Visigoths, Goths, and Early Medieval Barbarians in Popular Culture & The New Digital Humanities

The records of the 16th Council of Toledo held in 693 in the reign of the Visigothic king Egica indicate that officials had expected a sort of early medieval stay-at-home situation for parts of the kingdom’s Gallic territory hit hard by the plague. The most effective recent response to a world pandemic was fairly similar and led to an array of research grants for the study of the history of pandemics. A political intention of these grants is to employ academia – especially the power of Web2, Big-Data Digital Humanities – to predict outcomes, sway public opinion and curb popular dissonance. Exposed in this process is the gap between public and scholarly narratives about life, thought, emotions and environment in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.

The Visigoths have been mentioned by characters across a spectrum of U.S. comics, novels, movies, and types of TV shows including military satire (M.A.S.H.), utopian sci-fi (Star Trek: The Next Generation), conspiracy theory (X-Files), and small-town drama (Gilmore Girls). Whether in the Godot-style repartee of the latter, the prose of the others, or the lyrics of Immortal Technique, the meaning of “Visigoth” comes coded within the language of popular logic, constantly deferred to its imagined opposite. Representations of Visigoths, Goths, and barbarians can be found across the world in music, in the menus of restaurants, in pub themes, and even in the names of far-right groups advocating race war and ethno-states.

Part 1: Representation: Visigoths, Goths & Barbarians in Popular Culture

The papers of the first part of Visigothic Symposia 5 interrogate popular perceptions of the Visigoths and other “barbarian” assemblages in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. The aim is to reveal the prevailing uses of these identities in popular culture, what they represent and symbolize. From that awareness, we can better assess the gap between the narratives promoted by politicians and cultural corporations and those sold by academia. We can then evaluate the real, if any, discursive impact of scholars, and even see whether scholars themselves are critical or receptive of popular culture in their representations. We will also establish a grounding for reflection after the emerging mega-grants cycle.

Part 2: Function: Web3, Decentralization & the New Digital Humanities in Visigothic Studies

In complement to the papers of Part 1, those of Part 2 consider how the technologies and theories of decentralization, blockchain and Web3 can disrupt how we imagine pasts and write history. At the core of blockchain technology is trustless decentralization and peer-to-peer (P2) functionality without third-party mediation: Imagine if we could construct a P2P language for past-present transactions, for communicating pasts? What could we know about the Visigoths by creating an immutable layer 1 of Visigothic pasts whose representations (presents) could be transparently linked by anyone worldwide in any language any time and deciphered separately from that layer 2? What more if we could decipher Visigothic transactions, or pasts, by machine code, or rather by their function in the world: that is, by determining the real-worldness (reality, present) of the abstract (past)?

Web3’s decentralization circulates agency to individuals instead of to centralized institutions. This provides the opportunity for history to reconsider the “objective” not as universal absolute but as a local absolute that is verifiable immutably and transparently and can be connected to any present (representation, history) in P2P manner. It also provides the opportunity for a history blockchain to build “fact” blocks and transform the historian into a collective that is independent of institutional wealth and centralized power, a radical confirmation and democratization of (confirmed) pasts directly connected to (infinitely rewritable) presents. How we verify the transactions of existence on this planet and in our orbit is being entirely rethought, with value now assigned to UTXOs (unspent transaction outputs), PSBTs (partially signed transactions) and other sources of interaction previously without confirmed functionality. History’s object is the abstract, like computer science’s and blockchain’s, and in the world of pure imagination all is possible: what can we do with and for Visigothic pasts? What can they do for, with and to us?

The (Old) Digital Humanities innovated in crucial ways, with Big-Data sets, centralized digitizing and honorable intentions of making the Humanities accessible to everyone. All of this hard work can and should be integrated into the New Digital Humanities which now has the technical capacity to fulfill those dreams of the old Web2 digital space, to move academia from https to ipfs, from WordPress to inscribed domains, from “is this really that?” to algebra, category theory and simple Boolean logic to determine past via function.

ISSN 2475-7462

Editors: Dolores Castro & Michael J. Kelly

Program

Introduction

Essays

    • Mallory Elizabeth Wells, University of California, Irvine
      • Historia Gothorum: The Past and Present in Visigothic and Post-Visigothic Art, pp. 89-(publ. June 2024)
  • Part 2: December 2024

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