Inventing Slavonic: Cultures of Writing between Rome and Constantinople

This talk will assess the contemporary significance of the invention of the Slavonic letters in Eastern Europe, and the consequences this has had for the (academic and other) readings of our medieval texts. It will then seek to propose a new reading of the two hagiographies which provide us with the earliest narrative accounts of the invention of the script in the ninth century, the Life of Constantine-Cyril and the Life of Methodios, and with it a new social and political history of this fragile act of invention.