This monograph is a valuable addition to the scholarly literature on the challenging and important topic of slavery in early medieval Europe. Janel Fontaine makes slaving (= ‘slave trading’) central to her study, albeit as the axis of exposition that also informatively addresses essential correlates such as methods of enslavement and the range of conditions in which slaves lived. She concentrates comparatively on two major slave trading networks of the Early Middle Ages: the ninth and tenth centuries ad, above all Britain, Ireland and the ‘Viking’ North Atlantic; and the proto-Czech state of Great Moravia with its connections west and east across the Continent, and southwards to Venice, the Adriatic and the Caliphate.

What I found the most illuminating feature of this book is its strength in laying out recurrent – perhaps even constant – components of a practical framework within which past slavery can be examined and understood. To say so is not to impute any shortfall in dealing with the empirical details of relevant historical evidence from the study areas, which in fact emerge ever more substantially in a cumulative manner as the work successively approaches the data in light of a series of aspects: the relationship between free and unfree classes within societies and those societies’ involvement in external slave trading; a diversity of ways in which people became tradable slaves; and how changing ‘global’ circumstances could create a surge in demand for slaves in long-distance trading systems. Chapter 5, for example, starting with a focus on ‘small-scale’ trading systems, skilfully coordinates the largely eighth-century wīc sites of the Channel and North Sea and monetisation with the growing social weight of the Church – although more could be made there of male youths acquired specifically for conversion and mission. That chapter proceeds to a calm but firm account of exaggerated and clearly antisemitic yet not utterly fictitious allegations of Jewish merchants acting as slavers in central Europe. The reciprocal impact of the whole pattern of circumstances on the communities involved at the supply end or within the supply chain is reflected upon in the final chapter on ‘Slavery and power’, which offers a powerful statement of how enrichment and social power were the primary motive forces for slavers to feed a slave trade, while wide-scale politico-economic factors fundamentally underlie specific variance in the practices of slaving.

One might reasonably suppose such conclusions to have been able to go so much without saying as to appear an anticlimax, but that would fail to acknowledge keen matters of present contention in approaches to and representations of slavery in history. Fontaine’s assessment concurs powerfully with equally strong recent work by Alice Rio (Rio Reference Rio2017, Reference Rio2024), although complementary in focus; Rio’s studies are more functionalist in approach, and give a perspective on the phenomenon described from within the societies concerned rather than viewed from the outside, if not from above, against a more general structure. There is one additional, complementary facet I suggest now merits serious attention. The challenges of gleaning information on past slavery from documents that deal with the subject only partially or obliquely, or from archaeological evidence that is at best sparse and ambiguous, are carefully dealt with in this recent scholarship in a way that treats such sources forensically, as problematic clues to a largely obscured truth. Other studies, meanwhile, have indicated the potential for treating hagiographical, fictional, politico-legal and bureaucratic sources collectively as expressions of ideologies in which slavery – and indeed anti-slavery – was a regular Leitmotiv because such attitudes themselves played a dynamic cultural role (eg Pelteret Reference Pelteret1995, esp. 50–79; Wyatt Reference Wyatt2009, 1–60). Giving that proposition full rein could complete an investigative framework that would support fully comparative studies of slavery and slaving systems in all historical and contemporary contexts, not least by also requiring reflexive critical attention to how propositions and tropes are conveyed in museum and gallery contexts, besides academic publications.