This is an extremely important book that makes a major contribution both to South Slavic history and to the debate on the modernity of the nation. This massive work surveys all the printed, pre-1800 primary sources produced either in Croatia, Dalmatia, or Slavonia or by neighboring peoples. Its goal is to document how the literate in these areas characterized themselves and their language or how their neighbors characterized them. The book's thoroughness and erudition bolster its arguments and outweigh its flaws, which are primarily flaws of presentation.

Contrary to modern nationalists' projection of a millennial history of self-conscious Croats, John Fine concludes that from the Middle Ages until 1800, a number of terms were used to describe the people and language in this area. These terms were primarily “Slavs/Slavic,” “Illyrians/Illyrian,” “Dalmatians/Dalmatian,” “Croats/Croatian,” but also “Slavonians/Slavonian,” with the language sometimes even designated as “Bosnian.” While the mix of terms might vary with the era and with the author, the designation “Croat” was always among the least likely (self-)appellations. In the Middle Ages, the term “Slav” was most common, while in the early modern era “Illyrian” came to vie with it. While initially the term “Illyrian” was more likely in Latin-language documents, with a translation as “Slav” in what the author calls “proto-Serbo-Croatian,” by the eighteenth century “Illyrian” would appear in Slavic-language documents, too. The term “Croat” also became more common but not dominant by the eighteenth century.

The groups to which these various terms applied, according to Fine, differed with time and author as well. However named, “us” (or “them”) might at one extreme include solely the inhabitants of one Dalmatian city or the speakers of only one of the major dialects of modern Serbo-Croatian. At the other extreme, the group might extend to all Catholic South Slavs, all South Slavs—whether Catholic or Orthodox—or even all Slavs. The term “Illyrian,” for example, might include or exclude some or all of modern Serbs, Bulgars, and Slovenes. The term “Croat” might sometimes include only speakers of the čakavian dialect and exclude kajkavian dialect speakers. At other times and among other authors, the situation was exactly the opposite. The complex dialectical base of South Slavic languages, which rarely coincided with political boundaries, could even lead to those from the coast who spoke štokavian considering themselves “Dalmatians” but their language “Bosnian.”

Anyone who deals with the premodern history of what is now Croatia will need to confront Fine's overwhelming evidence. Historians will no longer be able to talk of “Croats” as self-conscious historical actors. Even canonic national heroes like Pavao Ritter Vitezović (1652–1713) did not have a modern Croat consciousness. According to Fine, Vitezović used “Croat” much more than “Slav” or “Illyrian” only later in his life, but he continued to use all three terms and, although he “has a developing ethnic feeling … it is usually inclusive, encompassing all the proto-Serbo-Croatian speakers … [for whom] the term he used most frequently was ‘Illyrian’” (492).

Historians of nineteenth-century South Slavs from now on will also need to heed Fine's arguments. If he is correct—as I think he is—then the Croatian national movement, the so-called Illyrian movement, appeared out of a centuries-long tradition of “Illyrian” feeling. At a minimum, discussions about the failure of the broad sense of nationhood of the Illyrianists and their Yugoslavist successors in Croatia will have to be rethought. Far from being out of touch with reality, their conception of nationhood accorded with what seems to have been the dominant literate tradition. Why, then, was it unable to penetrate broader popular consciousness as successfully as a narrower Croat identity?

Finally, Fine's evidence should be of use in the debate over the modernity of the nation. His findings clearly support the modernist position dominant among theorists. But, although he claims in his bibliography to “have read the classics and other works of ethnicity/nationalism literature” (569), there are only rare references in his text to these works or their ideas. The “ethnicity” of his title seems to be that of colloquial American English, not the sense of nation as found in most of the theoretical literature. He does not even mention the antimodernist Adrian Hastings, whose Construction of Nationhood (1997) argues for a medieval sense of nation found among many Europeans, including precisely the Croats about whom Hastings, unlike Fine, actually knows very little.

One wonders, too, whether Fine's manner of presentation of his evidence will distract readers. This book reads almost like a parody of nineteenth-century positivist history, moving chronologically from document to document, summarizing what each has to contribute to the issue of identity. Perhaps this is unavoidable since Fine's strength is precisely the return to the primary sources, read without the filter of a modern Croatian national consciousness. In places, however, the book reads almost like a draft. He seems to have been ill served by a press that should have provided better editorial help. As hard as it might be to read this important work, the results are fully worth the effort.