SSEES-British Library Collaboration on Ivan Fedorov

From 21 July 2014

On 9 May 2014, the SSEES Centre for Russian Studies commemorated the sixteenth-century origins of printing in Russia and Ukraine with an international conference at the British Library.

Entitled ‘Revisiting Ivan Fedorov’s Legacy in Early Modern Europe’ the conference celebrated the 450th anniversary of Fedorov’s Acts and Epistles (Apostol) and the 440th anniversary of his Primer (Azbuka). Speakers from the Russian State University for the Humanities, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and St Petersburg State University joined colleagues from UCL SSEES and Cambridge to challenge “the narrow national views of Fedorov’s heritage by offering a transnational approach to the history of early printing.”

The conference was held at the British Library which holds one of the most impressive collections of Federov’s edition in the West, including a copy of the Ostroh Bible which may have originated from the library of Ivan the Terrible.

Watch highlights of the Fedorov conference on UCL SSEES YouTube