Medieval Europe From Another Angle

Volume I: The People
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-45469-6
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 300 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Reihe: Variorum Collected Studies

While the Middle Ages represent a topic of perennial interest, most studies have addressed the western parts of the European continent, often from the angle of the written sources. This volume examines an area less known in the literary and archaeological evidence. The studies included therein provide significant insights into the history and archaeology of East Central and Eastern Europe during Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

This is the first volume of essays explicitly to reassess the significance of the region, as well as the role of the archaeological evidence in studying ethnicity in the Middle Ages, particularly in the case of the Slavs and the Avars. Because of its geographic, chronological, thematic, and methodological scope, this book offers a new perspective from a different angle on the analysis of the archaeological and written sources. Some chapters focus on settlement sites; others discuss artifacts from burial assemblages.

As well as advancing new models for the analysis of the written sources in relation to ethnicity, Medieval Europe from Another Angle offers new approaches to the understanding of how ethnicity may have been constructed in the Middle Ages in material culture terms. It will appeal to scholars and students alike studying Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages with an interest in material culture and its use in building ethnic boundaries.

Zielgruppe

Academic and Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Curta, Florin

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Alte Geschichte & Archäologie Mittelalterliche, neuzeitliche Archäologie (Europa)

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction

Part I: East Central and Eastern Europe

1. East Central Europe: the gate to Byzantium

2. The archaeology of service settlements in Eastern Europe

Part II: Ethnicity in medieval archaeology

3. Medieval archaeology and ethnicity: where are we?

4. The elephant in the room. A reply to Sebastian Brather

Part III: Slavs and Avars

5. Slavs in Fredegar and Paul the Deacon: medieval gens of “scourge of God”?

6. Four questions for those who still believe in prehistoric Slavs and other fairy tales

7. Were there Slavs in seventh-century Macedonia?

8. The earliest Slavs in east central Europe? Remarks on the early medieval settlement in Nova Tabla (Slovenia)

9. An ironic smile: the Carpathian Mountains and the migration of the Slavs

10. The earliest Avar-age stirrups, or the “stirrup controversy” revisited

11. Avar Blitzkrieg, Slavic and Bulgar raiders, and Roman special ops: mobile warriors in the 6th-century Balkans

Bibliography

Über Autor(innen)

Florin Curta is Professor of Medieval History and Archaeology at the University of Florida. His books include Slavs in the Making (Routledge, 2021) and The Long Sixth Century in Eastern Europe (2021). He is also the editor of The Other Europe in the Middle Ages: Avars, Bulgars, Khazars, and Cumans (2008) and Neglected Barbarians (2011). Curta is the editor of the online Bibliography of the History and Archaeology of Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, and co-editor of the series “East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450–1450.”