Evangelie [The Gospels]
Muscovite Russia, 15th century
NYPL, Spencer Collection

Of all the cultural riches bequeathed to Kievan Rus’ by Byzantium, none was more important than Orthodox Christianity. The new religion arrived via South Slavic intermediaries, as this rare manuscript of the Gospels suggests. It is written in a liturgical language – Old Church Slavic – devised by Byzantine missionaries for the propagation of the faith among the southern Slavs.

Hand-copied books prevailed in Russia far longer than in the rest of Europe, with printing arriving in the Muscovite tsardom a full century after Johann Gutenberg’s innovation of moveable type in the 1450s. Until the time of Peter the Great, the vast majority of books printed in Muscovy were religious in nature.