In current usage the term “Gothic” has two main
applications: (1) to a Germanic tribe that played a
major role in the dismemberment of the Roman Empire
in the fourth and fifth centuries of our era, and (2) to
the last of the great medieval styles of art and archi-
tecture, flourishing chiefly from the mid-twelfth
through the fifteenth century. (Note that the use of
Gothic as a term of stylistic analysis is restricted to
modern times; it was not so employed during the
medieval period itself.) Apart from these well-defined
and seemingly unrelated current senses, scholarly and
polemical writings from the fifteenth through the
nineteenth century reveal a surprisingly wide range of
meanings, most of them now surviving in at best
shadowy form—though they once had far-reaching
implications for aesthetics, political thought, and social
customs. In fact the two currently accepted senses may
be likened to modern towns built on very old sites,
with the present urban pattern overlying successive
strata of earlier development and with the roads and
tracks which linked the two sites in former times just
discernible.
Historically, two great trends—ethnological and
critical-aesthetic—have conditioned the growth of the
idea of the Gothic. The first trend is a body of ethno-
logical and historical speculation combining the pres-
ervation of authentic traditions with fanciful embroi-
dery based on a defective philological method. In the
Middle Ages the term Goth served—as it still does
today—to designate the Germanic tribal group that
migrated into Spain, southwestern France, and Italy
in the late phase of the Roman Empire. In addition,
however, through confusion with the Getae, a histori-
cally distinct group, its scope was extended to the
inhabitants of Scandinavia, which was sometimes re-
garded as the original home of the larger amalgam.
This extension figures prominently in the sixth century
in the Gothic History of Jordanes, who denied it from
Orosius and Cassiodorus. Another source, a ninth-
century vernacular rendering of Bede, was to lead
seventeenth-century English students of Anglo-Saxon
language and literature to a further amplification,
identifying the Goths with the Jutes who had settled
in southern England. Thus the Old English dictionary
compiled by William Somner (Dictionarium Saxino-
Latino-Anglicum, Oxford, 1649) defines Gothi as “Jutes,
Getae, Gothes.” Through this process of identification
the scope of the term Goth expanded enormously:
geographically, to the borders of the Germanic world
in Scandinavia and its offshoots in Iceland and Green-
land, as well as to England; and temporally, reaching
early modern times so that, for example, it seemed
natural to hail the seventeenth-century Swedish king
Gustavus Adolphus as a paragon of the Gothic virtues.
The second main trend appearing in writings on the
historical evolution of the Gothic idea is a value judg-
ment. Gothic appears as a pejorative label for medieval
traits and customs considered outworn and repugnant.
Not only were the Goths lumped together with the
Vandals and Huns as destroyers of classical Mediter-
ranean civilization, but they were also held to have
played a further disastrous role in the creation of the
bastard culture that took its place. Thus Gothic came
to be employed to designate bad taste in general.
In the discussion that follows other factors will
emerge, but the main development results from the
interweaving of the ethnological and aesthetic trends.
Paradoxically, Gothic is and is not equivalent to medi-
eval tout court, and the connotations associated with
it are complex, so much so that they seem at times
to defy exact definition. In order to bring out the
variety of nuances it has sometimes been necessary to
depart from a strictly chronological exposition in the
following account, which stresses the critical-aesthetic
trend at the outset, then the ethnological.
