The Early Slavs: Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe by P. M. Barford (review)

REVIEWS 201 which was misinterpreted by the British as a law that forced widows to selfimmolate , the banning of this rite had the effect of taking away choice and converting women into “passive heroines” (142). Imagery of the woman’s body, death rituals, performances, and devout people became symbols for India. Dryden ’s Aureng-Zebe incorporated this to create the impression of an idealized India where the imagery of burning became symbolic of power and passion. John Michael Archer produces an incredibly dense compilation of works which are emblematic of the changing representations of Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia, focusing on those works which influenced sixteenth and seventeenth century authors and consequently the Western point of view of these regions. He demonstrates how similarities between nations were ignored or confused with biblical or mythical imagery creating a barrier between Europe and other geographical areas in the “old world” which participated in trade but were not colonies of England at a time where the main focus of exploration was on the “new world.” Archer’s study is enlightening in the way it systematically demonstrate how perceptions are created through “imaginative geography,” and is most pertinent to those scholars interested in the debate about the meaning and effects of “orientalism” and changing views of history and British literature. YASMINE BEALE-ROSANO-RIVAYA, Spanish and Portuguese, UCLA P. M. Barford, The Early Slavs: Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2001) xvi + 416 pp., 12 maps, 72 figs. P. M. Barford offers the reader a compact and systematic account, rich in factual information, of the historical processes taking place over a large part of Europe for a period of roughly five hundred years. His book covers the period from the fifth to the tenth centuries, the migration of the Slavic tribes over large spans of Eastern Europe, the relation of the Slavs to Byzantium, the Avars or the Franks, the foundation and early history of the Bulgarian Khanate, Kievan Rus, Great Moravia, Poland, and Bohemia. A serious attempt has been made to treat the early history of the Slavic-speaking history in light, above anything else, of the archaeological evidence gathered in the last fifty years, and not so much on linguistic material or written sources, which were over-exploited by scholars in the more distant past. As Barford discusses the issue in the last chapter of his study of the early Slav history, modern historiography on Central and Eastern Europe during the early medieval period has played a major role in substantiating or refuting many political doctrines and cultural trends: romanticist nationalism, PanSlavism , Nazism, Stalin’s interpretation of Marxist postulates have all been strongly reliant on their reading of the early Slav problématique. Yet comprehensive reviews of the topic have not been numerous, since different theoretical approaches and mutually exclusive presumptions on the validity of archaeological evidence discouraged authors from building arguments covering all the Slavic-speaking countries. Barford, stationed in Warsaw, Poland, sets himself the risky task of observing in chronological sequence the early history of these countries. The purpose of the overview seems not to be to promote a new theory. Yet REVIEWS 202 the very way Barford arranges the material—understanding the similarities in archaeological evidence over large territory from the sixth century on, but especially during the eighth century, as signs of a single culture spreading in space, and discussing simultaneously parallel stages in state formation, cultural shifts and reaction to foreign pressures among south, east, and west Slavs alike— makes it clear that the author defends the cohesiveness of his subject and treats “Slavdom” as a legitimate object of historical research. This by itself is a serious theoretical stand, especially in view of recent publications (namely by F. Curta, who is often referred to here as a secondary source), which tend to regard the crystallization of Slavic culture and self-identity as a consequence of the migration period and as a response to pressure from outside and social changes within the communities. Barford traces back the “crystallization of a Slav identity” (35ff.) to the fifth century, when Jordanes writes his much-quoted passage on the Sclavenes; and in the archaeological...