The Early Medieval Era · 988-1054 · Kyiv, Novgorod
Kievan Rus' Christianity
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About This Movement
In 988 Prince Vladimir of Kyiv was baptised and had his people baptised with him — an act of state that the Rus' chronicle later dressed in one of the great stories of medieval Christianity. Envoys sent out to sample the religions who reported that in Hagia Sophia at Constantinople they had not known whether they stood in heaven or on earth. Within two generations there was a Christian culture to match the decision. Vladimir's son Yaroslav built his own St Sophia in Kyiv and filled it with mosaics; a monastery in the caves above the Dnieper became the school of Rus' monasticism. And around 1049 a native churchman, Ilarion — whom Yaroslav would make the first native-born metropolitan two years later — preached a Sermon on Law and Grace that is the first substantial theology written by a Rus' author. The window is short, barely two generations, but almost the whole later history of Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian Christianity runs back through it. Most of what tells the story was written down afterwards, by monks looking back.
Sources
- The Russian Primary Chronicle, Laurentian text (trans. S. H. Cross & O. P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, Mediaeval Academy, 1953) (primary) — The conversion narrative (Vladimir's investigation of faiths, 988 baptism). Compiled in the early 12th century from earlier material, so it needs careful, critical reading as a later compilation.
- Ilarion of Kiev, Sermon on Law and Grace (trans. Simon Franklin, Sermons and Rhetoric of Kievan Rus', Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, 1991) (primary) — The first great native voice (metropolitan of Kiev, c. 1049) - theology of the newly baptized nation.
- The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery (trans. Muriel Heppell, Harvard, 1989) (primary) — First complete English translation. A 13th-century compilation reaching back to the mid-11th-century foundation, so it needs careful, critical reading.
- Simon Franklin & Jonathan Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, 750-1200 (Longman, 1996) (secondary) — The standard English history of the period, source-critical about the chronicle.
- Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 3, ch. 6: 'Slav Christianities, 800-1100' (Jonathan Shepard) (reference) — From the vol. 3 TOC; Shepard is also co-author of the standard secondary above - a direct fit.