Mirela Ivanova
University of Sheffield
The legacies of Greek in both the medieval and modern Slavonic world remain deeply contested. At the heart of this tension lies the fact that the Slavonic alphabet, often perceived as the tool which freed Slavonic speakers from a Greek and Byzantine hegemony, was in fact invented by a Byzantine Greek speaker, Constantine-Cyril, sent on mission directly by the Byzantine emperor. This lecture will start from some of the contemporary tensions produced by this moment of invention, and trace how they have emerged from our medieval texts, but also how they have shaped our readings of these texts. It will conclude by revisiting some of the earliest texts in Slavonic to reveal the complex and manifold ways that they receive, interpret, and reinvent the Greek language and its history.