The Povest’ vremennykh let or the Rus Primary Chronicle, as Griffin refers to it in his book, has probably received more attention than any other text attributed to early Rus, certainly more so than any other chronicle of Rus. Its initial sections, in particular, continue to capture the imagination of medievalists because of their varied narrative elements. Folk tales, administrative documents, hagiographies, Byzantine chronicle excerpts and annals combine to recount the emergence of Rus via a multi-layered narrative, one that elevates the ascendant ruling group (the so-called Ruirikid dynasty), inserting it into sacred history. In six comprehensive chapters, Griffin offers a reading of these initial passages, those dealing with the formation of a holy group of local saints: Princess Olga, the first Rus ruler to convert to Christianity; Prince Vladimir Sviatoslavich, who adopted Eastern Christianity as the state religion; and SS Boris and Gleb, the saintly brother-princes who are often evoked in subsequent chronicles to quell tensions within the expanding dynasty. Although scholars (such as Gail Lenhoff on the cult of Boris and Gleb) have pointed to the role of Byzantine hagiography in shaping the historical consciousness of Rus and others have discussed the variety of Slavonic genres or proto-genres informed by Byzantine prototypes (such as Riccardo Picchio or Norman Ingham), Griffin takes a novel approach, transcending the question of genre and addressing the cultural and narrative substrate, that of liturgy.

The liturgical past has several objectives, including ‘to turn specialized liturgical scholarship on pre-Mongol Rus into a historical narrative accessible to the lay person’ (p. 27). The initial chapters present both abstruse liturgical scholarship and its history, from the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century to the present, in an eminently readable and engaging way. Another aim is to demonstrate that the liturgy, which Griffin aptly refers to as a ‘Roman technology’, informed various forms of textual production in early Rus. Echoing Averil Cameron in her state-of-the-field book, Byzantine matters (Princeton 2014), Griffin exhorts scholars of Rus to consult liturgical texts (numerically, the most important manuscript production of the pre-modern period), later demonstrating how these could have and did inform history-writing. Finally, The liturgical past offers a cultural history of the process by which Rus churchmen came to know the liturgy, through repetition and performance. Griffin writes that ‘clerics spent hours and hours reading, praying, singing, chanting, and hearing the divine services, every day of their lives’ (p. 27) and thus internalised the contents of these texts. However, this is where we encounter a degree of ambiguity: was knowledge of the liturgy solely the remit of a Byzantinised clergy and how did the clerisy engage or interact with the wider population? Griffin sometimes limits the liturgy to the clergy and, at other times, states that the ‘citizens’ (p. 90) or people of Rus were made aware of the liturgy and sacred histories. Information about the wider population of Rus is disparate and although archaeologists and epigraphists (such as Aleksei Gippius through his work on the graffiti found in the churches of Rus) suggest that some popular participation in church services was possible, it is also clear that Christianity expanded slowly beyond the fortified towns of Rus in the pre-Mongol period (as shown by Janet Martin in her work on the economy of Rus).

The first three chapters of The liturgical past provide a much-needed overview of the discipline of liturgiology and chronicle textology. Using Vavara Vovina-Lebedeva's exceptional book (Shkoly Issledovaniia russkikh letopisei: XIX–XX vv., St Petersburg 2011), Griffin demonstrates his remarkable narrative ability in recounting the development of the study of Rus chronicles from the eighteenth century, ‘a time when modern philological practices were still virtually unknown among Russia's intellectual and academic elite’ (p. 39), to the present day, pausing to discuss the illustrious, prolific and, ultimately, tragic career of the philologist, Aleksei Aleksandrovich Shakhmatov. There is a missed opportunity to point out that the beginning of the study of Rus chronicles was concomitant with the development of ethnography in the Russian Empire, the documenting and categorising of people according to ethnicity, a process which began with the work of Gerhard Friedrich Müller, an associate of Schlösser's, who is mentioned in the book. Here, two recent works offer further insight, those of Han Vermeulen on the development of German ethnography and its impact on Russia (Before Boas, Lincoln, Ne 2015) and that of Marina Mogilner (Homo Imperii, Lincoln, Ne 2013) on its application to imperial race science. Thus, the colonial project of the eighteenth century mirrored a medieval one, which Griffin characterises via the expansion of Christianity and formation of ‘imagined communities’ (p. 64), an ethnic process articulated by the literate elite of early Rus and contained in the Rus Primary Chronicle.

The final three chapters offer detailed analysis of liturgically-inflected sacred histories in the Rus Primary Chronicle. Griffin is refreshingly upfront about the relative discrepancy between the period he is writing about and the manuscript witnesses for the liturgy in Rus. Citing the Mongol invasion as the reason for this lack of medieval liturgical manuscripts (pp. 63, 208), Griffin sets out to reconstruct a set of resources that Rus chroniclers not only had on-hand, but with which they were imbued. Griffin outlines the respective arguments amongst scholars of the Slavonic and Byzantine liturgy, citing their reticence regarding medieval reconstructions (pp. 109–11 for the scholarly dispute between the liturgists Almazov and Arrenz). The resulting study presents a hypothetical approach, one anchored in sound philological reasoning. Griffin details the range of textual possibilities for accessing the liturgy as it may have existed and informed textual production in early Rus. In this respect, the argument about the placement and protocol for the rite of churching in Rus and, possibly, Byzantium (pp. 116–17) is especially compelling. The liturgical past makes salient a truth that was always there; namely, that the Christian culture of early Rus was both informed by liturgical practice and, likewise, informed textual production, the shaping of information about a sacred past reflected in (more or less) recent events.