Published in Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Peninsula Cultural History

Keywords: Keywords: Barbarians, Etnogenesis, Identities, Late Antiquity.

In this article, we discuss the identity issues in relation to the world of Late Antiquity and its subsequent representations. To this end, we start with a discussion of the identities in the late-ancient world, emphasizing the complexity and fluidity that occur in the processes of formation (ethnogenesis) and transformation. Then arises the problem of the terminologies used to represent the ancient people (focusing on the concept of “German”), and how these categories, having a potential to produce representations, create misconceptions of identity about (and between) the ancients.