The Early Slavs : Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe [Hardcover]

P. M. Barford (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr; 1St Edition edition (November 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801439779
• ISBN-13: 978-0801439773
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 7.7 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #570,992 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

59 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The 1st book those interested in the early Slavs should buy, February 13, 2003

By 

Vorthog (Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Early Slavs : Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe (Hardcover)

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.

31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Early Slavs: a wealth of hard-to-get information, June 26, 2002

By 

James Honeychuck - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Early Slavs : Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe (Hardcover)

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.

11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great introduction of the Ancient Slavs, April 19, 2007

By 

Eric S. Kim (Southern California) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Early Slavs : Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe (Hardcover)

"The Early Slavs" by P.M. Barford is probably the best non-fiction book about Ancient Slavs that I've ever read. It is, in reality, very complicated to discover who these Ancient Slavic peoples were, since there are sparse archaeological evidence and minimal historical accounts. Barford, despite the sparse evidence and accounts, fully details the "Pagan Ideologies" and the "Daily Life" and the "State Formation" of what is now Hungary, Ukraine, Poland, Russia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and (even) Germany. However, there is a downside to this book: this reads like a bloated textbook and much of the vocabulary is sophisticated (a dictionary must be useful). This is nonetheless a great introduction of the Ancient Slavs. A-