The Germania and the Readers It Attracted

The Germania is a short ethnographic work about peoples Tacitus never visited, written partly to hold a mirror up to Rome, and it is nonetheless the fullest surviving description of pre Christian Germanic religion. It reports peoples who do not enclose gods within walls or represent them in human likeness, but consecrate groves and woods and give the name of a god to the hidden thing they see only in reverence. It describes divination by cutting a branch into marked slips, scattering them on white cloth and drawing three, and by watching sacred white horses. And it gives the rite of Nerthus, mother earth, carried in a covered cart drawn by cows through the countryside, after which the cart is washed in a secret lake and the slaves who did the washing are drowned in it.

The manuscript came back into circulation in fifteenth century Italy and was received in Germany with enthusiasm, as evidence of an ancient and unmixed national ancestry. Nineteenth and twentieth century readers went considerably further, and a sentence about the Germanic peoples not being mingled with others was put to uses Tacitus could not have imagined and did not intend. The atlas holds the text as a valuable and one sided report by an outsider with a rhetorical purpose, and holds its reception history as a separate matter, because the two have been confused repeatedly and expensively.