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Part I. Forms of Organization, Representatives, Representation of the Power in Ancient Russia and the Medieval World (ed. by Elena Melnikovа, Timofey Gimon, Elena Litovskikh)
Part II. Phenomenon of Loyalty in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times and Its Institutional Boundaries (ed. by Sergey Fedorov, Marina Vinokurova, Tatiana Gusarova, Susanna Tsaturova).
Loyalty, both as an institutional phenomenon and as the most important tool of the social and political life of Western European society in the Middle Ages and early Modern times, is a favorite topic in modern historiography. The problems associated with various forms of loyalty are actively being developed by representatives of many schools and directions, ranging from adherents of traditional political history to the so-called frontier studies. At the same time, the vector of modern research has shifted towards the study of those forms of loyalty that are mainly associated with various types of collective, regional and local institutions and associations. The personal or personally oriented slice of loyalty that interested historians of the late 19th — first half of the 20th centuries faded into the background, but at the same time retained its original significance in studies written in line with cultural biography and, but only partially, in the works of representatives of the so-called new cultural history. The topics of the articles presented in the thematic block are aimed at reconstructing the social and political reality in which loyalty functions as a mechanism responsible for the consensual relations thus generated between groups and institutions of various kinds and origins, as well as for conflict situations arising between these groups and institutions, determined by the violation of various conditions of the same loyalty. The thematic block also contains materials from a round table organized by the Power and Society group within the framework of the international conference “Nations and Ethnicity in the Humanities: Loyalty in Multiethnic and National States”, held at the Saint Petersburg State University on February 6—7, 2023.
The image on the cover is a painting by A. D. Kishchenko “Dolobsky Congress of Princes” (1880).