The title says ‘medievalists’; but I'm not going to cover the whole of the Middle Ages. I want to concentrate on the period between Late Antiquity (starting, say, around 300/350) and the Great European Shift which lies somewhere between 980 and 1130 and which has been conceptualised in a whole range of different ways we don't need to go into here. As I'll explain shortly, this is a period in which questions of ethnicity have become highly though not universally significant to medievalists. I did a search through the International Medieval Bibliography CD-ROM, as one does, in preparation for this talk, using the obvious keywords, and even after I'd eliminated all the entries where identity was used in a positivist sense and other such ‘false hits’, there were still a staggeringly large number of articles touching on the subject – I'd guess about 800–1,000 in the past twenty-five years. They turn out to have been distributed quite unevenly across Europe, but although, as you will see, that is grist to my argumentative mill, I'm not going to make too much of it without knowing more than I do about the IMB's coverage and selection policy.

Now, setting this in the thematic context of this conference, I'd make some qualifications. Questions of identity and ethnicity have been of considerable interest.