Saint-Making in Early Modern Russia
Saint-Making in Early Modern Russia

Author: Isolde Thyrêt

Publisher:

Published: 2019-08-27

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781733398039

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Based on a case study of the formation of the cult of the Russian saint Nil Stolobenskii in the seventeenth century, this book provides insight into the complex dynamics of the saint-making process in early modern Russia. Utilizing a large array of documentary, literary, and visual sources, the author investigates the importance of a growing patronage network for the cults of early Russian saints and the role that local laymen and monks and high-ranking Russian Orthodox church officials played in the development of the hagiographic, liturgical, and iconographic image of individual saints and in the creation of the physical infrastructure of their cults. Saint-Making in Early Modern Russia challenges the prevailing view that the Russian Orthodox Church hierarchy determined the success of a saint's cult in the Muscovite period by demonstrating the crucial contribution of the leaders of the Nilov Hermitage to the development of Nil Stolobenskii's cult in the seventeenth century. By placing the achievements of these monastic figures within the wider theological, spiritual, and artistic framework of Eastern Orthodoxy that they operated in, this study affords the reader a rare view into the creativity of native Russian religious culture before the influx of Western ideas started to reshape the Russian Orthodox spiritual experience in the later seventeenth century. In light of its interdisciplinary and comparative approach to the topic, this book will appeal to historians, art historians, and experts in religious studies who are interested in the cult of saints in both Russia and the West.

Saint-Making in Early Modern Russia
Saint-Making in Early Modern Russia

Author: Isolde Thyrêt

Publisher:

Published: 2019-08-08

Total Pages: 754

ISBN-13: 9781733040808

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Based on a case study of the formation of the cult of the Russian saint Nil Stolobenskii in the seventeenth century, this book provides insight into the complex dynamics of the saint-making process in early modern Russia. Utilizing a large array of documentary, literary, and visual sources, the author investigates the importance of a growing patronage network for the cults of early Russian saints and the role that local laymen and monks and high-ranking Russian Orthodox church officials played in the development of the hagiographic, liturgical, and iconographic image of individual saints and in the creation of the physical infrastructure of their cults. Saint-Making in Early Modern Russia challenges the prevailing view that the Russian Orthodox Church hierarchy determined the success of a saint's cult in the Muscovite period by demonstrating the crucial contribution of the leaders of the Nilov Hermitage to the development of Nil Stolobenskii's cult in the seventeenth century. By placing the achievements of these monastic figures within the wider theological, spiritual, and artistic framework of Eastern Orthodoxy that they operated in, this study affords the reader a rare view into the creativity of native Russian religious culture before the influx of Western ideas started to reshape the Russian Orthodox spiritual experience in the later seventeenth century. In light of its interdisciplinary and comparative approach to the topic, this book will appeal to historians, art historians, and experts in religious studies who are interested in the cult of saints in both Russia and the West.

By Honor Bound
By Honor Bound

Author: Nancy Shields Kollmann

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2016-11-01

Total Pages: 499

ISBN-13: 1501706950

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In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Russians from all ranks of society were bound together by a culture of honor. Here one of the foremost scholars of early modern Russia explores the intricate and highly stylized codes that made up this culture. Nancy Shields Kollmann describes how these codes were manipulated to construct identity and enforce social norms—and also to defend against insults, to pursue vendettas, and to unsettle communities. She offers evidence for a new view of the relationship of state and society in the Russian empire, and her richly comparative approach enhances knowledge of statebuilding in premodern Europe. By presenting Muscovite state and society in the context of medieval and early modern Europe, she exposes similarities that blur long-standing distinctions between Russian and European history.Through the prism of honor, Kollmann examines the interaction of the Russian state and its people in regulating social relations and defining an individual's rank. She finds vital information in a collection of transcripts of legal suits brought by elites and peasants alike to avenge insult to honor. The cases make clear the conservative role honor played in society as well as the ability of men and women to employ this body of ideas to address their relations with one another and with the state. Kollmann demonstrates that the grand princes—and later the tsars—tolerated a surprising degree of local autonomy throughout their rapidly expanding realm. Her work marks a stark contrast with traditional Russian historiography, which exaggerates the power of the state and downplays the volition of society.

God, Tsar, and People
God, Tsar, and People

Author: Daniel B. Rowland

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2020-11-15

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1501752103

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God, Tsar, and People brings together in one volume essays written over a period of fifty years, using a wide variety of evidence—texts, icons, architecture, and ritual—to reveal how early modern Russians (1450–1700) imagined their rapidly changing political world. This volume presents a more nuanced picture of Russian political thought during the two centuries before Peter the Great came to power than is typically available. The state was expanding at a dizzying rate, and atop Russia's traditional political structure sat a ruler who supposedly reflected God's will. The problem facing Russians was that actual rulers seldom—or never—exhibited the required perfection. Daniel Rowland argues that this contradictory set of ideas was far less autocratic in both theory and practice than modern stereotypes would have us believe. In comparing and contrasting Russian history with that of Western European states, Rowland is also questioning the notion that Russia has always been, and always viewed itself as, an authoritarian country. God, Tsar, and People explores how the Russian state in this period kept its vast lands and diverse subjects united in a common view of a Christian polity, defending its long frontier against powerful enemies from the East and from the West.

Succession to the Throne in Early Modern Russia
Succession to the Throne in Early Modern Russia

Author: Paul Bushkovitch

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-03-18

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 1108801277

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This revisionist history of the transfer of the tsar's power in early modern Russia, from the Moscow princes of the fifteenth century to Peter the Great, overturns generations of scholarship to argue that legal primogeniture never existed: the monarch designated an heir that was usually the eldest son only by custom, not by law.

Cartographic Humanism
Cartographic Humanism

Author: Katharina N. Piechocki

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-09-13

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 022664121X

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Piechocki calls for an examination of the idea of Europe as a geographical concept, tracing its development in the 15th and 16th centuries. What is “Europe,” and when did it come to be? In the Renaissance, the term “Europe” circulated widely. But as Katharina N. Piechocki argues in this compelling book, the continent itself was only in the making in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Cartographic Humanism sheds new light on how humanists negotiated and defined Europe’s boundaries at a momentous shift in the continent’s formation: when a new imagining of Europe was driven by the rise of cartography. As Piechocki shows, this tool of geography, philosophy, and philology was used not only to represent but, more importantly, also to shape and promote an image of Europe quite unparalleled in previous centuries. Engaging with poets, historians, and mapmakers, Piechocki resists an easy categorization of the continent, scrutinizing Europe as an unexamined category that demands a much more careful and nuanced investigation than scholars of early modernity have hitherto undertaken. Unprecedented in its geographic scope, Cartographic Humanism is the first book to chart new itineraries across Europe as it brings France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Portugal into a lively, interdisciplinary dialogue.

Medieval Rus’ and Early Modern Russia
Medieval Rus’ and Early Modern Russia

Author: Susana Torres Prieto

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-03-08

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 1000836053

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Research on the East Slavs in the medieval period has considerably changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The emergence of new states forced a rethinking of many aspects of the history and culture of the early East Slavs as the subject became increasingly disentangled from the umbrella of Byzantine studies and fruitful collaboration was fostered between scholars worldwide. This book, which brings together scholars from Russia, Ukraine, western Europe and North America, of several generations, presents a broad overview of the main results of the last three decades of research and mutual collaboration. This is important work, providing a much-needed counterbalance to studies of western Europe in the period, which has been the main focus of study, with the lands of the East Slavs relatively neglected.