|
|
|
|
The Forest People |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Henry A. Myers |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 4/1/1989 |
| Size: 3,149 Words, 19,021 Characters |
|
HISTORY OF THE GOTHS
Herwig Wolfram
Berkley: University of California Press, 1988
622 pp., $39.95
American students can slip through many a Western civilization course without becoming aware that Gothic art and architecture, which they encounter in the form of color plates inserted into their textbooks, have absolutely nothing to do with the Goths, who appeared several chapters earlier in the account of the decline of the Roman Empire.
But if the Goths get no credit for medieval Gothic cathedrals, let alone Gothic novels and Gothic script, why are these called "Gothic"? What mark did the real Goths make on history? Or did they just destroy Rome and let it go at that?
Herwing Wolfram's book makes the Goths into human beings with a very colorful history. The Goths, whose civilization developed rapidly from relatively primitive origins, were constantly forced to work with, through, or against, the omnipresent superpower of Rome. Overall, they remind the reader of agile and alert Third Worlders forced up against a modern industrial power whose leaders do not quite know what to make of them or how to cope with them.
Wolfram is ideally suited for this task. Having taught paleography and the study of medieval documents for several decades at the University of Vienna before assuming directorship of the Austrian Institute for Historical Research, he has combined throughout his career a meticulous attention to detail with a talent for constructing a meaningful, living whole out of scattered fragments. Some twenty years ago he published a two-volume study on the intituatio, the changing, formal phrasing with which kings and lords of the Middle Ages introduced themselves with self-given Latin designations of rank and dignity. That much makes it sound deadly, but it is a highly readable work that analyzes what images of themselves medieval potentates w...
Read Full Article
...lationships in which relative newcomers to their culture would be accepted as equals.
The absence of successful, mutually supportive relationships contributed greatly both to he fall of the empire in the West and the elimination of the Goths as a people. In the moonlight, the ghostly spires of Gothic cathedrals can serve as reminders of the global consequences of this lost opportunity.
(1,938 of 19,021 characters)
|
|
|
Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
|
The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
