I'm a history undergraduate student and this semester I'm coursing my first seminar which is oriented towards the treatment of a source from the late antiquity. I chose the Variae from Cassiodorus, which is fascinating to say the least. My main focus is to understand how Theodoric planned or intended to make Gothic culture coexist with the Latin culture. I mean, did he want to maintain Gothic culture, replace it, upgrade it, etc. with the roman culture? Or maybe maintain the culture for each region and treat them according to local customs? I'm not asking you guys to answer these questions, but some bibliography to orient myself would be really helpful for me :) Thanks in advance for any suggestions!
This is a great topic! There are three very new monographs on this exact topic, all of which provide new insights even though they hold completely different views on how 'Roman' Theoderic's regime was. Shane Bjornlie's Politics and Tradition between Rome, Ravenna and Constantinople: A Study of Cassiodorus and the Variae 527-554 (2013) argues for a great deal of continuity and demonstrates how Roman the kingdom's culture remained - though I should temper this by noting that Alan Camerons's 'Anician Myths', Journal of Roman Studies, 102 (2012) convincingly argues that the influence of Anicii, a family Bjornlie focused on, was not as Mediterranean and co-ordinated as he thought. Still, it's a fantastic book, covering both the political culture of the early sixth century and the immediate context of the Variae. He proposes a radically different milieu for when the Variae was collected, so it should prove to be very useful for you.
Sean Lafferty, in his Law and Society in the Age of Theoderic the Great: A Study of the Edictum Theoderici (2013), however argues for the very opposite. He saw the Ostrogothic state as a rather less Roman one, suggesting that the Variae's overwhelming Romanitas was a veil, behind which there was an unstable kingdom that should not be seen as the direct successor to the Roman state. I'm not so convinced, but it is an interesting read nonetheless. I am more persuaded by the argument in Jonathan Arnold's Theoderic and the Roman Imperial Restoration (2014), which argues for exactly what the title says. Between Lafferty and Arnold, you should get a sense of what modern historians feel about Theoderic's regime. Arnold, Bjornlie, and Kristina Sessa have also edited A Companion to Ostrogothic Italy (2016) with Brill, and from the few chapters that I've read so far it looks like it is an excellent volume, so you might want to get your library to get a hold of it - Lafferty contributed a chapter to this too, so it will be interesting to see how these historians' different perspectives fit together.
Finally, for a more 'traditional' view, it is useful to refer to John Moorhead's Theoderic in Italy (1992) and Patrick Amory's People and Identity in Ostrogothic Italy, 489-554 (1997) to get a sense of how historians felt about the Ostrogoths before the recent wave of studies. Another interesting volume is Barnish and Marazzi (eds.), The Ostrogoths From the Migration Period to the Sixth Century: An Ethnographic Perspective (2007). I hope this has been useful!
Theodoric and the Ostrogothic kingdoms are extensively covered in:
The Goths by Peter Heather (1996) and The History of the Goths by Herwig Wolfram (1988).
These are often cited as the standard works on the Goths.