The Early Slavs : Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe

by P. M. Barford

Release Date: November, 2001

Edition: Hardcover

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The 1st book those interested in the early Slavs should buy

P. M. Barford is a British scholar residing in Poland. With this book he has made a valuable contribution by providing an easy to read, and best of all OBJECTIVE overview of this often controversial subject area.

I say controversial because as any student of Eastern Europe knows, the history of the region has always been fraught with vastly differing interpretations based on rival and competing nationalisms, and no area moreso than the fragmentary early history.

The author tackles this issue head-on, tracing the course of various nationalist contructions of early Slavic history in response to certain political imperatives, such as the post-WWII refutation of Nazi German claims to East European territory, or Soviet government desires to minimize and divert attention away from differences among peoples in order to facilitate the formation of one "Soviet people". He also carries this healthy skepticism even further, by constantly questioning the perspectives and motivation for writing of all of the existing early written sources he discusses, and even applying it to the newest scholarship which has begun to appear in Eastern Europe since the end of the Cold War.

The book begins with a preface and introduction as well as a very convenient time-line chart of East-, West- and South-Slavic history. The body of the book consists of 13 chapters. The first four cover the early history divided into several phases. Chapters 5-10 respectively focus on daily life of the early Slavs, their social structure, warfare, economics, paganism, and the coming of Christianity. Chapters 11-12 deal with state formation and the final chapter deals with the image of the Slavs from a historiographic perspective.

This is then followed by 30 pages of extensive notes to the preceding chapters, a select bibliography (which I would have preferred to be a bit more thoroughgoing), and best of all 80 pages of illustrations and maps. The 12 maps included here I found especially wonderful!

My only tiny complaints would be the rendering of certain East- or South-Slavic names in Polish style, which may be confusing to some readers, and the very occasional echoing of a distinctly Polish perspective on certain issues (which I had actually gone into the book expecting to be far stronger given the author's immersion in the Polish academic milieu). But neither of these are significant enough to mar my 5-star rating of this book.

I am happy to recommend this book as a concise, comprehensive and up to date introduction to this subject area.

The Early Slavs: a wealth of hard-to-get information

This is a scholarly book by an archaeologist/historian living in Poland. 12 main maps, plus some more maps among the 72 illustrations, most of which are clear line drawings, not photos. The most important characteristic of this book is that it summarizes in English a wealth of information otherwise available only in Slavic languages. (Most of the 38 pages of notes and references cite Slavic language sources.) A very enlightening examination of who the Slavs are and where they might have come from. Of limited use in genealogy, since the main story here ends in about the 11th Century. Tiny print is hard on the eyes.