The Preacher and His (Female) Audience: Monastic Discipline, Female Spirituality, and Confessionalization in Stefan Iavors′kyi’s Sermons to the Nuns of the Ascension Convent in Kyiv

• In Event: Religious Culture in Early Modern Eastern Europe: The Texts and Their Audiences

Abstract

Before moving to Russia in 1701, where he became Metropolitan of Ryazan, the influential Ukrainian Orthodox preacher and intellectual Stefan Iavors′kyi (1658-1722) delivered multiple sermons in his native Ukraine, many of which are documented in codex nr. 1592, fond 834 preserved in the Russian State Historical Archive in Saint Petersburg. In my paper, I offer close readings of two sermons preached to the nuns of the Ascension Convent in Kyiv, showing that they give us an important if isolated glimpse into the place of nuns in the religious, political, and social life of the Kyiv Church during the last decades of the seventeenth century. In particular, I argue that both sermons shed new and substantial light on Iavors′kyi’s view of the monastic discipline―how he perceived the distinction between religious men and women, and how the nuns were expected to address the divine differently from the monks. In illuminating the intersection of religion and gender within these texts, I will also contend that they belong to a broader process of confessional identity formation that promoted contemplation, meditation, and penance as disciplinary practices.

Author

• Maria Grazia Bartolini, U of Milan (Italy)