Learned Monks and Wandering Scholars in Muscovy in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century

• In Event: Seventeenth-Century East Slavic Intellectual and Political Thought: Three Case Studies

Abstract

Almost 70 years ago, in 1957, the noted historian Serge Zenkovsky engaged in the pages of the journal Russian Review in a nationalistic screed against “monks from Kiev and Polotsk [who] replaced the former Muscovite cultural leaders” in the late seventeenth century “almost overnight.” He went on to castigate “Ukrainian bishops [who] invaded Moscow, introducing their Catholic and Protestant ‘heretical’ teachings and replacing the Great Russian hierarchs….” Such sentiments, as anachronistic as they are from a historical study standpoint, do resonate in contemporary Russia. This paper seeks to go beyond pointing out the methodological flaws in Zenkovsky’s diatribe but to gain a better appreciation of the impact the learned monks and wandering scholars had on the development of seventeenth-century Muscovite intellectual history.

Author

• Donald Ostrowski, Harvard U