Walter Goffart

Walter André Goffart (February 22, 1934 – February 14, 2025) was a German-born American historian who specialized in Late Antiquity and the European Middle Ages. He taught for many years as a professor at the University of Toronto and at the Centre for Medieval Studies from 1960 to 1999, and was a senior research scholar at Yale University. He was the author of monographs on a ninth-century forgery (Le Mans Forgeries), late Roman taxation (Caput and Colonate), four "barbarian" historians, and historical atlases.

Two controversial themes in his research concern the Roman policies used when settling barbarian soldiers in the West Roman Empire (Barbarians and Romans and the sixth chapter of Barbarian Tides), and his criticism of the old idea that there was a single Germanic people opposed to the empire in late antiquity, which he believed still influenced academics studying the period.