reviews 547 'theSlovaks in opposition toBratislava were mortgaging the lifeof the nation; theywere asking their countrymen to turn the clock back to 1920 and accept the Czechoslovak option once more, an option that meant a state organised strictlyon Czech terms' (p. 208). Moreover, Kirschbaum is less than honest about the personnel of the First Slovak Republic. In speaking about Vojtech or Bela Tuka, for example, there ismerely a fleeting reference to his having received funds from irredentist Hungary in 1929; it says nothing about the documents retrieved from Hungary after thewar showing thatTuka was in the pay of the Irredenta and that his goal was, not an independent Slovakia, but a restored Greater Hungary. Equally, Kirschbaum isdishonest about his own fatherJozef, who was head of the students' division of the notorious Hlinka Guard which was based on the Italian Fascist Blackshirts. He does not once mention their relationship, though he quotes approvingly from Joseph M.' Kirschbaum, theCanadian Slovak historian. Judicious use of the index will, however, reveal that these men are one and the same. As for the originality of this new edition, thiswould seem to reside in an additional chapter called 'The Return toEurope'. Although newer works pub lished since 1995 by Laszlo Kontler on Hungary (2002), Kieran Williams on Prague Spring (1997) and Abby Innes on the 'Velvet Divorce' (2001) feature in the index, there is no evidence at all that they have informed the text. Indeed, on Hungary Kirschbaum prefers to use the much older work of C. A. Macartney (1937, and a reprint of 1962). In short, this isa book to be used with extreme caution, given itspolemical intent and content. Richmond,Surrey Maria Dowling Chekin, Leonid S. Northern Eurasia inMedieval Cartography:Inventory, Text, Translation and Commentary. Terrarum Orbis: History of the Representation of Space and Text and Image, 4. Brepols, Turnhout, 2006. 498 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Glossaries. Gazetteer. Bibliography. Indexes. 80.00. This book was initially published in Russian as Kartografiia khristianskogo srednevekov'ia (Moscow, 1999), a volume in the seriesDrevneishie istochniki po istorii Vostochnoi Evropy, which began to appear in 1977. The present volume presents an analysis of 198 Western European and Byzantine early medieval (eighth to thirteenth-century)maps which include the territories of ancient Scythia (corresponding to present-day Scandinavia, Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia). To medieval geographers Scythia represented the edge of the known world, the furthest regions of northern and north-eastern Eurasia. It was a territoryassociated in themedieval mind with a host of negative images and eschatological expectations, as a land of danger and evil fromwhich both present menaces (theNorthmen, theMongols) and future catastrophes (the legendary tribesofGog andMagog who would emerge to laywaste theworld) emanated. To themedieval mind world maps were less useful tools by which 548 seer, 86, 3, july 2008 to determine relative and absolute location than they were symbolic represen tations ofhuman history and cosmic destiny. In this sense, then,medieval maps may tell us more about what Western Europeans and Byzantines thought of those regions in a theological and world-historical sense than about what theyknew of them geographically. Despite this symbolic function ofmedieval maps (which isdiscussed in the book's introduction),maps did have some kind of basis in actual geography and it is this which provides the focus for thisvolume. The maps collected here are classified not according to their form or to the position of the inhabited world in relation to the globe or universe, but according to their structure and nomenclature, since the main purpose is to evaluate each map as a source for the history of northern Eurasia. In the case of certain maps, an important con sideration is the context inwhich they firstappeared, since many served as illustrations tovarious kinds of narrative work where theirposition in thework and the character of the textmight influence themap and where themap itself might be revised through various editions of the text.On these consider ations themaps in thisvolume are classified into fifteengroups ? some on the basis of theirnomenclature (derived fromLucan's Pharsalia or Sallust's War of Jugurtha), some on their structure (T maps, maps with four gulfs,maps with detailed coastlines), and some on their manuscript context (for example, those...