Introduction

Portraits of Medieval Eastern Europe is, in effect, a prequel to Portraits of Old Russia (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2011). In that book, Marshall Poe and I gathered together brief verbal portraits by noted scholars of imagined lives in Rus’ from 1300 to 1725. In the current volume, Christian Raffensperger and I have done a similar gathering of depictions and expanded the geographical area to Eastern Europe as well as pushing back the date range of the depictions to the period from the 920s to 1401.