Christian Raffensperger

The Kingdom of Rus' is one of the first installments of the ARC Humanities Press new Past Imperfect series, which seeks to provide concise critical overviews of topics in medieval studies that reach both a popular and an academic audience. Christian Raffensperger tackles the prevalent historiographical idea of the kingdom of Rus' as somehow separate from medieval Europe, and does so primarily by analysing how the titles of rulers in medieval eastern Europe have been translated and should be understood, both in medieval and modern sources. Rather than translating kniaz' as prince or duke, as is often the case—and which both implicitly diminishes the status of Rusian rulers and makes flattening assumptions about how power worked in western Europe—Raffensperger argues that it should be glossed as king or ruler. I found his argument convincing—the last chapter in particular had me nodding as he neatly demolished some long-standing assumptions about the operation of authority and hierarchy in the medieval world.

I do worry, though, that this is the kind of book that falls between two stools somewhat. Is there an audience for non-academics who're going to pick up a book about the historiography of the titulature of the rulers of Kievan Rus'? I even struggle to think of a context in which I could work this into an undergrad course. It's too inside baseball for a survey course, and while it could be a somewhat more informally written substitute for a journal article in an upper-level course, the chances of me ever teaching something that focuses on eastern Europe are slim.… (mais)