Ties of Kinship

Christian Raffensperger is the Kenneth E. Wray Chair in the Humanities and Professor and Chair of the History Department at Wittenberg University, and an Associate of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. He is the author of Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus´ in the Medieval World, 988–1146; Ties of Kinship: Genealogy and Dynastic Marriage in Kyivan Rus´; The Kingdom of Rus´; and Conflict, Bargaining, and Kinship Networks in Medieval Eastern Europe.

Christian Raffensperger gives us a book that has been needed for generations. Anyone who has ventured into the Kyivan chronicles and other Russian and western medieval sources immediately becomes disheartened by the maze of names and marriages of the Volodimeroviči. Not anymore, thanks to this book. But Ties of Kinship is more than a reference work; it is an erudite and ambitious work of interpretive historical scholarship that offers a source-based glimpse of how the Kyivan polity fit into a much broader social and political medieval European world. Anyone interested in Russian history or medieval Europe will find this work indispensable.