A Companion to the Global Early Middle Ages

Erik Hermans (PhD, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU) is an independent scholar, currently based in Washington, DC.

Although this is a book about global history its contributors frequently place the global in conversation with regional histories. This approach offers helpful methodological lessons for Europeanists asking "what can the global do for me"? Likewise, the Europeanist who always wanted to know more about faraway places but was too afraid to ask will benefit from the synthetic orientation of the chapters with their up-to-date bibliographies. These are useful gateways for further research. But the book can be used also as a teaching resource. [...] The book is an asset for university lecturers who previously struggled to identify introductory readings for students taking global history modules focused on the first millennium AD. It renders accessible a comprehensive set of themes and places that have hitherto been available only in separate publications with their discrete scholarly priorities and often irreconcilable linguistic conventions. Exhibiting more consistency in relation to these matters, this volume can form the centrepiece (or textbook) of an undergraduate course on global history in this period.

David S. Bachrach:
The present volume, therefore, is exceptionally welcome in that it brings together research by scholars with specialities in a very wide range of geo-political contexts and academic traditions. The decision by Erik Hermans, the editor of this volume, to limit its scope to the relatively brief period of c. 600 AD to c. 900 AD, has also proven quite fortuitous in that many of the essays provide overlapping coverage of the same questions and phenomena, but from different geo-political perspectives.[...] Overall, this is an exceptionally valuable volume, which will be of use to scholars across a wide sweep of fields. Many of the individual essays also will provide an easily accessible entrée to the political histories of non-western societies to graduate and even undergraduate students.