The volumes under review are the product of the inaugural meeting ‘World of the Slavs’ conference series held in early 2020 in Warsaw. Fifty-four scholars attended the conference and of that number twenty-six (twenty-four articles, two coauthored) are included in the two volumes. Many conference volumes are ‘hit and miss’ affairs, but this one is well worth the Brill price tag. The articles are largely well written and researched, the editing is excellent and the maps and charts are done well, including many colour images.
The theme of the ‘World of the Slavs’ conference was the life and work of Andrzej Poppe, who died one year earlier. Volume i begins with a précis of Poppe’s life and then a full bibliography of his work. The breadth of the latter helps to explain to those who did not know him why he is deserving of a conference in his honour. Further, Poppe’s body of work forms the main through line for the two volumes, and the variety of topics included develop his many interests.
The collection shares two main goals which are worthy of note and, sadly, rare. The first is that the conception of the ‘World of the Slavs’ is designed to avoid national and nationalistic paradigms, while the second is to allow scholars from eastern Europe ‘to publish in an English-language series and make their research accessible to a wider public’ (p. ix). While it may seem jingoistic, the only way to create a broader medieval Europe, inclusive of the European East, is for scholars to publish in Anglophone journals and with Anglophone publishers. In this way, the excellent research being performed in so many places in Europe can be dispersed to the widest possible group of scholars. This collection performs those goals admirably.
Given the twenty-four contributions it is impossible to deal in depth with all of them and so just a few have been singled out for duly high praise. One theme which unites the strongest of the papers is the excellent questions that they ask. Anna Litvina and Fjodor Uspenskii in their ‘The enigma of Prince Sviatoslav: name and power in the early Rurikid dynasty’ use as a guiding principle the question ‘Why did the perpetrator (whoever he was) need, of all Vladimir’s numerous heirs, to destroy these ones as a matter of priority?’ (p. 28). While Dariusz Dąbrowski’s ‘On building structures: Rus medieval historians on architecture, using the example of the Galician-Volhynian Chronicle (Romanovichi Chronicle)’ asks the question: ‘Why do the chronicle sources not bear witness to the wide variety of churches and fortresses which archaeology has revealed?’ (p. 119). And finally, Vitaliy Mykhaylovskiy dives into historiographical controversy in his ‘Captured by ideology: historians’ descriptions of a document from Medyka of 19 October, 1404’, where he asks which of the two documents, the Latin or the Ruthenian version, came first, and why? (p. 383).
Leaving questions aside, there are simply fascinating pieces included as well. Maria Lavrenchenko and Dmitriy Dobrowolski’s ‘The cross of St. Stephen in Russian lands: a commentary on the Kyivan Chronicle entry of 1152’ deals with very specific details on a particular event, but contextualises them in a way that is comprehensible to a wider audience. Moreover, the authors also utilise broader medieval comparands, and modern theory, to help better explain what was happening in mid-twelfth century Rus. Márta Font’s ‘From Saint Vladimir to Vladimir Monomakh: milestones of Christianisation in East-Central and Eastern Europe in comparison’ also contextualises the conversion of Rus into a broader world with helpful tables to illustrate similarities and timelines.
The ‘World of the Slavs’ is exemplified by Aleksey Martyniouk in his ‘Rus in the Christian community: a view from thirteenth-century Europe’, where he discusses the little-known Weltchronik of Jans der Enikel which situates Rus alongside the Austrian homeland of the author and integrates eastern Europe with central Europe fully. Martyniouk closes by noting that ‘We can conclude that Hungarians, Bohemians, Poles and Rusians were considered as Austria’s “traditional” neighbours during the second half of the thirteenth century’ (p. 94). Aleksander Paroń also engages with a wider world of the Slavs in his ‘White Croatia: a territory between western and eastern Slavdom’ wherein he deals with Constantine vii Porphyrogenitus’ De administrando imperio. The opposite of Enikel’s Weltchronik, De administrando Imperio is used a great deal and often with little question of its accuracy. Paroń puts the source alongside archaeological and textual evidence, including Arabic sources, to question some of the traditional assumptions laid out about the Slavic world in the Byzantine source.
No volume is perfect, and this collection too has its problems. The goal of spreading scholarship in English is undermined a bit by the lack of translations of primary sources in some, though not all, articles. While leaving Latin in the original is common in Europe, it is less so in the United States and Canada, and Slavonic languages need to be translated if their topics are to have the impact they should in the Anglophone world. Secondly, though Poppe works as a through line for the articles, there are several places where the synchronicity of the pieces is clear to the reader and should be emphasised by the authors. Simon Malmenvall’s ‘To save lives of innocent men: martyrdom on the periphery of medieval Europe (Rus, Dioclea, Orkney islands)’ pairs quite nicely with Litvina and Uspenskii’s ‘The enigma of Prince Sviatoslav’ in terms of saints’ Lives and martyred rulers, but neither mentions the other, and in fact they are in different sections. Similarly, though Dąbrowski’s ‘On building structures’ and Andrzej Buko’s ‘The residential complex of Daniel Romanovich on the Cathedral Hill in Chełm: a meeting place of cultures and ideas’ are next to one another, there is no mention of the clear overlap in the subject of meeting places or Chełm itself. The final note in this vein is that the last contribution in each volume is well outside of the chronology of the volume as a whole and thus is a bit jarring to the cohesion of the collection.
These small items should, in no way, detract from what is a well-organised series of articles which present a great deal of new and interesting information about the medieval past of the world of the Slavs.
