A few years ago I read Simon Franklin’s Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c.950-1300 and found it very enlightening (see this post), so when Jonathan Morse alerted me to his new book, The Russian Graphosphere, 1450-1850
, I went to the Amazon page, saw (with sadness but no surprise) that the price was outrageous (for shame, Cambridge University Press!), and had the free Kindle sample sent to me forthwith (thanks, Amazon!). Much of the introduction is laying out of concepts and intentions, but I thought the section about the chronological benchmarks was interesting enough to share. He says the range 1450-1850 will seem banal to historians of Western Europe but will probably surprise Russianists, ignoring as it does the supposedly fundamental shift brought about by Peter the Great, and goes on to explain the start and end points:
The ‘graphospheric’ excuse for beginning from the second half of the fifteenth century is derived from a cluster of disparate phenomena, few (or none) of which may be regarded as particularly dramatic or decisive in themselves, but which together reflect initial stages in the emergence of the early modern graphosphere. A continuous practice of public inscription in Muscovy can be traced to the late fifteenth century. In the second half of the fifteenth century, after decades of coexistence, paper replaced parchment as the almost exclusive material for the production of manuscripts. The same period also saw the end of the continuous or regular tradition of using birch bark as a material for inscription. Wax replaced metal as the normal material for seals. With regard to the linguistic landscape, in the late fifteenth century coinage ceased to be bi-scriptal in Cyrillic and Arabic, becoming monolingually Slavonic. Towards the end of the century Muscovites could also see the first prominent public lapidary inscriptions in Latin. With regard to technologies of the visible word: the craft of casting cannons in bronze was brought to Moscow in the late 1480s, and cannons (and bronze-cast bells) became regular bearers of monumental inscriptions. Or, with respect to a more familiar technology: although Muscovite printing did not start until the middle of the sixteenth century, active engagement with products of the printing press (via imported books) can also be dated to the final decade of the fifteenth century. Finally, with regard to institutions of production: the emergence of regular specialised administrative personnel is normally traced to the second half of the fifteenth century, an initial phase in the emergence of a state bureaucracy.
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