"At the height of the tumultuous developments taking place in Central and Eastern Europe in the ninth century, two Greek missionaries from Thessalonica came to the fore. Their work of acculturation among the Slavs, had far-reaching and lasting changes upon European life. This book looks back over the life and work of these two outstanding figures and analyzes their ecclesiastical and cultural mission. Their presence in the Crimea was closely bound up with several aspects of Byzantium's ecclesiastical policy and programs of acculturation, and also with the Russians' first encounter with Christianity." "In presenting the Slavs with an alphabet and the written work, the brothers transmitted to them the world, and thus it was in Cyril and Methodius' time, and thanks to their work, that Great Moravia reached the height of its vigor and prosperity as a central European state. The Cyrillo-Methodian tradition lived on, spreading among the Slavic peoples and laying the foundation of their spiritual life."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Winner of the 2020 Verbruggen prize This book provides a comprehensive synthesis of scholarship on Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages. The goal is to offer an overview of the current state of research and a basic route map for navigating an abundant historiography available in more than 10 different languages. The literature published in English on the medieval history of Eastern Europe—books, chapters, and articles—represents a little more than 11 percent of the historiography. The companion is therefore meant to provide an orientation into the existing literature that may not be available because of linguistic barriers and, in addition, an introductory bibliography in English. Winner of the 2020 Verbruggen prize, awarded annually by the De Re Militari society for the best book on medieval military history. The awarding committee commented that the book ‘has an enormous range, and yet is exceptionally scholarly with a fine grasp of detail. Its title points to a general history of eastern Europe, but it is dominated by military episodes which make it of the highest value to anybody writing about war and warmaking in this very neglected area of Europe.’ See inside the book.

Few alphabets in the world are actively celebrated, and none more so than the Slavonic. Annually across Eastern Europe, the alphabet and its inventors, Cyril and Methodios, are celebrated with parades, concerts, liturgical services, and public addresses by presidents, ministers, and mayors. Inventing Slavonic: Cultures of Writing Between Rome and Constantinople offers a new reading of the invention of the Slavonic alphabet and its implications. Its premise is simple: namely, that the alphabet was not invented once, but that it continued to be contested and redefined in the century after its creation. However, Inventing Slavonic goes against the grain of modern scholarship and popular common sense, where a stable and fossilized story about Cyril, his brother and companion Methodios, and the alphabet still persists. Mirela Ivanova shows that this well-known story is, in fact, a Frankenstein's monster, bolted together from texts which originally attributed quite different and often conflicting meanings to the elements which make up this supposedly unified narrative. In this narrative's place, the book offers a series of new readings of our earliest sources for the alphabet's appearance. In doing so, it constructs a new social history of the early script's fragility, and the ways in which its existence was conditioned by changes in socio-political life between Rome and Constantinople.

With the help of the reader, two detectives search for the letters of the alphabet.

This is the first comprehensive study of Byzantine influence on the art and iconography of East Central Europe and also the first account of the disciplinary development of Byzantine Studies in the Czech and Slovak Republics.