The article is in honour of memory of E. V. Gutnova, a well-known historian-medievalist, and is an attempt to put Gutnova’s works into the context of Russian medieval studies, taken from the quite subjective point of view. This position is easily explained by the personal closeness of the author of the article with E. V. Gutnova, and also by wish to evaluate not only scientific contribution of the scholar in the process of historical perception, but also an expressed character of her conscious perception of historical knowledge and its history. The task seems possible and reasonable due to historical epoch, when Evgeniya Vladimirovna lived and wrote, and also her personal characteristics and specificity of her research interests, with special attention towards the problematic of historiography as a scholarly discipline. The materials of the article systematized into parts with a general, rather cursory, characteristic of private and scholarly life of E. V. Gutnova that were marked by Soviet reality and subsequent profound scientific and political crisis of the last third of the 20th century; appraisal of her works in the field of political and national history (problem of estate monarchy); social history, with elaboration of theoretical and sociological problems (nature of medieval town and burghers; typology of the genesis of feudalism, typological analysis in general); research of the issue of public conscience of medieval peasantry and her works on historiography of the European Middle Ages. The analysis is done in the context of development and renewal of Russian medieval studies and Gutnova’s role in this process.