Name Unknown: The Life of a Rusian Queen

Name Unknown: The Life of a Rusian Queen offers an example of an eastern European queen as a corrective to the western European focus of medieval queenship studies.

Through a chronological approach, this book looks beyond the popular biographies of royal women such as Eleanor of Aquitaine and Berengaria of Castile and gathers material from sources throughout Europe. It engages with modern queenship studies literature to create a collective biography of a Rusian queen through the various cycles of her life from the marriage of eight-year-old Verkhuslava to the death of the ruler of Minsk whose generosity is recorded, but not her name. For medievalists interested in women and queens, Name Unknown: The Life of a Rusian Queen provides an entry point to an area of Europe rarely studied in that literature. For Slavists, it presents a way of looking at medieval Rusian women that has not yet appeared in this scholarly tradition. Ultimately, this biography integrates Rus, and eastern Europe, into the medieval world and acts as an important reminder that women are essential to our history and thus to our overall understanding of the past.

This book is of great use to students and scholars interested in the history of women, queenship, and medieval Europe.

Christian Raffensperger is the Kenneth E. Wray Chair in the Humanities at Wittenberg University, USA, as well as a professor and chair of the History Department. His research interests focus on the kingdom of Rus and its integration into medieval Europe. The development of these ideas can be seen in Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus’ in the Medieval World (2012), Conflict, Bargaining, and Kinship Networks in Medieval Eastern Europe (2018), and Rulers and Rulership in the Arc of Medieval Europe (2023).