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Christian Raffensperger, "Authorship, Worldview, and Identity in Medieval Europe" (Routledge, 2022)
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An interview with Christian Raffensperger
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- [00:01]
Erica Monahan
This episode is brought to you by State Farm.
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Christian Raffensperger
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Marshall Po
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical, there are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed, and the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:33]
Erica Monahan
Hello and welcome to New Books Network. I am your host Erica Monahan and today I have the pleasure of interviewing Christian Raffensperger about a newly edited volume that is just out. The title of the volume is Authorship, Worldview and Identity in Medieval Europe. Christian Raffensperger is the Kenneth E. Ray Chair in Humanities at Wittenberg University in the usa. Professor and Chair of the History Department, Christian has written two monographs. His first monograph was a 2012 book, Reimagining Kievan Rus and the Medieval World. In 2018 he came out with a second monograph entitled Conflict, Bargaining and Kinship Networks in Medieval Eastern Europe. Along the way he has also co edited two volumes of collected essays which are wonderful. One was Portraits of medieval Eastern Europe 800-1300, co edited with Donald Ostrowski. And this is a wonderful volume that provides portraits of medieval individuals and I have found it to really resonate in the undergraduate classroom. So I am delighted to recommend that to people. And your other edited volume is his Radical Traditional the Influence of Walter Kagi in Late Antique, Byzantine and Medieval History, which you co edited with David Ulster. Christian has also written a number of scholarly articles, as well as some pieces for the popular press. Back in 2016, some of our readers may have encountered this. He wrote a piece for in the Monkey Cage at the Washington Post about the about Ukraine's EU association agreement. This was when the issue was revisited in 2016. And you wrote a powerful piece there. And I'll also note that since the invasion, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, you've written several pieces offering historical perspective for various local newspaper outlets, which is such an important thing to do. So thank you very much for all that you've done, all that you continue to do, and thank you for spend an hour here with us to talk about this latest book.
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Christian Raffensperger
Christian, happy to be here. Thank you.
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Erica Monahan
Thanks. All right. Well, we always start our new books, networks, interviews, or at least I do, with the question of how did you become a historian? Please tell us a little bit about your path into history.
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Christian Raffensperger
My path actually began, you know, a long time ago because I was a little kid who played with knights in castles and I just was fascinated by the Middle Ages through that aspect. And then when I got into high school, it was during the time the Soviet Union was beginning to fall apart under Gorbachev and we had a Russian teacher. And so I took Russian and those paths continued very separately, Russian and then Medieval Europe until I got to college and I took a upper level seminar class with Michael Jones at Bates College on the Vikings. And I learned about the Vikings in Eastern Europe. And all of a sudden there was this synchronicity between my interests. I didn't pursue it immediately. I went and worked for a while, and then I decided, you know, I wanted to go into higher education. And so I went to graduate school. And, you know, I really thought this is what I wanted to do and I wanted to teach people about these things that I discovered. And that's what I've ended up doing. And so, you know, it's really worked out nicely for me. I get to do what I love.
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Erica Monahan
Super. Super. That is great.
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Christian Raffensperger
All right.
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Erica Monahan
And then the next question which we all, which we typically ask and I want to ask you is I want to ask you, why did you write this book? But given that this is an edited collection, I want to pause a bit more on how you as the editor who you didn't write the individual pieces, but you conceived of this project, you edited and worked with all of these authors, and you brought this project to fruition. And I find this book to be so rich, it cuts in a variety of directions that I found really worth thinking about. And so I want to spend a little bit more time on this kind of the project, how you see it as a whole. And one example, for example, is I like how you point out in your introduction that the. The ahr, the flagship journal of the American Historical association, has published on its website that it is consciously trying to broaden its coverage. And it put it in these terms and you quote it in the article that quote. For much of its history, the AHR published essays primarily on the history of North America and Western Europe. And it goes on and it says, and it is now looking to expand its coverage and actively encourages, now I'm quoting in the submission of manuscripts on Africa, Asia, Oceania, Oceania, Latin America and the Middle East. And in that capacious list of geographic spaces, there is no Eastern Europe. And so I want to ask you to say more about the place of Eastern Europe in medieval Europe and medieval history here, please.
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Christian Raffensperger
Yeah, so this, I mean, you know, and I'm so glad that you noted that, because that's one of these funny things that, you know, the HR editors have no ill intent, intent whatsoever. They're simply trying to follow along with this current trend. You know, much needed to try and expand historical coverage. But the lacuna is pretty obvious when you list all those places as you did, and you just don't have Eastern Europe. You know, when I started my academic career with reimagining Europe, you know, what I wanted was to bring Rus into Medieval Europe. And then as I kept reading and kept writing, what I found is it's not just Rus. You know, basically Medieval Europe ends at the Elbe as far as the majority of what we call medievalists in the Anglophone world are concerned. And so, I mean, this leads me back to your initial question about authorship, worldview and identity and how it was conceived. And so this is a title that, you know, we workshopped with the publisher. You know, Rutledge has just been amazing. You know, my editor there, Michael, has been fantastic and I like it. But in my head, I still call this book Medieval's Worldview, as in the possessive peoples, medievals, their worldview. And the reason I call it that is because for a long time I've picked on a very popular medieval European history textbook published by Oxford University Press. Called the Medieval Worldview. And the Medieval Worldview is pretty easy to pick on because it has got three really beautiful full page, two page spread maps. And on the left side of the page is Western Europe. And you've got all the cities in France and Southern England, some cities in the German Empire and Italy, and then the entire right hand is empty. And so you see these maps, and I've used them in a number of publications, you see these maps and it's like, why did you even include a two page spread? If you are the audience of this book, undergraduate students, and you're looking at these maps of medieval Europe, your impression is very clearly that Medieval Europe is populated in the west and utterly depopulated in the East. And you know, it might sound like I'm exaggerating, but certainly I'm not. You know, you can go look at these maps and you see Poland, Bohemia, Hungary is in early medieval Europe. And those are just labels. But then in high medieval Europe, even those labels disappear. Although we do get Prague as a city. And then everything else is gone. My Rus, for instance, is under the key. They put the key right where Rus is. So there is this impression given that medieval Eastern Europe, and really, I mean by that small E, as in directional note, capital E, Eastern, as in, you know, the concept of Eastern Europe. But the eastern half of Europe is empty. It's terra incognita in the text of the book, you know, follows along in this. And there are a few mentions of Eastern Europe, but the few mentions of Eastern Europe in that book are generally to prove a modern point. So the author will talk about the religious divide as mirroring the Iron Curtain or the religious divide in the Balkans as mirroring the Balkan wars of the 1990s. You know, it's not there for its own historical purpose as the history of France or England is there. And so, you know, I've talked so much about this and I thought what we really need to do is we need to go back to our primary sources. And I published a piece a few different a few years ago in a volume called the Medieval Networks in East Central Europe. And that piece, which does have those maps in it as well, talked about this idea that what we should do is we should go back to our primary sources and see how they conceptualize the world. And this was, you know, riffing on an idea. And then after a couple years, I thought, okay, you know what, that's actually a pretty good idea. I don't have it in me to do all of that. You know, let's get some people together and let's have them talk about their favorite source or one of the sources they use the most. And how did that source, how did that primary author conceptualize their world? And so that's what the edited collection came to be, is how do those medieval people view the world around them?
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Erica Monahan
Okay. And so. And that is what you're talking about. There's a spot in the introduction where you're laying out the goals and also get into the methodology a bit. And I'll just even quote this because the passage stuck out at me. Stuck out for me. And you write. This volume attempts to correct or at least challenge the construct that is medieval Europe by going back to the primary sources, the building blocks upon which the story of medieval Europe rests. Though it is an approach reliant upon returning to the sources, this volume has no intention of replicating the style of history made famous by Leopold von Rankje so many years ago. And so you talked about the goal, and now I want to ask you to just say little bit more about this method of bringing us to the sources, but not in the way that von Reinke did.
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Christian Raffensperger
Yeah. So one of the things that I've done in my 15 plus years at Wittenberg is teach our methods classes. And the methods classes for history majors always include the requisite historiography and going back to radca and what the idea, the Ronchian idea that if you just read all of the sources, you can combine the true fact of history. And certainly we are well past that and we are post postmodern historians for the most part at this point. But anytime you say go back to the sources, to historians, especially to medieval historians, there is an immediate knee jerk reaction of like, oh wait, nope, this is a 19th century thing that you're doing. And so I felt like I had to really put that in there that it is not. We're utilizing very modern methodologies in the book. And you know, you see that in a variety of places, not only through the inclusion of material culture. You know, Yitzke Jaspersa has a wonderful piece about the Treasuries, the Guelph Treasuries, and then the treasury in San is adoro. But you know, Stacy Morell's piece also is fantastic in this regard. But we're. I really thought it was important to acknowledge up front that we were not trying to use some kind of recidivist methodology to go back to the past, but instead we were trying to utilize the sources to go forward into the future. And I think it's really important to try and do that for all kinds of things and let the sources speak and not in a negative way. Right. Not, you know, that they will tell us the truth. But, you know, and I mentioned this in the introduction, you know, Lisa Wolverton has an amazing book on Cosmos at Prague, where instead of, you know, mining Cosmos's narrative for information about medieval Bohemia, instead she's writing about Cosmas, the author, and what the author's intention was for his work. And it really changes the way we look at Cosmas and Cosmos text rather than looking up a date in it or, you know, what did this king do or that king do? If we can understand the authors and their authorial intent, which is, again, a very postmodern way of looking at things, I think that will help us understand this worldview construction that the book is trying to get at.
- [15:07]
Erica Monahan
Thank you so much. And yes, that is one of the things that I found so rich in this book that cuts in a variety of really valuable directions. So we've talked about medieval Eastern Europe and in Eastern Medieval Europe, but the volume isn't just about Eastern Europe. These 17 articles take us, in addition to Kiev and the Baltics and the Baltics and the Baltic states and the Balkans, we also see texts in people from Scandinavia, Iberia, the Mediterranean and even Western Europe. And actually, that's a good segue to get right into the meat of the.
- [15:47]
Christian Raffensperger
The volume.
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Erica Monahan
We, we won't have time to discuss everything in here, so hopefully readers will, you know, listen to this and then go and get their hands on authorship, worldview and identity in Medieval Europe. But we'll but to talk about just a few of the pieces. So the first article in the volume is by Aaron Thomas Daly, and he has this piece, the Horizons of Gregory Tours. So here you've got this person very much from Western Europe. Right. Please tell us a bit about this piece and how this piece about from someone, what's now France serves the purposes of this project.
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Christian Raffensperger
Yeah, you know, Erica, I really appreciate you asking that and pointing out that it does encompass all of Medieval Europe, because that was a very intentional goal. And, you know, one of the things that I really am trying to do with a lot of my scholarship and this book really was a way to start that was to look at Medieval Europe more broadly. And part of that is because, you know, I've got a pretty reliable audience who will read stuff on Bruce. Right. But, you know, my good friend Amy Livingstone, for instance, who's a historian of the Loire Valley and now has moved to Brittany. She is not going to read a book on Rus, necessarily, but she's a medievalist and she is somebody I want to be reading my work and exchanging ideas with. And so my work needs to be about all of medieval Europe. And so that's why I tried to include such a broad territory here. And Aaron Daly's piece is a great example of that, because Gregory of Tours is just symbolic for early medieval Europe in so many ways. And his history, right, or history of the Franks as it's often been called, is used for so much of understanding the Merovingian world and the early Christianization and all kinds of topics. It's been used in feud literature. It's been used in women's studies for understanding all of these powerful women and then the stereotypes about powerful women. But what Aaron does in his piece that I think is so fascinating as he points out that actually Gregory lives in a much bigger world than Frankia. He talks about saints, both living and dead, in the Middle East. He talks about India. He talks about these enormous horizons because the world he lives in is Christendom. And yet the vast majority of uses that Gregory has been put to are relatively narrow. They're relatively confined to the horizons of medieval Western Europe or early medieval Western Europe. But. But as Aaron read through this text and then narrated this information for us, picking out these examples, you know, we've got all sorts of things from the Eastern Mediterranean. We've got all sorts of things, both, again, living and dead. So this is not just going back to biblical times, but current things during Gregory's period that are going on in. In the Eastern Mediterranean that show us his awareness of, and his conceptual, conceptualization of a much wider world than we traditionally think of Gregory as living in.
- [18:48]
Erica Monahan
Thank you. And, you know, actually, this, this reminds me that I want to come back to your. Your own previous work that led you up to doing this volume that. Because, as you know, as I listened to you speak, yes, it makes so much sense that people living in Gaul, in what's now France, might, if, if we are open to the possibilities, when we read their work, we get. We could get real clues about how big or where their worlds stretched, which is what I see this book doing. And in one of the reasons it makes sense that it turns out some of those worlds of so many medievals stretched farther than, say, that traditional textbook that you. That you talked about might lead us to believe. One of the reasons we can appreciate that it goes farther, I think it has, is because of your earlier work. And so I, because I looked through and I noticed there isn't an NBN interview on it. I wanted to ask you to tell us a little bit about your. Your first two books. They are very much part of this project. Your first book, Reimagining Kievan Rus and the Medieval World, and then your second book on kinship networks. In some ways this is super unfair of me to just pop on you, but in paragraph or so, will you tell us what you do in those books and how it helps us understand that the connections were wider than just Western Europe?
- [20:20]
Christian Raffensperger
Absolutely. Well, and I don't think it's super unfair of you, but, you know, I'm also, Erica, going to pick on nbn, if that's all right for just a minute, because I think one of the reasons that there isn't an NBN interview is because my work falls between categories. And categories or silos, as I often talk about them, are really what define the academic world. And so you and I know each other from the Slavic Studies world. And so I fit into the Slavic Studies world as part of this early part of Slavic Studies. You're more in a Muscovite period of Slavic Studies. And then I go to Medieval Studies conferences where I'm off at the Eastern fringe, or Byzantine Studies conferences where I'm part of a northern fringe. But, you know, medieval, traditional medieval studies I don't really fit into, and traditional Slavic Studies I don't really fit into, which is more, you know, imperial or Soviet. So, you know, my work exists in a really weird intersection that is neither a Slavic silo, a Byzantine silo, or a medieval silo, but is intentionally trying to bridge many of those different things. So, you know, that's maybe two paragraphs more than you wanted. But, but coming back to Reimagining Europe, I mean, Reimagining Europe from 2012 was a book where I was trying to integrate Rus into medieval Europe, and I was trying to do it through a few different categories. One of those was to get rid of this idea of the Byzantine Commonwealth. And it's interesting because art historians at the time told me, oh, that's a straw man. The Byzantine Commonwealth is dead. But it's not dead. It's really not dead at all, especially for historians and especially for medievalists who still use it all the time. And so I wanted to talk about something alternate, which was the Byzantine ideal, which is that Byzantium or the Medieval Roman Empire, as I call it more often these days, was the ideal empire. And everybody was looking to appropriate from it. And The Ottonians did that. We see that at Monte Cassino in the Italian peninsula. We even see that in the Arabic and Turkic world as well. And yet, because of Obolensky and because of a variety of other scholars, we've singled out the Slavic appropriations as different or special and divided that off. And that is, not surprisingly, matches very nicely to the Iron Curtain. So situating Rus in that broader world of we're all appropriating from Byzantium takes away some of that otherness. I also looked at dynastic marriages and the marriages that were made between the Rusian royal family and the rest of medieval Europe. And, you know, this is something that, for instance, in that Slavic Studies silo, if you go back to Kyivan Russia, which is, you know, a classic book of that world, these marriages are dismissed in. In just a few sentences. They don't really appear in Western medieval things, unless it's Anna Yaroslava who is married to Henry of France. And then, you know, she's othered for a variety of reasons. So I really focus on those marriages as a way to tie Rus into medieval Europe. And then I also talked about their religious ties, because that's one of the things that often Rus is discussed as converting to Christianity. In 988 with Byzantium, you get a marriage between Volodymyr and Anna. And then you get. The next discussion is about Ivan III and Sophia palaeologena, which is 400 years later. And you see this Byzantine connection, right, for Rus. But in the 10th and 11th and 12th centuries, you know, the Rusian world existed as part of a larger Christian world. And we see that with the marriages. We see that with taking in saints, lives and celebrations of saints from Pope Urban II, celebration of the translation of the relics of St Nicholas, for instance, all kinds of connections. And so that's, you know, reimagining Europe in a nutshell. I mean, it's a big night. It's like a coconut shell. I'm sorry, Erica. Well, the holidays have come and gone once again. But if you've forgotten to get that special someone in your life a gift. Well, Mint Mobile is extending their holiday offer of half off unlimited wireless. So here's the idea. You get it now, you call it an early present for next year. What do you have to lose? Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch limited time.
- [24:41]
Erica Monahan
50% off regular price for new customers. Upfront payment required, $45 for three months, $90 for for six months, or $180 for 12 month. Plan taxes and fees. Extra speeds may slow after 50 gigabytes per month when network is busy. See terms. Yeah, but I mean, it is such a great book. I mean, when I read wow, 54 marriages to Western Europe over this, over this, you know, century and a half or so was it. It's been a while since I've read it, but it just, it's remarkable work and that we should all know about actually though, and I want to. That you talk about these historical silos and I want to say NBN is trying to do its part in addressing that. And so you've given me this chance to just plug for a minute and maybe I can, you know, we can have another conversation in that Nubuck's network in conjunction with Kritika. I've just been involved in founding a series called History x Silo. And the idea is exactly what you talk about that so often as historians, we only talk to each other or this particular community. And the idea of History ex silo is to try and get historians talking across our subfields. So listeners, I encourage them to put in search History x Silo. We're just starting to do interviews now. Christian, I can talk to you more about that as well. Although, even though I think that the sense in which you used our silos is that some of this work, like medieval marriages from the royal house of Kiev landing in Western Europe, has in many ways just fallen out of the picture for so many people. And your work is so important in bringing that back in. All right, but moving on, moving on to our.
- [26:29]
Christian Raffensperger
Hold on. Before you go on though, I would note. Yes, absolutely. I've got one scheduled for August. It was supposed to be February, but it's gotten pushed back. So. So you can hear me on that too.
- [26:39]
Erica Monahan
Oh, super, super. Okay, great.
- [26:42]
Christian Raffensperger
All right, Joanna, drill.
- [26:45]
Erica Monahan
Oh, all right. All right, good.
- [26:48]
Christian Raffensperger
Yay.
- [26:49]
Erica Monahan
All right, now next, I want. Okay. Because I currently in my own research. Oh. And I actually wanted to say I really. So much of what you're saying resonates so much with what I would consider my intellectual agenda of really integrating, you know, places east of the Elbe into a broader context. And for me, the period I focus on most is the early modern period and the 15 to 1800. But I think that this kind of approach can we have a lot of work to do in our respective fields in that direction. So I am with you on that one. And so because I spend time, so much of my time in my own research thinking about people who traversed Eurasia before there were modern maps to do it. I wanted to ask you about this article about Marco Polo, one of those, you know, intrepid travelers. So it's. Teresa Shawcross has an article, the worldview of Marco Polo's Divisamento Dumond. His current the Currency of the World Commercial Marvels, Silk root, Nostalgia and Global Empire in the Late Middle Ages. So we've all heard the name Marco Polo probably know a little bit, we think about him. But I wanted to ask you to tell us a little bit about this article.
- [28:09]
Christian Raffensperger
And.
- [28:10]
Erica Monahan
And what does this article achieve that that's been missing? That's a new contribution in your perspective?
- [28:17]
Christian Raffensperger
Yeah, absolutely. I would love to do that. I. I would also add a parenthetical that. I agree, absolutely, that your work does the same sort of thing. Especially, you know, I'm moving beyond the Elbe and you're moving us beyond the Urals. And, you know, I am trying so hard to integrate, you know, all of that material into the. The Imperial Russian things and not just talk about a European focus. So I appreciate that very much. So for Teresa's article, Shawcross article, she's trying to look at Marco Polo in a very different way than is traditionally done. And she's focused on, as the title indicates or the subtitle indicates, the commercial implications. And so she's reading it via the commercial implications and saying this is what Marco Polo was focused on. And. And within that, we see an analysis of the mercantile community of Byzantium and the mercantile community of the Mongol world and how that fits into the Italian city states and how those compare one to another. And so within that, she can really get at a whole variety of topics that have been a little bit hidden before because that divis a was being used for a different purpose. And it's really interesting to think, actually, you know, so many of these things in this volume worked out very nicely, and I can't take credit for that. The authors did all the work, but they worked out so nicely in resonating one with another, getting back to that idea of what was the authorial intent. And you know, of course, we could go into a long thing about who was the author of that particular text, but. But the text itself's purpose, Teresa Shawcross points out, is maybe not what we've often thought it was and that we learned so much instead about the way that Marco Polo and the Polos in general viewed their world via this mercantile interaction rather than, you know, the othering of, look at this crazy stuff that I'm seeing out in the world or, you know, look at what I can pull out of this text about race or ethnicity or religion. And so it's a. And again, it feels like, you know, a new focus, but it's a new focus on a topic that we often consider to be an old topic, which is mercantile history or economic history.
- [30:36]
Erica Monahan
Yeah. And then. And even that she calls that. In this text, you know, one of the marvels identified actually turns out to be, you know, a European at a distant court. And so that was. So it's not just about some really othered exotica in some ways.
- [30:52]
Christian Raffensperger
Exactly. Exactly. Yep.
- [30:54]
Erica Monahan
Yeah, I like that piece a lot. And. Well, let's see, the other piece that, you know, as a historian of early modern Russia, that definitely jumped out to me and I wanted to ask you about is this article. There's an article in the volume by Innes Garcia de la Puenta called Imagined Geographies in Early Route. And in it she has. She writes this. She's talking about sort of in, put crudely, you know, what can we learn about geography from the Primary Chronicle? And she said, which is the, you know, kind of. Well, I'll let you give us a primer for readers and listeners that don't know on the Primary Chronicle. But. So she writes, by explaining where the land of Rus came from and describing its territory, the Primary Chronicle engages in a process of symbolic interpretation rather than of objective representation. Perhaps foreseeably, the textual map that transpires from its pages imagines geography rather than pictures it. And at some. As I was reading this article, at some albeit minuscule level, I just couldn't help but wonder that if Vladimir Putin, who has fancied himself a student of history, had read this sort of material in his syllabi, perhaps. I mean, could he have come to some different conclusions? I don't, given what we've seen, hold up much hope. But I wanted to ask you to tell us a bit about this piece and how it speaks to the volume's main goals.
- [32:40]
Christian Raffensperger
Yeah, absolutely. I really like this one, of course, because I do do medieval Eastern Europe and medieval Rus in particular. And so instead of inserting myself into the volume, I really wanted to get a great, great scholar who would do good work. And Inez certainly blew me away with that because she brings in all kinds of things here, that is literature and scholarship that I don't do and ways that I don't think about this history. And I really like this piece in so many ways because she goes through and she talks about the construction, and it is a construction of the world. As viewed by the author or the authors of this text. And this text we call the Pove Surim Nikliat, the Tale of bygone years, perhaps, is one way to translate it. That is the earliest text that we have from Rus, and it narrates the history kind of from the Flood, but really mostly from the 10th and 11th into the very early 12th century. And we see a lot of narrative information in there. We see a lot of. Of analytical information or analystic, pardon me, information. But in the early stages, which is what she's talking about, we see the writer try and conceive of how does Rus fit into a Christian world? And there is some reliance on biblical information from George Hamartolas, John Mullalis, and it's possible that there is some borrowing directly from those texts. And we see that. But we also get, you know, this narrative of creation from Genesis, and we get the division of the world among the sons of Noah. And the world that ends up being created is not one that is. Is creating itself as an Eastern European other. It's connected to the Byzantine world, of course, it's connected to the Middle east, but it's also connected to the Slavic world because we've got all of these other Slavic connections. And so we see mentions of the Moravians and Bulgarians, the Croas, the Liaks. The Liaks, how the Poles are referred to. But we also see that the chronicler connects the travels of St. Andrew through the land of Rus, and he has St. Andrew travel through the land of Rus as a way to reach Rome. And this is such an odd thing. I mean, you know, I can almost imagine, you know, booking this on Expedia, but it would be, you know, Constantinople to Kiev to Novgorod, and then around Europe to Rome. No way. No way. That's the easiest way to go. But the chronicler used this as a way to almost delineate the known world, including Rus as part of that wider Christian world. And so I think that's really important to think about. The chronicler, almost certainly he. But he used these, you know, boundaries to the Caspian, the. The Euro mountains, you know, these other boundaries to conceptualize that known and unknown that makes Rus part of a Christian world. Right. Not necessarily defined as a European world. World. Yeah.
- [36:04]
Erica Monahan
Yeah. Thank you so much for that.
- [36:06]
Christian Raffensperger
Yeah. Can I add one thing to that, too, which is that, you know, I love your question or your. Your. Your thought about Vladimir Putin, because this is one of the things I think about as well when I give talks on the Ukraine war and I have A small book that came out in January called From Kiev Rus to Ukraine, Past is Present and it's from a German publisher and there's Zeiten Spiegel series and it's one of these, you know, small format, you know, 30,000 word books and it talks about the Ukraine war as a bookend, introduction and conclusion. And then in the middle is a potted history of Rus talking about all of these interconnections, making Rus part of medieval Europe. And so, I mean, it is really trying to shape this narrative that if we view the past differently, as moderns, as present people, if we view the past differently, such that Rus and modern day Ukraine is part of Europe, that changes how we conceptualize what Europe is and the way and the ways in which we care about medieval Europe as well.
- [37:15]
Erica Monahan
Yes. So, and, and also I thank you so much for that and in breaking down what, you know, any understanding of what's primordial perhaps is another aspect I appreciated, but thank you for. So you have a book that just came out and just came out that I didn't mention in the beginning. My apologies for that. And yes, please tell us again the title.
- [37:36]
Christian Raffensperger
From Kievan Rus to Ukraine, Past is Present.
- [37:41]
Erica Monahan
Super, thank you very much. Oh, that's great. Well, so actually we don't have a whole lot I don't want to keep you too, too much. But so far we've talked about some of the articles that are in the first part of the book. And the first part of the book, the articles is listed under this section titled A Wider World. And in the second part of the book there's a series of articles that the title there is Neighbors and Neighborhoods. And I just thought that one of the articles that I wanted, that I thought I might ask you about because it has this great methodology of looking at vernacular in the use of vernacular and administrative documents. And it was Frederick Soup, I think, and he has this article, the Medieval Welsh Ethnic nicknames and implications for the Welsh View of Their Geopolitical context. And it's 1050-1400. Could you tell us a bit about that article? What's going on in there and how that serves the volume's purposes?
- [38:40]
Christian Raffensperger
Yeah. So, you know, anytime you try and create an edited collection, table of contents or structure, you have to try and think about, okay, so am I just going to throw all this in there or is there going to be some organizing principle? And if so, what is that organizing principle? And so I tried to create an organizing structure that was sources that are very outward looking and then sources that are more inward looking and it doesn't always fit. Right. I mean, you know, there are a couple texts that are really right on the border. And so I put one at the end of the first section and one right at the beginning of the second section. But Frederick's text absolutely is one of these that is much more inward looking about its own neighborhood. Right. And so what he's talking about are nicknames, which is something I've never thought about. And so I was just really bowled over when I got this information from him and read through this because I've been reading a little bit about medieval wales, Stevenson's work, but I hadn't thought about any of these issues. And so what Fred does in here is he looks at the term terms that get used for ethnic nicknames. So Sais, right, is one of these nicknames that gets used pretty often. And we see in there that sais S a I s and I apologize, I don't actually speak Welsh and so I'm probably mispronouncing that, but gets used for English, right? So as somebody who is from England. And so we see the inclusion of this nickname seis in 23 instances in one place and 10 instances in another. And. And it's always like, you know, so. And so the English, Griffith. Seiss, right, Griffith, the English. And it is a way to other and connect Griffith, which is a good proper Welsh name, with the English. And then we see the same thing literally when we get to Gwydell, right? And then we get this Gwyddel nickname and it's a label for an Irishman. And so we see this with el nickname for people who are of Irish descent. And already from the 11th and 12th century, we see these labels as ways to identify the ethnicity of somebody that is creating them as other than native in our sources. And I just thought that was so fascinating and embedded in documentary sources, but pulled out in a way that we never would have thought about in the past, or at least I don't think we would have. And going back to an earlier question, Erica, this is one of the reasons I put in the bit about Ranka is because yes, we are going back to the sources, but we're looking at the sources with all of these new lenses that we didn't have 200 years ago. This is one of those great places where nobody actually thought about these nicknames in the way that Fred is doing. I think this is clever way to try and get at the sources, author's view of their world around them.
- [41:57]
Erica Monahan
Thank you. And I also just thought that it is such a great way of illustrating how identity is constructed at multiple scales. And I think that this volume does a really nice job of presenting that.
- [42:11]
Christian Raffensperger
Thank you. Yeah.
- [42:13]
Erica Monahan
Okay. Well, listen, gosh, we could. I know, I'm. Oh, we could talk about all of them, but I said I wouldn't keep you, keep you too, too long. And so with that, I'm going to just encourage our readers to, you know, medievalists and people that study worldviews and identity and issues of authorship. Really, I think you'll find it worth your while to peruse the articles in this wonderful volume. So thank you again for doing it. But before I let you go, I want to thank you for your time. And our final NBN question tends to be what are you working on next? What's your next project? What are you working on now?
- [42:55]
Christian Raffensperger
Do you want what I'm writing or what's going to come out soon? Both. Okay. Well, there are a couple things that are coming out soon, but the one I'd like to mention is a book called Rulers and Rulership in the Arc of Medieval Europe. And this is an attempt to reconceptualize how we think about rulers and rulership, taking England not as normative, but as abnormal, and instead focusing on the ways that we see rulers and rulership in a territory that stretches from Iberia north to Ireland, across Scandinavia and down through Central and Eastern Europe to Byzantium, the Medieval Roman Empire. And if we look at that territory, which is the territory that is most of Europe, what's going on there? And let's look at what's going on there and see, is that the same as what we've constructed as our normative view based on England? And it turns out it's not. I mean, perhaps not surprisingly. And so it's a way to get out a new view of how we understand medieval Europe as a broader perspective. So that comes out in August. What I'm writing right now is a collective biography of the Queen of Rus. And we don't have enough information to write a book about. We've got no Eleanor of Aquitaine or Uraka of Leon Castell Steel. So I'm writing a collective biography where we've got bits and pieces about all kinds of different women. And it's going to follow a life cycle. And so we'll learn about their marriages, their faith, their death, their political activities, all of these sorts of things.
- [44:29]
Erica Monahan
Oh, that sounds fascinating. They both sound terrific. And I will really look forward to reading this and potentially assigning a book about medieval queenship. So, yeah, I'm really. Thank you for. Thank you for doing that. Thank you for sharing it. All right. Then again, just thank you so much for your expertise, your work, and for spending this hour with us. And congratulations on all these wonderful publications that you have made happen. And I look forward to the next interview.
- [45:02]
Christian Raffensperger
Christian, thank you.
- [45:04]
Erica Monahan
All right, thanks. Bye. Bye.