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‘Fragments of Cultural History’? Recent work on south-east European cultural history *
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2016
Extract
In his review of Jean-Baptiste Duroselle’s ‘Europe. A History of Its Peoples’, Paschalis Kitromilides lamented that in most general accounts, Europe has been reduced to a history of Visigothic Europe. In these two volumes reflecting his oeuvre until 1994 — one a valuable monograph on a crucial figure of the Balkan Enlightenment, the other an updated collection of essays written in the course of fifteen years and covering some of the central processes of the past two centuries — Kitromilides is rectifying this short-sighted view of Europe. What he shows is a Europe as a common playground of ideas where elements from the core regions are transmitted and transformed to other, adjacent and peripheral territories. His focus is on the Balkans (or Southeastern Europe in his preferred nomenclature). What he also shows admirably is the reverse relationship of core and periphery in scholarship. Even good scholars of the core are parochial in their exclusive confinement to the centre. Conversely, good scholars of the Balkan region are, as a rule, deeply knowledgeable and conversant with ideas and trends outside their immediate geographic sphere of expertise (immensely complex in itself). Paschalis Kitromilides happens to be not simply among the good scholars of and from Southeastern Europe; he is one of the best.
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- Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 1998
References
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2. Enlightenment, Nationalism, Orthodoxy, Preface, XIII.
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4. Ibid., I, 61.
5. Ibid., I, 65. On the embattled position of liberalism in the Balkans, see also ‘Modernisation as an Ideological Dilemma in Southeastern Europe: from National Revival to Liberal Reconstruction’, and ‘The Dialectic of Intolerance: Ideological Dimensions of Ethnic Conflict’, Enlightenment X (1993), XII (1979).
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