Historical Writing of Early Rus (c.1000–c.1400) in a Comparative Perspective, by Timofey V. Guimon

Abstract

This work’s title is misleading, in that its ‘comparative perspective’ mainly concerns Anglo-Saxon England, albeit with glances at other Insular writings and writing practices in ancient civilisations. Its comparisons between Rus chronicles and texts produced in England may thus escape attention from early English history students. Timofey V. Guimon’s familiarity with the manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle enables him to reappraise the ways in which those of Rus chronicles, too, may have undergone additions and emendations. Only two extant manuscripts pre-date 1400, and even these are copies. A cat’s-cradle has developed of hypothetical reconstructions of the successive redactions which texts supposedly underwent. For his part, Guimon does not favour over-elaborate stemmata. Instead, he offers a nuanced version of the chain of developments postulated by the founding father of Russian ‘textology’, Aleksey Shahkmatov: a set of annals kept soon after Prince Vladimir’s acceptance of Byzantine-style Christianity; a retrospective narrative composed, probably, in the mid-eleventh century; composition in the 1090s of the ‘Initial Compilation’; and the creation in the early 1100s of what is known to English readers as the Rus Primary Chronicle.