Religion and Culture in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine

Samuel H. Baron and Nancy Shields Kollmann, eds. Religion and Culture in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine. DeKaIb, 111.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997. $35.00, cloth.Stressing the complex, multifaceted, ambiguous nature of lived experience in early modern Russia and Ukraine, this collection of essays from the second workshop in Early East Slavic Culture ( 1993) exemplifies the variety of ways in which cultural studies enriches our understanding of societies that far too often have been reduced to a one-dimensional foil to the modernizing Petrine state. This superb collection is organized into three sections.Part One addresses social and cultural practice in the context of peasant agriculture, petitions to the tsar, and the effects of changing social systems on the political history of early modern Rus'. Drawing on studies of pre-industrial European societies, Janet Martin questions longstanding assumptions about the inherent backwardness and inefficiency of agriculture in pre-modern Muscovy by suggesting that the peasant farmer strove for economic equilibrium based on rational assessments of the size, needs, and resources of the local population. As Martin indicates, such an interpretation calls for careful consideration of how state policies, for example, territorial expansion and military recruitment, not to mention the institution of serfdom, may have affected population density and thereby the choice of agricultural methods. Martin's portrait of a dynamic agricultural society finds indirect support in Nancy Kollmann's argument about the diversity of early modern identities. In an astute analysis of petitions to the tsar, Kollmann further undermines the mythic underpinnings of the autocratic state by demonstrating that the inhabitants of early modern Muscovy remained embedded in multiple networks based on locality, profession, rank, family, and household, which provided the primary basis for protection, mutual aid, not to mention their interactions with the state. The complexity of pre-modern society is also at the heart of Frank Sysyn's examination of the myriad factors contributing to widespread social unrest and political change in early modern Ukraine. Discussing the makeup, as well as practical and political effects of three, interlocking social systems-Polish-Lithuanian legal, corporate orders, associational and regional groupings, and patronclient relationships-on daily life, Sysyn not only stresses the ways in which the seventeenth-century social order failed to correspond to the inflexible Polish-Lithuanian corporate ideal, but ultimately provided alternative sources of social identity and cohesion for overturning that order.Part Two is dedicated to issues of religion and belief. This section opens with Michael Flier's detailed analysis of seventeenth-century changes to the Muscovite Palm Sunday ritual, which he attributes to the Patriarch Nikon. In addition to reasserting the more mundane, personal political motives behind the celebrated churchmen's reformism, Flier argues that the newly revised Palm Sunday ceremony made use of current Greek commemorative patterns to enhance the historicity, dramatic effect, and contemporary appeal of this royal ritual so as to reinforce Muscovy's claims to leadership of the Orthodox world as the New Jerusalem. Ritual innovation gives way to varieties of belief in Eve Levin's essay on the supplicatory prayers of Muscovite priests and laypeople. …

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