engleski

The Image of the Slavs in the Medieval Latin Narrative Sources

The paper is aimed at an analysis of a number of medieval narrative source dating from the sixth to the twelfth centuries that were written in the West. The intention is to redress conclusions by previous researchers about the image of the Slavs that these narrative sources conveyed to their respective audiences, as well as to enrich the existing dossier about what type of information the authors were most concerned with and how and to what purposes they constructed their accounts of the Slavs as their stand. The paper also endavors to detect the authors' narrative strategies and ideological backgrounds in relation to the subject of the Slavs, as well as to establish whether the facts that the authors included in their narratives were derived from locally-based knowledge, be it their own personal experience or other contemporaneous source of information at hand, or from the knowledge of previous written accounts, which may even suppose an appropriation of stereotypes from other cultural traditions. To this effect, a comparison with the image of the Slavs in Byzantine sources will also be attempted depending on temporal plans and bearing in mind the possibilities of cultural transmissions. The examination should provide insights into contexts in which the Slavs were mentioned, and whether there was a shift in the interest in and the perception of the Slavs during the early Middle Ages in the West.

Slavs, Latin West, narative sources, Middle Ages

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