As scholarship continues to expand the idea of medieval Europe beyond "the West," the Rus' remain the final frontier relegated to the European periphery. Examining a wide range of medieval sources, ...and through an innovative analysis of medieval titles, The Kingdom of Rus' challenges the perception of Rus' as an eastern "other" - advancing the idea of the Rus' as a kingdom deeply integrated with medieval Europe.
An overriding assumption has directed scholarship in both European and Slavic history: that Kievan Rus' was part of a Byzantine commonwealth separate from Europe. Raffensperger refutes this, and ...offers a new frame for two hundred years of history, in which Rus' is understood as part of medieval Europe, and East is not so neatly divided from West.
In The Nature and the Image of Princely Power in Kievan Rus', 980-1054, Walter K. Hanak provides a critical analysis of the annalistic and literary record of a newly Christianized state and its ...impact upon the formulation of princely authority.
This book is devoted to the Old Rus' dress of the Upper Volga region, as gleaned from the archaeological evidence of the burial sites from the late 10th century to the 13th century.
Over the last two decades, it has become clear that Russia insists on its great power status, even at considerable cost. Chasing Greatness provides an interpretive explanation of the tacit rules that ...shape Russia's great power identity today. Anatoly Reshetnikov argues that this never-ending chase for greatness is a result of how Russia and its predecessors—including the USSR, Russian Empire, Muscovy, and Kievan Rus’—historically interacted with its neighbors to the east, the south, and particularly the west. By analyzing an extensive amount of original source material, including primary sources that have not been previously translated into English, he is able to reconstruct a millennial history of the Russian concepts that express political greatness. He also traces numerous encounters between Russia and the West, as well as Russia’s troubled integration into the European society of states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to show how these concepts have affected Russia’s interaction with international society. Despite its substantive historical depth, Chasing Greatness is not a book of history. Rather, it is a synthesizing social science work inspired by the continental tradition of the critical history of modernity. As such, the book is more about the present than about the past. Its main aim is to expose and explain the rich conceptual baggage behind Russia’s unceasing great power rhetoric (domestic and international) and how this rhetoric drives the current international crises involving Russia.
This book intertwines two themes in medieval studies hitherto kept apart: comparisons of Latin and Orthodox Europe and the "feudal revolution" of the late- and post-Carolingian periods. The book ...broadens the debate by comparing texts written in "learned" and "vulgar" Latin, Church Slavonic, Anglo-Norman, and East Slavonic. From this comparison, the Kingdom of the Rus appears as a regional variation of European society. This suggests current interpretations overemphasize factors unique to the medieval West and overlook deeper pan-European processes.
In Identity Formation and Diversity in the Early Medieval Baltic and Beyond, contacts between Early Medieval Baltic Finns, Sami, Scandinavians, Slavs and Balts are discussed and exemplified. ...Communication expressed through material culture is analysed in order to understand the culturally diverse regions in the Baltic and beyond.
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