Bøker 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.

The Kingdom of Rus' challenges the perception of Rus' as an eastern "other" - advancing the idea of the Rus' as a kingdom deeply integrated with medieval Europe.

Conflict, Bargaining, and Kinship Networks in Medieval Eastern Europe takes the familiar view of Eastern Europe, families, and conflicts and stands it on its head. Instead of a world rife with civil war and killing, this book presents a relatively structured environment where conflict is engaged in for the purposes of advancing one's position, and where death among the royal families is relatively rare. At the heart of this analysis is the use of situational kinship networksrelationships created by elites for the purposes of engaging in conflict with their own kin, but only for the duration of a particular conflict. A new image of medieval Eastern Europe, less consumed by civil war and mass death, will change the perception of medieval Eastern Europe in the minds of readers. This new perception is essential to not only present the past more accurately, but also to allow for medieval Eastern Europe's integration into the larger medieval world as something other than an aberrant other.

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.