Books by Walter Goffart

Barbarian Tides radically subverts the grand narrative of a "Germanic" migration and reinvents the role of barbarians in the Later Roman Empire. Goffart sets out how the fragmented foreign peoples once living on the edges of the Empire participated with the Romans in the larger stirrings of late antiquity.

Focuses on two types of historiography: early medieval narratives, with special attention to Bede's "Historia Ecclesiastica"; and printed maps designed to portray and teach history, with special attention to the ubiquitous 'map of the barbarian invasions'.

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.