OUP (2024) h/b 304pp £90 (ISBN 9780198891505)
Mirela Ivanova, Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Sheffield, has published a reappraisal of an event widely celebrated today: Cyril and Methodius' introduction of a Slavic literary language through the Glagolitic script. The International Day of the Slavonic Alphabet and Culture takes place on 24 May in the Orthodox world and 5 July in the Catholic world and is celebrated with parades, speeches, concerts, conferences and other events. Furthermore, as ‘Apostles to the Slavs’, the brothers are widely commemorated across the Slavonic-speaking countries, in the names of libraries, schools, universities and in the form of statues and other likenesses.
The story behind the invention of the Slavonic alphabet has achieved a broad consensus amongst modern scholars, though not all agree on the details. There were once two brothers: Cyril (ca. 826–869, known for most of his life as Constantine), one of the most distinguished scholars in Byzantium, and Methodius (ca. 815– 884), abbot of the Monastery Polykhron in Bithynia. Over in Great Moravia, the ruler Rostislav (846–870), was seeking ways to make his church (and state) more independent of Frankish influence. Around the year 863, he turned first to Rome with a request for a bishop and teacher, someone capable of instructing Moravians about the Christian faith in their own language. The pope does not seem to have acted upon his request, but when Rostislav approached the Byzantine emperor Michael III, he seized on the opportunity to spread his influence to lands already claimed by Western clergy. He selected Cyril and Methodius for the mission. They were proficient in a Slavic dialect spoken in their native city of Thessaloniki. Cyril and Methodius used their native dialect as the foundation for making Slavic translations of the liturgical and biblical books necessary for ministering and conducting services.
In order to record these translations, Cyril devised a special script, which rendered the specific sounds of the Slavic language. The language of these translations is usually termed ‘Old Church Slavonic’ and the script ‘Glagolitic’.
After Cyril’s death, Methodius was especially decisive in the expansion and preservation of the Slavonic liturgy. The mission to Moravia ultimately failed - Pope Steven V issued a papal bull forbidding the Slavonic liturgy in Moravia and the Slavic clergy were chased away. Neverthelss, disciples of Cyril and Methodius escaped to Bulgaria, where they established new centres of Slavonic literary and religious culture. This was where the Cyrillic script was developed from the Glagolitic and Greek alphabets. Cyrillic gradually replaced Glagolitic as the alphabet of the Old Church Slavonic language, which became the official language of the First Bulgarian Empire and later spread to the Eastern Slav lands of Kievan Rus'. The Cyrillic alphabet eventually spread throughout most of the Slavic world to become the standard alphabet in the Eastern Orthodox Slavic countries.
As noted above, modern scholarship mostly concurs with the popular celebration of the the invention of the Slavonic alphabet. The scholarly literature on this topic is voluminous and in many languages. The key sources for the invention of the Slavonic alphabet are just three, relatively short, Slavonic language texts written in the late 9th and early 10th centuries (but surviving only in much later manuscripts). These texts are two hagiographies (the Life of Constantine-Cyril and the Life of Methodios) and a text entitled On Letters attributed to a monk Khrabur, which defends the alphabet against Greek letters. Ivanova’s book is structured around these three texts in turn: Chapters 1-3 offer new interpretations of the Life of Constantine-Cyril, Chapters 4-6 focus on re-assessing the Life of Methodios, and Chapters 7-9 provide fresh analyses of On Letters.
Ivanova’s book began as her doctoral dissertation and her contribution is methodological. She aims to re-appraise these three sources as myth-making texts. She is not so much concerned with individual statements of fact, or with establishing or verifying events that occurred. Rather, she aims to apply new ways of approaching language and identity. For example, when interpreting the Life of Constantine-Cyril, she is interested less in Cyril as a man and more in ‘how authorial agency organises and structures the ideological positions found in the text.’ The aim of the book is to cause some disruption – to offer a new narrative of the process of inventing Slavonic and to open up new avenues of research into an old topic.
The monograph is published by OUP in the Oxford Studies in Byzantium series. At this price point, the book will mainly be of interest to libraries and specialist academics.
Giles Gilbert