Simon Franklin, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c.950-1300

Medium Aevum, Spring, 2003 by Andrew Kahn

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), xii 325 pp. ISBN 0-521-81381-6. 45.00 [pounds sterling].

For Simon Franklin the history of culture, religion, and intellectual development in Kievan Rus' is inseparable from the history of writing. By 'writing' Franklin means both the development of a technology and its capacity to signify in a multiplicity of contexts and to perform a wide range of social, political, and anthropological functions. While philological precision marks the survey of the linguistic environment in part I, the Kievan Rus' of Franklin's description is a world undergoing dynamic change in its administration, religion, and written culture. Throughout Franklin argues against synchronic analysis of writing as dematerialized language by emphasizing the importance of the technological (as well as intellectual) context, since the materials on which writing appears also affect functionality. In analysing a highly diverse body of textual matter, ranging from manuscripts to birch-bark fragments, and from ecclesiastical texts to records of commercial exchange, the author applies a taxonomy of writing divided as primary, secondary, and tertiary types as defined by material and functionality.

Part II moves to a diachronic picture by examining the functions and purposes served by writing. Here the meaning of writing encompasses virtually all messages recorded according to a linguistic or pictorial code, and is seen as a process increasingly open to a wide range of writers and readers. Context determines function and also expresses attitude. Despite the avowed Kievan debt to Byzantium, he shows why the functions of writing in one system cannot be transplanted directly into administrative and legal structures that are entirely separate and evolve differently. He also presents a view of a 'graphic environment' that extends beyond the preserve of monastic copyists and court-based production, and beyond the confines of the book. Alongside the 'official' written culture of the Church and its sacred texts he presents examples of writing that has been underestimated as evidence for attitudes to writing and its diffusion: graffiti, inscriptions, receipts, rescripts, labels on icons, frescos, and icons constitute a large part of the remains of this graphic environment. The overview of this disparate body of evidence is exemplary. His method is as exciting as his scholarship is exacting: Franklin draws skilfully on recent scholarship on orality and literacy in the ancient world, where a parallel paucity of evidence has stimulated new approaches to interrogating evidence that is frustratingly slender; and also draws illuminating lessons from the work of Michael Clanchy and Michael Camille.

Written with wit and style as well as great erudition, Franklin's book breaks new ground, taking 'histoire des mentalites' for Kievan Rus' as far as it can go. His claims for the growth of literacy and for a populist dimension to writing are not radical or inflationary, but in assembling a picture of a world where writing is increasingly visible and increasingly available he opens an entirely new perspective on the mental processes of a society that are being subtly altered by an awareness of how writing and reading operate. The penultimate chapter concentrates on church-paintings as images that imply certain strategies of reading. The virtual tour that Franklin constructs of a Kievan church combines all his gifts as historian, reader, and observer. The result is a spellbinding performance that brings Franklin's own reader as close as possible to reading the world through the eyes of a Kievan.

ANDREW KAHN

Oxford