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-Cyil and the Life of Methodios, and with it a new social and political history of this fragile act of invention. 

Mirela Ivanova is a Lecturer in History at the University of Sheffield. Her work explores cultural production at the multi-lingual fringes of imperial space in the Middle Ages, and how these products and processes are politicised in modern historiography in the Balkans, Russia and Turkey. She is the author of Inventing Slavonic: Cultures of Writing in Rome and Constantinople (Oxford University Press, 2024) and with Benjamin Anderson she is co-editor of Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline? Towards a Critical Historiography (Penn State University Press, 2023). 

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