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

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Something fundamentally changed in Eastern Europe's religious culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Old genres like primers changed their content and form, sermons took a creative and more audience-oriented role in the liturgy, and catechisms appeared as a new phenomenon. What do these changes tell us about believing and believers in that period and that region? How do the changes interrelate to other and broader developments of cultural and intellectual history in Eastern Europe? Maria Ivanova will discuss the significance of hitherto unknown copy of an early printed East Slavic abecedarium in the context of the history of ideas by addressing the questions of methodological innovations in the early printed Cyrillic primers, as well as their intended audiences. Maria Grazia Bartolini will offer close readings of two sermons preached by Stefan Iavors'kyi 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. Stefan Schneck will discuss the newly invented European genre of catechisms in Eastern Europe (Budny, Zyzanij). He will ask questions about adaptation, readership, and other phenomena typical for cultural and knowledge transfer in Early Modern times.

Sub Unit

• Early Slavic Studies

Chair

• Nancy S. Kollmann, Stanford U

Papers

• 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 - Maria Grazia Bartolini, U of Milan (Italy)

• Catechetical Thinking in 17th-Century Moscow: In the Search of an Audience - Stefan Schneck, U of Zurich (Switzerland)

Discussant

• Nancy S. Kollmann, Stanford U