The Emergence of Rus, 750-1200

Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard's The Emergence of Rus, 750 to 1200, published by Longman in 1996, is a standard scholarly history of the formation of the medieval Rus state and its Christianization, drawing on Byzantine, Scandinavian and Slavic source material. Its strength is that it is a peer-reviewed academic synthesis widely assigned as the standard English-language account of the period. Its limit is that scholarship on Rus origins, particularly the balance of Scandinavian and Slavic contribution, remains an area of active and sometimes politically inflected debate, so a claim resting on a contested point of that debate should be checked against the wider literature as well.