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The question where do we come from? has been posed in all historical periods; modern historical research has met the challenge of this quest for origins and the remote roots of modern identities. The early Middle Ages played a key role in legitimizing national and other identities, and thus become entangled with modern projections and ideologies. Only in recent decades has the discipline gradually liberated itself from such burdens. This volume collects a series of new approaches and thus gives a unique overview of the contemporary treatment of early-medieval origins and identities and their significance from the Middle Ages to the present day.nIt discusses, inter alia, the problem of ethnic interpretation of archaeological and onomastic data (Bierbrauer, Haubrichs), 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 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.
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