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Geoffrey Koziol, Helmut Reimitz. History, Frankish Identity and the Framing of Western Ethnicity, 550–850., The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 5, December 2017, Pages 1558–1561, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1558
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The title of this dense, difficult, but immensely rewarding book is at once perfectly accurate and a little misleading; the terms are simply too abstract to convey the variegated richness with which the author develops them. Begin with “Frankish Identity”: in fact, in Helmut Reimitz’s view there never was a “Frankish identity.” Instead, a number of complementary and competing Frankish identities developed over time and existed at the same time, while in at least two important cases “Frankishness” was purposely rejected as a useful category of belonging. Second, “History” has to be taken in all its meanings. The book is therefore a history of these various Frankish identities between the sixth and the early ninth centuries. It is also an investigation into the writing of history during these centuries and the ways such histories treated Frankish identity. At the same time, the book offers a broad examination of how contemporaries regarded history in general and the history of the Franks in particular. As to “Western Ethnicity,” Reimitz is focusing on a tendency in early medieval Europe to think of the world as naturally divided into “peoples” (gentes). For example, in his collection of canons, Regino of Prüm asserted that the world was naturally composed of “various nations of peoples differing among themselves in descent, customs, languages, and laws” (Libri duo, 22). Reimitz points out how curious it is that such ethnic diversity should have become accepted as so normal that, again according to Regino, even the universal Catholic Church had to work with it. Reimitz’s purpose is to discover how this happened. Finally, the book’s title does not even hint at one of the book’s most important, if inexplicit, concerns: during these formative centuries of European history when ethnic diversity became a given, how was “community” imagined?
