Walter Goffart


Walter André Goffart, is an American historian of the later Roman Empire and the early Middle Ages who specializes in research on the barbarian kingdoms of those periods. He taught for many years in the History Department and Centre for Medieval Studies of the University of Toronto, and is currently a senior research scholar at Yale University.

Biography

Walter Andre Goffart was born in Berlin on February 22, 1934, the son of Francis-Leo and Andree Goffart. His father was a Belgian diplomat of Walloon descent, while his mother, born in Cairo, was of French and Romanian descent.
Goffart spent his early years in Belgrade, where his father worked. In 1941, upon the German invasion of Yugoslavia, Goffart and his mother evacuated on the Orient Express. Passing through Turkey, Beirut, Jerusalem and Cairo, they eventually reached New York City, and then Montreal. He became an American citizen in 1959. Several writers have suggested that Goffart's dramatic childhood might have impacted his interpretation of history.
Goffart received his A.B., A.M., and PhD from Harvard University. From 1957 to 1958 he attended the École normale supérieure.
Goffart became a lecturer at the University of Toronto in 1960. He was made an assistant professor in 1963. In 1965-1966 he was a visiting assistant professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. He was made an associate professor at the University of Toronto in 1966. In 1967-1968 he was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies. Goffart was an academic secretary of the Centre for Medieval Studies in 1969-1971. He was made a full professor of history at the University of Toronto in 1971. In 1971-1972 he was the acting director of the Centre for Medieval Studies. Goffart was again an academic secretary of the Centre for Medieval Studies in 1972-1973. In 1973-1974 Goffart was a visiting fellow at the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies. In 1986-1988, Goffart was coordinator of graduate studies in department of history at the University of Toronto. Goffart retired from the University of Toronto as a professor emeritus in 1999. Since 2000, Goffart has been a senior research scholar and lecturer in history at Yale University. In 2001 he had a study center residency at the Rockefeller Foundation.
Goffart is a member of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, the American Historical Association, the Haskins Society, and the Medieval Academy of America, of which he was a councilor in 1977-78, and became a fellow in 1982.
Goffart was a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies fellow in 1973-74, a Guggenheim fellow in 1979-80, a Connaught research fellow in the humanities at the University of Toronto in 1983-84, and the recipient of a standard research grant at the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada in 1990-92. In 1991 he received the Haskins Medal of the Medieval Academy of America, for his book, The Narrators of Barbarian History .
Alexander C. Murray edited a Festschrift for Goffart called After Rome's Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History.

Theories

Goffart specializes in the fiscal and administrative history of the Roman Empire, and the examination of medieval authors and texts. He is especially well known as a primary exponent of a revisionist approach to the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, which suggests that the Western Roman Empire did not collapse as such, but merely absorbed invading "barbarians" in a relatively peaceful transition. In this approach, Goffart is heavily influenced by nineteenth century theories, particularly those of Henri Pirenne.
The circle of scholars associated with Goffart is often referred to as the Toronto School of History. They are opposed to the Vienna School of History, which posits that Germanic peoples were multi-ethnic coalitions led by warrior elites carrying on a core-tradition. According to Wolf Liebeschuetz, Goffart's school denies that the Germanic peoples had any core tradition neither as a whole nor as individual tribes, and contend that Germanic culture, if it ever existed at all, was entirely derived from the Roman Empire. Goffart has argued that the theories of the Vienna School are indebted to Nazi views of the past. He criticizes the field of Germanic philology for failing to thoroughly reconsider the theoretical basis and assumptions underpinning it in order to excise earlier racialist or nationalist assumptions ; he sees the faults in these theoretical underpinnings as the origin of the notion of pre-Carolingian "Germanic peoples", which he considers to be bogus. According to Goffart, this Germanic concept cannot become valid simply by purging it of Nazi influences, it has to be completely discarded. For this reason, followers of Goffart such as Michael Kulikowski generally use the term "barbarian" rather than "Germanic".
Goffart's theories have found academic support in the European Science Foundation project Transformation of the Roman World Project, which is alleged by opponents to be strongly ideologically influenced by the multicultural and relativist values ascribed to the European Union. More recently, Goffart's theories have been scrutinized by a younger generation of historians associated with the University of Oxford, such as Peter Heather and Bryan Ward-Perkins. Heather has described Goffart's theories as "deeply mistaken", while Ward-Perkins charges Goffart with waging a campaign to "play down the role of the Germanic peoples in European history".
In his most recent work, Barbarian Tides, Goffart contends that Germanic peoples, early Germanic culture, early Germanic law, Germanic art and the notion of a Migration Period, are pseudoscientific inventions of German nationalist scholars. He believes that the Germanic peoples never existed, and that there was no "Germanic world" until the Carolingian dynasty. He insists that the term "Germanic" should be purged entirely from academia beyond the field of linguistics. Bryan Ward-Perkins of the University of Oxford has suspected Goffart of seeking to "play down the role of the Germanic peoples in European history". Although having insisted upon his views on Germanic peoples since the early 1970s, Goffart laments that his theories have had little influence in wider scholarship. He claims that Nazi-influenced beliefs in the existence a Germanic culture has strengthened since World War II, and that these beliefs in recent times have emerged stronger than ever.

Personal life

Goffart is married with 2 children.

Selected bibliography