It is very rare that scholars can bring a new perspective on a medieval primary source that has been commented upon since the eighteenth century. Sean Griffin has accomplished this feat in an accessibly and often beautifully written book, uncovering echoes of the Byzantine liturgy in the ca. twelfth-century Primary Chronicle, especially in the chronicle's representation of key moments in the conversion of Rus to Christianity. These moments include the tenth-century baptisms of Princess Olga and her grandson Vladimir and the assassination in 1015 of Vladimir's sons, the brothers Boris and Gleb, who were subsequently venerated as the first native saints of Rus. Griffin makes the persuasive argument that the monks of Kiev [Kyiv], who celebrated liturgical services from dawn to dusk, interiorized narratives of universal sacral history, “the Gospel according to the church” (87), and then applied these narratives to the creation of their own local Christian heroes when writing the Primary Chronicle. Griffin thus argues that there was an ongoing reciprocal relationship between monastic participation in liturgical services and chronicle-writing, a “liturgical-historiographical-liturgical loop” (239) which ultimately paved the way not only for the writing of the first major narrative text in Rus but also the eventual canonization of members of the ruling dynasty and political cohesion in Rus.

Introductory material includes an accessible literature review of the voluminous scholarship on medieval liturgy, political theology, and the Primary Chronicle. The author is at pains to explain why scholars in the past have missed the full extent of the liturgical references in the Primary Chronicle and suggests, among other reasons, that “anti-monastic, anti-ritualistic, and text-centric principles” may have blinded some to the connections between chronicle text and liturgical practice (59).

Chapter 3 turns to the liturgical context in which the Primary Chronicle was written, describing the entirety of a vespers service at the Kievan Monastery of the Caves. The book stresses how prayers sung by the monks joined past and present into a “single liturgical moment” (76), the “liturgical past” of the book's title that shaped the narrative structure of the Primary Chronicle.

The heart of the book consists of three central chapters offering close readings of liturgical subtexts in ten passages of the Primary Chronicle's entries for the years 955–1015. Extensive extracts of the East Slavic—and, occasionally, Greek—texts under discussion, with English translations, are provided for the reader throughout. The book presents parallels between the Byzantine baptismal rite and the chronicle's representation of Olga's conversion, between episcopal prayers and Vladimir's prayers over the baptized Kievans in 988 and over the newly consecrated Church of the Tithes in 996, and between the Liturgy of Preparation and Eucharistic Divine Liturgy and the martyrdom narrative of Boris and Gleb. These chapters also explore the liturgical typology at work in the chronicle's representation of the central figures of early Rus: Olga, the first member of the dynasty to convert to Christianity, is depicted as a kind of Slavic Virgin Mary, female John the Forerunner (the Baptist), and Empress Helena. Vladimir, miraculously cured of blindness in the Chronicle after his conversion, is likened both to Paul and to a new Constantine, a kind of “first bishop” who converts Rus by the power of the cross. The murdered prince Boris is portrayed as a priest preparing the altar for the Divine Liturgy, while his brother Gleb is depicted as a sacrificial lamb/eucharistic offering. The book's conclusion hypothesizes that liturgical commemoration and chronicle writing helped initiate, rather than crown, the process of canonization of native saints in early Rus.

The general argument that repeated monastic participation in the Byzantine liturgy impacted chronicle writing is entirely convincing. Nonetheless, claims of near word-for-word parallels between liturgical books and the Primary Chronicle—which does not survive in its original eleventh-century text but only in later manuscripts, the earliest from 1377—could have been qualified with more frequent caveats. As the author admits, there are few surviving liturgical books from Kiev for the pre-Mongol period as a whole (to 1240/1241). In particular, no complete liturgical books from the chronicle-writing center of the Monastery of the Caves are extant, though it is known that the eleventh-century Typicon (monastic foundation charter and rule) of Patriarch Alexis the Stoudite was in use there (63, 66–68). To compensate for missing liturgical books, Griffin employs Byzantine manuscripts, Slavonic manuscripts from twelfth-century Novgorod and thirteenth-century Riazan, early printed Slavonic books, critical editions, scholarly reconstructions of liturgies, and even, where no liturgical sources survive, the chronicle text itself as evidence for liturgical practices in Kiev (116–117). The author is aware of the potential misapplication of manuscripts of later date or from different regions to eleventh-century Kiev (208, 213–214, 218) but points to conservatism in liturgical practice and textual parallels between manuscripts suggesting lost common sources (218–220) to justify this approach. A fuller discussion of the reasons why individual manuscripts are selected as representative for an eleventh-century Kievan context nonetheless would have been useful.

Surprisingly, the book does not make full use of the Paterik, the most important surviving source for daily life in the Kievan Monastery of the Caves, despite the fact that this source includes a rare description of book writing at the monastery (Muriel Heppell, trans., The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery [Harvard University Press for the Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University, 1989], p. 56). The characterizations of liturgy as a “technology” (13, 20, 21, 24, 30, 55, 60, 81, 240) and as a tool of “social control” (30) are also not fully fleshed out and somewhat at odds with the poetic evocation of vespers as a multisensory experience in chapter 3.

Overall, this is an important book that offers a bold new interpretation of the Primary Chronicle and will appeal broadly to liturgists, medievalists, students, and specialists alike.