The Russian Empire 1450–1801

Figure 12.1The mosaic and fresco interior of Kyiv’s eleventh-century Sofiia Cathedral demonstrates the three layers of church de ...

reading, responding, or listening. Thus holydays were celebrated with processions around the church and through public squares; ...

(1619–33) and Nikon (1652–8) amassed wealth and power for the patriarchate; enterprising bishops did the same for themselves. In ...

material gain (donors generously supported some monasteries with gifts of land and treasure), religious leaders founded more tha ...

Other church writings focused on monastic and by extension lay morality, although most likely the authors had in mind an elite a ...

spirituality (Figure 12.2). Nil argued that too easily such cenobitic communities slip into worldly vices, such as living off th ...

Whether these ideals and moralistic messages penetrated to laymen almost cannot be known. They were embodied in hagiography, ico ...

embracing conquered lands into the Muscovite state) and in the mid-seventeenth (to nationalize, as it were, some of the local cu ...

those that did, or that observed cross processions and other rituals, were exposed to a dynamic message about faith—one that pro ...

and convents for lax discipline and sexual misbehavior by monks and nuns. The council directed particular animus against folk be ...

While one group was pursuing moral reform, a second, represented primarily by Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, his close associate F. ...

rebuffed by bishops jealous of their power. Even so, in Russia many in the laity rebelled at these reforms, precisely because th ...

had come to an end. Tsar and patriarch were declared Antichrist, an easy claim to maintain once Peter I introduced European cult ...

Russian ethnographers in the nineteenth century indeed found animist and pagan beliefs and practices widespread among titular Or ...

their songs, dancing bears, and quasi-spiritual authority (minstrels were believed to ward off evil spirits from wedding process ...

men, in contrast to most early modern European and American cases; as Valerie Kivelson argues, this might be explained by the te ...

“CHRISTIANIZATION WITHOUT CONVERSION” Afinal word might be said about the relationship of the Orthodox Church to other religions ...

missionary Church, and state policy of allowing religious and cultural differences gave the empire stability. ***** On the conce ...

Valerie Kivelson has done fundamental work on magic and witchcraft prosecution in Russia:“Male Witches and Gendered Categories i ...

PART III THE CENTURY OF EMPIRE: RUSSIA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ...