Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Russian Orthodoxy: Sin and Virtue in Cultural Context

100 Valerie A. Kivelson Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Russian Orthodoxy: Sin and Virtue in Cultural Context valerie a. kivelson What is more evil than a lion among four-legged beasts and than a serpent ... slithering along the ground? An evil woman is more evil than all of these. There is nothing on earth greater than a woman’s evil. Through a woman, our first forefather, Adam, was driven out of paradise ... O sharp, evil weapon of the devil! From a seventeenth-century manuscript of the ‘Slovo’ of Daniil Zatochnik1 As a rule, gender studies and Orthodox religious history have had little to say to one another over the years. Gender studies has not received a warm welcome in Orthodox circles, and historians of women, sexuality, and the body have had little positive to say about the strictures of official Orthodoxy.2 Thus, it is difficult to get a clear sense of what the official Russian Orthodox line on gender and sexuality was during the early modern period, much less to hazard a guess at what popular religious notions might have been or how they affected lived experience. The task of this paper is to explore ideas about gender and sexuality as expressed in a number of ecclesiastical and more ‘popular’ texts produced in the Muscovite era. After reconstructing the ideas presented in these literary texts, we will assess the relevance of religiously inspired textual images by comparing them to Muscovite practice. This excursus through Muscovite sources ultimately offers a rather new perspective for assessing the relative weight of sexual as opposed to other forms of sin, and the manner in which Muscovites thought about gender, sexuality, and virtue. According to most scholars who have devoted any thought to the subject, Orthodox Russian culture associated women with sin, particu- Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Russian Orthodoxy 101 larly with sexual sin, and cautioned men of good faith to avoid them as much as possible. Certainly, there is plenty of evidence to support this interpretation. Clerical writers, repeating the wise words of the church fathers, secured a place in the literary annals for an ugly Christian misogyny, based on antipathy for females in general and for the sexual danger that they posed in particular. While making the occasional nod to ‘the good wife,’ ‘a husband’s crown and consolation,’ Orthodox authors left a more exuberant record of condemnation of the female sex.3 Carrying this hostile logic to its extreme, church writers concluded that not only evil women, but even good women threatened the purity and salvation of the vulnerable men who ogled them: Do not look at virgins lest you be tempted. Avert your eyes from a beautiful woman and do not glance at another’s beauty. From a woman’s goodness many have perished, and from her friendship a fire flares up. Do not speak with a woman at a feast, lest your soul become inclined toward her.4 In her pioneering book on the subject, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, Eve Levin explains that, ‘Slavic clerical writers ... explicitly accept[ed] the notion that the Devil was the source of sexual desire (blud).’5 Women were viewed as particularly susceptible to this particular form of temptation, giving in to the devil’s whispered advice and leading males astray. As Levin points out, the connection between sexual sin and the female sex is illustrated by the depiction of the lewd and the debauched, whether human or diabolical, male or female, with pendulous breasts.6 Women, sex, and sin, then, went hand-in-hand, with one evoking the other two. The same invidious association of women, sex, and sin surfaces in a number of nonecclesiastical sources, suggesting that it crossed over into a popular, or secular, milieu. By innuendo, Daniil Zatochnik places sexual sin squarely in the female camp, attributing other kinds of sins to men: ‘A maiden ruins by her beauty; and a man by his thievery.’7 ‘The Tale of Savva Grudtsyn,’ a seventeenth-century narrative aimed at a secular, urban audience, deals explicitly with issues of sexuality and sin, and so allows us to examine the two within a more popular religious framework.8 This tale confirms the impression that Muscovites saw women as acting to corrupt men and lead them into sexual sin. The seductress in the tale leads the innocent young Savva into fornication and adultery. Initially, the tale places the blame on the devil: ‘The 102 Valerie A. Kivelson enemy, the devil, hates all things good; having seen this man’s virtuous way of life, he decided to upset his household by inducing Bazhen’s wife to the vile sinfulness of fornication with the young man to corrupt her with love of Savva.’ However, corruption appears to be particularly easy where a woman is concerned. ‘Woman’s nature’ gives her an intuitive sense of how to ensnare the innocent young man. ‘Woman’s nature (zhenskoe estestvo) knows how to lead the minds of young men to fornication. And thus Savva, through the perfidy of this woman, or, better to say, by the devil’s envy, stumbled and fell into the trap of fornication.’9 Lest we miss the point, or somehow misunderstand the nature of their sin, the author provides us with overwrought, repetitive descriptions of exactly what it was that they did: ‘They sinned endlessly, and constantly, but still they were unable to satiate their desires. And for a long time they remained in filthy sin. Even on Sundays and on the Lord’s holy days and, having forgotten their fear of God and the hour of their deaths, they kept fornicating, wallowing like swine in excrement.’10 The unpleasant ‘Tale of the Merchant Grigorii and How His Wife and a Jew Wanted to Kill Him’ echoes these themes. The young and beautiful wife ‘through the machinations of the devil, fell into adultery with a Jew,’ and the narrative unravels from there.11 These passages and the general tone of the scholarly literature produce a convincing impression of a Russian Orthodoxy that shared many features with the more familiar teachings of Western Christianity: susceptible to the devil’s enticement, inherently lecherous and prone to inordinate desire, pernicious to the souls of the males of the species, women were true daughters of Eve. These and many other sources illustrate the persistent association made between women and sexual sin in Russian Orthodox thought, both official and popular, in the early modern period. This summary, indeed, reflects the general consensus of the scholarly literature on the topic. However, a consistent methodological problem haunts this work, both in Russian and in Western variants. The source base thoughtfully and deliberately selected to reveal Muscovite (or Western) ideas about sexuality and gender necessarily foregrounds issues of sexuality and gender. A collection of penitentials devoted to eking out confessions of specifically sexual transgressions, when paired with the few spicy sexual escapades in Muscovite secular literary works, and their most highly sexualized iconography, inevitably gives an impression of a religious culture preoccupied with sexual sin and dedicated to its eradication. Methodologically, this presents problems. A study of late-twentieth- Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Russian Orthodoxy 103 century pamphlets and publications on Dutch Elm Disease might convey the impression of a society obsessed with Dutch elms, if those publications were not situated in a broader context of other concerns. In European historiography, studies that focus on denunciations of women as susceptible to the devil’s seductions because of their insatiable lust similarly reach foreordained and rather exaggerated conclusions about the salience of the linkage of women, sex, and sin in the early modern West.12 In order to assess how sexual sin fit into a broader vision of sin and virtue, one needs to view a wider range of sources. While Orthodox Muscovites of varying degrees appear to have understood that sexual transgression was sinful, was to be avoided, and often could be blamed on women, they also had plenty of other vices and transgressions to preoccupy them. The danger of analysing isolated passages apart from the broader context is that such analysis removes ideas about women and notions of sexuality from the world in which they were situated. Deprived of cultural context, their significance is rendered unintelligible. In the following pages, I will attempt to return these isolated insights into a more complete survey of sources on men as well as women, and on sin more broadly conceived. Lust, after all, is just one of the seven deadly sins, and while it may be a favourite in the Western canon, thanks in large part to St Augustine, it need not take pride of place universally. After considering the implications of a twogendered tour through Muscovite proscriptive sources, and exploring the relative weight of sexual sin as opposed to other sins in the Muscovite pantheon, this essay will turn in its final pages to an examination of the impact of Orthodox visions of sex and gender in Muscovites’ lived experience. Orthodox theologians writing in the nineteenth and twentieth century tend to express minimal concern about women’s sexuality, but they consistently emphasize the religious importance of the corporeal humanity of both Mary and Jesus. The brilliantly insightful historian of Russian Orthodoxy, George Fedotov, explained that the Russian Orthodox tradition found the condition of motherhood far more arresting than the condition of virginity of the Mother of God. Not only was she consistently called ‘the Mother of God,’ but Orthodoxy stressed the physical pain and emotional suffering that she endured as a mother. Never endorsing the concept of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin either, the Orthodox Church stresses the complete humanity of the birth process as a positive good, a feature to be celebrated as a link between the Mother of God and ordinary mortals, just as the humanity 104 Valerie A. Kivelson of Christ is held up as an irreducible element of the miracle of the Incarnation.13 Fedotov draws our attention to the tenderness and pain simultaneously characterizing the face of the Mother of God in Russian iconography. Rather than the youth and beauty that raise her above other women in many Western renditions, it is her maternal love and suffering that identify her in the Russian tradition. It is her humanity, and in particular her maternal, that is, female, physiology, that authorize her claims on human reverence and devotion (see p. 105).14 Physicality, the body, is itself a site of suspicion in much Western theology, and the body merits its share of suspicion in Orthodoxy as well (as dramatically demonstrated by that most extreme off-shoot of Russian Orthodoxy, the self-castrating sect of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries).15 Hair-shirts, heavy chains, and mortification of the flesh were not unknown in the Russian tradition, but the more mainstream tradition emphasized moderation over mortification. As Horace W. Dewey and Natalia Challis point out, extremes of pious virtuosity were viewed with suspicion and were often greeted with censure rather than with awe in early Russia. The commitment to moderation continued to dominate in the religious teachings of the Muscovite period as well, where the extremes of ascetic self-deprivation never gained much popularity.16 Orthodoxy in its Muscovite guise accepted the miracle of creation as a gift from God, to be glorified and celebrated. In Russian portrayals of nature in the seventeenth century, the physical world itself retained the glow of God’s handiwork. God’s immanence bestowed a wonder and glory upon the material world.17 The human body, as a part of divine creation, deserved respect. The human body was further ennobled by the Incarnation, when God himself assumed human form. St Athanasius wrote of this mystical moment that ‘God became human that we might be made god.’18 Orthodox teaching took a surprisingly positive attitude towards the physical world, including a vision of the body, the realm of the flesh, as not only something to tolerate, but as a vehicle for the divine. Created in the image of God himself, the human body, male or female, could not occupy a fully negative theological space. The intertwined themes of sex, sin, and gender in a Christian cosmology hark back, inevitably, to Adam and Eve and original sin. Since the fifth century, original sin has been strongly identified with sexual sin in the Western tradition, thanks in large part to the influence of St Augustine. Peter Brown explains that for Augustine, ‘the way that sexual drives escaped the control of the will was a peculiarly resonant symptom of the frailty inherited by mankind from Adam’s first act of disobe- Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Russian Orthodoxy 105 Tikhvin Mother of God, ca. 1600, Moscow. Ikonen-Museum Recklinghausen. 106 Valerie A. Kivelson dience.’ While other sins might bring more immediate devastation on mankind, ‘sexuality and the grave stood one at each end of the life of every human being. Like two iron clamps, they delineated inexorably mankind’s loss of the primal harmony of body and soul.’19 As Elaine Pagels writes, ‘By the beginning of the fifth century, Augustine had actually declared that spontaneous sexual desire is the proof of – and penalty for – universal original sin ... Augustine, one of the greatest teachers of western Christianity, derived many of these attitudes from the story of Adam and Eve: that sexual desire [Brown would add, disconnected from the will] is sinful; that infants are infected from the moment of conception with the disease of original sin; and that Adam’s sin corrupted the whole of nature itself.’20 The Eastern Orthodox Church preserved a different image of the meaning of the Fall. In both Orthodox and Western Christian teaching, the actual sin committed in the Garden of Eden was defiance of God’s command, not sex. In Orthodoxy, however, the consequences, though painful and deadly, were not congenital. In other words, because of Adam’s fall, mankind became mortal and subject to a host of ills, but the sin itself was Adam’s, and future generations do not bear the burden of his sin from birth. Instead, Orthodox Christians are born to a world already doubly redeemed by the Mother of God and then by the Incarnation. They are further cleansed by the sacrament of baptism, and they are then free to accumulate their own record of piety or sin. The sexual taint of the Garden of Eden does not hover over each new baby, nor does the sexual genesis of life count against the newborn coming into the world.21 Such at least is the theology presented by modern theologians and historians of the church, but it is borne out in sources of the early modern period as well. ‘Adam’s Fall,’ not Eve’s, is most often commemorated in Muscovite writings, although an apocryphal tradition preserved ‘Eve’s Confession.’22 ‘Adam’s Lament,’ preserved in texts from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries and presumably sung during Lent, gives voice to Adam’s regret for the loss of paradise, ‘created for me and for Eve,’ which he lost through his own unspecified sinfulness.23 When the sin is named, it is the pair’s refusal to follow God’s explicit orders, not their sexual transgression. Eve occasionally takes the blame, as in the epigraph above from Daniil Zatochnik, or in a widely copied passage from John Chrysostom, but more generally Adam or both take centre stage.24 When the original couple is depicted in icons or miniatures, their often strikingly sexless bodies seem to emphasize the asexual essence of their transgression (see p. 107).25 Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Russian Orthodoxy 107 Adam and Eve in paradise, 16th-century miniature. From L.A. Dmitriev and D.S. Likhachev, eds., Pamiatniki literatury Drevnei Rusi. XVII vek. Kniga pervaia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1988), unnumbered plate. 108 Valerie A. Kivelson One would not want to go too far with this line of argumentation. The human form may have basked in the reflected glory of the Incarnation, but sexuality did not. Like any Christian variant, Russian Orthodoxy condemned sexual sin and placed chastity above any form of sexually active life. The monastic life was the ideal; abstinence within marriage was second best. Levin writes, ‘Sexuality was evidence of the imperfection of the world. Consequently, the closer human beings came to reflecting the perfection of heaven, the less sexuality would be in evidence.’ In paradise, the resurrected dead would enjoy sexless and ungendered bodies.26 Nonetheless, as Levin’s work has so clearly demonstrated, the church took a wonderfully practical approach towards sex and sexuality in this world. Acknowledging that humans were sexual beings, the church required its parish priests to marry and to stay married. Church penitentials listed dozens of imaginative forms of sexual deviance worthy of investigation, but prescribed remarkably minimal forms of penance, particularly for what we might term ‘victimless sins.’ The church, according to Levin, reserved its harshest condemnation and punishment for sexual crimes that threatened to disrupt community and social order, rather than pegging the response to the actual nature of the acts committed. This pragmatic accommodation is seen most clearly in ecclesiastical responses to infanticide: where the child was killed according to an economic calculation, in order to preserve a marginally subsisting family unit, the church took a lenient stance; where the child was killed to hide adultery, which could have disrupted legitimate marriages, the response proved far fiercer.27 As the allusion to infanticide suggests, sexual sins were more easily pinned on women, who carried the fruit of their transgressions to term, but male sexual sins garnered strong and equally pragmatic responses from the church. As Nancy Kollmann’s work on prosecution for rape demonstrates, male sexual misconduct met with harsh condemnation, from both ecclesiastical and secular authorities.28 A number of ‘popular texts,’ written in the late seventeenth century, presumably by secular authors or at least for secular audiences, contain valuable information on the ways that gender and sexuality were lived or viewed in a Muscovite context. These tales provide an important link between prescriptive ecclesiastical sources and the evidence of lived, secular experience that we glimpse in trial records. Secular literature was a newly evolving concept in seventeenth-century Russia, and these texts reveal a lay culture still fully integrated with religious ways of thinking. The works examined here – ‘The Tale of Savva Grudtsyn,’ Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Russian Orthodoxy 109 ‘The Tale of Misery Luckless Plight,’ ‘Uliana Osor’ina,’ and Domostroi – are among those most frequently quoted in studies of women and gender in Muscovite society. They dwell on matters of domestic relations and familial morality, and some explore issues of sexual conduct and misconduct at length. They do not, however, speak in a unified voice. Unlike Savva Grudtsyn, the others do not express a blanket condemnation or even any conceptual linkage of sexuality and female sinfulness. Read more contextually, they offer quite a different vantage point, giving us an opportunity for measuring the relative salience of various sins in the popular Orthodox Rolodex. Sex does not even enter in the litany of sins and lures enumerated in the evocatively titled ‘Tale of Misery Luckless Plight.’ Instead, the spotlight falls directly on the mortal sin of disobedience. The tale begins, conveniently for us, with a recap of the Creation and the Fall, which spells out a gratifyingly explicit moral message: In the beginning of this mortal age God created heaven and earth, God created Adam and Eve. He ordered them to live in holy paradise, and gave them this divine command: He told them not to eat the fruit of the grapevine from the great tree of Eden. The human heart is unthinking and fractious, and Adam and Eve were tempted. They forgot God’s command, tasted the fruit of the grapevine, from the great, marvellous tree, and for that great transgression, God became enraged at Adam and Eve.29 Adam and Eve’s sin, then, is explicitly identified as their disobedience to God’s command. Spinning out this point, the tale continues to underscore the essence of the problem. Having cast the pair out of Eden, ‘God gave them this commandment: there should be weddings and marriages for the propagation of the race of men, and for having beloved children.’ The tale thus presents sexual activity within marriage as not only tolerable, but as in accordance with God’s direct command, and as resulting in ‘beloved children.’ Far from the cause of their disgrace, conjugal activity is described as Adam and Eve’s obligation. But, given 110 Valerie A. Kivelson the ‘unthinking and fractious’ nature of man, things continue to decline: ‘Human kind from the very beginning acted insubordinately, looked with disdain at the father’s teaching, acted defiantly towards the mother, was duplicitous about the advice of friends.’ The introduction sets up the moral premise of the tale: Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden for their unruliness and for defying the Lord’s command; subsequent generations were disobedient and insubordinate, defying their parents – mothers as well as fathers – and their friends. Disobedience to one’s elders and superiors towers over all other sins, and sexual transgression does not merit even an innuendo in this prologue.30 The rest of the tale fulfils the promise and continues the moral message of the opening passage. The story starts mid-stream, with the unnamed youth receiving the advice and instruction of his pious parents, again, mother as well as father. Given what the prologue told us about human nature, we are not surprised to find him soon defying his parents’ admonitions. The youth was then young and foolish, not in his full sense, and imperfect in mind; he was ashamed to submit to his father and bow to his mother but wanted to live as he pleased. His recklessness rapidly brings him into bad company. He is hounded by Misery Luckless Plight, who poses as a friend, and induces him to throw aside family, wealth, friendship, and a potential bride. Things go from bad to worse until finally, in a rather unmotivated plot twist, ‘the youth recalled the path to salvation and at once he went to a monastery to be shorn a monk, and Misery stopped at the holy gates.’31 ‘Misery Luckless Plight’ makes its moral message extremely clear. The ultimate sin, both in the Garden of Eden and in this mortal world, consists of disobedience. Although along his path to perdition the young man indulges in a host of physical sins – intemperance, greed, gluttony – it is unquestionably the act of disobedience that earns him God’s wrath and from which he needs to be saved at the end. ‘Misery Luckless Plight’ articulates a set of priorities in which disobedience, defiance of authority, ranks as the most egregious of sins, with other, merely physical sins, cascading below in no particular order. True to the same moral order, Uliana Osor’ina, embodying Christian moral perfection as envisioned by her devout son, manifested her piety through Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Russian Orthodoxy 111 obedience. ‘She humbly obeyed [her in-laws] in all things, never disobeying them, never contradicting them, but respecting them and carrying out their wishes without fail, so that all were amazed by her.’32 Although late in life she convinced her husband to live with her in sexual abstinence, her earlier life was demonstrably characterized by an actively sexual marriage, as the births of her many children attest. In the tale, her participation in conjugal life only augments her virtue, because she obeyed the instructions of priest and husband in carrying out her marital obligations. Even in the Savva Grudtsyn tale, obedience and humility prove the most important of virtues, miraculously bringing salvation to the penitent sinner. The humbled protagonist gains redemption by tearfully swearing obedience to the Mother of God, promising to fulfil her injunctions unquestioningly. These seventeenthcentury tales present a moral universe in which obedience towards authorities, whether male or female, formed the most pressing moral imperative, and where concerns about sexuality, if present at all, occupied a distinctly second tier. Marriage and sexual reproduction within marriage figure in many secular and quasi-religious sources as constituting a positive good. Uliana’s willingness to fulfil her marital obligations and produce a pious family testify to her obedience to God’s command as well as to her husband’s. In his explanation of Siberia’s exemplary role in a divine plan to spread Christian glory to the ends of the earth, cartographergeographer Semen Remezov echoed this theme in his atlases at the end of the seventeenth century, depicting marital relations and reproduction as directly linked to Christian enlightenment: ‘Evangelical wisdom touches Siberia and results in peaceful familial relations with spouses and children,’ as well as ‘plentiful harvests, fruitful livestock, and the restful well-being of satisfaction.’33 If physicality and sexuality were not the fundamental preoccupations of early modern Russian Orthodoxy, then it makes sense that gender itself might be a lesser preoccupation and the position of women vis-àvis men would be less differentiated than in Catholic or Protestant cultures. Some visual evidence would suggest that men and women were viewed more as a unit than as polar opposites. In perhaps the most poignant woodblock print from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, an elderly, careworn husband and wife occupy separate squares, each attending to his or her separate but interconnected task: ‘The husband weaves bast shoes with skill; the wife spins flax with a will.’34 Neither their somber, creased faces nor their shape- 112 Valerie A. Kivelson less robes betray any gender; only their headdresses and their tasks, and of course the beard, differentiate man from wife. Where the honest Muscovite couple is swathed in all-concealing robes, the Adam and Eve depicted above, by contrast, reveal all, but there is precious little difference to reveal. Scenes of the Fall emphasize neither their sexuality nor their sexual difference; instead they depict them equally chastened, sharing the mortal consequences of their disobedience. Compare these images with a luscious, lascivious Eve by Lucas Cranach, for instance, or with one of the many prints produced in the German lands at the same time, in which gender reversal formed the core focus of interest, aiming to provoke both anxiety and laughter.35 While Muscovite culture certainly noted sexual difference and indulged in its share of gender typing, there is good reason to believe that gender difference and hierarchy preoccupied Muscovites less than other kinds of social differentiation. Not only in painting and in tales, but also in a variety of lived practices, Muscovites structured their society to emphasize the mutuality and completeness of the married pair, rather than the antagonism of male and female. They channelled their concerns about social order more into maintaining social hierarchies than gender divisions. As Elise Wirtschafter notes in her book on imperial Russian society, ‘However unequal the mutual obligations of husbands, wives, and children may appear from the perspective of the late twentieth century, in the official family, duty was a reciprocal concept that set a moral standard and implied interdependence rather than difference ... Where survival depended upon direct farming or daily earnings, husbands and wives were so materially interdependent and the fruits of their labor so inextricably intertwined that notions of gender difference and equality held little meaning.’36 Underscoring the extent to which husband and wife were understood as a single, functioning unit in the official institutional structures of imperial Russia as well as among the labouring peasants, the unit of taxation was calculated according to the number of married couples in a village. Where European tax registers frequently listed only male heads of household in the early modern period, in Muscovite and imperial Russia such registers more commonly listed both spouses and all family members.37 Witchcraft litigation exposes another area in which the sharp gender differentiation familiar from Western European trials and witch-lore evaporates in the Muscovite case. Where Western witchcraft beliefs identified witches firmly with the female sex, and associated women’s Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Russian Orthodoxy 113 sexuality specifically with their proclivity for satanic temptations, in Muscovy, witchcraft was largely an ungendered activity, and not a sexualized one either.38 More men than women were charged with witchcraft in Muscovite trials, but the grounds for accusation were largely indistinguishable for male and female suspects, and the most common characteristic of those accused of witchcraft in Muscovite courts was that they were disobedient in one way or another: they had defied the law, their masters, their betters, their husbands, or their uncles. That most of the disobedient people charged with witchcraft happened to be male appears to have been what I have described elsewhere as a ‘second-order’ phenomenon, indicative of the greater possibilities for defiance structured into a Muscovite male’s experience.39 Other forms of litigation similarly reveal less sharply distinguished male and female experiences than one might expect. Honour, property regimes, inheritance, all allowed agency and voice to women on similar grounds to those allowed to men.40 Domostroi, the popular household handbook found in prosperous urban households in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, provides another textual way to explore the meaning of gender difference in Muscovy. Domostroi generally enjoys the reputation of providing a blueprint for patriarchal oppression of women. It preaches that husbands must instruct their wives in everything, and wives must consult their husbands in everything and must obey them in everything. It teaches that husbands should beat their wives for serious infractions, although adding the caveats that husbands should beat wives only within measure, without inflicting physical harm, and the beatings should be carried out in private. Daughters also need close supervision, lest they bring shame and dishonour. These are the passages that are most frequently quoted, but they tell only part of the story. Less often noted are the passages that explain that sons too should be beaten lest they bring shame and dishonour, that wives should order servants around and beat them (male and female), lest they bring shame and dishonour: ‘A husband must teach his wife how to please God and her husband, arrange her home well, and know all that is necessary for domestic order and every kind of handicraft, so that she may teach and supervise the servants ... If someone fails to heed her scoldings, she must strike him.’41 By far the majority of the chapters deal with sex-blind admonitions to humility, piety, and obedience. Chapter titles offer helpful hints such as: 114 Valerie A. Kivelson One should revere bishops, priests, and monks. One should honour tsars and princes, obey them in everything, and serve faithfully. How men and women should pray in church, preserve their chastity, and do no evil. Instruction to a husband and wife, their servants and children, on how they must live well. The master of the house, while at the top of the pecking order, is himself subject to the strict rules of order, with dire consequences if he violates them: ‘If a man does not teach his household himself, he will receive judgment from God. If he acts well himself and teaches his wife and servants, he will receive mercy from God.’42 Viewed as a whole, Domostroi can certainly be seen as a patriarchal manual, but one concerned with maintaining social hierarchy across the board, and not simply with upholding male supremacy. Domostroi, presumably written by a cleric, interweaves religious precepts with daily life concerns about how to run a household, store food supplies, and patch old clothing.43 Because of its heavy dose of religious moralizing and because of questions about limited readership, some historians have been tempted to ignore its teachings as merely prescriptive, having little bearing on the way that Muscovites actually lived their lives. The admixture of religious and hierarchical concerns, however, and the overriding preoccupation with maintaining social order and dignity, along with piety and frugality, ring true to other sources produced by that society. Gender differentiation and gender hierarchy figure into the concerns of Domostroi’s author as integral parts of a more complete vision of ordered social hierarchy, in which children obey and serve their parents, servants obey and serve their masters, prosperous homeowners obey and serve their princes and bishops, and all obey and serve God with humility and deference. Social, gender, political, and religious order figure as part and parcel of a single, hierarchical world of domination and submission. Popular religion, if it has any significant purchase on people’s minds and behaviours, should affect and colour actions and words outside of explicitly religious settings. The crucial question in exploring popular religion is not only what did people do when they were at church, but also what did they do when they fed their chickens or disciplined their children. In what ways were their lives shaped or affected by religious sensibilities? Like the secular tales, Domostroi provides a superb ex- Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Russian Orthodoxy 115 ample of a text that is simultaneously religious and not, directed towards the habits of daily life and yet fully imbued with a religious framework of understanding. If Domostroi and its teachings had any resonance in Muscovy, whether formative or merely reflective of norms and practices, it would show us a view of popular religion at its most practical level. In pursuing this problem, and testing the relevance of the images of religion, sexuality, and gender in literary and prescriptive texts, let us now turn to some even less explicitly religious texts, to see how these issues were played out in real world settings. When Muscovites of any degree wished to solve a problem or seek redress for a grievance, they drafted a petition, with or without the help of a professional scribe. While the format of the petition was formulaic and generic, the content was not. Moreover, the form itself can be extremely significant. In the case of the Muscovite petition, the language of the petition stressed the petitioners’ obedience and humility. Aside from minor terminological differences, the language of pathos and supplication was the same whether employed by men or women. Male petitioners made no effort to present strong, muscular, manly independence, as a reader schooled in Western notions of masculinity might anticipate. The male petitionary language in Muscovite petitions sounds strikingly similar to the particularly female, supplicatory voice identified by Natalie Zemon Davis in her study of ‘fiction in the archives.’44 Meekness and subservience, like pious and repentant tears, carry a positive valence in Muscovite political culture, as in Orthodox Christianity, for men and women alike. Just as Savva Grudtsyn finally achieved redemption by falling on his knees and weeping in all humility before the icon of the Mother of God, Muscovite men routinely employed abject, lachrymose phrases in presenting themselves to their elders, superiors, or potential patrons. A few examples from Muscovite petitions illustrate the potency of this language of self-mortification and pathos. In making a plea for governmental assistance, a state official wrote in January 1642: To Tsar, Sovereign, and Grand Prince Mikhail Fedorovich of All Russia and Sovereign-Lady, tsaritsa and Grand Princess Evdokiia Luk’ianovna! Your poor and helpless slave ... Lukashka Onikeev, clerk of the Grain Bureau, petitions you! Officer Ivan ... Tekutev, agreed with me, your slave, to marry my daughter, and their little wedding is supposed to take place this month, but I, poor one, have nothing to give for a dowry, and I have nothing to give for the wedding. Merciful sovereigns ... grant me, your 116 Valerie A. Kivelson poor and defenceless slave, whatever God tells you to give for my little daughter and her little wedding.45 Making no excuses for his own inability as pater familias and head of household to provide for his daughter, Lukashka deploys the language of humility as his most effective strategy. Similarly, Vaska Krechatnikov wailed, in a 1646 petition to Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich: This year I was ordered to serve in your service as a dragoon in Kursk, but while I, your slave, was getting ready to go to your service with everyone else, for my sins ... a fire started and my humble little house burned with everything in it. The fire spread outwards from my house, taking four other houses with it; I was able to save nothing from the fire, and all my supplies that I had prepared for service, and my service equipment and saddles and all kinds of gear burned up without a trace ... I have nothing to bring [to support myself in] your service, but I couldn’t fail to go, so I went to serve with the dragoons, but my little children remain in Moscow and wander from house to house, drifting among other people’s homes. Merciful sovereign ...! Favour me, your poor and helpless slave, burned out of house and home. Give me whatever support God suggests, so that I will have some means or other to support myself in your sovereign service and so that I won’t be in disgrace among my brothers and so that my little children, wandering from house to house without me, will not die a hungry death.46 Krechatnikov’s pride and manly reputation, which he is evidently anxious to preserve, seem unhurt by this litany of woes; rather this represents an appropriate male language of supplication. The language of appeal is exactly the same when the supplicant is female. In her 1692 petition to the cotsars Ioann and Peter Alekseevich, day-labourer Varka Ivanovna wove a tale with as complex and moving a narrative as any literary work, sparing none of the pathetic details. I, your poor and helpless orphan, Varka, Ivan’s little daughter, the little wife of Sidor Tatarin, petition you! In the past, my husband Sidor lived in the household of Kadashev townsman Ananii Konaev and worked at various jobs, and he Ananii took me from the household of taxpayer Ivan Evdokimova, where I lived as a free woman, and married me to Sidor. And Sidor and I had two children who lived with us: a son, Filimon, and a daughter, Maria. The son is 9, and the daughter 12 years old. And in 1684/ Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Russian Orthodoxy 117 85, my husband Sidor was hacked to death by criminals in the street, and after his death, Ananii gave me, your orphan, in marriage to Ivan Mikhailov, one of his men, and took from my [new] husband a contract obligating him to five years of work. And in 1688/89, Ananii dismissed us from his household and ripped up the contract in front of many people, and he didn’t give us the money, 25 rubles, that he owed us according to the contract – not the money, nor those little children of my first husband. Ananii and his son Grigorii won’t give my son and daughter to me. He, Grigorii, wants to keep them for himself and to enslave them by force. Merciful Great Sovereigns, Tsars and Grand Princes ... Have mercy on me, your poor and helpless orphan, for the sake of the Saviour and the Immaculate Mother of God and for your own long health and for the health of the grand princesses ...! Order him, Grigorii, to give those little children of my first husband, my son and daughter, back to me!47 Except for Krechetnikov’s reference to his military service, the supplicant could as easily be a man as a woman in any of these cases. The beseeching tone, humble language, abject self-representation and pathos transcend gender, as indeed the Orthodox ideal recommends. Displaying admirable consistency, Muscovite authors glorified the same traits in the mighty that they advocated for ordinary folk. Humility, piety, and deference were as respected in tsars as in servants. Court ceremonies emphasized the humility of the tsar-as-Christ in Palm Sunday reenactments of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem.48 Chronicles and histories singled out Tsar Fedor Ivanovich, the mentally impaired son of Ivan the Terrible, as the ideal ruler among the entire roster of more competent, activist, and alert men who sat on the throne. Tsar Fedor, paragon among men, lived the life of the ideal Orthodox Christian, devoting his time to prayer, repentance, and tears.49 Defence of the meek and helpless was similarly a trait shared by males and females in positions of power. Just as Lukashka Onikeev, clerk of the Grain Bureau, directed his petition about his daughter’s upcoming wedding to Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich and his tsarista, so Muscovites of all ranks commonly addressed their petitions to well-connected women, whether tsaritsas or wives of noblemen and officials, and their prayers to the Mother of God, hoping for her intercession in bringing their supplications before her Son.50 A genderless Orthodox ideal, a vision of pious men and women obediently and humbly occupying their appointed positions, accepting the orders of their superiors and intervening on behalf of their subordi- 118 Valerie A. Kivelson nates in a complex social hierarchy, percolated into secular political culture and language. While we still know little about the spiritual life or religious practice of ordinary Muscovites, we can assert with confidence that they encountered and used tropes of Orthodox piety and obedience in their daily lives, in interactions with the state, in popular tales, or in household relations. Muscovites of every rank could deploy those genderless expectations to further their own claims to merciful support or to condemn those around them for impudence and insubordination. Used in an extraordinarily sex-blind way, charges of disobedience could drag a transgressor into court on suspicion of witchcraft, while reputations for obedience could lay the ground for local canonization.51 What can we conclude about gender and sexuality in Muscovite popular religion? The church, in its official teachings and in its unofficial manifestations, in tales, icons, and household handbooks, was generally far more concerned with sins of defiance and disobedience than with sexual sin. Orthodox Christianity, in its Russian variant, placed sexual sin comparatively low in its calculations of the relative weight of sins. Moreover, with occasional notable exceptions, Orthodoxy made little distinction between male and female susceptibility to sin or to the lures of Satan, and made little effort to attribute sexual guilt specifically to Eve or her daughters. Muscovite secular culture acted according to a relatively undifferentiated understanding of gender in models of behaviour, civic participation, and hierarchical ordering. In secular contexts as in religious ones, obedience to one’s superiors was required regardless of the sex of either party, and the ideal language of selfrepresentation stressed pathos and dependency. The most searing inequities in Muscovite culture, as reinforced by Muscovite popular religion, were not particularly associated with gender and its primary condemnations not particularly associated with sex. Summarizing our findings is a straightforward job. The harder task is to prove the link between the two discourses. Did secular language mirror religious models because a popular Orthodoxy so thoroughly permeated Muscovite society as to make the secular indistinguishable from the religious? Or did the two merely run along two parallel tracks, without intersecting or influencing each other? A powerful current in Muscovite historiography argues that in fact religion and secular life had little to do with one another. This claim forces the burden of proof Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Russian Orthodoxy 119 onto those of us who would argue for a popular culture deeply inflected by Orthodox religious ideas and customs. The interweaving of explicitly religious imagery and injunctions in the texts and practices examined here suggests more than a casual admixture of the two supposedly distinct worlds. Muscovite ideas of gender, and consequently of the body and of sexuality, traced their origins at least in part to a popularized Orthodox Christianity, which in turn resulted in a society far less fixated on sexual sin or on female sexuality than previous work has suggested and perhaps, though this remains to be further explored, less so than some of its Western Christian counterparts. The potentially emancipatory implications of a relatively equal gender regime, however, were entirely offset by the far more coercive set of social hierarchies that formed the object of obsessive concern and protective labour on the part of church and state, masters and lords, husbands and fathers, mothers-in-laws and eldest daughters throughout Muscovite society. NOTES 1 V.F. Pokrovskaia, ‘Neizvestnyi spisok ‘slova’ Daniila Zatochnika,’ Trudy otdela drevnerusskoi literatury (TODRL) 10 (1954): 288. On Daniil Zatochnik, see, among others, H. Birnbaum and R. Romanchuk, ‘Kem byl zagadochnyi Daniil Zatochnik?’ TODRL 50 (1997): 576–602; D.S. Likhachev, ‘Daniil Zatochnik,’ in Slovar’ knizhnikov i knizhnosti Drevnei Rusi, vol. 1, XI– pervaia polovina XIV v. (Leningrad, 1987), 112–15; and M.N. Tikhomirov, “Napisanie’ Daniila Zatochnika,’ TODRL 10 (1954): 269–79. 2 Neither ‘gender’ nor ‘sexuality’ appear in a search of Russian Orthodox web sites or reference works, and the cautious, distancing introduction by Father Thomas Hopko, dean of St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, to Brenda Meehan’s study of female spirituality suggests an unease with the marriage of the two approaches to the history of religion. Preface, in Brenda Meehan, Holy Women of Russia : The Lives of Five Orthodox Women Offer Spiritual Guidance for Today (San Francisco, 1993), ix–xii. Joanna Hubbs’s Mother Russia provides the strongest formulation of the church as deliberately implementing a policy of subordinating women. Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, 1988). 3 Pokrovskaia, ‘Neizvestnyi spisok “slova” Daniila Zatochnika,’ 288. 4 Reworking of book of Sirach in the Apocrypha, translated and quoted in 120 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Valerie A. Kivelson Eve Levin, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs (Ithaca, NY, 1989), 54–5. Levin, Sex and Society, 46. Ibid., 46–9, 56, 180. Pokrovskaia, ‘Neizvestnyi spisok “slova” Daniila Zatochnika,’ 287. Literally, the phrase is ‘A maiden ruins her beauty,’ but the parallel to the instrumental case for men ‘tat’boiu’ suggests my reading. Marcia A. Morris reviews some of the controversies in dating the tale, but concludes that a late seventeenth- rather than early eighteenth-century date is more compelling. The literature generally assumes that the tale reflects a seventeenth-century urban context. ‘The Tale of Savva Grudcyn and the Poetics of Transition,’ Slavic and East European Journal 36 (1992): 203–4. The tale contains numerous traces of Western influence, and so may not accurately reflect a purely Muscovite sexual sensibility. Passages here are taken from versions of the tale in ‘Povest’ o Savve Grudtsyne,’ in Pamiatniki literatury drevnei Rusi. XVII vek. Kniga pervaia (henceforth PLDR) (Moscow, 1988), 41; and ‘Povest’ o Savve Grudtsyne,’ in M.O. Skripil’, ed., Russkaia povest’ XVII veka (Leningrad, 1953), 84. ‘Povest’ o Savve Grudtsyne,’ PLDR, 41. ‘Povest’ o nekoem kuptse Grigorii, kako khote ego zhena z zhidovinom umoriti,’ PLDR, 94. Set in Rome, this story too must be based on a foreign import. An extraordinary but idiosyncratic misogynistic condemnation of women as the vehicles of sexual sin is found in the Malleus Maleficarum: The Hammer of Witches of Kramer and Sprenger, trans. Montague Summers (Mineola, NY, 1971). Focus on this kind of fiercely misogynistic text in isolation, however, repeats the same methodological mistake that I have identified above. Stuart Clark puts the overwhelming misogyny of this piece in context in ‘The Gendering of Witchcraft in French Demonology: Misogyny or Polarity?’ French History 5, no. 4 (1991): 426–37. On early modern theology of the body, see Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London, 1994), 171–98. On the Web, see the adamant refutation of Immaculate Conception in ‘The Heterodox Teaching of “Immaculate Conception” and “Original Sin,”’ http://aggreen.net/theotokos/orig_sin.html. ‘Because Roman Catholic doctrine teaches that all people bear the stain and guilt of original sin from the moment of their conception in the womb, the Roman Catholic Church had to devise a “Doctrine of Immaculate Conception” to confirm that the Holy Mother was sinless because, the Vatican rationalized, our Lord could Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Russian Orthodoxy 121 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 not be born of someone sinful. The immaculate conception doctrine makes her different from the rest of humankind; it makes her not fully human because she was not by her own choice sinless but by the will of God. If Mary were sinless by God’s choice, not hers, then by virtue of the fact that she was as fully human as all of humankind is and has been, then God could make us all sinless and take away the free will given to us by our being created in His image and likeness.’ The author, ‘a priest of the Orthodox Church in America,’ cites Blessed John Maximovitch, Life of the Virgin Mary, The Theotokos (Buena Vista, CO, 1989). Another similar web site: www.networks.now.net/sspp/a_nativity_theotokos.htm (web site of Ss Peter and Paul Antiochian Orthodox Church). For more scholarly treatments of original sin, see also John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes (New York, 1974), 143–9; Timothy Ware (Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia), The Orthodox Church, new ed. (London, 1993), 222–5, 257–61. George P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, Kievan Christianity: The 10th to the 13th Centuries (Belmont, MA, 1975), 360–2, 376. Laura Engelstein, Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian Folktale (Ithaca, NY, 1999). On the Western tradition, see Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York, 1989). H.W. Dewey and N. Challis, ‘Divine Folly in Old Kievan Literature: The Tale of Isaac the Cave Dweller,’ Slavic and East European Journal 22 (1978): 255–64. This article discusses Kievan tradition, but the implications hold true in Muscovy as well. See David M. Goldfrank, Joseph Volotskii’s Monastic Rules: Its Sources and Historical Importance (Kalamazoo, MI, 1983); Ia. S. Lur’e, Ideologicheskaia bor’ba v russkoi publitsistike (Leningrad, 1960), ch. 4–5; Donald G. Ostrowski, ‘Church Polemics and Monastic Land Acquisition in 16th–c. Muscovy,’ Slavonic and East European Review 64 (1986): 357–79. See my ‘The Souls of the Righteous in a Bright Place: Landscape and Orthodoxy in Seventeenth-Century Russian Maps,’ Russian Review 58 (January 1999): 1–25; and Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Ithaca, NY, 2006). Cited in Ware, The Orthodox Church, 21. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, 1988), 387–427, quote on 416. See also his Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967). For a nuanced examination of women in the Calvinist tradition, see Carol Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York, 1987). Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, xviii, xix. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, 1:75–6; Ware, The Orthodox Church, 122 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Valerie A. Kivelson 222–5; Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 143–6. It is important to note, however, that an exorcism is a standard part of baptism rituals. N. Tikhonravov, Pamiatniki otrechennoi russkoi literatury (St Petersburg, 1863), 1:299–300. V.N. Sergeev, ‘Dukhovnyi stikh ‘Plach Adama’ na ikone,’ TODRL 26 (1971), 281–2, 284. The Chrysostom passage is quoted in Sergeev, ‘Dukhovnyi stikh “Plach Adama’ na ikone,” 285: ‘If Eve had held back from the tree, we would not need this fasting.’ Images of Adam and Eve: Muzei drevnerusskogo iskusstva imeni Andreia Rubleva, Zhertvennik kontsa XVI–nachala XVII v.; M.V. Alpatov, Early Russian Icon Painting (Moscow, 1984), plate 203, ‘The Symbol of Faith,’ second half of the seventeenth century, from the Kolomenskoe Museum, Moscow, (reproduced here); Gennady Popov, Tver Icons, 13th–17th Centuries (St Petersburg, 1993), plate 173, Door to a Prothesis. Scenes: ‘The Expulsion from Paradise’ and ‘The Parable of the Lame Man and the Blind Man,’ first half of the seventeenth century; V.G. Briusova, Russkaia zhivopis’ 17 veka (Moscow, 1984), 65, black and white plate no. 52: ‘Novgorodskie pis’ma. Simvol very. Ikona iz Preobrazhenskogo sobora Solovetskogo monastyria,’ mid-seventeenth century. Briusova reproduces a detail from the icon in beautiful colour: colour plate 115, ‘Grekhopadenie,’; see also colour plate 114, ‘Novgorodskie pis’ma. Sotvorenie Adama i Evy. Izgnanie iz raia. Fragment rospisi altarnoi dveri,’ mid-seventeenth century; and colour plate 130, ‘Kostromskaia shkola. Sotvorenie Adama i Evy. Grekhopadenie. Izgnanie iz raia. Fragment ikony “Veruiu,”’ 1680s. Levin, Sex and Society, 46. Eve Levin, ‘Infanticide in Early Modern Russia,’ Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 34 (1986): 215–24. Nancy Shields Kollmann, ‘Women’s Honor in Early Modern Russia,’ in Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, ed. Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine D. Worobec (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991), 60–73. Levin makes the same point: ‘Although didactic literature taught that women were more susceptible to sexual sin ... most provisions of canon law authorized identical penalties for men and women offenders.’ Sex and Society, 78. ‘Povest’o Gore i Zlochastii, kak Gore-Zlochastie dovelo molottsa vo inocheskii chin,’ in PLDR, 28. Translation is primarily my own, with reference to Serge A. Zenkovsky, Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles and Tales, revised and expanded ed. (New York, 1974), 489–501. On ‘Misery Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Russian Orthodoxy 123 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 Luckless Plight,’ see F. Vizgell (Wizgell), ‘Bludnye synov’ia ili bluzhdaiushchie dushi: “Povest’ o Gore-Zlochastii” i “Ocharovannyi strannik” Leskova,’ TODRL 50 (1997): 754–62; V.L. Vinogradova, ‘Povest’ o GoreZlochastii,’ TODRL 12 (1956): 622–41; J.P. Zbilut, ‘The Tale of Misery and Ill Fortune as Allegory,’ Slavic and East European Journal 20 (1976): 217–23. Here my reading diverges from Faith Wizgell’s. She reads the central crime or sin in the tale as the youth’s rejection of a righteous, prosperous, and happy life and his wilful preference for a bitter and corrupt life. She rejects the reading that the tale concerns conflict between parents and children (‘Bludnye synov’ia,’ 758). I agree that it is not a psychological tale of family dynamics, but the disruption of generational and other hierarchies seems incontrovertibly to define the heart and moral of the story. ‘Povest’ o Gore i Zlochastii,’ 38. Marcia A. Morris notes and analyses similar unmotivated plot developments in ‘The Tale of Savva Grudcyn and the Poetics of Transition,’ Slavic and East European Journal 36 (1992): 202–16. ‘Povest’ ob Uliianii Osor’inoi,’ in Skripil’, Russkaia povest’ XVII veka, 40. The tale is also reproduced in ‘Povest’ ob Ul’ianii Osor’inoi,’ in PLDR, 98–104. Uliana practises what Peter Brown calls ‘post-marital celibacy.’ Rossiiskaia Natsional’naia Biblioteka, St Petersburg, Ermitazhnoe sobranie, 237, Sluzhebnaia chertezhnaia kniga Remezova (Sluzhebnaia kniga), 12. Text published in E.I. Dergacheva-Skop, ‘“Pokhvala” Sibiri S. U. Remezova,’ Trudy. Institut russkoi literatury (Pushkinskii dom). Otdel drevnerusskoi literatury. Novonaidennye i neopublikovannye proizvedeniia drevnerusskoi literatury 21 (1965): 266–74; quote on 272. Alla Sytova et al., The Lubok: Russian Folk Pictures, 17th to 19th Century (Leningrad, 1984), plate 16. Lyndal Roper, ‘Was There a Crisis in Gender Relations in SixteenthCentury Germany?’ in her Oedipus and the Devil, 37–52; Steven E. Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1983). Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, IL, 1997), 10, 17. S.B. Veselovskii, Soshnoe pis’mo. Izsledovanie po istorii kadastra i pososhnogo oblozheniia Moskovskogo gosudarstva, 2 vols (Moscow, 1916) ; V.A. Aleksandrov, Sel’skaia obshchina v Rossii (XVII-nachalo XIX v.) (Moscow, 1976). Records from Muscovite witchcraft trials very rarely hint at the sexual conduct or misconduct of the accused, but interestingly, this is not true of literary representations of witchcraft. For instance, in both ‘Savva 124 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 Valerie A. Kivelson Grudtsyn’ and the tale of the merchant’s wife and the Jew, the guilty parties employ magic specifically to facilitate their adultery. Valerie A. Kivelson, ‘Male Witches and Gendered Categories in Seventeenth-Century Russia,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 3 (2003): 606–31. Nancy Shields Kollmann, By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (Ithaca, NY, 1999); and her ‘Women’s Honor’; George G. Weickhard, ‘The Legal Rights of Women in Russia, 1100–1750,’ Slavic Review 55 (1996): 1–23; Valerie A. Kivelson, ‘The Effects of Partible Inheritance: Gentry Families and the State in Muscovy,’ Russian Review 53 (1994): 197–212; Ann M. Kleimola, ‘“In Accordance with the Canons of the Holy Apostles”: Muscovite Dowries and Women’s Property Rights,’ Russian Review 51 (1992): 204–29. The Domostroi: Rules for Russian Households in the Time of Ivan the Terrible, ed. and trans. by Carolyn Johnston Pouncy (Ithaca, NY, 1994), 124, 143. Pouncy, Domostroi, 145. The ever-satirical Daniil Zatochnik phrases the same requirement in inverted form. Asserting the natural patriarchal order, he notes with scorn that ‘a husband who is commanded by his wife [is not] a man among men.’ Pokrovskaia, ‘Neizvestnyi spisok “slova” Daniila Zatochnika,’ 287. On the question of authorship, see Pouncy’s Introduction to Domostroi, 1–54. Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Cambridge, 1987). Moskovskaia delovaia i bytovaia pis’mennost’ XVII veka, ed. S.I. Kotkov et al. (Moscow, 1968), 62, no. 38, 27 January 1642. A similar petition appears on p. 67, no. 50, September 1649. A similar tone of lament characterizes a literary counterpart of these petitions, the ‘Alphabet of a Naked and Penniless Man.’ ‘Azbuka o golom i nebogatom cheloveke,’ in V.P. Adrianova-Perets, ed., Russkaia demokraticheskaia satira XVII veka (Moscow, 1977), 149–50, 229–31. Moskovskaia delovaia i bytovaia pis’mennost’ XVII veka, 66, no. 48, 23 May 1646. Ibid., 117–18, no. 132, 6 November 1692. This petition is unusually genderfree in its formulaic language. Women usually address the sovereign as his ‘slave’ (raba), rather than as his ‘orphan’ (sirota), a term usually reserved for nonnoble males. Varka for some reason refers to herself as the tsar’s ‘orphan.’ I have taken some liberties with the translation, shortening the text and simplifying the names by omitting the patronymics. Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Russian Orthodoxy 125 48 Michael S. Flier, ‘Breaking the Code: The Image of the Tsar in the Muscovite Palm Sunday Ritual,’ in Medieval Russian Culture, vol. 2, ed. by Michael S. Flier and Daniel Rowland (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994), 213–42. 49 Daniel Rowland, ‘The Problem of Advice in Muscovite Tales about the Time of Troubles,’ Russian History 6, pt. 2 (1979): 259–83. 50 Isolde Thyrêt, Between God and Tsar: Religious Symbolism and the Royal Women of Muscovite Russia (DeKalb, IL, 2001); Valerie A. Kivelson, Autocracy in the Provinces: Russian Political Culture and the Gentry in the Seventeenth Century (Stanford, 1997), 154–80; Rossiiskaia Natsional’ naia Biblioteka, Sluzhebnaia chertezhnaia kniga, 9. 51 On obedience as grounds for unofficial, local canonization, see Eve Levin, ‘From Corpse to Cult in Early Modern Russia,’ in Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice under the Tsars, ed. Valerie A. Kivelson and Robert H. Greene (University Park, 2003), 81–104.