Such Stuff as Peoples are Made on

Abstract

Peoples, or ethnic communities, ‘have been present in every period and continent’, says the cover of a recent volume on ethnicity.1If true, we should also be aware that ‘peoples’ in the recorded past are social entities which are always to a large extent constructed and constantly changing during continuous processes of state formation. This article aims at summarising the building blocks and leitmotifs, derived from Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian tradition, that medieval authors, in particular the clerical writers of histories, used in their construction of peoples in a time when political communities developed state-like features which required some measure of national identification. Understandably, the development of national identities in medieval Europe proved to be a complex interplay, in which the imagining of ‘Self’ was inextricably bound up with the judgement of ‘Other’ within the boundaries of that period's mental outlook.