Ethnic Identities and Christianities between Late Antiquity and Early Medieval Period

This paper aims to re-read Roman-Barbarian ethnicity as a cultural construct not least based on Biblical models viewed and interpreted as founded as well as authoritative instruments of self-definition. The study intends to overturn the traditional historiographical paradigm, according to which ethnicity emerges as a purely "Barbaric" construction in opposition to the Christian-Roman universalism. Starting from such a model, European history was often represented as a conflict between universalistic and nationalistic issues. According to A.'s analysis, the political role of ethnicity in Latin Europe doesn't emerge, at least partially, as a Barbarian "import". Far from representing an antithesis to the Universal Church, ethnicity assumes its politic role through Christianity and, more specifically, on the basis of exegesis as well as of re-adaptation of ethnic self-definitions well attested in Biblical texts.