Böcker av Christian Raffensperger

This collection of essays brings the focus back to medieval authors to see how they described their world. While we see that each author certainly had their own biases, the vast majority of them did not view the world as constrained to their small piece of it.

A new, family-based history of the region known as Kyivan Rus'.

Izyaslav and Gertrude focuses on two well-known Rusian rulers, King Izyaslav and Queen Gertrude, from their marriage to their rule in Rus' to their travels in exile and their ultimate fates. Through this book, readers will see the Rusian royalty as not an eastern Other, but part of the broader complex of medieval European royalty.

Christian Raffensperger tracks the dynastic marriages of the Volodimerovici, the ruling family of Rus. Using a modern scholarly approach and broad range of primary sources, he delivers a fully realized picture of the Volodimerovici from the tenth through twelfth centuries and the first comprehensive, scholarly treatment of the subject in English.

An overriding assumption has directed scholarship in both European and Slavic history: that Kievan Rus' was part of a Byzantine commonwealth separate from Europe. Raffensperger refutes this, and offers a new frame for two hundred years of history, in which Rus' is understood as part of medieval Europe, and East is not so neatly divided from West.