Editing Ostrogoths (section)

==Gothic Identity as a Roman-Constructed Political Category==
The ethnic identity of both the Ostrogoths and Visigoths during the late antique period should not be understood as a direct continuation of some biologically stable "Germanic" lineage. Instead, as Ian Wood emphasizes—drawing on the work of Patrick Amory—Gothic identity in the West was a flexible and politicized construct, fashioned through Roman political categories, military patronage, and cultural performance.{{sfn|Wood|2025|pp=224–225}} Particularly under Theodoric, Gothicness functioned as an integrative label, rooted less in ancestral continuity than in court ritual, legal status, and strategic uses of ethnicity. This performative and administrative character of Gothic identity challenges nationalist historiographies that have projected later ethnic essentialism retroactively onto the Goths of Late Antiquity.{{sfn|Wood|2025|pp=223–226}}