Ostrowski Donald - Portraits of Medieval Eastern Europe, 900-1400

Balancing on an intricate edge between facts and fiction, this thoughtfully edited volume offers an excellent selection of real and imaginary biographies of individuals, from slaves to kings, who populated the eastern half of Europe in the centuries before and after the first Millennium. The expert authors provide a refreshing and instructive read to students of history and to anyone who has roots in this region or wishes to broaden her mental horizon.

Katalin Szende, Central European University, Budapest

First published 2018

by Routledge

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2018 selection and editorial matter, Donald Ostrowski and Christian Raffensperger; individual chapters, the contributors

The right of Donald Ostrowski and Christian Raffensperger to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN: 978-1-138-63704-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-70120-5 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-20417-8 (ebk)

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Neven Budak is Professor of medieval Croatian History at the University of Zagreb. As Associate Professor he was also teaching at the Central European University (Budapest). His main interests are early medieval history, urban history, history of identities, and cultural history.

Florin Curta is Professor of Medieval History and Archaeology at the University of Florida. His books include The Making of the Slavs: History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube, ca. 500700 (Cambridge, 2001), which has received the Herbert Baxter Adams Award of the American Historical Association; Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 5001250 (Cambridge 2006); and the Edinburgh History of the Greeks, c. 500 to 1050. The Early Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 2011). Curta is the editor of five collections of studies and is the editor-in-chief of the Brill series East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 4501450.

Ins Garca de la Puente is Visiting Assistant Professor at Boston University and Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University. Her research focuses on different aspects of the culture of pre-Mongol Rus and on Translation Studies.

David M. Goldfrank is Professor of History and Director of Medieval Studies at Georgetown University. Primarily a specialist in pre-modern Russian history, his books include The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky (Kalamazoo, 1983; rev. ed., 2000); The Origins of the Crimean War (London, 1993); A History of Russia: People, Legends, Events, Forces (with Catherine Evtuhov, Lindsey Hughes, Richard Stites) (Boston/New York 2003); and Nil Sorsky The Authentic Writings (Kalamazoo, 2008). He is currently working on a monograph on Iosif and a critical translation of his Prosvetitel , as well as preparing for publication the late Andrei Pliguzovs collection of 268 documents, The Archive of the Metropolitans of Kiev and all Rus . His work on the Vojelk convoy of texts goes back to the 1980s.

Isaiah Gruber is Research Associate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Professor of Jewish History at the Israel Study Center, and co-founder of the academic services company Kol Hakatuv. He is the author of Orthodox Russia in Crisis: Church and Nation in the Time of Troubles as well as articles and translations related to art history and Jewish-Christian interaction in Eastern Europe.

Mari Isoaho is a docent in General History at the University of Helsinki. She received her PhD from the University of Oulu, where she wrote her dissertation, The Image of Aleksandr Nevskiy in Medieval Russia: Warrior and Saint , which was published by Brill in its series The Northern World , vol. 21, in 2006. Besides history, she has also experience in the field of archeology. She is an editor and co-author of the book Past and Present in Medieval Chronicles , published in the online series COLLeGIUM, Studies Across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences , vol. 17, 2015. Her recent research interests include the Kievan chronicle tradition and apocalyptic thinking in Kiev.

Eve Levin is Professor in the History Department at the University of Kansas, specializing in issues of gender, sexuality, religion, medicine, and popular culture in pre-modern Russia and Eastern Europe. She is also the Editor of The Russian Review .

Timothy May is Professor of Central Eurasian History at the University of North Georgia. He is also the author of The Mongol Art of War (2007), The Mongol Conquests in World History (2009), and the editor of The Mongol Empire: A Historical Encyclopedia (2016).

Paul Milliman is Associate Professor in the History Department at the University of Arizona. He is the author of The Slippery Memory of Men: The Place of Pomerania in the Medieval Kingdom of Poland (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013) and teaches courses on the history of Europe in the global Middle Ages, including courses on games and food.

Balzs Nagy is Associate Professor of Medieval History at the Etvs Lornd University and a visiting faculty member at the Department of Medieval Studies at the Central European University, Budapest. His main research interests are the medieval economic and urban history of Central Europe. He is co-editor of the Latin-English bilingual edition of the autobiography of Emperor Charles IV (ed. with Frank Schaer, CEU Press, 2001); has edited with Derek Keene and Katalin Szende, Segregation Integration Assimilation: Religious and Ethnic Groups in the Medieval Towns of Central and Eastern Europe (Ashgate, 2009) and Medieval Buda in Context with Martyn Rady, Katalin Szende, and Andrs Vadas (Brill, 2016).

Leonora Neville is the John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Professor of Byzantine History and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Her studies of authority and gender in Byzantium have led to Anna Komnene: The Life and Work of a Medieval Historian (Oxford, 2016), Heroes and Romans in 12th Century Byzantium (Cambridge, 2012), and Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society, 9501100 (Cambridge, 2004).

Donald Ostrowski is Research Advisor in the Social Science and Lecturer in History at the Harvard University Extension School. He is the author of Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier 13041589 (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and the editor of The Povest vremennykh let: An Interlinear Collation and Paradosis , 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, 2003), which received the Early Slavic Studies Association Award for Distinguished Scholarship. He has published over 100 articles and review essays and has been a co-editor of four collections of studies. He also chairs the Early Slavists Seminars at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.