Download PDF | Mirela Ivanova - Inventing Slavonic_ Cultures of Writing Between Rome and Constantinople (Oxford Studies in Byzantium)-OUP Oxford (2024).
295 Pages
Acknowledgements
If it takes a village to raise a person, it takes at least a university town to write an academic book. This book emerged as a doctoral thesis, but its final shape is the product of countless conversations, recommendations, serendipitous moments of realisation, and a lifetime of reading and thinking with others. I wish I could acknowledge everyone on this journey but naming them may well exceed the length of this manuscript, so I will limit myself as much as I can.
This is in many ways a book about words, so I must begin by thanking Greig City Academy, where my love of words was born and fostered by the generosity of some inspiring teachers. James Murphy, Lucy Helan, and Damilola Ajagbonna taught me to read and think, whilst Jon Holt created an environment where that was possible. I will always have the late Mark Whittow’s charm and brilliance to thank for leading me to the world of Byzantine studies. It was only in the third year of my undergraduate degree that I realised the part of the world I came from was a legitimate object of study. His class trained me to read sources rigorously, but also taught me that nothing is worth doing if you forget to have a wild and wicked time. He is still sorely missed in our community but it is my hope that this book is part of his legacy, along with the work of everyone else he inspired.
I had the fortune and privilege to conceive of this book and develop it under the guidance of Catherine Holmes and Jonathan Shepard. They both gave so much to this project and to me as a young scholar. Whilst I miss our regular meetings and their meticulous standards of scholarship, these will always permeate my work. I simply cannot thank them enough. At Oxford, many others helped me by patiently reading clunky drafts of this book or offering helpful guidance to misguided questions. I am grateful to them all: Phil Booth, Helen Gittos, Elizabeth Jeffreys, Marc Lauxtermann, Conrad Leyser, and Efthymios Rizos.
I must also thank my friends, comrades, and colleagues Alex Vukovich, Matthew Kinloch, and Nik Matheou for various adventures across the Mediterranean and for many years of reading and talking about theory and method. This was first done informally and later under the auspices of the network ‘New Critical Approaches to the Byzantine World’, together with Hugh Jeffrey, Sophie Moore, and Jules Gleeson. Whatever method there is in this book was forged in our conversations. This is also a book about language, and it would not have been possible without the brilliant language instruction I received as a graduate student. Mary Whitby taught me all the Greek grammar that I know (or ever knew).
Ida Toth taught me how little the Byzantines were troubled by grammar. Michael Featherstone and, later, James Howard-Johnston patiently read with me in return for little more than gossip. I thank Catherine Mary MacRobert for the years of reading Slavonic with me, as well as her assistance with questions about language and translation since. Thanks also to Anna-Maria Totomanova for giving me access to online resources for Old Slavonic at the University of Sofia. The Hilandar Research Library at Ohio State University and the monks of the Hilandar Monastery granted me access to their collection, and Mary Allen (Pasha) Johnson helped me navigate it. Florin Curta’s bibliographical help was crucial to this project; his resource-gathering across languages is unparalleled. My doctoral examiners, Julia Smith and Simon Franklin, read my work with generosity and interest. They made this in every way a better book, and Julia’s graduate mentorship made me in every way a better scholar. Anthony Kaldellis and Yulia Minets both read parts of the book from afar, bringing important insights and perspectives.
I thank the anonymous reviewers at Oxford University Press for their thorough comments, and the Oxford Studies in Byzantium Board and Charlotte Loveridge for taking on this book. Two parts of this book have appeared in print before. Parts of Chapter 2 first saw light of day as: ‘Re-Thinking the Life of Constantine-Cyril the Philosopher’, The Slavonic and East European Review, 98 (2020), pp. 434–63. Parts of Chapter 5 appeared in: ‘Inventing and Ethnicisizing Slavonic in the Long Ninth Century’, Journal of Medieval History, 47 (2021), pp. 574–86. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers of both, who helped make these better articles but also in turn improved this book and to both journals for letting me print some of these articles’ findings here. I am also grateful to the Early Slavic Studies Association for awarding the latter their Article Prize in 2022. Whilst conceived in Oxford, this book’s later phases of writing and rewriting were done itinerantly, in the spirit of some of its protagonists. I thank Koç University’s Centre for the Study of Anatolian Civilization in Istanbul. My fellowship there let me prepare the initial manuscript on the glorious Bosporus, in the City of Cities.
The post-peer review drafting began as a fellow at the Centre of Advanced Study in Sofia, often in the suitably named Saint Cyril and Methodios National Library. The book was finally completed in my new home, the University of Sheffield, where I must thank my colleagues for the warm welcome, and Charles West for being the last person to read this manuscript (aside from its meticulous copy editor at OUP). On seven hills, Sheffield is well-known as the Rome of South Yorkshire. Suitably, then, this book was completed between Rome and Constantinople. To quote the Gospel of Matthew (4:4), however, ‘(wo)man shall not live by (medieval historical) bread alone’. And this book is as much the product of the vibrant historical communities I found myself in, as it is of the care, support, and intellectual stimulation of my loved ones.
I have been spoiled when it comes to brilliant people. Rachel, Olivia, Beth, Justine, Xavier, Emma, Sarah, Dave, and Elspeth have each in their own unique way nourished, held, nurtured, supported, or challenged me. Jack has moved and inspired me. Kez has helped me be and become. Josh is a part of how I see the world. I am thankful and excited to share my life with you all. My deepest gratitude to the sumaiak of balıklar, the slon of slons, who has made it seem, even at the worst of times, that all of this: this work, this world so full of sound and fury, signifies something. Ed, you are my home. Finally, this book is dedicated my mother, who gave me everything. I am sorry that I have nothing better to give you back. January 2023 Sheffield
Note on Transliteration
Transliteration is a necessary evil when working across alphabets and languages, and it is always fallible and imperfect. The aims of my practice are firstly ease, and secondly consistency. I have used the Library of Congress guide without diacritics for Slavonic when rendering scholars’ names or titles of works in the footnotes and bibliography. This does leave some things unclear: ‘u’ represents both ‘у’ and the Bulgarian hard ‘ъ’; ‘i’ represents both ‘и’ and the soft ‘й’. It also often leads to rendering the names of scholars, especially from the Balkans, in ways that they themselves would not: Khristo instead of Hristo, Giuzelev instead of Gjuzelev. When citing names in the main body of text or giving names to texts myself, I have opted for commonly accepted anglicised spellings for Slavonic proper nouns, partly because the alternative would be to choose to transliterate one national spelling over and above another. So, the reader will find ConstantineCyril and Methodios instead of Konstantin-Cyril and Metoděj (Czech), Konstantin-Ciril and Metod (Slovak), Konstantin-Ćirilo and Metodije (Serbian), Konstantin-Kiril and Metodii (Bulgarian), Konstantin-Kiril and Metodij (Macedonian), or Konstantin-Kirill and Mefodii (Russian). But when citing the original publication in footnotes or bibliography, I have transliterated faithfully from the author’s own language. So, one may find Methodios in the main text but Metoděj, Metod, Metodije, or Mefodii in a footnote. For Greek I also use the Library of Congress guide when transliterating words or phrases, and I retain markers to distinguish between short and long vowels.
When citing names or proper nouns in the main body of text or shorthand names I have given to texts, however, I have followed the transliteration of the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium: so Theodoros rather than Theodorus, Photios rather than Photius. When citing the original publication in the footnotes, I have rendered it as the author themselves did, should the reader need to find the publication in an inflexible library catalogue, so at times Niketas in the main text is found as Nicetas in a footnote. Working across different scholarly fields and different textual genres also comes with their different practices of referring to primary sources. I do not claim to resolve the inconsistent practices across these, but simply to stick to the conventions of each field as I have found them and accept some inevitable inconsistency in my own approach. I usually refer to the editions of Greek-language chronicles and hagiographies, using the chapter numbers and line numbers assigned by their editors. Only if neither of these is available do I turn to page numbers.
I refer to the editions of Latin-language hagiographies using only the chapter numbers, as line numbers are far less frequent across Latin editions and rarely transferred into translations. When citing Latin-language annals, I use the year of the entry. I cite short Greek and Latin letters using page numbers only, but long letters usually are divided into chapter by editors, so I give those. For texts surviving in Slavonic, I use both chapter numbers and lines if available, and page numbers only if not. When referring to a text which has been translated in the main body of text, I give both the edition and translation in the first footnote, and then simply refer to the text’s title and chapter number henceforth to refer to both the original and translated text. However, when the text I am citing is central to the argument and is quoted at length in an indented quote, I give a separate footnote to indicate the source of the translation. Any indented English left unmarked is therefore my own.
Introduction
Few alphabets in the world are actively celebrated, none more so than the Slavonic. The alphabet and its legendary inventors, Cyril and Methodios, are commemorated annually on the Day of the Slavonic Alphabet and Culture on 24 May in the Orthodox world, and 5 July in the Catholic world, and statues, churches, schools, and streets bearing the brothers’ names or likeness saturate the Central and Eastern European landscape. This book offers a new reading of the invention of the alphabet and its implications. It is the first intellectual history of the earliest narratives of the invention of the Slavonic alphabet. What this means is that it approaches these texts as intellectual monuments which sought to make specific contributions to contemporary political contexts, and not as sources of historical fact to be assessed or verified. Its principal contribution is twofold.
The first argument takes up less space and concerns modern historiography.1 But it is no less essential. I maintain that a critical engagement with medieval sources is not possible without a critical engagement with the history of scholarship which makes the texts we approach always-already read.2 The relationship between politics, popular discourse, and medieval history in Central and Eastern Europe is stronger and more pertinent than elsewhere in Europe at the very least.3 The day of the Slavonic Alphabet and Culture is often a large state- and churchfunded national holiday (see Figure 1). National academies are frequently given extra funding to produce anniversary volumes on medieval figures or events. In 2016, on the anniversary of the death of the Cyrillo-Methodian disciple Clement of Ohrid, the Macedonian Academy of Science organised an international conference in Ohrid which opened with a presidential address, followed by an address by the mayor of Ohrid, both of which feature in the subsequent academic publication.4
In 2017, the Bulgarian state celebrated 1,100 years since the battle of Achelous (now Akheloi), where according to Greek chronicles, Tsar Symeon defeated Byzantine troops. The celebrations of this medieval victory included a historical re-enactment of the battle at a field identified as the battleground, and were attended by the Mayor of the Region of Pomorie, the Mayor of the City of Akheloi, and the President of Bulgaria.5 Medieval conferences are often politicised by their close interaction with the state. In 2016, the 23rd International Congress of Byzantine Studies in Belgrade, Serbia was opened by a presidential address. The then president, Tomislav Nikolić, called upon international scholars to denounce the legitimacy of the state of Kosovo’s claim to the monasteries in their territory, comparing the citizens of Kosovo to the ‘infidels’ (‘неверника’) of the Ottoman empire who conquered Constantinople.6 This was filmed and screened on national Serbian television. The day ended with a reception at the presidential palace. The next congress, due to happen in Istanbul in 2021, was moved to co-hosts Venice and Padua in 2022, after Byzantinists’ international outcry at the conversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque. The president of the International Association of Byzantine Studies, John Haldon, tried to single-handedly reverse this decision by writing a letter directly addressed to Turkish president Recep Erdoğan.7 The entry or attempted entry of various Central and Eastern European countries into the European Union has also affected the ways in which scholars have framed their medieval object of study. Since its 2013 entry into the EU, Croatia’s medieval scholarship, for example, has begun to frame the region not as part of the Balkans or a Byzantine Commonwealth, but as the south-eastern frontier of the Carolingian (and therefore Western European) world.8 Elsewhere, the word Europe has become ever more ubiquitous in volumes on Cyril, Methodios, Moravia, and their disciples.9 This will be elaborated upon throughout the book. I argue that a stable and fossilised story can be found in the modern scholarship and popular common-sense about Cyril, his brother and companion Methodios, and the alphabet.10 This has produced what Patrick Geary calls ‘a moment of primary acquisition’, a ‘primordial moment’ of the birth of Slavonic culture which exists almost ‘outside the domain of history’.11 In brief, this account sees the invention of Slavonic as an act which unified Slavs and liberated them from others. It was achieved by a sacred brotherly pair, Cyril and Methodios, who were apostles to the Slavs and united in their mission to Moravia, a short-lived kingdom in modern-day Central Europe. After the expulsion of the CyrilloMethodian students from Moravia, the alphabet arrived in Bulgaria, where it was preserved by the Bulgarian state and especially its ruler Symeon (ca. 893–927) before making its way to the Slavonic speakers of the north-east, modern-day Ukraine, Russia, and the Baltics. I argue not so much that any of these individual statements about facts is wrong, as that they have been put together by combining sources with profoundly different agendas, to serve a wider, politically significant, and commonly accepted contemporary narrative about the invention of Slavonic. In doing so, I show that the coherent picture painted by modern scholarship is in fact a Frankenstein’s monster, bolted together from texts which originally attributed quite different, often conflicting meanings to the elements which make up this supposedly unified narrative. By identifying and disentangling the constituent parts of this common-sense narrative, this book is then able to excavate and critically assess the underlying assumptions that have permitted modern scholarship to forge these disparate parts into a supposed whole. These positions are rarely explicitly expressed or formulated in the works I cite. The teasing out of these positions and of how they manifest themselves in the scholarship of each text, is itself part of the intellectualhistorical analysis of this study, and it is as much its purpose as it is to offer new readings of the medieval texts and new arguments about their relationship to the medieval past. The second argument which takes up the bulk of this book is about medieval history and is alluded to in my title: that Slavonic was not invented once, but underwent a process of inventing and reinventing, in profound ways, over the course of its first century of existence, ca. 870–950. What I mean by Slavonic is intentionally broad and ambiguous. In part, I refer to the alphabets used to record Slavonic languages in the early Middle Ages. I want to encompass both scripts which survive from the period, since both Cyrillic and Glagolitic changed in their shape and use, and since our texts never specify which alphabet they are referring to when they narrate the invention. But this book also explores the change and reinvention of Slavonic as an ethnic, linguistic, and personal identity. Throughout the period under consideration, what it meant to be a Slavonic speaker and a Slav was also being contested, and our surviving texts testify to the diverse ideas and possibilities of the label. So this book seeks to unpick these processes of invention, rather than examine a specific immutable object, whether that be the Slavonic script or a Slavonic ethnicity. It posits that the script, its inventor, Cyril, and his brother and companion Methodios, were all repeatedly reconceptualised. Quite unlike modern historiography, there was no settled hegemonic account of the invention of the alphabet in the ninth and tenth centuries, but rather a number of competing and contradictory proposals produced in response to a series of fluctuating sociopolitical circumstances. Over the course of this period, a number of the key features of the modern narrative of the invention of Slavonic emerged in individual texts. But when they did, they emerged as specific responses to contemporary problems, and often at the expense of rather than as a supplement to earlier narratives. No medieval text bears the Cyril and Methodios story of modern historiography. But what they do offer us is a new history of the efforts of literate communities to bring about changes in their sociopolitical circumstances through the production of texts, and in particular through attempts to mobilise the new alphabet to concrete political ends. I refer to these efforts as ‘cultures of writing’ in the title to capture two things. The first is the inheritance of Greek and Latin written culture which fed into the early Slavonic-speaking translations and texts: much of this book is made up of analysis of sources and citations from Greek and Latin. The second is the creative efforts of the textual communities which produced my texts: namely, the cultures they sought to bring into being. Cultures of writing, therefore, here means both the written cultures one inherits and the real cultural practices out there in the world one seeks to produce. In proposing this history of reinvention, I seek to shift the study about Cyril and Methodios away from the intra-national(ist) disagreements which have plagued historiography (was Cyril Bulgarian or Macedonian? Did the brothers translate into Czech or Slovak?), and to integrate the birth of Slavonic and the texts which narrate it firmly into the wider history of writing and its relationship to power in the early medieval world. This wider field, therefore, and not the concerns of nationalist historiography, informs the underlying assumptions about writing with which I have approached the sources of this book. I outline these starting points, and how they differ from scholarship on Slavonic in what follows.
Inventing Writing
One of the key pillars of scholarship on the history of literacy has been the understanding that new literacies are fragile, and have no guaranteed success. In a world where the technology of writing is already available, however small the reach of literacy, a new script has no internal drive. Separate from its situatedness in the sociopolitical landscape it is an empty signifier. To succeed, it requires some temporary alignment of the interests of various individuals, communities, and institutions which may otherwise have opposing agendas. Furthermore, no language requires its own, designated alphabet. Alphabets rise and fall much more readily than languages do.12 These may seem like banal observations, but they are nowhere to be found in the scholarship on Slavonic, where the idea that the Slavs needed a Slavonic alphabet in the ninth century, has remained unquestioned, despite the fact that many Slavonic nations today use the Latin script. A second observation central to literacy studies, and in particular the so-called ‘ideological model’ of literacy, which sees writing as embedded in social practices and structures, is the idea that writing itself is not inherently a good thing.13 It is only as liberating or oppressive as its users. More often than not, and certainly in the Middle Ages when the custodians of writing were those with access to institutional power and wealth, writing was firmly integrated in and used towards maintaining existing inequalities. That is not to say that it could not be used for resistance in what Mark Amsler calls ‘unruly textualities’, but simply that it often was not, and one has to look carefully to find out.14 This observation too, has bypassed scholarship on Slavonic, which has almost unequivocally accepted that the Slavonic alphabet was indeed a good thing for the Slavs. Diana Mishkova’s apt summary of twentieth-century Slavonic historiography on the letters, for example, notes that it was widely accepted that ‘the literature created in this script [i.e. Slavonic] was of a genuinely democratic character since the broad masses could avail themselves of it in their fight against class and national oppressors’.15 So much is made clear in the relentless modern celebration of the inventors across Eastern Europe. Throughout this book, I seek to resist taking this assumption for granted by assessing the various ways Slavonic speakers were evoked and caricatured in our earliest texts. Perhaps unsurprisingly from the vantage point of literacy studies, our literate authors’ agendas (although they were Slavonic speakers themselves) did not always have the illiterate and subaltern Slavonic people’s best interests at heart. By trying to move away from the medieval Slavonic ethnos or nation as unit of analysis, and towards more granular individuals and institutions, I argue in Chapter 9, for example, that it was perfectly possible to be a Slavonic speaker and to resist or choose not to use the Slavonic alphabet in the ninth and tenth centuries, just as it is today, if Serbian, Bulgarian, and Russian young people’s social media alphabet practices are anything to go by. Finally, recent scholarship on the history of writing and literacy has tended to maintain a distinction between the histories of the practice of writing in early literate societies, and the myths recording the origins of various scripts. The two have often been collapsed in the study of Slavonic, so it is worth teasing them out. On the one hand, therefore, are studies of complex sociopolitical processes, involving multiple actors with different agendas for utilising writing and their written output in charters, documents, graffiti, and the like.16 Such studies have remained attuned to the possibility that all the ground gained by a particular script can at any point be lost or reversed, as the social context in which this writing was embedded fluctuated.17 This kind of pragmatic study which seeks to measure literacy or catalogue its spread is not the kind of study this book attempts, but it nonetheless has much to offer to those who are interested in such questions. On the other hand, there sits the study of the pre-modern accounts of the origins of writing, which is this book’s primary concern. These kinds of mythical texts are conspicuously lacking in complex and multiple agencies, fragility, and contingency. To the contrary, as societies reorganised their pasts to serve, explain, or represent their contemporary concerns, earlier processes of invention, adoption, and adaptation, became fossilised in what anthropologist Maurice Halbwachs has called ‘figures of memory’.18 In the words of Halbwachs, ‘if a truth is to be settled in the memory of a group it needs to be presented in the concrete form of an event, of a personality, or of a locality’.19 This is nowhere truer than in the case of the invention of alphabets or literacies more generally. The complex processes discussed above are often symbolised instead by an uncomplicated event and an individual inventor. In ancient Mesopotamia, amongst the earliest societies to record writing, a Sumerian text notes that the invention of writing was occasioned by an exchange of messages between Enmerkar, the lord of Uruk, and the lord of Aratta, which was too complex for the messenger to remember, so the ruler of Uruk put the words on a clay tablet.20 In Plato’s famous account in the Phaedrus, it was the Egyptian god Thoth who gave the King Ammon the first writing.21 In al-Masudi’s tenth-century Arabic account, most probably sourced from a much earlier text, the prophet Zoroaster created the letters used by ancient Persians.22 In the era of Abrahamic monotheism, as a healthy dose of scepticism towards the written word withered away, these kinds of legendary accounts needed only cosmetic transformation.23 Multiple gods were replaced by various mediators of the one God, either scriptural figures or, in the Christian traditions, saints. In the ninth-century summary of Philostorgius’ Church History, the fourth-century bishop Ulfila was sent to the ruler of the Goths by the emperor Constantnius II (ca. 337–61), and produced an alphabet for them into which he translated scripture.24 In his fifth-century vita, the Armenian bishop Mashtots is tasked with inventing an alphabet by King Vramshapuh (ca. 389–417).25 Whilst he is at it, Mashtots invents alphabets for Georgian and Albanian too. And in the ninth century, which concerns us here, the Life of Cyril records that Emperor Michael III sent Constantine-Cyril to the Slavs, and in course, God revealed the Slavonic letters to the saint. Much like the alphabets whose origins they expose, these narratives are by no means necessary. It is not the case that all societies formulate figures of memory for the invention of their writing system. Whilst one can purchase a Mashtots t-shirt at most Armenian historical sites and at the Yerevan airport today, no single inventor or event dominates ideas about the emergence of the Latin, Greek, or even, despite its otherwise sacred association, the Arabic script.26 Thus, as with the emergence and sustenance of the script itself, the way individuals, communities, or institutions go about recording the invention of theirs or others’ writing systems is always contingent on the specific sociopolitical contexts which occasioned this act of recording. The historian of medieval Japan, David Lurie, has noted that narratives of the origins of writing are ‘highly ideological’ and rarely if ever actually interested in confronting ‘the emergence of something new in the distant past’.27 Stories depicting the origins of writing are always in some sense allegorical, and ‘writing is never invented only once, as it is repeatedly reconceptualized and reorganized when it is adopted and adapted for different purposes’.28 This understanding forms the backbone of the present book and my approach to my sources. This is a book about narratives of the origins of writing, but only insofar as narratives of the origins of writing are never really about the origins of writing.
Inventing Slavonic: Sources for Origins and Textual Practice Whilst the purpose of this book, therefore, is to interrogate the processes which produced competing myths about the origins of writing, it is worth here disaggregating the sources for the emergence of Slavonic. It is in part due to the problems with these sources, that many studies of the emergence of Slavonic have not consciously separated myth-making and practice. This book is for the most part a study of changing ideas about and attitudes towards writing, as they are expressed in the earliest texts concerned with the invention of the Slavonic alphabet and its legendary ninth-century inventor, the Byzantine diplomat, Constantine-Cyril.29 This largely means that I deal here with three myth-making texts, which have rarely been recognised by scholarship as plainly such. The earliest accounts of the invention of the Slavonic alphabet are two hagiographies, the Life of Constantine-Cyril, its inventor, and the Life of Methodios, his brother-cum-companion. On the basis of philological and historical analysis, which I will engage with in more detail throughout the chapters to come, both of these texts have been dated to the late ninth century, within no more than a few decades of the deaths of their eponymous protagonists, sometime between 869 (when Cyril died), 885 (when Methodios died) and, at the latest, 907 (when the region was overrun by Hungarian invasion) and they survive in Slavonic languagemanuscripts only. These texts were written in either Rome or Moravia, a polity whose location remains disputed, but most probably covered territories between modern-day Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia.30 Not much later, another account discussing the Slavonic alphabet’s invention was written. A text, entitled On Letters, attributed to a monk Khrabur, which defends the alphabet against the Greek letters, has been dated to sometime between 907 and 927, not long after the arrival of the alphabet in the Balkans, where the text was most probably written. Although the transmission of these texts is fairly rigid and their contents surprisingly stable, they survive in much later manuscripts.31 There are, in addition, passing mentions of the fact Cyril invented the Slavonic letters in a number of Latin texts. Yet there is a much noted total silence from contemporary Byzantine sources. Some of the contents of the vitae are reiterated and reworked in undated Slavonic homilies and hymns in Cyril and Methodios’ honour. There are also other Slavonic texts, dated to the early tenth-century Balkans through their language or their dedication to Bulgarian rulers, which offer occasional mention of Cyril and Methodios in passing. I use these throughout the book, where possible, as supplementary or contextual evidence. But when it comes to early medieval sources offering a narrative of the actual invention of the Slavonic alphabet from a near-contemporary period, the three texts at the heart of this book are essentially all that we have. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that in its choice of texts this study can hardly claim any novelty. In Vatroslav Jagić’s 1895 collection of extracts and studies, entitled Discussions on the Church Slavonic Language from South Slavonic and Early Rus Sources, the Life of Cyril, the Life of Methodios, and On Letters already had pride of place, making up three out of the first four texts selected.32 Just under a century later, in 1988, Boris Floria, produced an influential overview of the field and translation into Russian of what he calls Narratives concerning the Beginning of Slavonic Literacy. He chose the very same three texts to do so: the Life of Cyril, the Life of Methodios, and the treatise On Letters.33 There is something of a paradox in the evidence concerning the invention of Slavonic, however. Whilst in the Life of Cyril and Life of Methodios, the alphabet comes into being thanks to the request of the Moravian polity, and its earliest use is in Moravia, where Cyril and later Methodios are said to translate scriptural texts, there is in actuality no securely dated manuscript or inscription in Slavonic from late ninth-century Moravia. In fact, there is little evidence there was much writing of any sort in the region, which means any fragment thereof quickly produces scandal. In 2021, a team of archaeological scientists dated a bone which bore Germanic runes and was discovered in what is considered to be a ‘Slavonic settlement’ to the year ca. 600 ad, and termed it the ‘oldest inscription amongst the Slavs’.34 This is a fairly insignificant discovery, used to argue that Slavonic and German speakers coexisted in what was formerly (and unhelpfully) considered purely a Slavonic settlement. Yet, the outrage that followed demonstrates the level of tension inherent in the question of the earliest Slavonic writing. This was amusingly documented in a long-form New York Times investigation with the suitably orientalising title: ‘A Scratched Hint of Ancient Ties Stirs National Furies in Eastern Europe’.35 Runes aside, the closest evidence of the use of a Slavonic alphabet in the region of Moravia is a number of pottery shards with individual symbols, some of which resemble Glagolitic letters, considered to be the earliest alphabet iteration invented by the hand of Cyril.36 These shards were discovered in the early to mid-2000s amongst a huge collection of clay shards found on the Zalavár-Castle Island (over half a million fragments!) and are currently on display in the Hungarian National Museum.37 The shards, found in an early church complex, remain near impossible to date concretely, but are found amongst shards with Greek invocations in Latin letters, a number of crosses, and a symbol often associated with the Turkic god Tengri and also found in early medieval Bulgaria.38 They may therefore be the only material evidence we can associate with the Cyrillo-Methodian mission in Central Europe. A rather different story is told purely from the surviving evidence of the contemporary practice of writing. The earliest explicitly dated Slavonic manuscript is a gospel from early Rus, dated to 1056–7.39 The earliest dated inscription in Slavonic, discovered in 2015, is a funerary inscription bearing the date 921, found in a rock-cut monastery near the north-western Bulgarian village of Krepcha.40 Philologists place the earliest surviving Slavonic manuscripts, which are not internally dated, in the late tenth and early eleventh century, so after the collapse of the Moravian polity where the letters were supposedly invented.41 These are usually gospels or psalters. None of the original translations of Cyril and Methodios, if they even resembled what the lives claim, have survived. Nor have any roughly contemporary manuscripts. A number of other texts, often translations or compilations from Greek, have been at various times associated with Cyril and Methodios’ own hands, or Moravia more generally, but this has remained very speculative, and on a number of occasions a text considered original or Moravian has been discovered to be a compilation of extant Greek texts, or dated to the tenth-century Balkans.42 A more source-rich picture of the use of Slavonic emerges from the tenthcentury Balkans, where the alphabet arrived sometime between the 880s and the 907 collapse of the Moravian polity, and where we can locate the third text which concerns this book, On Letters. In addition to a small corpus of dated inscriptions, the Balkans offer a rich corpus of undated epigraphy in what are most probably tenth-century monastic complexes—this includes both surviving alphabets that record Slavonic, the Glagolitic, and the Cyrillic. The aforementioned corpus of translations and a smaller set of short original compositions can also be dated to the early- to mid-tenth century through their authors or dedication to Bulgarian rulers. There was therefore some spread of the use of the alphabet throughout the Balkans by the mid-tenth century, even if the reach or depth of this remains hard to fully discern. In short, the invention of Slavonic is quite unlike other instances of origins of writing myths, which, as Lurie has noted, are often later attempts to explain a distant past, influenced by contemporary literacy.43 By contrast, the earliest narratives of the invention of Slavonic, and I mean the Life of Cyril especially, and to a somewhat lesser extent the Life of Methodios, dated to the late ninth century, seem to predate the widespread use of the Slavonic alphabet in our records. The figure of memory emerged almost contemporaneously with the early fragility of new literacies, and in this case is our only source of evidence for recovering this fragility. In this sense, despite the fact myth-making texts and the intellectual history of writing are my main concerns, the unique set of circumstances in which Slavonic emerged means this study inescapably deals with the sociopolitical contexts of writing, and comments on the institutions in place which promoted or prohibited the spread of literacy. Thus, and precisely because writing and its fragility did not emerge in a vacuum, I turn to the geopolitical framing of my inquiry.
Between Rome and Constantinople A number of discourses about the space in-between major political centres have influenced my thinking when framing this study of the cultural and political space between Austria, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, and the Balkans as ‘between Rome and Constantinople’. The first thing which drives this study is the recognition of the agency of actors in liminal in-between zones, and their possibility for both cooperation, or what Richard White calls ‘productive misunderstanding’ with imperial power in ‘middle grounds’, but also for resistance in spaces James C. Scott has called ‘zomias’ or ‘shatter zones’.44 In this book, emperors, popes, and patriarchs loom large, but they are often at a distance from our texts and their authors. The communities which produced the works under investigation here were the middle (wo)men, for whom central imperial power was at an arm’s length, and who nonetheless tried to utilise this power, whether political or literary, for their own ends. However, the studies of White and Scott, as well as a broad spectrum of studies in postcolonial contexts, which have focused on such interactions, have emerged from regions where there is a clear distinction between ‘indigenous’ and ‘imperial’ or ‘colonial’ culture. The culture of native Americans in the Great Lakes or that of the peoples of upland Southeast Asia was formed in isolation from the imperial powers which it later encountered. Whilst this distinction between a state of ‘native-ness’ and imperial infringement is tempting, it does not accurately reflect the deeply intertwined history of the region under investigation here. The formation of polities and cultures in Central Europe, Italy, and the Balkans, was always done amidst others and amidst the legacies of (both Eastern and Western) Roman rule. There was no such thing as a fully insular and indigenous Avar or Germanic or Slavonic culture. Rather, as traced by Patrick Geary for the Germanic barbarian tribes, there were a range of processes of constructing cultural and political configurations in the aftermath of the fall of the Western Roman Empire which elevated and essentialised different aspects of the identity, law, or political organisation at different times.45 Moreover, precisely due to the complex and overlapping history of the region, claims to indigeneity have little potential for liberation in Eastern Europe. They ultimately end up being claims to the primacy of one moment in medieval history over another. And worse still, this primacy of a particular moment of indigeneity is typically proposed in order to pursue or justify violent nationalist politics rather than justice for the subaltern. The reach of such claims can be quite striking. In July 2020, two-time Grammy Award winning pop star Dua Lipa posted a Tweet with a photo of a map of Greater Albania, the territory which modern right-wing movements perceive to be rightfully Albanian, with the word ‘autochthonous’ above it. The London-born star’s parents were themselves born in Yugoslavia, but in the territory of modern-day Kosovo where many Albanian speakers reside. She accompanied the map with the following explanatory text: au•toch•tho•nous adjective (of an inhabitant of a place) indigenous rather than descended from migrants or colonists46 The territorial expansion of Albania over modern-day Kosovo, which the map calls for, is presented as justifiable because of the fact Albanian speakers (like Dua Lipa and her family) are indigenous to those lands. But of course, Albanian speakers have not occupied those lands since prehistory: the first polity considered Albanian in ethnic makeup dates to the late twelfth century. Unsurprisingly, therefore, competing claims to indigeneity are posed to their land foremost by Slavonic speakers, and the state of North Macedonia, who claim that the Slavs actually came to the Balkans before the Albanians, namely in the sixth and seventh centuries, and had a developed ethnic culture thanks to literacy and the Slavonic alphabet by the tenth century. Even engaging with this debate, however, means conceding to the logic of these arguments of national-ethnic essentialism and continuity. But it leads me onto the second key way this book sees this region, or rather the way my framing explicitly does not view the region at hand: namely as one divided into (larger) imperial and (smaller) ethnic political entities. This kind of way of viewing Central and South-Eastern Europe has emerged from the study of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and has plenty of explanatory power for that period. At the turn of the twentieth century, the region was deemed a shatter-zone of empires by Bartov and Weitz, as it saw the decline of Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian imperial power, as they gave way to nationalist movements, and a wave of violence and forced migration. But the consensus created by nationalism that ‘conformity of territorial and ethnic borders was the natural state of being’ is perniciously prevalent in the historiography of the Middle Ages of this region.47 A metaphorical parallel has emerged, often viewing Byzantine and Frankish overlords as the imperial oppressors akin to later Ottoman and Habsburg ones, and resistant to emergent ethnic movements for autonomy by Slavs in general.48 In this light, the rise of Moravia, Pannonia, and Bulgaria in the ninth and tenth centuries, more particularly, have been viewed as the original birth of the then emergent Czech, Slovak, and Bulgarian nationalist movements. I maintain that no medieval ruler believed strictly that ‘people were essentially constituted in nations’, that these nations deserved political autonomy and that attaining such autonomy was the purpose of political organisation. Rulers of Slavic or other descent were not striving for the equity of political and ethnic borders any more than their ‘imperial’ counterparts. Therefore, it is worth not separating the polities found in this region into ‘empires’ and more or less ‘ethnic kingdoms’. Rather, Central and Eastern Europe was populated by short-lived, often fragile young polities which could and often did have great imperial pretensions of their own. These emerged in the space between two political entities, in the face of the East Roman Empire and the East Frankish Kingdom, eager to stress their own stability, but who were themselves subject to constant internal upheaval and reinvention. Since ethnicity or nationhood was not the sole driver of political activity in this period, I also maintain that it did not delineate or create isolated systems of cultural production. Thus I take Rome and Constantinople to stand in for two sets of scribal cultures, both sacred and bureaucratic, in Latin and Greek. These sources of cultural capital were both available to the textual communities which concern me here, but at different times and to differing degrees. But Rome and Constantinople also interacted with and influenced one another. My purpose therefore is to contextualise the work of medieval authors and their communities to reveal how they used the resources of Rome and Constantinople’s scribal cultures and their relationships with one another, to their own authorial ends. And further, I seek to show how these authors sought to change not only themselves but Rome and Constantinople in the act of doing so.
With all this in mind, what follows is a brief precis of the high politics of the region under consideration for the uninitiated reader. More elaborate accounts are to be found in the footnotes. Of course, full sensitivity to the complex issues of the ethnic makeup of polities notwithstanding, a short precis will always compress information. I hope, therefore, the reader will forgive the nuance lost. The late ninth-century East Roman state has often been categorised largely by what came before and after it: not as ‘bad’ as the catastrophic seventh and eighth centuries, when the state was losing much of its eastern territory to Arab raids, and Balkan territory to Avars, Slavs, and Bulgars, but not quite as ‘good’ as the tenth century, which saw some territorial gains in the east, and by the turn of the eleventh, the total incorporation of the Balkans into Medieval East Roman territory.49 In this territorial stasis, the ninth century saw the eventual resolution of the iconoclast controversy, and a rich corpus of intellectual production, whether that be iconodule hagiography, comprehensive chronicles, or philosophical learning, as personified by the sometime patriarch of Constantinople, Photios (858–67, 877–86) who will feature heavily in this book.50 By the late ninth century, the imperial elite was looking outward again, successfully converting the neighbouring Bulgarian polity from the 860s onwards, trying to convert the Khazars of the north Caucasus with less success (ca. 861), and agreeing, at least according to the Life of Cyril, to send teachers to Moravia (ca. 864).51 These were early steps towards a more comprehensive missionary effort in the tenth century.52 The fate of the Bulgarian polity, which concerns the last third of this book, is deeply intertwined with that of the Byzantine empire. The Bulgars, a nomadic Turkic people from the central Asian steppe, arrived in the North-Eastern Balkans in the late seventh century. How many came remains unclear and guestimates range from 20,000 to 300,000.53 Likewise, who they found there and in what quantities is uncertain, but it no doubt included some formerly East Roman subjects and others who had never been under imperial rule, and who were made up of Greek and Slavonic-speaking peoples. By the turn of the ninth century, the Bulgars controlled much of the territory of modern Bulgaria, as well as southern Romania, south of the Carpathian Mountains, and more irregularly the areas of Thrace and Northern Greece. At around the same time, archaeology suggests their formerly nomadic or semi-nomadic ways were being shed, and stone constructions, identified as palaces, replaced what seem to have been wooden structures for temporary habitation in the ‘capital’, Pliska.54 A short king-list of the Turkic rulers and their tribes aside, no native chronicles survive, but it appears that this initially Turkic-speaking elite also began to adopt and adapt East Roman, sedentary-state customs: using seals and Greek inscriptions.55 By the 860s the elite pursued Christianisation. Perhaps the best recorded period of medieval Bulgarian history is the long negotiation between the ruler Boris (ca. 852–89, 889–93) and the Constantinopolitan and Roman churches.56 Boris settled with the Orthodox Church by 870 but whilst official conversation was complete, cultural Christianisation was only just beginning, and Pope John VIII continued to write to Boris in the hope he would change his mind. It was in this context that the Slavonic alphabet arrived in the Balkans, and received some patronage from Boris and his son, Symeon (ca. 893–927). It is unclear how far the Bulgar elite, who still used Turkic honorific titles in their Greek inscriptions in the early ninth century and produced at least two inscriptions in what seems to be a Turkic language with Greek letters, had become ‘Slavicised’.57 Nineteenth-century pseudoscience’s race hierarchy incentivised Bulgarian scholars to peddle this Slavicisation with some vigour, perceiving the Slavs as a superior or more Aryan race with which to become associated.58 More recently in scholarship since 1989, as the political tide in Bulgaria has turned away from Russia and the Soviet block and towards the European Union, pan-Slavonic brotherhood has been replaced with an interest in and rehabilitation of the Bulgars, as well as suggestions their culture persisted longer than previously suggested.59 But as far as the medieval evidence is concerned, it cannot be known for certain whether the Slavonic alphabet, at the time of its arrival, was an alphabet for a majority or minority language, or an alphabet for a ruling or under class. In short, the decision to adopt it cannot simply be assumed to be the most obvious thing to do. Neither the appointment of Photios as patriarch of Constantinople nor the conversion of the Bulgarians pleased Rome. In fact, questions of jurisdiction were ever more pertinent in the ninth century, as a scandal over the deposition of a Byzantine bishop in Italy, Geregory Asbestas, spiralled into what would become ‘the Photian schism’, or papal excommunication of the Photios, patriarch of Constantinople.60 Papal records show a preoccupation with Photios and Constantinopolitan affairs, as well as sustained communication with Boris long after the expulsion of the Latin clergy from Bulgaria.61 Rome and Constantinople were very well connected in this period, in part precisely as a result of these matters of dispute. Evangelos Chrysos notes that there were thirty embassies recorded between the two centres between 860 and 880 alone.62 Moreover, Greek monks were not rare in Rome, which boasted six Greek monastic communities at the turn of the ninth century, and nor were papal delegates unusual in Constantinople.63 Cultural contact was not all about conflict, however. One papal delegate, Anastasios the Librarian, returned to Rome with a corpus of Greek texts, which he went on to translate into Latin.64 Whereas, Byzantium’s sacred and bureaucratic scribal cultures went hand in hand, at least in principle, and emperors appointed patriarchs, the relationships between the papacy and the Carolingian rulers in the ninth century were far from rosy. Louis the German, ruler of the East Frankish kingdom, had himself tried to baptise Boris, and more generally the Frankish rulers started to undertake their religious activity, whether canonical, or missionary, in house.65 The late ninth century in particular saw an extremely concerted effort by Pope Nicholas I, Pope Hadrian II, and Pope John VIII to ‘restore’ a constructed image of the former missionary glory of the papacy as an institution, whether through their own interest in Bulgaria and Moravia, or through their literary output: biographical notices, lives of earlier missionary popes, letters to foreign rulers, and the way they chose to keep their own records.66 Making the papacy missionary again, especially with respect to Moravia and Pannonia inevitably displeased the Frankish kings. The region to the east of the Frankish polities had been occupied by the Avar Khaganate until the turn of the ninth century, when its western territories were subsumed by the Franks and its south-eastern territories fell to the Bulgarians. The Franks undertook a process of Christianisation, for which none other than Alcuin, Charlemagne’s main court scholar, came up with a blueprint, to be found in various missionary hagiographic accounts.67 The Frankish authorities, therefore, very much saw these territories as their own to convert and administer. And the proximity of these formerly Avar territories to areas of strong historic Constantinopolitan influence, brought to the forefront some theological tension between the Frankish and Byzantine churches over the question of the filioque, namely whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son or only from the Father.68 The actual emergence of the short-lived polities or principalities of Moravia and Pannonia in this region is hard to pinpoint, as prior to their mid ninthcentury appearances found in the Life of Cyril and Life of Methodios, Latin chronicles record various interactions between simply ‘Slavic leaders’ and Frankish kings. Both polities were clearly created or at least granted by the Frankish kings on formerly Avar lands which seem to have already had some Slavonic-speaking inhabitants, although ethnicity in the Avar polity remains a subject of dispute.69 Both principalities therefore had deeply intertwined histories. But conflicting narratives coexist in modern scholarship as a result of the association of Moravia with the ancestor to the Czechs and Pannonia with the ancestor of the Slovaks.70 The region of Pannonia in particular—also called Carantania, the Balaton Principality, or the Principality of Lower Pannonia—was granted to Pribina, aSlavic lord, as an imperial gift in 848.71 Estimates of the area it covered vary, but it was most probably located south-south-east of Moravia, and included Lake Balaton in modern-day Hungary as well as possibly some lands in modern-day Serbia. By the late ninth century it was held by Pribina’s son, Kočel (ca. 861/4–76), about whom we have rather conflicting records in Latin and Slavonic. He was the last recorded leader of the principality. Today, a twentieth-century statue of him is to be found in the National Assembly of Serbia in Belgrade. The first mention of a Moravian duke, Mojmir, is in a ninth-century Latin text primarily concerned with Pannonia. It records that he attacked Pribina, the first ruler of the Pannonian principality.72 This resulted in Louis the German’s appointment of Rastislav, Mojmir’s nephew, to the duchy of Moravia.73 Rastislav (ca. 846–70) was also intent on more independence, however. He supported a number of anti-Louis rebellions, including the 861 rebellion against Louis by his son, Carloman.74 In response, Louis the German contacted none other than the Bulgarian ruler, Boris, to ask for support against the Moravians in 863.75 It is in this immediate context, at least according to the Life of Cyril, that Rastislav contacted the East Roman emperor Michael III to ask for preachers and a bishop in the Slavonic language, ca. 864. This was the very same year when Boris is recorded as contacting Louis the German for preachers in Latin in the Annals of St Bertin.76 Moravia’s rule then fell to Sviatopluk, Rastislav’s nephew, who continued to cause problems for the Franks, regularly invading Pannonia and supporting rebellions.77 Sviatopluk died around 894, and after some decades of succession disputes, the Hungarians migrated from the Black Sea steppe and settled the territory by 907. Before too long, the Moravian principality was no more.78
Conclusions and Addenda It would be an understatement to say that scholarship on the invention of Slavonic is overwhelming in quantity. Yet despite the intimidating amount of work produced and continuing to be produced on the invention of Slavonic, and the mission of Cyril and Methodios to Moravia, there has been a self-diagnosed stalemate in the field. When, in 2000, Floria wrote a new introduction to his 1988 volume mentioned above, he had the option of revising and updating his bibliography in light of new research. He noted instead: Однако знакомство с появившимися за это время исследованиями позволило автору сделать вывод, что ни вступительная статья, ни комментарий к переводам памятников не требуют значительной переработки.79 An acquaintance with the research which has appeared over the course of this time, has permitted the author the conclusion, that neither the introductory essay, nor the commentary to the translations of the textual monuments needs any significant reworking. The same impression emerges from Anatoly Turilov’s 2015 review of new developments in scholarship on the mission to Moravia and its legacy between 1985 and 2015.80 The review sidesteps the questions surrounding the narrative of the invention and the lives of Cyril and Methodios, and focuses instead on impressive recent discoveries in the sphere of early Slavonic hymnography.81 Whilst important philological work continues to revise the corpus of translations dated to the early period, no new original compositions have emerged outside of hymnography; nor have any new sources emerged to modify the narrative of the invention of Slavonic as outlined above. Nevertheless, historical inquiry has continued its preoccupation with specific factual matters about which the surviving texts do not offer sufficient information, despite no new evidence having come to light. The debate continues to address speculative questions such as: where was medieval Moravia precisely? What is the mysterious language called ‘ros’sky’ in the Life of Cyril, which the saint learns? Was it Methodios or his disciple Clement of Ohrid that wrote the Life of Cyril? Did Cyril’s mission to the Abbasids happen, and if so on which mission recorded in Greek chronicles was he, and did he go to Samarra or Baghdad? Vast quantities of such scholarship continue to be produced, cycling through such a multiplicity of speculations that we now see early twentieth-century readings being resurrected.82 The variety of specific interpretations, however, has been accompanied by a general unity in method, namely a preoccupation with our medieval texts as sources with which to establish the factual-historical narrative of events that occurred. This book undertakes two intellectual projects. The first is to devise a methodology which adequately equips us to analyse the kinds of texts produced in the Central and East European medieval world. This is done as a conscious attempt to move scholarship on this topic and on the region more broadly away from the questions which have long preoccupied it, largely to do with establishing or verifying events that occurred, but often doing so within pre-existing national frameworks. This methodological move is in line with some recent work in Byzantine and medieval studies, which has sought to propose new ways of reading texts and approaching language and identity.83 Although some of this work has turned to the north-eastern Slavs of Rus, little of it has trickled into studies of medieval Central and South-Eastern Europe.84 The second is to show how this new methodological approach can produce new arguments about the invention of Slavonic in particular and new insights into the social world in which it emerged. So in place of what is lost in this sourcecritical study, namely certainty about some of the events that occurred, I emphasise instead what is gained: on the one hand, an insight into the dynamic and sophisticated intellectual culture of Central and Eastern Europe, which is integrated into the intellectual worlds of both East Roman and the Frankish realm and has consequences for the study of both. On the other hand, this book proposes a new social history of the efforts of educated clerics to both adjust to and transform their sociopolitical circumstances, caught in the borderlands between the hegemonic centres of cultural production, Rome and Constantinople. Both in its method and in its findings, my one ambition is to bring new life to the study of this rich topic. Chapter Summary This book is divided into three parts. The first deals with and situates the earliest account of the invention of Slavonic, as narrated in the Life of Cyril. In Chapter 1, I offer a short precis of the historiography of the text and some of the problems with studying a figure so celebrated. In Chapter 2, I offer a new reading of the text, arguing that it is a profoundly Byzantine hagiography, originally written by a Byzantine author and most probably in Greek. Perhaps precisely due to the fact the Life was written so soon after the alphabet’s initial invention, the script creation is by no means the central focus of the text. Its brief appearance in the text is best integrated within the wider argument the text makes for the sanctity of Cyril, as a philosopher and saint. I argue that the text is organised around a tripartite process of learning and the application of learning through disputation. This learning intentionally harmonises the tension between piety and ‘outside’, or classical, education present in ninth-century Constantinopolitan culture. Having understood what the text is arguing, in Chapter 3, I make arguments about who the text is arguing with. This chapter situates the text, within the genre of contemporary Byzantine hagiography, and within the intellectual context of a ninthcentury Constantinopolitan elite preoccupied with the relationship between learning and piety. I suggest that the particular discourse with which this text is engaging as the ‘anti-Photian’ position, associated with supporters of Patriarch Ignatios. I tease out two of this position’s key tenets and demonstrate how the Life subverts them. Given these preoccupations, I posit the text was written in Greek very shortly after the death of Cyril in 869, most probably in Rome. It did not perceive itself as a mythical account of a predestined alphabet inventor, but rather as a specific contribution to an immediate intellectual problem. This argument about education and missionary activity, however, fell on deaf ears, as the Moravian milieu underwent a profound transformation, and the Life of Cyril never made it back into the Constantinopolitan discursive milieu it targeted. The break with this early Byzantine intellectual agenda and with the East Roman political elite more generally is marked by the reinvention of the alphabet and of Cyril himself in the Life of Methodios, which forms the basis of the second part of this book: the institutionalisation of Slavonic. Chapter 4 situates the study of Methodios, and offers a critical assessment of how the two brothers have been paired by scholarship, and how this has resulted in collapsing the Life of Methodios into the Life of Cyril, as no more than a supplement or extension. Chapter 5 offers a new reading of the text on its own terms, and demonstrates it to be a radical reinvention of Slavonic, but also of its main actors. The text diminishes the significance of Cyril, learning and rhetoric, and makes the role of Byzantine imperial power appear distant and mythical. In so doing, it redistributes the agency of Cyril, as it is found in the Life of Cyril, to the pope and the institution of the (Latin) church, through its more general promotion of papal primacy. This transformation of the alphabet also marks its institutionalisation. Finally, the Life of Methodios forges two bonds absent in the Life of Cyril but ubiquitous in scholarship: a bond between Cyril and Methodios as a sacred pair with one shared purpose, and another between Methodios and the Slavic peoples. Chapter 6 situates the text in an intellectual milieu. It demonstrates that the author of the Life of Methodios is using Byzantine materials, but that they do so whilst addressing a Latinate audience. Against the grain of scholarship, this chapter posits that this text is best situated within the corpus of Latin missionary hagiography. A nuanced study of ideas about missionary activity between Rome and the Carolingian empire allows me to explain specific narrative interventions made by the Life of Methodios into the events presented in the narrative of the Life of Cyril. Through this, I show that the unification of the brothers and their relationship with the Slavs are best understood as answers to Frankish claims over the ecclesiastical hegemony of Moravia as they are recorded in the ninth-century Latin text, the Conversion of the Bavarians and Carantanians. This defence of Methodios’ legitimacy over Moravia and Pannonia was much needed in the late 880s and 890s, as papal support for the mission wavered. However, much like its main source text, the Life of Cyril, the best efforts of the author of the Life of Methodios and their community had limited success. The use of Slavonic in liturgy was banned in Rome in 890. But this was not the end of the Slavonic alphabet. By the turn of the tenth century some scribes with the alphabet arrived from Moravia in the Balkans, together with both versions of the invention of Slavonic noted above. This is the focus of the third part of this monograph. Here too, the set of political and cultural concerns pertaining to the alphabet and its use were transformed, and neither the Life of Cyril nor the Life of Methodios sufficed. Chapter 7 opens this third phase of the invention of Slavonic with a historiographical critique. In particular, I point out the way in which state fetishisation and teleology have produced a particular and simplistic account of the arrival of Slavonic in the Balkans. Chapter 8 offers a reading of how Slavonic was invented anew in On Letters, the first text explicitly concerned with the alphabet, rather than the Byzantine philosopher saint who invented it, or the papally aligned clerics in Moravia who inherited it. The text marked the return of the Slavonic alphabet into a cultural sphere dominated by Byzantine-Greek hegemony, but it is also the first version of the invention of Slavonic targeted specifically at Slavonic speakers: I call this therefore the first such Byzantino-Slavic text. In it, the author puts Cyril front and centre, but strips him of his Greek identity, and dislocates the event of the invention from its historical specificity in Moravia. The invention becomes an event in the universal history of the Slavonic peoples, whose identity the author seeks to mobilise, against the use of Greek. This is the closest to the figure of memory in modern scholarship. But the position of the text is once again best explained by its immediate intellectual and political context, which I turn to in Chapter 9. In On Letters, the matter of missionary activity is abandoned for a specific, scholarly debate about the history of language, and so the chapter situates this text within an inward-looking, educated, monastic community. Amongst contemporary Slavonic texts and the available sigillographic and epigraphic evidence, the author’s position appears somewhat unusual. They seek to separate the bilingual milieu which was responsible for the production of the earliest Slavonic texts in the Balkans into Greek and Slavonic bookmen. That they seek to do so in such an aggressive fashion leads me to posit that it is possible that some Slavonic speakers in the Balkans resisted the use of Slavonic literacy, and that this text reveals the earliest evidence of internal reluctance to adopt the new script. Even though this text propagates an invention of Slavonic most similar to that found in modern scholarship, what it actually reveals is that in its own time, the author held an unusual position of linguistic exclusivity in an environment of identarian fluidity. The Slavonic alphabet made its way from Moravia to the Balkans, therefore, in part due to a number of failures: the failure of the author of the Life of Cyril to have their text received in Constantinopolitan and wider East Roman intellectual culture and the failure of the author of the Life of Methodios to secure the support of the papacy. This study seeks to reveal the cracks behind the surface narrative of continuity in the invention of Slavonic, in order to offer insight into a social history of the fragility of the early script, and the often-contemporary concerns which preoccupied its users and defenders. It seeks to show how the idea that the Slavonic alphabet was unequivocally and undoubtedly a good thing for Slavonic people has been taken for granted for too long. In the texts which concern this book it is clear that the alphabet’s users were often not as preoccupied with the alphabet as they were with other social and intellectual problems. Often, they used the alphabet, instrumentally, to resolve the problems they faced, sometimes they invoked the brotherhood of Cyril and Methodios, at others some suddenly relevant relationship between them and the Slavs. These various intellectual agendas performed by conscious political actors to promote specific ends are flattened or lost completely in the narrative that so prevails and reproduces itself in scholarship.
A Note on Method
As noted above, it is through a methodological innovation in the study of the invention of Slavonic that I seek to offer new readings of the medieval past. This methodology did not come to its sources pre-made or pre-packaged but was formed by the interaction between the types of evidence available, their possibilities and limitations, and a number of theoretical frameworks. In what follows, I offer the reader a self-conscious reflection on the assumptions guiding the historical analysis in this book. This is done in line with the maxim of Hayden White that ‘historians who draw a firm line between history and philosophy of history fail to recognize that every historical discourse contains within it a full-blown if only implicit, philosophy of history
There are a number of academic discourses through which to describe the historical analysis to be found in this inquiry, and all of them have to a greater or lesser extent influenced it. By recognising, in the words of the scholar of medieval historiography, Gabrielle Spiegel, that ‘texts both mirror and generate social realities, which they may sustain, resist, contest or seek to transform’, I draw not only on intellectual history as practised primarily by the so-called Cambridge school and spearheaded by Quentin Skinner, but also on Spiegel’s work on the social logic of the text.86 I also draw on the Marxian theorist Frederick Jameson’s work on narrative as a socially symbolic act, an act which seeks to resolve the contradictions inherent in the sociopolitical structures of its context.87 What these approaches have in common, and share with that of this book, is that they look to alternative ways of reading texts which prioritise their immediate local intervention over and above their absolute truth values. This book, together with all three approaches, ‘elucidates the meaning of texts and documents by investigating the circumstances of their composition, uses, and further receptions’.88 Thus, both this book and the theorists outlined, rely on the value of some form of contextualisation to elucidate meaning. But there is little agreement on what effective contextualisation looks like, especially when it comes to the relationship between social and economic context, and intellectual context. Skinner in particular is keen to stress that understanding social conditions may serve to explain texts but not to ‘understand them’, and thus that the sociopolitical can in some sense be superseded by the context of ideas.89 Jameson and Spiegel both attribute more interpretive weight to material conditions and specific social sites, as equally fundamental to understanding texts.90 The inverse side to establishing the bounds of context is establishing the agency of the author. Here too, disagreement is common. Skinner and the intellectual school grant the author and their intentions the most autonomy. Jameson’s Marxian framework argues instead, for what he calls ‘semi-autonomy’. And Spiegel’s collected essays on theory and practice in medieval historiography leave the matter largely untheorised. In what follows therefore, I outline where I have followed, parted with, and mixed these approaches, in the most crucial methodological concepts of this book: firstly, on the matter of contextualisation, and then on the question of authorship and audience.
Context Three different kinds of contextualisation are performed in this book, which seek to recognise that texts exist in multiple kinds of contexts and that no one method of contextualisation will ever lead to an exhaustive understanding of the text. In doing so I seek to engage with and offer some solutions to critiques that contextualisation has faced. The first kind of context considered by each chapter is an analysis of the identifiable sources used by each text. The method of citation greatly varies between our texts, and I consider citation in two ways. The first is the closeness of the words used: how far the text is an exact word-for-word replica of an identifiable source text. The second is the ideological thrust of the words: how far our authors agree with the ideological positioning of the words of their source texts, and how far they are using their source texts to promote another, different agenda. In some instances, close citation in words also reflects a general alignment of ideas, as in the neoplatonic definition of philosophy in the Life of Cyril. In other instances, a looseness of language also aligns with a profound transformation of the ideological position of the text cited, as in the use of a Byzantine synopsis of the ecumenical councils in the Life of Methodios. But in other cases, very close textual citation can be used to put forward a new, different argument, at odds with the position held by the text from which these words are taken, as in the use of Greek grammatical textbooks in the treatise On Letters. I assess the nature of texts cited and the practice of citation to offer insights into the ideological alignment or intellectual position of the author as well as their education and social class. Contrary to the critique of contextualism, that placing a text in context domesticates it by creating a coherent system within which the text is totally explicable and which it cannot escape, I demonstrate that in two out of three cases, namely the Life of Methodios and On Letters, these texts ‘radically upend their contexts’ and that contextualisation is the very way to reveal that.91 The latter two kinds of contextualisation move beyond citation, and into a more tentative set of arguments for medieval context(s). Throughout the book I refer to this exercise as an attempt to identify a ‘discursive milieu’. I use this phrase to strike a balance between recognising on the one hand that context in the medieval world was not purely textual, it could be experienced orally or more structurally through genre tropes and norms. In this way it was discursive. On the other hand, I settle on ‘milieu’, to insist on the fact that utterances and discourses are grounded within social environments, or milieus, and between people of varied levels of access to knowledge and power.92 In this, I side with Jameson and Spiegel on the interpretive value of material conditions as equally formative to the meaning of texts, even if, in Central and Eastern Europe in the early Middle Ages, these material conditions are not always readily available to us. To my mind, the poststructuralist efforts to abandon the loosely inter- and intrapersonal (or social) context for an object-less and dematerialised discourse have been unpersuasive, not only because they flatten the sociopolitical hierarchies of social reality, but also because they leave us with no possibility for distributing moral and ethical responsibility.93 The second kind of context taken into account, and the first way I seek to identify a discursive milieu is generic, and only applies to two out of three case studies in this monograph (the Life of Cyril and the Life of Methodios). This analysis is concerned with structures, types, and tropes available rather than specific texts or direct textual or interpersonal contact. I study contemporary Greek- and Latinlanguage hagiography to identify different discourses of sanctity available to the ninth-century hagiographer and then situate the Life of Cyril and the Life of Methodios within these contemporary conventions. In both cases, however, I move from purely generic analysis into making claims about the social and political values professed by each text in constructing the hagiographic genre in the way that it does. The third and last kind of contextualisation, seeks to identify a discursive milieu on the basis of both intellectual and intertextual contexts, beyond the generic. This is done through the study of a range of texts in different genres which I argue are dealing with the same kinds of issues as each of my texts. This intellectual move will always be an argument to be made given the different kinds of contemporary evidence available rather than a context to be taken for granted. In the case of the Life of Cyril and On Letters, this is done firstly through identifying common discursive components available in a range of contemporary texts, such as for example the question of classical learning or the matter of translation. And then secondly through demonstrating how each of my texts engages with or subverts these components. In the Life of Methodios, my case is stronger, and it is for engagement with a specific surviving set of Latin texts. In short, I make arguments for what each text is trying to do, in saying what it does, and what exactly it seeks to change or affect in doing so. More generally, studying these texts together and diachronically, this book seeks to elide the critique that contextualism necessarily ‘implies a cessation or (at the very least) a slowing down of historical time’.94 Rather, demonstrating the changing contexts between texts which inherit the same story, about the invention of Slavonic and about Cyril, but frame and structure this story differently, I seek to stress the vibrancy and flexibility of medieval intellectual culture, and to stress ‘the dynamic force field of contending contexts, both synchronous and diachronous’ available in the study of medieval texts.95 Another way of framing the question of texts seeking to make interventions in specific intertextual and intellectual contexts, is as a matter of authors seeking to affect specific audiences. I consider the two to some extent parallel activities, and I use the language of both throughout this book. But I maintain that the identification of an author and an audience requires further argument, over and above the identification of text and context, because it transposes the texts at hand into a social space, and the inquiry into a social-historical one. I ask not simply what a text is trying to do, but why a community or individual may be trying to do that, and whether it is possible to determine if this intervention comes from a position of strength or weakness. In the words of Spiegel, I recognise that ‘language subtly mirrors the social location and relative power of its speakers’.96 In what follows I clarify how authorship and audience is conceived in this book, and how the author manifests themselves in the early Middle Ages of Central and Eastern Europe.
Author and Audience
The post-structuralist claim that the individual (author) emerged with modernity has been subject to sustained criticism, and recent work on pre-modern authorship has demonstrated a plethora of authorial modes, some of which closely resemble the self-conscious self often considered to be the product to Renaissance and post-Renaissance thinking.97 In the early medieval context of Central and Eastern Europe, however, and especially with reference to the texts which concern this book, Michel Foucault’s urge to abandon the oeuvre as a taxonomising category for texts, Roland Barthes’ murder of the named, monolithic author, and Julia Kristeva’s assertion that every text is a ‘mosaic of quotations’, appear not so much as the well-known assault on the author in the twentieth century, but rather as an accurate description of medieval textual practice.98 The three texts on which this book is centred are authorless. One, On Letters, circulated under a dubious name, Chernorizets Krabur (literally meaning ‘the brave monk’) for some of its manuscript transmission but even here no extratextual evidence survives to allow us to construct or identify a specific author. In all three cases we have no identifiable names, no biographies, no oeuvres. As will be discussed, this has not stopped modern scholarship from trying to pin these texts onto known figures from the period. But this rather futile effort seems to achieve little and in effect narrows the intellectual sphere of the Middle Ages. By contrast, there is something of the tabula rasa to this anonymous state of affairs, which can be productive. Throughout, I hold on to ‘the author’, maintaining that texts are to some extent the product of intentions and agency. But I recognise that ‘the author’ is not simply the person that the label designates, in two ways. The first is that the author as a concept stands over and above the person it is associated with, and is analysed to some degree as an autonomous agent, with rational powers to propose arguments rather than, say, a mammal with basic physical needs.99 Recognising this distance between the person and author, whether by calling it an ‘author-function’ as Foucault does or an ‘author-creator’ as does Bakhtin is necessary when a name like Sappho or Shakespeare hangs over a corpus.100 In the absence of a person to attach this to, I keep to the term author, as a consciously constructed label. The second is that the author is always already socially situated and therefore their intellectual production is shaped by the social conditions it emerged from. The state of the evidence for early medieval Central and Eastern Europe permits the conscious bypassing of the thorny question of how far exactly socio-economic conditions constrain the possibilities of individual agency, on which as noted above Spiegel, Jameson, and Skinner disagree. In the absence of any specific biographical information to be attached to the individual authors of my texts, I hold the author as intimately related to and as nearly interchangeable with what I call their ‘textual community’.101 The scarcity of our evidence makes it difficult to determine if the author’s position was or was not simply the hegemonic one in their community or immediate social class, and therefore whether they are expressing something ‘original’ or ‘individual’ or not. As such I use the pronoun ‘they’ to refer to this medieval author, both as a gender-neutral shorthand, and as a term that carries within it the potential plurality of a textual community. Whilst I use ‘textual community’ to denote where a text comes from, this book also seeks to identify the targets of these texts: the context they seek to affect or their intended audience. This also has two tenets. Throughout, the texts presented here propose arguments which seek to resolve tensions within their social worlds, not in the offensive but often in the indicative: they declare the resolution as if it were already true. In some cases, I call this a ‘declaration’ in the words of the linguistic philosopher John Searle, in others I say simply that they ‘show’ the reality they are proposing, rather than explicitly arguing for it. Both of these kinds of statements reveal the ideal audience which the texts construct within them and seek to bring into being, an audience which takes as already given the realities the texts seek to bring about.102 The second tenet of audience once again pulls us out of the text and into the social sphere. Ultimately, I seek to identify the ‘discursive milieu’, made up of social actors, that each text sought to affect. I recognise that this milieu by no means necessarily accepted the validity of the interventions proposed by our authors and their textual community.
To the contrary, I often illuminate how, as far as our evidence permits, the milieus I identify, in our three cases as a Constantinopolitan-educated elite, the papal court, or a more immediate bilingual monastic circle in the Balkans, did not already share the views of the texts studied. Further, I suggest that these texts were not ultimately successful in persuading them. It is far from clear that the world views put forward by the authors or communities from which the Life of Cyril, the Life of Methodios, and On Letters emerged, represented the hegemonic common-sense of their contemporary sociopolitical context. This is precisely why the texts are so essential to complicating our understanding of early medieval intellectual culture but also the relationships between communities in the borderlands of cultural authority between Rome and Constantinople.
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