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The Germanic peoples were historical groups of people that once occupied Northwestern and Central Europe and Scandinavia during antiquity and into the early Middle Ages. Since the 19th century,they have traditionally been defined by the use of ancient and early medieval Germanic languages and are thus equated at least approximately with Germanic-speaking peoples,although different academic disciplines have their own definitions of what makes someone or something "Germanic". The Romans named the area belonging to North-Central Europe in which Germanic peoples lived Germania,stretching east to west between the Vistula and Rhine rivers and north to south from southern Scandinavia to the upper Danube. In discussions of the Roman period,the Germanic peoples are sometimes referred to as Germani or ancient Germans,although many scholars consider the second term problematic since it suggests identity with present-day Germans. The very concept of "Germanic peoples" has become the subject of controversy among contemporary scholars. Some scholars call for its total abandonment as a modern construct since lumping "Germanic peoples" together implies a common group identity for which there is little evidence. Other scholars have defended the term's continued use and argue that a common Germanic language allows one to speak of "Germanic peoples",regardless of whether these ancient and medieval peoples saw themselves as having a common identity. While several historians and archaeologists continue to use the term "Germanic peoples" to refer to historical people groups from the 1st to 4th centuries CE,the term is no longer used by most historians and archaeologists for the period around the Fall of the Roman Empire and the Early Middle Ages.
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References
- ↑ "Shami Ghosh". University of Toronto . Retrieved September 11, 2020.
- ↑ "Curicculum Vitae". University of Toronto . Retrieved September 11, 2020.
- ↑ Cronan 2017 , pp. 825–826. "A central component of his argument throughout the book is the denial of anything that approaches a common Germanic culture or identity... Ghosh repeatedly downplays the significance of the Germanic languages... He views language as merely the means through which oral narratives circulated from one people to another... To this reader, at least, it seems that he concedes much of what constituted what some of us would call a common Germanic culture."
- 1 2 Neidorf 2018 , pp. 275–276. "The works studied in his monograph relate historical matter pertaining to peoples who spoke Germanic languages, and these works have traditionally been valued for their preservation of Germanic lore and legend, but Ghosh prefers to characterize the past represented in them as 'barbarian' rather than 'Germanic.'... Since these works are preserved in Germanic vernaculars, Ghosh entertains no doubts about their content deriving from Germanic oral traditions. Yet the anti-Germanic thread of his book is continued... [T]he fact that medieval Germanic peoples told stories about other, distant Germanic peoples does not, according to Ghosh, reflect identification with those peoples or any perception of ethnic similarity. It is solely a matter of linguistic convenience... Ghosh’s anti-Germanic arguments are often plausible... It is doubtful, however, whether his arguments will have much of an impact... One must wonder whether any adjectives used to describe cultural phenomena in medieval studies (e.g., Celtic, Romance, Byzantine, Carolingian) could withstand the kind of scrutiny that Ghosh has applied to the term 'Germanic.' The term will doubtless continue to be used because it is useful... If 'Germanic' is to be abandoned because Germanic tradition contains non-Germanic elements, then all of the other ethno-linguistic adjectives employed in medieval studies must surely be scrapped as well.... Despite Ghosh’s claims to the contrary, the negative fixation on the term 'Germanic' among medieval historians such as himself still appears to be 'a matter of the ideological baggage it carries'... Although Ghosh’s predilection for anti-Germanic readings occasionally entangles him in improbabilities, Writing the Barbarian Past remains an excellent introduction to the principal early medieval sources for Germanic legend..."