The Bosnian Church: Its Place in State and Society from the Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Century

by John Fine

John Fine’s major classic work on the history and nature of the medieval Bosnian Church, which flourished on the fault-line dividing the worlds of Western and Eastern Christianity, is now back in print with an important new introduction.

Based on a wide-ranging and critical use of the extant primary sources, he not only successfully challenges enduring stereotypes and presumptions about the religious and political history of medieval Bosnia, but also reviews and reinterprets the wider context of religion and heresy in South-eastern Europe at the time.

This seminal work has far-reaching implications for our understanding of the entire process of Islamization of early Ottoman Bosnia.

John Fine is Professor of Balkan and Byzantine History at the University of Michigan. His books include The Early Medieval Balkans, The Late Medieval Balkans and Bosnia and Hercegovina: A Tradition Betrayed.

430 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2007

Reviews

[Grof J. Kešetović · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting view of something that most historians are aware but dismiss it quite easily: Bosnian religious streams are directly connected with the people - it is the remoteness and overall ignorance of the population that led to the deterioration of the Church and ecclesial beliefs connected with it. This in turn led the Pope to believe that these lands are full of heathens, patarens, infidels etc. - all in turn leading to label the Bosnian folk with various heretical teachings. What in fact here is the absolute disconnection of religious center with peripheral branches that in times turns the peripheral churches being labeled as non-following and heretic.

Not a bad book but it does have way too many theoretical conclusions that could be interpreted either way.