Book Review: Germany and the Confessional Divide: Religious Tensions and Political Culture, 1871–1989 by Mark Edward Ruff and Thomas Großbölting, eds

Abstract

of the most enlightened realms the world has ever known’ (181). On the other hand, the book has many strengths. The authors show deep knowledge of primary sources and look critically at original narratives in them that have been too readily accepted by numerous later historians. They display a command of the secondary literature on their subject. They carefully examine such complex matters as inter-familial and inter-clan relationships and rivalries, the rise and decline of different regions within the lands of Rus, and shifts in the complex understandings and practices governing inheritance and succession. It should also be said that the book is attractively produced and generously illustrated (although a small number of the family trees that are helpfully included in every chapter are difficult to read in the landscape orientation that is used). Nor, finally, should the contemporary resonance of this re-examination of Rus be overlooked. By challenging the anachronistic notion of Rus as a proto-Russian state ruled by a dynasty supposedly founded in the ninth century, Raffensperger and Ostrowski weaken the claims of Great Russian Muscovite rulers and their modern admirers to exercise legitimate autocratic control over all the lands in which Eastern Slavs mingled or competed with other ethnic groups in the Middle Ages.