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274 Pages
Medieval Rus’ and Early Modern Russia
Research on the East Slavs in the medieval period has considerably changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The emergence of new states forced a rethinking of many aspects of the history and culture of the early East Slavs as the subject became increasingly disentangled from the umbrella of Byzantine studies and fruitful collaboration was fostered between scholars worldwide.
This book, which brings together scholars from Russia, Ukraine, western Europe, and North America, of several generations, presents a broad overview of the main results of the last three decades of research and mutual collaboration. This is important work, providing a much-needed counterbalance to studies of western Europe in the period, which has been the main focus of study, with the lands of the East Slavs relatively neglected.
Susana Torres Prieto is an Associate Professor of Humanities at IE University, Madrid/Segovia.
Andrei Franklin is a freelance researcher, proofreader, and translator.
Contributors
Sergei Bogatyrev (University of London)
Sergei Bogatyrev is Associate Professor, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. Sergei’s research interests lie in the history of family memory in Kyivan Rus, the history and culture of Muscovite Russia (15th to 17th centuries), book culture, and technology transfer. He is on the editorial boards of several academic journals and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Dmitrii M. Bulanin (Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg)
Dmitrii Bulanin is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg, Russia, at the Department of Old Russian Literature. His research focuses on the literature of Old Russia, Byzantine-Russian, and Slavic-Russian relations in literature and culture.
Anne-Laurence Caudano (University of Winnipeg)
Anne-Laurence Caudano is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Winnipeg and the author of “Let There be Lights in the Firmament of the Heaven”: Cosmological Depictions in Early Rus (2006). Her recent work focuses on Late Byzantine and Slavic cosmographical texts, and on John Chortasmenos’ astronomical miscellanies.
Michael S. Flier (University of Harvard)
Michael Flier is the Oleksandr Potebnja Professor of Ukrainian Philology at Harvard University. He specialises in Slavic linguistics, especially the historical phonology and morphology of East Slavic; and in the semiotics of the culture of medieval Rus’, including art, architecture, ritual, and literature.
Aleksey A. Gippius (Higher School of Economics, Moscow)
Aleksey Gippius is a member of the School of Philology at the National Research University Higher School of Economics and principal researcher at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He received his PhD in 1996 and the degree of Doctor of Science in 2006; since 2011 he has been a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. His research interests include the language and writing of medieval Rus (in particular chronicles, birchbark documents, epigraphy), social and cultural history of medieval Novgorod, and old Russian monetary system. He is the author of about 200 publications, including two volumes of the serial edition Novgorod Birchbark Documents (2004, 2014, co-authored with V. L. Yanin and A. A. Zalizniak).
Sergey A. Ivanov (Higher School of Economics, Moscow)
Sergey Ivanov is Professor at the Institute of the Classical Orient and Antiquity of the National Research University-Higher School of Economics in Moscow. His research focuses on the literary and cultural relations between Byzantium and the Slavs. He is a corresponding member of the British Academy.
Olena Jansson (Uppsala University)
Olena Jansson is a PhD Candidate in Slavic Languages at Uppsala University (Sweden). She combines philological and translation studies approaches. She has just completed a philological study on the history of the text with a focus on cultural transfer, choice of language register, translation strategies and the reasons for the multiple translations from Polish to Russian in the 17th century.
Valerie A. Kivelson (University of Michigan)
Valerie Kivelson teaches at the University of Michigan. Her publications include Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia (2006), and Witchcraft in Early Modern & Modern Russia and Ukraine: A Sourcebook translated and edited by Christine D. Worobec.
Maria V. Korogodina (Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg)
Maria Korogodina is the Head of the Manuscript Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences Library in St. Petersburg. She is a Doctor in History and the author of four books, published in Russian and dedicated to the Orthodox penitential texts, and the Russian canon law collections (Kormchaja kniga).
Anna F, Litvina (Higher School of Economics, Moscow)
Anna Litvina is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Humanities, National Research University Higher School of Economics (Russia). Her research interests focus on Russian historical linguistics, medieval Russia, history of Russian Literature, and historical onomastics. She is the author of numerous studies, among which are: The Choice of Names in Rurikids Dynasty (2006), The Dynastic World of Pre-Mongol Russia (2020).
Nick Mayhew (University of Glasgow)
Nick Mayhew received his PhD in Slavonic Studies at Cambridge in 2018, under the supervision of Simon Franklin. From 2018 to 2021, he was a research fellow and lecturer in Slavic Languages & Literatures at Stanford. Since October 2022, he is Lecturer in Russian at the University of Glasgow.
Oleksiy P. Tolochko (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv)
Oleksiy Tolochko is Director of the Center for Kievan Rus’ studies at the Institute of Ukrainian History (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine). His research has addressed various problems of Medieval and Early Modern history of Eastern Europe. His most recent project was leading a team of Ukrainian scholars into textological examination of the 13th-century Galician-Volhynian Chronicle (2021).
Fjodor B. Uspenskij (Higher School of Economics, Moscow)
Fjodor Uspenskij is Full Professor of Medieval Studies at the Faculty of Humanities, National Research University Higher School of Economics (Russia). Since 2021 he is also a Director of the Vinogradov Institute of Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences. His fields of research include Russian historical linguistics, Scandinavian philology, medieval Russia and medieval Scandinavia, Old Norse language and literature, history of Russian literature, and historical onomastics.
Tatiana Vilkul (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv)
Tatiana Vilkul, Doctor of History, is a leading researcher of the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. She works in the fields of Old Rus’, Old Russian chronicles, textual criticism, Old Slavonic Bible, medieval social history, and medieval Kyiv.
Alexandra Vukovich (King’s College London)
Alexandra Vukovich is Lecturer in late medieval history at King’s College London. Her research and teaching focus on the interactions between northern Eurasia and the Byzantine world through writing, society, political culture, and material culture, spanning the later Middle Ages.
Daniel C. Waugh (University of Washington, Seattle)
Daniel Waugh is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Washington, Seattle (USA). He has published extensively on Muscovite book culture and with Ingrid Maier (Uppsala) is completing a book on foreign news in Muscovy. He also writes about the historic Silk Roads across Afro-Eurasia.
Monica White (University of Nottingham)
Monica White is Associate Professor of Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Nottingham and holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Her research interests include Byzantine-Rus relations and Orthodox sainthood.
Foreword
It is indeed a truism that each epoch produces its own narrative of the past, and the present volume is just another example of it: it is rooted in a gradual change of paradigms that has severely affected, and continues to do so, our study of the first centuries of history of the East Slavs. Both the time frame and the geographic area covered by this book are difficult to define in conventional terms and therefore terminology, and accurate terminology, is of utmost importance, not only because it betrays a conception of the past, but also because it underlines an understanding of the present. If accurate terminology has always been important in academia, it becomes crucial at the time of writing the present introduction.
The range of centuries covered by the chapters of this book, from the 9th to the 21st centuries, overlaps with the traditional categories of medieval and modern historiography that are useful for other colleagues in non-Slavic studies. Most importantly, within the geographic area covered by this book, there are at least five, if not more, modern political entities that were relevant in the same space at different times. Some are extinct, such as the Byzantine Empire or Kyivan Rus’, others, like Russia or Poland, are still a reality. Kyivan Rus’ is indeed not Russia, and it is neither Ukraine, nor Belorussia.
It was a polity that included lands that are today within the modern borders of at least three modern nations: Ukraine, Russia, and Belorussia. It was medieval only in the sense that it was premodern, but certainly not in the sense that it followed Antiquity. If one chooses the official date of its Christianisation, 988, as a meaningful date, though there is evidence of an organised society from at least a century before that, the end of Kyivan Rus’ is usually placed by the time the Mongols sacked the capital city in 1240. It would take a few more centuries for Russia to emerge, in the course of which a constant re-shifting of centres of political, religious, and cultural power will take place. Oversimplification is tempting, nuances are paramount, and refraining from the automatic allocation of well-known categories to new unexpected realities takes some effort.
The title of this volume tries to reflect the difficulties inherent to this problem. Many formulas have been tried before, and all of them are ultimately problematical: from the conventional Early Rus’ (which would naturally oppose a Late Rus’, whose range of dates would be even more difficult to pinpoint and which would imply a continuity of Rus’ to Russia that many would deny) to the often used Kyivan Rus’, which would not reflect the decades where political, religious, and cultural prominence were displaced from the old capital, even before the Mongol invasion, to the principalities of Galicia-Vohlynia or Vladimir-Suzdal. Equally problematical is the term Early Modern Russia, because it tends to include the centuries known in Western Europe as the Renaissance and far beyond (Late Modern Russia?) almost to the days of Peter I ‘The Great’ in the 18th century.
Many would argue that dates could be found (change of dynasty, change of capital, change of sovereignty) to try to structure and organise these nine long centuries of history into recognisable categories. The problem, of course, is that, in order to recognise those categories we assign to them certain characteristics that we incorporate into their definition and the common use of the terms, either as praises (“this is so modern”) or as insults (“a very medieval society”). The area under study has traditionally challenged all those definitions, and the essays collected herewith are a good example of the complexity of the situation.
Traditionally, the study of the history and culture of this geographic area before the emergence of modern states has been in the hands of two significant groups of scholars: on the one hand, and due to chronological frame and cultural sphere of influence, Byzantinists. The list of Byzantine scholars, of Slavic origin or not, who devoted their professional careers to understanding the transfer of culture from Constantinople to the northern corners of what Dmitri Obolensky, one of its most notable representatives, called “The Byzantine Commonwealth’, is long and full of extraordinary titles.
On the other, and due to the geopolitical situation imposed after the Second World War, medieval scholars of the USSR, regardless of their nation of origin, were the most prolific in their study and description, if only because they had a direct access to the sources that, for a long time, was limited to foreign specialists. In that situation, medieval East Slavic studies flourished in the West in the second half of the 20th century thanks to the efforts of a few specialists, one of whose most notable representatives is honoured by his colleagues and students in this volume.
Since the demise of the USSR, the study of the Middle Ages in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, what is understood as the East Slavic realm, has benefitted from several important changes. Firstly, the emergence of new states forced a rethinking of the theoretical framework, both spatially and temporally, of the object of study. Secondly, studies on every aspect of the history and culture of the early East Slavs were finally disentangled from the umbrella of Byzantine studies under which they had flourished for decades in Europe and the United States. Lastly, and probably most importantly, for the first time new findings of Russian and Ukrainian colleagues were made widely available to fellow medievalists in Europe and the United States thanks to more intense collaboration and the translation into Western academic languages of the main works of our Eastern colleagues.
This encounter of medieval and early modern scholars from two previously separated academic traditions has rendered mutual benefits for both, particularly, but not only, in the interpretation of sources. For some decades now, new interpretative paradigms in the West have fostered the reassessment of narratives and sources in order to distance themselves from the teleological ethno-genetic and nation-building endeavours that had encouraged the study of the European Middle Ages in the 19th century and a significant part of the 20th century. As these changes were occurring in the West, our Eastern colleagues, deprived of the possibility of engaging in any theoretical discussion that would undermine the tenets of Soviet historiography, focused on a meticulous study of the sources, both textual and archaeological, with brilliant results. When finally free and fruitful collaboration could take place between both traditions, the results have been quite spectacular.
The present volume, which includes chapters from scholars of several generations and half a dozen countries, is a tribute to this encounter. As such, it aims to present a broad outlook on the main achievements of these last three decades of mutual collaboration in the study of the medieval and early modern history and culture of the East Slavs. Whether as historians, philologists, or palaeographers, the authors have focused their often interdisciplinary research of recent decades on either bringing new explanations to formerly existing materials, or on bringing to light previously unknown sources for study. To those previously unfamiliar with the more remote history of the East Slavs, the volume will present curious resonances of similar questions in their own areas of study. For Slavonic and Byzantine scholars, it will present the latest tendencies in research by some of their most widely acknowledged colleagues.
Regardless of their approaches or their particular field of study, all authors are also united in their admiration and friendship to the person honoured by this book. In many respects, the career of Simon C. Franklin, Fellow of Clare College and former Professor of Slavonic Studies at Cambridge, embodies all the above-mentioned changes, from a Byzantine to a Slavonic perspective, from a theoretical inductive to a material deductive methodology, that has illuminated new generations of scholars both in the East and the West. Disciple himself of one of the most notable Byzantinists of the 20th century, Dmitri Obolensky, of whom he was his last PhD. student, Simon Franklin soon showed how a mastery in the command of Byzantine Greek, Old Church Slavonic, and a handful of modern European languages was key in pushing the studies of Medieval Rus’ further in the West. After completion of his PhD at Oxford, he received a post-doctoral fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks and from there to Clare College, from where he has researched, studied, and taught students from all over the world for more than three decades, years of indefatigable work interspersed with trips to the USSR, then to Russia, to foster that collaboration which is herewith attested. Authors in this volume include some of his best friends form the young days at Dumbarton Oaks as well as some of his own latest PhD students.
The volume is, as Simon Franklin’s own production, interdisciplinary, and it is necessarily focused on some, not all, of the honouree’s interests. The reader will often find references to and quotations from some of his most prominent works. From the volume co-authored with Jonathan Shepard in 1996, The Emergence of Rus 750-1200, which served as inspiration to undertake Rus’ studies to so many of his own future PhD students, to the groundbreaking Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c. 950-1300 (2002), and his latest innovational The Russian Graphosphere, 1450-1850 (2019). And throughout those years, quite a collection of substantial articles, some of them published subsequently in Byzantium-Rus- Russia (2002), in which his theories were being presented in peer-reviewed journals as his work was becoming familiar in specialised circles and his work admired by older and younger colleagues.
The volume is, therefore, grouped in thematic blocs, arranged more or less chronologically, that are, nevertheless, easily permeable and highly disputable. Many of the chapters would be equally well placed in two or more of these. Part I, ‘Use of Byzantine Models and Sources’, is the one that, maybe not surprisingly, encompasses the chapters of many of Simon Franklin’s PhD students. Starting with Monica White’s reassessment of the relations between the Byzantine Empire under Leo VI and the newly-arrived Rus’, in which the author underlines how key those years were in defining a new strategic approach towards Byzantine’s northern neighbours, to the intriguing piece by Oleksiy Tolochko in search of the real identity of a certain Theodore the Rhos’ whose name appeared on an inscription of an enkolpion in Venice. The cultural links between Byzantium and Rus’ and Early Russia were long-standing and fruitful, as is aptly demonstrated by the chapters by AnneLaurance Caudano and Nick Mayhew. Caudano, carrying out a meticulous study of the miscellanies from the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius containing astrological and medical texts, shows how the transmission process was long and complex, and decisive for a better understanding of Early Russia’s cosmogony. Similarly, the innovative reading by Nick Mayhew of some of the most famous hagiographies transmitted from Byzantium to Rus’ and then popular in Russia provides wonderful new insights into the relation between gender-transgression and the very East Slavic tradition of the holy fools.
In Part II, ‘Historiography and Construction of Historical Narratives’, Sergey Ivanov analyses some previously unnoticed quotations in early Rus’ chronicles, opening new possibilities for a deeper understanding of the extent to which Byzantine literary culture was known and used in Kyivan Rus’. Michael S. Flier analyses in detail the difficulties encountered in translating into English the most famous Early Rus’ chronicle, the Povest’ vremmenykh let, known as The Rus’ Primary Chronicle. Taking as a starting point the project of Horace Lunt, Flier digs into the problems associated with trying to render style, orality, register, or paraphrase in the monument of Early East Slavic letters. The different witnesses of the Primary Chronicle are also discussed by Tatiana Vilkul in her own research into the famous episode of the baptism of Olga in Constantinople and the intriguing question of which emperor did she actually meet, or, rather, which Byzantine Emperor did the sources say she actually met, which are clearly two separate questions. Historical narratives, however, are not only restricted to the works of historiography. As some authors clearly show in their innovative scholarly approaches, narratives concern not only traditional historiographic sources. Maria Korogodina, for example, discusses in depth the relation of Church elites in the times of Patriarch Germanus I, a key character not so much in the first process of Christianisation of Early Rus’, but more decisively in the key years of consolidation of the Metropolinate of Kyiv as a referent in Rus’. Similarly, Alexandra Vukovich underlines the relevance of rituals of enthronement in order to create a powerful visual narrative, undoubtedly aimed at their contemporaries, but key in our modern understanding of how monarchs understood their social and religious role. For their part, Anna Litvina and Fjodor Uspenskij have looked into the conventions that the family of Boris Godunov used in naming themselves, thus betraying a self-image in their use of polyonymy, and constructing for posterity their own historical narrative.
Part III, ‘Material Supports of Written Texts’, explores the ways in which writing created a new communication environment from its introduction among East Slavs. From the Novgorod graffito analysed by Aleksey Gippius and its linguistic and literary repercussions for our understanding of literary culture in Kyivan Rus’, to the detailed analysis of Daniel Waugh and Olena Jansson about the books that were imported into Early Modern Russia from neighbouring Poland, which provides extraordinary insights into which topics and authors interested the Russian public in the 17th century. In between those two extremes, Dmitrii Bulanin discusses the value of the books as objects and how authority often rested on their material features and not on their content.
The final part, Part IV, also corresponds to Simon Franklin’s latest research. Under the title “Social Repercussions of the Graphosphere’, Sergei Bogatyrev and Valerie Kivelson discuss the social and cultural reception of objects and events that are part of the Russian graphosphere created by Franklin in his latest title. Sergei Bogatyrev explores diachronically the visual repercussions of the wedding of Sofia Vitovtovna to Vasilii II in the mid-15th century, particularly as it appears depicted in the [//ustrated Compilation. Valerie Kivelson challenges in her chapter the often radical separations made in academia between artistic movements, and proposes a more nuanced scenario in which Early Modern Russia was certainly exposed to, and sometimes imported, aspects of the Western European Baroque. We want to thank all the authors for their work and their wonderful collegiality. It has been a pleasure sharing this project with them.
This project would have not been possible, however, without the decisive support of our editor at Routledge, Peter Sowden. His enthusiasm from the beginning was key in taking us this far.
When we first entertained the idea of preparing and editing this volume in 2019, neither of us could foresee that two dramatic events were going to mark its development. In February 2021, Simon lost his lifelong companion and one of us, his mother. This volume is also a tribute to Natasha, whose generosity and partnership with her husband are undoubtedly behind many of his achievements. Many among the authors were also her students and her friends. Secondly, when we were about to send the final manuscript to the editors, Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, and our Ukrainian colleagues found themselves bombarded and undergoing the horrors of war that nobody should ever have to witness. This is our joint tribute to them.
Under current circumstances, a volume such as this, in which scholars from both countries at war, and friends of many years, were involved from the very beginning, and in which references are present to places now destroyed, becomes dramatically relevant. We started by saying that terminology matters. Under the present circumstances, it is maybe more relevant than ever, and we have made an effort to be scrupulous about it. Today, maybe more poignantly that a few months ago, we think that a less conscious use of terms and labels can result in the falsification of history and, more dramatically, in a justification for war.
The Editors London — Segovia April 2022
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