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REVIEWS 180 Slavic presence in present-day Bulgaria cannot be traced to earlier than the year 700. The presumption that ethnic identity crystallizes as a result of political, economic, or social ambitions of élites leads Curta to chapter 7, in which he tries to reinterpret the evidence contained in the early Byzantine sources (and which have been traditionally used as reference to a particular kind of “military democracy” reigning among the Sclavenes) in the sense that the Slavs were gradually organizing themselves according to lines of chiefdom and social competitiveness (marked, for instance, by the previously mentioned distinctive brooches, 333). Curta’s project to unite in a single argument the tendencies observed in archaeological evidence—suggesting a process of group consolidation and social differentiation among social members, and the changing tonality of the written accounts of the Slavs’ settlement in the Balkans—is not only intriguing, but quite inspiring. An approach to the Slavs’ early history based on the understanding that they were in the process of becoming an ethnie under particular historical circumstances, and were not carrying their ethnicity from times immemorial , is certainly very promising in order for the traditional, in my opinion implicitly racist, theories of the prehistoric ethnic peculiarities of the Balkan peoples being inherited unchanged from generation to generation along the millennia to be finally discarded. Curta’s unwillingness to address in longer terms the difficult and unavoidable question as to how his new approach can mesh with the older theory that the Slavic migrations originated from a Urheimat that was based predominantly on the linguistic similarities of the Slavonic languages is probably due to his inability, at this stage, to provide an argument more convincing than the hypothetical usage of Slavic as “lingua franca” in the Avar qaganate (345) and later in Bulgaria. But while I hope that new ideas will help make better use of the linguistic material, in the same way that Curta has done with the archaeological evidence, this new study of early Slavic history is a particularly successful attempt open new perspectives for dealing with the important challenges of history. BORIS TODOROV, History, UCLA Simon R. Doubleday, The Lara Family. Crown and Nobility in Medieval Spain (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press 2001) 198 pp. The title of Simon Doubleday’s The Lara Family. Crown and Nobility in Medieval Spain is something of a misnomer. Anyone expecting a study of medieval kinship relations will be disappointed because this book is actually not about the Lara family qua family. Doubleday does warn his readers of this in his introduction: “The chapters that follow do not aim to provide an exhaustive history of the family. Little attention is paid here to their role as patrons of religious foundations, for example, or to the complex webs of marriage and clientage relationships which they established” (3). Likewise, anyone anticipating a study of the medieval nobility as a social class will come away to a certain extent frustrated, in part due to the omissions Doubleday mentions in the passage cited above. Then what is this book about? Doubleday declares in his introduction that it “is primarily concerned with the tumultuous interaction between the crown and a great aristocratic family” (3). But neither is that, pre- REVIEWS 181 cisely, what this study is about. In effect, this monograph is about the tumultuous interactions between successive heads of the Lara family and successive rulers of the medieval Iberian kingdoms of Castile and Leon, between the late eleventh and mid-fourteenth centuries. The other members of the family receive little mention, unless they eventually rise to head the family themselves. Lara women, in particular, are rarely mentioned. As a result of the large number of topics Doubleday has opted not to discuss, these interactions, as they are presented here, not infrequently seem to occur in something approaching a vacuum. The work is not without its virtues, although they are, for the most part, incomplete ones. Doubleday successfully argues two major themes about the medieval Castilian nobility and how they have been perceived by historians until relatively recently. The first of these themes is that the primary foundations of noble power changed, around the beginning of the thirteenth...

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