Peter Heather

British historian

Peter John Heather (born 8 June 1960) is a British historian of late antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Heather is Chair of the Medieval History Department and Professor of Medieval History at King's College London. He specialises in the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Goths, on which he for decades has been considered the world's leading authority. In his earliest works, Heather mostly rejected the Getica of Jordanes as a valuable source on early Gothic history. In later years, as a result of advances in archaeology, Heather has largely retreated from that position, and now considers the Getica to be partially based on Gothic traditions, and that the archaeological evidence confirms a Gothic origin on the Baltic. Heather disagrees with the core tradition (Traditionskern) theory pioneered by the Vienna School of History, which contends that Germanic tribes were constantly changing, multi ethnic coalitions held together by a small warrior elite. Instead, Heather contends that it was the freemen who constituted the backbone of Germanic tribes, and that the ethnic identity of tribes such as the Goths was stable for centuries, being held together by the freemen. Heather has written several works on the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Contrary to several historians of the late 20th century, Heather contends that it was the movements of "barbarians" in the Migration Period which led to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. He accepts the traditional view that it was the arrival of the Huns on the Pontic steppe in the late 4th century which set these migrations in motion. Heather's approach differs from many of his predecessors in the late 20th century, who have tended to downplay the importance migration played in the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Guy Halsall groups Heather together with Neil Christie and E. A. Thompson as being among the so called Movers, who trace the collapse of the Western Roman Empire to external migration. These are contrasted with the Shakers, including Patrick Amory and Jean Durliat, who trace the collapse to internal developments within the empire, and contend that the barbarians were wilfully but peacefully integrated into the empire by the Romans. The Movers and Shakers are largely divided, as the Germanists and Romanists were in the early 20th century. According to Heather, the idea that the invading barbarians were peacefully absorbed into Roman civilisation "smells more of wishful thinking than likely reality". Along with Bryan Ward Perkins and other scholars affiliated with the University of Oxford, Heather belongs to a new generation of historians who beginning in the early 2000s started to challenge theories on Late Antiquity that had been prevalent since the 1970s. These older theories generally denied the importance of ethnic identity, barbarian migrations and Roman decline in the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. According to Andrew Gillet, Heather's works have been championed by (especially British) academics as a "new, definitive narrative" on the fall of Rome.

Peter Heather has been criticised by members of the Toronto School of History. Michael Kulikowski, who is sometimes associated with this group, has said Heather promotes a "neo Romantic vision of mass migrations of free Germanic peoples" and wishes "to revive a biological approach to ethnicity". Halsall writes that Heather and the Oxford historians have been responsible for "an academic counter revolution" of wide importance, and that they deliberately provide "succour" to far right extremists such as Anders Behring Breivik. Similar criticism has been levelled by Andrew Gillett, another associate of the Toronto School, who laments Heather's "biological" approach and lists Heather's research as an "obstacle" to the advance of multicultural values.

Peter Heather, The Goths and the Balkans, A. D. 350 500. University of Oxford DPhil thesis 1987. Peter Heather and John Matthews, The Goths in the Fourth Century. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991. Peter Heather, Goths and Romans 332 489. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Peter Heather, 'The Huns and the End of the Roman Empire in Western Europe', English Historical Review cx (1995): 4 41. Peter Heather, The Goths. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1996. Peter Heather, ed. The Visigoths from the Migration Period to the Seventh Century: an ethnographic perspective. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999. Peter Heather, 'The Late Roman Art of Client Management: Imperial Defence in the Fourth Century West', in The Transformation of Frontiers: From Late Antiquity to the Carolingians, eds. Walter Pohl, Ian Wood, and Helmut Reimitz. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2001, pp. 15–68. Peter Heather, 'State, Lordship and Community in the West (c. AD 400 600)', in The Cambridge Ancient History, Volume xiv, Late Antiquity: Empire and Successors, A. D. 425 600, eds. Averil Cameron, Bryan Ward Perkins, and Michael Whitby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 437–468
Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: a New History of Rome and the Barbarians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Peter Heather, Empires and Barbarians: Migration, Development and the Birth of Europe. London: Macmillan, 2009. Peter Heather, The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes and Imperial Pretenders. London–New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Peter Heather, Rome Resurgent: War and Empire in the Age of Justinian. Oxford University Press, 2018. Peter Heather, Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300 1300. Knopf, 2023. Peter Heather and John Rapley, Why Empires Fall: Rome, America, and the Future of the West. Yale University Press, 2023.