Names, Ethnic Identity, and Community in Fifth- and Sixth-Century Burgundy

"Names, Ethnic Identity, and Community in Fifth- and Sixth-Century Burgundy." Despite much recent work emphasizing the political construction and volatility of ethnic identity at the end of the Roman Empire, some scholars continue to see polarized communities of barbarian soldiers and Roman senators in the kingdom of Burgundy (443-534). In Burgundy the division of personal names between the counts (almost all Germanic) and the bishops (almost all Greco-Latin) might seem to support a theory of ethnic division. Nevertheless, individual aristocratic men and women behaved in consistently similar ways, founding churches, debating theology, serving in the royal government, corresponding, and leaving metrical Latin epitaphs. The division of names does stem from descent: the military counts from barbarian mercenaries, the bishops from senatorial families. But none of these people defined themselves as "Roman" or "Burgundian," and their provincial late antique world contained nothing resembling traditional ideas of Germanic culture. The mentalities of the lower classes remain more elusive, but scraps of evidence show that some of them served in the regional government of the Burgundian kings, and suggest that in rural areas their identities were defined by locality, not ethnicity.