Introduction
Chapter 1: The Importance of Conflict
Chapter 2: Conflict as Bargaining
Chapter 3: Everyone Goes Home Alive
Chapter 4: The Kinship Web in Theory and Practice
Chapter 5: Iaroslav Sviatopolchich’s Kinship Web in Action
Chapter 6: Géza II in the Center of a European Kinship Web
Conclusion: Kinship, Religion, and “Nation”: Alternate Identity
Issues in Medieval Eastern
Christian Raffensperger is associate professor of history at Wittenberg University.
Christian Raffensperger gives us a new understanding of conflict in
medieval Eastern Europe. He explores the highly complex relations
between conflict resolution and kinship networks. Original,
theoretically innovative, vividly written, and well-constructed,
this is a path-breaking work shedding considerable light on a key
component of medieval politics in Eastern Europe.
*Florin Curta, University of Florida*
Elucidating the necessarily trans-realm, regional nature of haute
politique in eleventh- and twelfth-century Eastern Europe, with its
continuously shifting family alliances within and across the
borders of often unstable polities, Christian Raffensperger has
crafted a meticulously researched, innovative monograph with an
originally formulated leitmotif-concept—the ‘situational kinship
network.’
*David Goldfrank, Georgetown University*
Another Raffensperger cannon ball through the conceptual wall
between Eastern and Western medieval Europe. Conflict, Bargaining,
and Kinship Networks in Medieval Eastern Europe takes great strides
toward normalizing the history of Rus by replacing the image of
incessant civil war with a story of bargaining for power through
formalized, largely bloodless conflict within a relatively stable
and functioning polity. Christian Raffensperger shows how in both
the plastic use of kin networks and levels of conflict the politics
of eastern European families resembled that of their western
European counterparts. Let the walls come down.
*Leonora Neville, University of Wisconsin–Madison*
Christian Raffensperger’s book is a major interpretation of
medieval politics in Rus’. Raffensperger offers an innovative
explanation of numerous conflicts among the ruling elite as a tool
for bargaining between individuals, families, and clans.
Raffensperger advances our understanding of kinship politics by
convincingly demonstrating how the terms of kinship were challenged
and negotiated during such conflicts. This study defies modern
nationalism and isolationism by taking the reader to the
fascinating world of medieval kinship networks that crossed
national and ethnic boundaries.
*Sergei Bogatyrev, University College London*
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