Byzantine Liturgy in Rus: The Making of the Kievan Primary Chronicle

"The history of eastern Christian liturgy was truly a 'global' or 'trans-national' event and yet the purpose of these rituals within the broader medieval Mediterranean remains critically understudied, outside the rather specialized discipline of oriental liturgiology. One of the aims of this book, therefore, is to acquaint readers with the solemn, mysterious, and sometimes bizarre religious rituals of the middle Byzantine Empire and its ecclesiastical satellites on the northern periphery. With that end in mind, I have chosen to engage with early medieval liturgical manuscripts in a perhaps novel way: not as the source material for purely linguistic or liturgiological debate, but as the instruction manuals, the guidebooks, for reconstructing a long-overlooked dimension of pre-modern society"-- Provided by publisher The chroniclers of medieval Rus were monks, who celebrated the divine services of the Byzantine church throughout every day. This study is the first to analyze how these rituals shaped their writing of the Rus Primary Chronicle, the first written history of the East Slavs. During the eleventh century, chroniclers in Kiev learned about the conversion of the Roman Empire by celebrating a series of distinctively Byzantine liturgical feasts. When the services concluded, and the clerics sought to compose a native history for their own people, they instinctively drew on the sacred stories that they sang at church. The result was a myth of Christian origins for Rus - a myth promulgated even today by the Russian government - which reproduced the Christian origins myth of the Byzantine Empire. The book uncovers this ritual subtext and reconstructs the intricate web of liturgical narratives that underlie this foundational text of pre-modern Slavic civilization. Cover......Page 1 Half-title page......Page 3 Series page......Page 4 Title page......Page 5 Copyright page......Page 6 Contents......Page 7 Acknowledgements......Page 8 List ofAbbreviations......Page 10 Introduction......Page 13 Chapter 1 Liturgy and History in Early Rus......Page 27 Chapter 2 The Rus Primary Chronicle......Page 47 Chapter 3 Vespers at the Kiev Monastery of the Caves......Page 74 Chapter 4 The Dayspring Before the Sun:Princess Olga of Kiev......Page 105 Chapter 5 A New Constantine in the North:Prince Vladimir and the Baptism of Rus......Page 146 Chapter 6 A Rational Sacrifice:The Martyrdom of Princes Boris and Gleb......Page 200 Conclusion:The Making of Royal Saints in Early Rus......Page 241 Bibliography......Page 255 Index......Page 281 Original and engaging, this substantial contribution to the study of the Rus Primary Chronicle, the most important piece of evidence for the history of the Rus in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, includes the first English-language translations of key Slavonic sources.