Моята Библиотека: East Central and Eastern Europe in the Early Middle Ages - Florin Curta University of Michigan Press | 2005 |

 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

All rights reserved

Published in the United States of America by

The University of Michigan Press

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

2008 2007 2006 2005 4 32 1

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored

in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form

or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise,

without the written permission of the publisher.

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.