peoples of Late Antiquity, known from records in the third to sixth centuries AD. The best recorded group of Heruli established a kingdom north of the Middle Danube, probably near present-day Vienna. It was a neighbour to several more small and short-lived kingdoms in the late 5th century AD and early 6th century, including those of the Scirii, Rugii and Gepids. After the conquest of this kingdom by the Lombards in 508, these Heruli split up and splinter groups moved to Sweden, Ostrogothic Italy, and present-day Serbia, which was under Eastern Roman control.
The Migration Period, also known as the Barbarian Invasions, was a period in European history marked by large-scale migrations that saw the fall of the Western Roman Empire and subsequent settlement of its former territories by various tribes, and the establishment of the post-Roman kingdoms.
The Sciri, or Scirians, were a Germanic people. They are believed to have spoken an East Germanic language. Their name probably means "the pure ones".
The Chernyakhov culture, Cherniakhiv culture or Sântana de Mureș—Chernyakhov culture was an archaeological culture that flourished between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE in a wide area of Eastern Europe, specifically in what is now Ukraine, Romania, Moldova and parts of Belarus. The culture is thought to be the result of a multiethnic cultural mix of the Geto-Dacian, Sarmatian, and Gothic populations of the area. "In the past, the association of this [Chernyakhov] culture with the Goths was highly contentious, but important methodological advances have made it irresistible."
Oium was a name for Scythia, or a fertile part of it, roughly in modern Ukraine, where the Goths, under a legendary King Filimer, settled after leaving Gothiscandza, according to the Getica by Jordanes, written around 551.
The sack of Rome on 24 August 410 AD was undertaken by the Visigoths led by their king, Alaric. At that time, Rome was no longer the administrative capital of the Western Roman Empire, having been replaced in that position first by Mediolanum in 286 and then by Ravenna in 402. Nevertheless, the city of Rome retained a paramount position as "the eternal city" and a spiritual center of the Empire. This was the first time in almost 800 years that Rome had fallen to a foreign enemy, and the sack was a major shock to contemporaries, friends and foes of the Empire alike.
Peter John Heather is a British historian of late antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Heather is Chair of the Medieval History Department and Professor of Medieval History at King's College London. He specialises in the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Goths, on which he for decades has been considered the world's leading authority.
Walter Pohl is an Austrian historian who is Professor of Auxiliary Sciences of History and Medieval History at the University of Vienna. He is a leading member of the Vienna School of History.
Walter Andre Goffart is a German-born American historian who specializes in Late Antiquity and the European Middle Ages. He taught for many years in the history department and Centre for Medieval Studies of the University of Toronto (1960–1999), and is currently a senior research scholar at Yale University. He is the author of monographs on a ninth-century forgery, late Roman taxation, four "barbarian" historians, and historical atlases.
The Goths, Gepids, Vandals, and Burgundians were East Germanic groups who appear in Roman records in late antiquity. At times these groups warred against or allied with the Roman Empire, the Huns, and various Germanic tribes.
Odotheus was a Greuthungi king who in 386 led an incursion into the Roman Empire. He was defeated and killed by the Roman general Promotus. His surviving people settled in Phrygia.
Herwig Wolfram is an Austrian historian who is Professor Emeritus of Medieval History and Auxiliary Sciences of History at the University of Vienna and the former Director of the Institute of Austrian Historical Research. He is a leading member of the Vienna School of History, and internationally known for his authoritative works on the history of Austria, the Goths, and relationships between the Germanic peoples and the Roman Empire.
The barbarian kingdoms were states founded by various non-Roman, primarily Germanic, peoples in Western Europe and North Africa following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century. The barbarian kingdoms were the principal governments in Western Europe in the Early Middle Ages. The time of the barbarian kingdoms is considered to have come to an end with Charlemagne's coronation as emperor in 800, though a handful of small Anglo-Saxon kingdoms persisted until being unified by Alfred the Great in 886.
The Vienna School of History is an influential school of historical thinking based at the University of Vienna. It is closely associated with Reinhard Wenskus, Herwig Wolfram and Walter Pohl. Partly drawing upon ideas from sociology and critical theory, scholars of the Vienna School have utilized the concept of ethnogenesis to reassess the notion of ethnicity as it applies to historical groups of peoples such as the Germanic tribes. Focusing on Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, the Vienna School has a large publishing output, and has had a major influence on the modern analysis of barbarian identity.
Concerning the origin of the Goths before the 3rd century, there is no consensus among scholars. It was in the 3rd century that the Goths began to be described by Roman writers as an increasingly important people north of the lower Danube and Black Sea, in the area of modern Romania, Republic of Moldova, and Ukraine. They replaced other peoples who had been dominant in the region, such as especially the Carpi. However, while some scholars, such as Michael Kulikowski, believe there is insufficient evidence to come to strong conclusions about their earlier origins, the most commonly accepted proposal is that the Goths known to the Romans were a people whose traditions derived to some extent from the Gutones who lived near the delta of the Vistula in what is now Poland. More speculatively, the Gutones may have been culturally related to the similarly named Gutes of Gotland and the Geats of southern Scandinavia.