Book description
Histories of medieval Europe have typically ignored southern Italy,
looking south only in the Norman period. Yet Southern Italy in the
ninth and tenth centuries was a complex and vibrant world that
deserves to be better understood. In Before the Normans,
Barbara M. Kreutz writes the first modern study in English of the
land, political structures, and cultures of southern Italy in the two
centuries before the Norman conquests. This was a pan-Meditteranean
society, where the Roman past and Lombard-Germanic culture met
Byzantine and Islamic civilization, creating a rich and unusual mix.
Barbara M. Kreutz was Dean Emeritus of the Graduate School of Arts
and Sciences of Bryn Mawr College.
