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Nineteenth Century French And German Interpretations Of The Early Medieval Germanic Invasions, James N. Owens

Dissertations and Theses

Various interpretations of the Germanic invasions of the early Middle Ages have been advanced. These present to the student of historiography a fertile field for inquiry. In this thesis the interpretations of the Germanic invasions propounded by Jules Michelet (1798-1874) and Gustav Freytag (1816-1875) are examined with a view to establishing the cultural context in which their mutually exclusive versions were formulated, and the extent to which that context lent the interpretations of both writers a perceptible national and aesthetic bias.