HSE Publishing House

The book Architects, Konungs, Pontiffs in Medieval Europe, which opens the series Polystoria, is based on research conducted by the Centre for Medieval Studies of the Higher School of Economics on the problems of medieval history of Western and Eastern Europe. The book deals with several aspects of cultural, political and religious interplay on a wide geographical horizon, from Byzantium, Caucasus and Rus’ to Scandinavia and the latin Christendom, from the early Middle Ages to the early Modern Time. Little studied, but still historically important cases and situations, like the visit of the pope to Constantinople in 711, single objects, like the konung Sverrir’s standard, are studied in great detail along with some crucial, and long discussed historiographical hyperthemes, like the genesis of Rus’, the christian architecture in Caucasus, the background of gothic naturalism or the anti-judean polemics. The volume concludes with the first complete and commented russian translation of the De miseria humanae conditionis, written around 1195 by the cardinal Lotario de’ Segni, the treatise to be one the milestone in the history of western religious thought and reflection on the nature of man. 
The book is intended for historians, philologists, art historians, specialists in religious and cultural studies and political analysts.