Slavic Civilizations. A Book Review of Francis Dvornik’s The Slavs in European History and Civilization

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A Book Review of Francis Dvornik’s The Slavs in European History and Civilization
Francis Dvornik’s The Slavs in European History and Civilization was published in New Brunswick by Rutgers University Press on May 1, 1962, and comprises 724 pages. The book is written by a Czech priest who is also a Harvard professor of Byzantine history. It expands on a Harvard class on Slavic history at the end of the 1950s and covers a considerable chronological period of time, from the middles ages into the early modern period. The Slavs in European History and Civilization is also a sequel to Dvornik’s previous work, The Slavs: Their Early History and Civilization that was published in 1956, and to some varying extent, his other book, The Making of Central and Eastern Europe that was printed in 1949. While earlier works only contained the history and civilization of Slavs up to the 13th century, the present book continues its study of the subject up to the 17th century. It embraces the history of Eastern Europe, including Slavic and non-Slavic Eastern Europe, based on the historical treatment of Slavic provinces as an organic unity.
The voluminous book is a scholarly work that thoroughly covers the history of Slavic politics, culture, international relations, and religion from the 13th through the 17th century. Dvornik presents Slav history in a chronological manner, starting with their emergence in Europe in the middle ages and concluding with a discussion of the Russian empire along with the Slavic world in the early modern period. The title is accurate since the book covers the political organization of feudal Slavic states, their interactions with neighboring peoples, as well as their social and cultural developments over the centuries up to Imperial Russia. Dvornik discusses every branch of the Slavs from the eastern to the west to the southern, with special consideration to their interweaving relationships and historical fates. Dvornik’s mastery of Slavic history is impressive, as demonstrated by the immense scope of time and geography covered in the book.
The volume’s contents are also divided into themes. For instance, certain chapters are devoted towards evaluating the origins of Slav civilization, others on describing religious history in specific economic and political contexts, others on the cultural achievements of Slavic medieval, and etcetera. Dvornik based his inquests on a broad array of firsthand documentation, citing numerous original sources and academic monographs in various dialects, including Rumanian. The impressively assembled sources are accompanied by a myriad of footnotes. One of the book’s critical features is the extensive bibliography after every chapter, which lists both the source material and available literature. Even though the bibliography does not include Hungarian and Slavic dialects, this deficiency is compensated by its comprehensive annotations after every chapter where pertinent literature, frequently in Slavic languages, is provided and conferred. The volume’s first-rate index, accompanied by its distinctive bibliography, make it a valuable reference work. Moreover, the book contains six maps, quite a few pages of pronunciation and transliteration tables along dynastic lists for the reader keen on penetrati...