Ebook: 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"--