Anna, a woman of Novgorod
Eve Levin
The lives of non-elite people, particularly women, are not easily reconstructed from the best-known sources, which focus disproportionately on ruling families and high-ranking clergy. At most, normative sources such as laws and sermons describe how people ought to behave, rather than how they did. But archeological excavations in Novgorod and other places in Russia have uncovered hundreds of notes by men and women of all social orders. These notes are reminiscent of modern email or text messages, and concern daily activities. Medieval people wrote on birchbark, which was plentiful, rather than parchment or paper, which were expensive. When the message had served its purpose, it was thrown away, to be uncovered centuries later. The birchbark documents usually preserve only one side of the dialogue, and make reference to unexplained circumstances and unidentified individuals. Holes and tears further obscure the meaning. Yet these are the unmediated voices of ordinary people, and as such, they provide rare insight into their thoughts.
The woman in this vignette, Anna, the members of her family, and her accuser Konstantin are composites of real people represented in birchbark documents. The material in bold type is excerpted from actual birchbark documents, with only the names of the authors and recipients changed, in order to weave them into a plausible, but fictitious story. The other figures are all authentic, as are the locations and historical events. Because real surviving birchbark documents tell only fragments of the whole story, this vignette concludes with the situation yet unresolved, leaving readers to speculate on what ultimately happened to Anna. Anna’s story takes place in 1216.
Further Reading
Brisbane, Mark A., ed. The Archaeology of Novgorod, Russia: Recent Results from the Town and its Hinterland. Lincoln: Society for Medieval Archaeology, 1992.
Levin, Eve. “Novgorod Birchbark Documents: The Evidence for Literacy in Medieval Russia.” In Medieval Archaeology: Papers of the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, edited by Charles L. Redman, 127–137. Binghamton: State University of New York at Binghamton, 1989.
Pokrovskaya, Lyubov’ V. “Female Costume from Early Novgorod and its Ethno-Cultural Background: an Essay on Reconstruction.” In Vers l’Orient et vers l’Occident: Regards croise sur les dynamiques et les transferts culturels des Vikings a la Rous ancienne, edited by Pierre Bauduin and Alexander E. Musin, 101–112. Caen: Presses universitaires de Caen, 2014.
Pushkareva, Natalia. Women in Russian History: From the Tenth to the Twentieth Century, trans. and ed. Eve Levin. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1997.
Pushkareva, N. L. and E. Levin, “Women in Medieval Novgorod from the Eleventh to the Fifteenth Century.” Soviet Studies in History 23, no. 4 (Spring 1985): 71–90.