Canadian-American Slavic Studies 50 (2016) 265–274 brill.com/css
Book Reviews / Comptes rendus
∵ Christian Raffensperger Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus’ in the Medieval World. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2012. 340 pp. $ 55.00.
Where was Kievan Rus’ in medieval Europe? In this new challenge to the post hoc fallacy of drawing a straight line from Byzantium to Muscovy, Christian Raffensperger offers a bold scholarly reframing of the question. He takes a long, polycentric, and multivalent view, integrating Kievan Rus’ into the spectrum of medieval Europe’s broader diplomatic affairs through meticulous examination of claims of commercial exchange, dynastic marriage, and cultural transmission. Challenging Dimitri Obolensky’s Slav-centric trajectory of Byzantium to Muscovy, Raffensberger follows the work of Donald Ostrowski and Omeljan Pritsak by extending the medieval Rusian source base beyond the Povest’ vremennykh let and Rusian chronicles to ecclesiastical sources, foreign royal and monastic chroncles, charters, hagiographies, and other histories. Raffensberger advances what he calls the Byzantine Ideal in place of Obolensky’s Byzantine Commonwealth, with Kievan Rus’ on a par with Europe’s varied kingdoms and not as a unique place with a singularly Byzantine tradition. Raffensberger’s lucid prose, careful source criticism, and balanced European historiographical perspective make for a stimulating read. Reimagining Europe features an introduction, five chapters, and a where-we-go-from-here conclusion on teaching world history. There are multiple charts on onomastics, an appendix on the rulers of Rus’, and over 125 pages of extensive notes and bibliography. The author’s five chapters deal with the themes of (1) the Byzantine Ideal, (2) dynastic marriage in medieval Europe, (3) dynastic marriage in Rus’, (4) commercial networks of Kievan Rus’, and (5) the regional, borderland placement of Rus’, drawing from the model of micro-Christendoms advanced in 2003 by Peter Brown. Raffensberger shows persuasively the limits of selective appropriations of the Byzantine legacy. He illustrates how the political geography of Rus’ in
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi: 10.1163/22102396-05002009
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medieval Europe can be treated and integrated more fruitfully into transnational histories of England, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and the papacy. He warns against projecting early modern and modern nation-state history back onto the premodern world of the eleventh-twelfth centuries, and of assuming a Rusian dependence on Constantinople, or any full and immediate conversion of all the peoples of Rus’ to Eastern Orthodoxy. He picks apart parochial biases of Rusian monastic chroniclers while avoiding “pro-Latin” tendentiousness in the other direction, providing a judicious picture of European Rus’ from Latin chronicles, Greek sources, and Scandinavian sagas. He lays out the methodological strengths and weaknesses of dealing with royal marriages and genealogical charts, extending the discussion to transfers, exchanges, and alliances between families who were tied by lineage and political interest to Europe. Raffensberger’s book is provocatively grounded in a world-history model, and he is rather straightforward about the political geography of Rus’ which he prefers. In chapters two and three, the author’s “European” treatment of dynastic marriage is original and compelling, for he focuses laudably on female onomastics and the power of medieval noble and royal women, while pointing out the monks’ misogyny and silence about women’s power, an unfortunate pattern in the Byzantine Christian tradition of those who wrote medieval chronicles. In his broad reading of sources from outside the Rus’ world, he also assembles a strong case. The author produces five figures in chapter three, detailing Rusian-Polish intermarriage and then French, Hungarian, Danish, and Anglo-Saxon onomastics, as a visual key to his historiographical aims. The fourth chapter on commercial routes, drawing from Janet Martin and others, succeeds where Raffensberger shows European breadth as well as Eurasian interconnectivity, and the multiple, regional exchange zones of which Rus’ was a part. For Raffensberger in 2012, as for Catherine the Great in 1767, Europe exists. Historically, Kievan Rus’ was a part of it. He ends on an optimistic integrationist note, noting the ongoing trend against national-territorial histories. He argues for a European model of ideals, elite interests, micro-regionalisms, and the focus on women’s agency, inviting discussion between premodern and modern specialists. He shows the problem of rigid frames such as Byzantine Rus’ and the West, and the basic error of conceptualizing the medieval past into east/west blocs and national exceptionalisms. He challenges the Cold War gradient. If at times the author editorializes a bit too much on behalf of his own Eurocentrism – for Mongol rule is never front and center, medieval Islam is mostly omitted, and Sinocentric world history is minimized – to his credit he returns to Europe-based evidence in conceptualizing Kievan Rus’. He calls for twenty-
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first-century scholars likewise to reconsider the histories of premodern east European kingdoms, and to adapt those analyses to medieval European history and world history as a whole. Sure to prompt debate, Reimagining Europe is a fresh scholarly look at the importance of place and space in the plural constructions of medieval Rus’. Steven Seegel University of Northern Colorado
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Canadian-American Slavic Studies 50 (2016) 265–274
