American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

Aspects of the Slavic Middle Ages and Slavic Renaissance Culture by Henrik BirnbaumReview by: Norman W. InghamThe Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Summer, 1994), p. 355Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/308811 .

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Reviews 355

REVIEWS

Henrik Birnbaum. Aspects of the Slavic Middle Ages and Slavic Renaissance Culture. Ameri- can Univ. Studies. Series 12, Slavic Languages and Literature, 4. N.Y.: Peter Lang, 1991. xi, 838 pp., 31 plates. $110.95 (hardcover).

Once again a collection of Henrik Birnbaum's essays has brought out the immense scope of his erudition. Forming a sequel to two earlier volumes, On Medieval and Renaissance Slavic Writing: Selected Essays (The Hague, 1974) and Essays in Early Slavic Civilization/Studien zur Friihkultur der Slaven (Munich, 1981), the new collection comprises twenty articles on a range of medieval and Renaissance subjects and includes, this time, broad historical and cultural surveys. Most of them originally appeared in English and are reprinted here unchanged, but some have been freshly translated from other languages, and a few revised and updated. A certain amount of repetition and technical inconsistency necessarily results from the fact that the pieces were composed over a period of years and for various occasions.

Birnbaum's encyclopedic knowledge of the sources and the secondary literature is every- where apparent. Probably no one, East or West, is as thoroughly conversant with interna- tional scholarship on such a wide variety of premodern Slavic topics as he. In the course of assimilating this prodigious reading he subjects it to his own critical judgments, and the result is a thoughtful and balanced synthesis that, in the best of cases, encapsulates the present state of knowledge. To read one of these studies by Birnbaum is to listen to an expertly prepared lecture, highly informative and soberly evaluative.

Among the several broader topics are "The Slavic Share in Western Civilization: The Early Period," "The Subcultures of Medieval Russia," "The Balkan Slavic Component in Medieval Russian Culture," and "Orality, Literacy, and Literature in Old Rus'." A group of essays deals with a special interest of Birnbaum's, the culture and institutions of Novgorod. As he himself repeatedly comments, the survey form does not allow him to discuss many concrete details of such large subjects. He can be more thorough when he reviews smaller questions, such as "Christianity before Christianization in Kievan Rus' " or "When and How Was Novgorod Converted to Christianity?" Some of the cultural-historical pieces are com- parative in form; and here the reader wishes that a juxtaposing of, say, Novgorod and Dubrovnik or Daniel the Exile and Walther von der Vogelweide were made to reveal some greater point. Birnbaum is, of course, most at home in the linguistic and philological essays, such as those on texts and typology of Old Church Slavonic and issues in West Church Slavonic. A valuable summary is "Roman Jakobson's Inquiry into the Cultural Legacy of the Slavic Middle Ages."

The extensive notes and bibliographies to the articles would by themselves make this a useful book. Anyone who wishes to undertake the study of a subject within Henrik Birn- baum's vast realm of knowledge would be well advised to start by consulting his survey and the literature he cites.

Norman W Ingham, University of Chicago

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