The word Gothic has a history at least two millennia long. During this period, it has described the Germanic peoples best known for their role in the fall of the Roman Empire, medieval architecture, artistic and musical styles and genres, and a late twentieth century subculture. Gothic is also an international word, present in many languages. Its development has involved both innovative usages and their spread across Europe and the United States.
The word Goth itself is much older than English. Its origin is the Proto-Germanic root Gut, which has the literal meaning of “one who pours out.” The meaning of this word as the name of a people is obscure, however. If the Goths were originally Scandinavian, as their great king Theodoric said they were, the word may come from the name of the river Götaälv, which “pours out” into the North Sea. Alternately, it may be a testimony to the virility of the Goths—or at least the male Goths—as those who “pour out” semen. Or perhaps it may indicate that the Goths followed Gaut, a god of war.
Greek and Roman writers first used the word around 20 A.D. in the form Gutones, and Ptolemy wrote of the Guti in the mid second century. The Greeks and Romans of late antiquity used the term Goth for a number of peoples with similar languages and cultures, even though they often had more specific names for many of these groups as well. They traced the migrations of these tribes to the shores of the Black Sea in southeastern Europe.
Medieval scholars described three tribes of Goths: the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths, and the Gepids. Each of these names has its own peculiarity. Gepid was derived from gepanta—“lazy and sluggish ones”—a derogatory name given by the other Goths. The Ostrogoths were once the “Goths of the rising sun,” and, since the sun rises in the east, became known as “east Goths,” or Ostrogoths. The Visigoths were called the Vesi, or “the good,” until Cassiodorus, a Roman serving the Gothic kings, termed them Visigoths so that their name paralleled Ostrogoths.
In the eighth century, Bede wrote about the “Gothorum” in his Latin Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Later, seventeenth century scholars reading a ninth century Anglo-Saxon translation of Bede’s History would identify the “Gothi” as the Jutes and thus associate the Goths with England; the Dictionarium Saxino-Latino-Anglicum, compiled by William Somner in 1649, translates the Anglo-Saxon word Gothi as “Jutes, Getae, Gothes.” In King Alfred’s ninth century Anglo-Saxon, the word took the singular form Gota. This is evidenced by Alfred’s translation from Latin of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, in which he writes that “unrim manes se Gota fremede”—“the Goth perpetrated an excess of wickedness.” In the fourteenth century, Chaucer too produced a translation of the Consolation and spelled Goth with a th; it was spelled both with a t alone and with a th through the seventeenth century.
Though Goth was used as a noun throughout the medieval period, it was not until the sixteenth century that adjectival forms of the word began appearing in written English. Among these were the short-lived sixteenth century form Gothian, the early seventeenth century Gothish, which remained in use through the nineteenth century, and the nineteenth century Gothicky. Gothic, which became the dominant adjectival form, first appeared in English in 1611.
This first use of Gothic in English stuck closely to Goth’s narrow historical meaning; in the translator’s preface to the King James Bible, it was reported that someone had “translated the Scriptures into the Gothicke tongue.” In the middle of the seventeenth century, however, two other usages of the word were introduced into English from continental Europe. One of these was simply a generalization; Gothic was used as a synonym of Germanic, referring to a broader set of people than it had before. (The people to whom Gothic referred varied a great deal over time. Later, in the nineteenth century, the word was associated with the Mozarabs, the Christians of Muslim medieval Spain.) The other new usage had its complex history that had begun in Italy centuries earlier.
The ideas that led to the redefinition of Gothic to refer to an architectural style—and later to other artistic and cultural styles—came out of Renaissance Humanism. In the fourteenth century, Italian humanists such as Petrarch described a three-part history of Europe made up of antiquity, the barbaric “Middle Ages,” and modernity. The humanists argued that Germanic invaders had brought down the Roman Empire, causing Europe’s descent into the medieval period, a tragedy from which Europe was only then recovering. As a result, they hated the Germanic tribes that dominated Europe at the beginning of the Middle Ages, and particularly despised the Goths, with whom they began to associate all that they disliked about the prior millennium.
This attitude led to pejoration of Gothic. Examples of its effect are numerous. Within the literary realm, the humanist and philologist Lorenzo Valla referred to black letter script, which he found clumsy and “monkish,” as “Gothic.” In England, this font came to be known as “Gothic” at the same time as it came to be known as “black letter,” in the mid seventeenth century.
The term Gothic came to refer to medieval architecture—sometimes all medieval architecture, not merely a specific late medieval style as it does now—as a result of passages in Giorgio Vasari’s 1550 Lives of the Architects, Painters, and Sculptors. Vasari was a Florentine artist who became arguably the first art historian and had an immense influence on how those in generations to come would think about art. In his book, Vasari frequently called medieval architecture “German,” as did others of his day. On occasion, however, he instead wrote that such barbaric architecture was the fault of the “Goti,” or Goths.
There are works of another sort that are called German, which differ greatly in ornament and proportion from the antique and the modern. Today they are not employed by distinguished architects but are avoided by them as monstrous and barbarous.… This manner was invented by the Goths, who, after the destruction of the ancient buildings and the dying out of the architects because of the wars, afterwards built—those who survived—edifices in the manner: these men fashioned the vaults with pointed arches of quarter circles, and filled all Italy with these damnable buildings.
Though Vasari wrote in Italian, writers in other languages adopted his idea of a link between the Goths and medieval architecture, and soon used the adjective Gothic to this context, an innovation Vasari himself had not made. In the eighteenth century Gothic underwent another generalization. This one was focused on England, where writers used the word to mean both in bad taste and old-fashioned. In 1734 George Berkeley, for example, described dueling as a “Gothic crime.”
In the same century, however, art historians began to recognize value in Gothicness, and both medieval architecture and Gothicity began to lose their negative connotations. The two unusual nouns in the previous sentence, both of which are nineteenth century coinages describing “the quality of being Gothic,” demonstrate an interest in the Gothic that grew over the next few centuries. In architecture, this interest led to the Gothic Revival. In the fine arts and literature, it was one of several influences that led to Romanticism and especially to the Gothic literature of the nineteenth century.
It was these modern artistic movements that introduced the concept of horror and fascinations with death and religion to the idea of the Gothic. These qualities influenced art and culture throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For example, when introduced to punk rock music in the late 1970s in England, they produced a subgenre known for a time by the strange name “positive punk” because it did not advocate violence. This music was first referred to as “Gothic” in 1979 and the Goth subculture was somewhat defined by 1983. Like earlier revolutions in the meaning of the word Gothic, its application to a youth subculture in the late twentieth century has murky origins, and debates exist over how Goth music, dress, and culture evolved and how they were named. In this way, the newest usage of the word Goth shares much with its many historical meanings.
- Tina Waldeier Bizzarro, “Gothic,” in Paul F. Grendler, ed., Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, vol. 3 (New York: Scribner, 1999).
- Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Based on the Manuscript Collections of the Late Joseph Bosworth (Oxford: Clarendon, 1882).
- Wayne Dynes, “Concept of Gothic,” in Philip P. Wiener, ed., Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, vol. 2 (New York: Scribner, 1973).
- Paul Frankl, The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1960).
- Louis Grodecki, Gothic Architecture, trans. Mark Paris (New York: Rizzoli, 1985).
- Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989 with 1993 additions).
- Wikipedia, Punk (accessed April 24, 2006).
- Herwig Wolfram, History of the Goths, trans. Thomas J. Dunlap (Berkeley, Calif.: U of California P, 1987).
- Pete Scathe, History of Goth (accessed April 24, 2006).