Gypsies, or Such as Do Counterfeit

Abstract

The ethnic identity and origins of the Romani people remain unsolved enigmas to this day, generating many hypotheses but no universally accepted theory.¹ If still puzzling today, one can easily imagine the consternation caused by the appearance of bands of unidentifiable aliens on the roads and at the gates of towns and cities in Western Europe during the first half of the fifteenth century. These exotic-looking foreigners, I should like to propose, constituted one of the irritants which bred the early modern malady of doubt about reality. “Who are these guys?” was a question that accompanied the strangers wherever they went. Were they Egyptians? Greeks? Bohemians? Tartars? Pseudo-Jews? Red Jews? Babylonians? Or perhaps just a bunch of local riff-raff adopting an exotic identity?