Auf der Suche nach den Ursprüngen

The question "where do we come from?" has been posed in all historical periods; the answer was also expected to give clues to the next question, "who are we?". Modern historical research has met the challenge of the quest for origins, and offered to uncover the remote roots of modern identites. The early middle ages have played a key role in legitimizing national claims and other identities. For medieval research, the consequences were ambivalent: on the one hand, beginning with the romantic period, it moved centre stage in gaining national attention; on the other hand, it became entangled with modern projections and ideologies, a weight that has not been completely shed yet. Only in recent decades has the descipline gradually liberated itself from such loads; often, however, at the expense of giving up any interest in research on national origins and early histories altogether. This volume collects a series of new approaches and thus gives a unique overview of up-to-date ways to deal with early-medieval origins and identites and their significance from the middle ages to our day. It contains contributions from many of the most distinguished representants of the field and from a few younger scholars from Vienna. It discusses, among others, the problem of ethnic interpretation of archaeological and onomastic data (Bierbrauer, Jarnut), the methodological implications of the terms `identity` (Pohl) and `Germans` (Jarnut), the emotional side of identity formation (Rosenwein), the role of women in origin myths (Geary), Burgundian, Frankish, Saxon, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, Norman and Slavic perceptions of origin and their impact in the later middle ages (Wood, Reimitz, Corradini, Scharer, Sawyer, Plassmann, Mayr-Harting, Lübke, Steinacher), the origins of the medieval Empire and its significance for identities (Schieffer, Schneidmüller), the relationship between Christian and ethnic identities (Scheibelreiter, Diesenberger, Ehlers, Niederkorn, Scharer, Mayr-Harting) and the traces of processes of identity formation in the transmission of manuscripts, a topic for which the `Viennese school` of early medieval research has recently become renowned (Diesenberger, Reimitz, Corradini). Herwig Wolfram touches all these aspects in his introduction and sums up his own decade-long research in the field.