'We were much worse in our vices'. Representations of barbarians in Early Modern Europe

KWIATKOWSKI, NICOLÁS

París

Conferencia; Seminario EHESS; 2020

EHESS

The theme of my presentation today is barbarians and barbarism. It is, at the same time, very small and gigantic. It is small because we will be looking at just one concept, its history and the various forms in which it was thought and imagined. But it is also huge in at least two senses, one that stems from the material and another that is my own fault. The one coming from the texts, objects, events, ideas, and images that we will be discussing is the fact that barbarians and barbarism have played a central role in Western history. They were important to shape the way in which identity and otherness were conceived and modeled. In fact, the construction of an other simultaneously implies the conformation of the identity of the individual and the collective creating those distinctions.