Лучшие книги Вальтера Гоффарта

In this substantial work Walter Goffart treats the four writers who provide the principal narrative sources for our early knowledge of the Ostrogoths, Franks, Anglo-Saxons, and Lombards: Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon. The University of Notre Dame Press is pleased to make this book available for the first time in paperback.

“The title Narrators of Barbarian History speaks to a modern audience in the terms with which it is familiar, but it should not be understood to mean that the authors in question wrote a type of history sharply contrasting in subject to that practiced in earlier centuries. That Jordanes and his peers were concerned with Goths and other ‘barbarians,’ though not an incidental detail, is not the main reason for studying them. The Constantinopolitan perspective of Jordanes overshadows his Gothic theme. Gregory of Tours was primarily concerned with current events rather than with the Franks, and he was intent on portraying the depravity of all men rather than of a subgroup among them. Bede was Northumbrian rather than English and cared more about the Christian face of his compatriots than about their ethnic peculiarities. Paul waited so long to write about his fellow Lombards, applying his pen to other subjects, that he left their history unfinished. Our four authors are less compelling for occasionally addressing themselves to the peoples whom we call Germanic barbarians than they are for being the leading practitioners of narrative history in Latin within the two hundred fifty years that separate Justinian, for whom Jordanes may have worked, from Charlemagne, at whose court Paul the Deacon briefly sojourned.” — from the original introduction

The episcopal biographies, saints' lives, charters, and poems knowncollectively as the "Le Mans forgeries" are an intricate puzzle that has occupied critics of medieval sources ever since the seventeenth century without yielding a generally acceptable solution. The persistent mystery has lain in the fact that, though the contents are obviously tendentious, the date of composition has seemed to be virtually contemporary with the events described.

By solving the mystery of the date of composition, Walter Goffart unmasks the full extent of the forger's deception and goes on to present the forgeries in their true guise--as the effort of a cathedral cleric, in the reign of Charles the Bald (840-877), to rewrite the law of church property in such a way as to vindicate for the bishopric of Le Mans the ownership of all church lands in the diocese.

On the basis of extensive manuscript study, Goffart delves deeply intoall textual problems raised by the forgeries and related writings. He disentangles the order of composition and authoritatively pronounces on the authenticity of the eighty-four Le Mans charters. Most of all, he insists that the forgeries are an essay on church property and its law and indicates their importance for the study of Carolingian and ecclesiastical institutions.