Presentations by Streams

This panel aims to reconsider various binaries that have often characterised study of the pre-modern Slavonic world: between ‘faith’ and ‘faithlessness’ among Latin conceptions of the Slavs’ religious practice; between formal and informal notions of early Rus’ canon law; between the ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ in medieval Novgorod; and between different forms of Mongol agent in Rus’.

Intertwining questions of power, territory and religion, the papers seek to challenge underlying assumptions about the nature of both spiritual expression and political change. Amplifying each presenter’s individual focus, as a whole the panel adopts a transhistorical approach, to highlight how the assumptions underpinning historiographical binaries recur across periods and regions. In this vein, we aim to encourage new lines of enquiry – to revisit the complexities of early Slavonic history not simply for their own sake, but to conceive of a more nuanced interplay of politics, space and faith.