Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of Ethnic Communities, 300-800

Between the 4th and 8th century, a number of experimental politics had to create new forms of legitimacy and organization to overcome a Roman world based on empire, city and tribe. In the course of time, a new world developed that relied on Christendom, kingdom and people to pull a variety of local communities together. This volume discusses the process of construction of ethnic identities. What did names, law, language, costume, burial rites, rhetoric, culture, royal representation or ideology mean, and to whom? This question is common to the papers collected in the book. They span several centuries and a geographic area from the Iberian peninsula to the Black Sea steppes, and all deal with the ways in which ethnic distinction became a political factor in the post-Roman world.