Download or read book Before the Normans written by Barbara M. Kreutz and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-06-07 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.