Никола Бенин
Книга на английски език, която съчетава история и археология за период от историята, който понастоящем е обект на голямо научно внимание, „Източна, Централна и Източна Европа през ранното Средновековие“ разглежда ключови проблеми на ранносредновековната история на Източна Европа, с особен акцент върху обществото, държавата и приемането на християнството, както и различните начини, по които тези аспекти са били разглеждани в историографията на региона. Включените есета разглеждат документалните и археологически доказателства за ранносредновековна Европа в опит да се оцени тяхното значение за разбирането на изграждането на културна идентичност и процеса на политическа мобилизация за възхода на държавите.
Copyright
by the University of Michigan 2005
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reserved
Published
in the United States of America by
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University of Michigan Press
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2008 2007
2006 2005 4 32 1
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A CIP
catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of
Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
East
Central & Eastern Europe in the Early Middle Ages / Florin Curta, editor.
p. cm.
Includes
revisions of papers presented at the International Congress on Medieval Studies
in
Kalamazoo in 2000 and 2001.
Includes
bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13:
978-0-472-11498-6 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN-10:
0-472-11498-0 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Europe,
Eastern-History. I. Title: East Central and Eastern Europe in the Early
Middle
Ages. II. Curta, Florin.
DJK46.E23
2005
909'.0491801-dc22
2005048574
Preface
This book
developed out of three sessions organized for the International Congress on
Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo in 2000 and 2001. Several articles published here
(Henning, Urbańczyk, Buko, Shepard, and Font) are expanded versions of the
papers presented in Kalamazoo. Others (Kovalev, Barford, Petrov,
Madgearu,
and Stepanov) were later solicited by the editor for this publication.
The volume
examines specific aspects of the early medieval history of Eastern Europe-with
particular reference to society, state, and conversion to
Christianity-and
the diverse ways in which these aspects have been approached in the historiography
of the region. Many previous studies have described developments in Eastern
Europe as replicas of those known from Western Europe or as reactions to
military and political encroachments from that
same
direction. This volume reconsiders such views and attempts to demonstrate that
the processes of social integration, state formation, and conversion
to
Christianity were gradual and complex, displaying many specific variations
at the
regional and local level. A considerable amount of data is now available,
and old
questions can now be rephrased in the light of the new evidence. What
forms of
social organization existed in different regions of Eastern Europe in
the early
Middle Ages, and how different in that respect was Eastern from
Western
Europe? What were the implications of the contacts established with
the world
of the steppes or with early states founded by nomads in present-day
Hungary
(Avars) or Bulgaria (Bulgars)? How is the process of state formation
reflected
in the surviving material and documentary evidence? Above all, this
volume's
aim is to open up an interdisciplinary and comparative dialogue in
the study
of early medieval Europe, and the included chapters examine the
documentary
and archaeological evidence in an attempt to assess the relative
importance
of each in understanding the construction of cultural identity and
the process
of political mobilization responsible for the rise of states.
This
collection of essays should also be viewed as an effort to provide a
more
theoretically sophisticated account of the early medieval history of Eastern
Europe and to bring its study up to date in terms of developments in the
regional
schools of archaeology and history. The approach taken in this volume is both
broader and more rigorously contextual than has been the case
with
previous English-language studies of the medieval history of this area.
