Saints in the Slavic Christian World

This landmark edited collection offers a new series of studies of power, religion and language in the literature of the Slavic Christian world. The focus is on how saints became symbols of power during conversion and the process of transition to Christianity. Studies of locally venerated saints provide a road into early Slavic societies because saints and their cults existed and were sustained for a wide variety of reasons. Rulers and church-leaders alike needed symbols and narratives to maintain and expand their power, and hagiographies allow us to study how this power was brokered, shared and grasped by elites. Collectively, the authors in this volume pursue the idea that saints are an outward expression of Christianity becoming embedded and localized in the newly Christianized societies of East and Central Europe.

The period covered here stretches from the Macedonian dynasty in Eastern Rome (c. 800) to the rise of Muscovite rule in Russia (c. 1600). The main focus is on the Slavic religious traditions but, as this volume demonstrates, Greek and Baltic traditions were also significant.

This book will be essential reading for researchers and students interested in the religious and cultural history of Eastern Europe, the cult of saints, and the rise of Christendom.

Emil Hilton Saggau, Ph.D., is a Danish church historian working as a research fellow at Lund University, Sweden. He graduated from the University of Copenhagen in 2020, with a thesis on the Orthodox historiography of former Yugoslavia, and has continued to publish on saints and cults in Southeastern Europe. His main interest is Southeast European history and religion – in particular, the region’s connections with Byzantium.

Wawrzyniec Kowalski, PhD., is an assistant professor at the Institute of History, University of Wrocław, Poland. He has worked extensively on the nation-making process in Central Europe between c. 500 and c. 1300. His landmark study The Kings of the Slavs: The Image of a Ruler in the Latin Text of ‘The Chronicle of the Priest of Duklja’ was published in 2021.

Mihai Dragnea, PhD, is an associate researcher at the University of South-Eastern Norway and the president of the Balkan History Association. His interests include cultural, social and political relations between Germans, Scandinavians and Slavs during the High Middle Ages, the Viking Age, Slavic identity and state formation , Wallachian and Vlach identity as well as ethnicity and conflict in the Balkans.