In three volumes. Edited by Academician S. D. Skazkin (executive editor), L. A. Kotelnikova, and V. I. Rutenburg. 1970. 579 pp. The print run is 19250. Price 2 rubles. 50 kopecks. The history of medieval Italy aroused considerable interest among Russian pre-revolutionary scholars, but it increased especially during the Soviet period1 . Now our literature is being updated with a new generalizing work prepared by the Institute of General History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR - "History of Italy", the first volume of which, covering the period from the fifth to the eighteenth century, has already been published. The authors ' team * took into account both Soviet and foreign, mainly Italian, studies, and used data from many sources. Unlike the bourgeois historians, the authors did not limit themselves to the framework of political history or small excursions into the field of socio-economic development, but drew a comprehensive picture of the history of medieval Italy. The peculiarity of this country - the lack of straightforwardness and uniformity of its development-determined the features of the presentation of the material: the authors do not so much strive to give a consistent description of events as to reveal in each of the chapters the core problem of a particular era (p. 7). Adhering to this principle, the editors entrusted the writing of individual chapters to those scientists who specifically deal with this problem, by preserving the overall proofs and conclusions of each of them. Therefore, as the preface points out, "in some cases, different points of view may clash" (p.7). The leading problems of Italian history include, first of all, the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages. In its treatment of this question, modern bourgeois medieval studies, as a rule, adheres to the "theory of continuity" - the continuity of development from ancient or ancient Germanic orders to feudal ones. This theory is strongly opposed by Soviet Medievalists .2 The ... Читать далее