An Academy at the Court of the Tsars

An Academy at the Court of the Tsars PDF

Author: Nikolaos A. Chrissidis

Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press

Published: 2016-08-10

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 1501756737

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The first formally organized educational institution in Russia was established in 1685 by two Greek hieromonks, Ioannikios and Sophronios Leichoudes. Like many of their Greek contemporaries in the seventeenth century, the brothers acquired part of their schooling in colleges of post-Renaissance Italy under a precise copy of the Jesuit curriculum. When they created a school in Moscow, known as the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy, they emulated the structural characteristics, pedagogical methods, and program of studies of Jesuit prototypes. In this original work, Nikolaos A. Chrissidis analyzes the academy's impact on Russian educational practice and situates it in the contexts of Russian-Greek cultural relations and increased contact between Russia and Western Europe in the seventeenth century. Chrissidis demonstrates that Greek academic and cultural influences on Russia in the second half of the seventeenth century were Western in character, though Orthodox in doctrinal terms. He also shows that Russian and Greek educational enterprises were part of the larger European pattern of Jesuit academic activities that impacted Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox educational establishments and curricular choices. An Academy at the Court of the Tsars is the first study of the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy in English and the only one based on primary sources in Russian, Church Slavonic, Greek, and Latin. It will interest scholars and students of early modern Russian and Greek history, of early modern European intellectual history and the history of science, of Jesuit education, and of Eastern Orthodox history and culture.

A Bride for the Tsar

A Bride for the Tsar PDF

Author: Russell E. Martin

Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press

Published: 2012-06-15

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 1501756656

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From 1505 to 1689, Russia's tsars chose their wives through an elaborate ritual: the bride-show. The realm's most beautiful young maidens—provided they hailed from the aristocracy—gathered in Moscow, where the tsar's trusted boyars reviewed their medical histories, evaluated their spiritual qualities, noted their physical appearances, and confirmed their virtue. Those who passed muster were presented to the tsar, who inspected the candidates one by one—usually without speaking to any of them—and chose one to be immediately escorted to the Kremlin to prepare for her wedding and new life as the tsar's consort. Alongside accounts of sordid boyar plots against brides, the multiple marriages of Ivan the Terrible, and the fascinating spectacle of the bride-show ritual, A Bride for the Tsar offers an analysis of the show's role in the complex politics of royal marriage in early modern Russia. Russell E. Martin argues that the nature of the rituals surrounding the selection of a bride for the tsar tells us much about the extent of his power, revealing it to be limited and collaborative, not autocratic. Extracting the bride-show from relative obscurity, Martin persuasively establishes it as an essential element of the tsarist political system.

Window on the East

Window on the East PDF

Author: Robert P. Geraci

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 9780801434228

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Robert Geraci presents an exceptionally original account of both the politics and the lived experience of diversity in a society whose ethnic complexity has long been downplayed. For centuries, Russians have defined their country as both a multinational empire and a homogeneous nation-state in the making, and have alternately embraced and repudiated the East or Asia as fundamental to Russia's identity. The author argues that the city of Kazan, in the middle Volga region, was the chief nineteenth-century site for mediating this troubled and paradoxical relationship with the East, much as St. Petersburg had served as Russia's window on Europe a century earlier. He shows how Russians sought through science, religion, pedagogy, and politics to understand and promote the Russification of ethnic minorities in the East, as well as to define themselves. Vivid in narrative detail, meticulously argued, and peopled by a colorful cast including missionaries, bishops, peasants, mullahs, professors, teachers, students, linguists, orientalists, archeologists, and state officials, Window on the East uses previously untapped archival and published materials to describe the creation (sometimes intentional, sometimes unintentional) of intermediate and new forms of Russianness.

Legitimating the Law

Legitimating the Law PDF

Author: John Phillip Reid

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2012-06-15

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1609090543

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John Phillip Reid is one of the most highly regarded historians of law as it was practiced on the state level in the nascent United States. He is not just the recipient of numerous honors for his scholarship but the type of historian after whom such accolades are named: the John Phillip Reid Award is given annually by the American Society for Legal History to the author of the best book by a mid-career or senior scholar. Legitimating the Law is the third installment in a trilogy of books by Reid that seek to extend our knowledge about the judicial history of the early republic by recounting the development of courts, laws, and legal theory in New Hampshire. Here Reid turns his eye toward the professionalization of law and the legitimization of legal practices in the Granite State—customs and codes of professional conduct that would form the basis of judiciaries in other states and that remain the cornerstone of our legal system to this day throughout the US. Legitimating the Law chronicles the struggle by which lawyers and torchbearers of strong, centralized government sought to bring standards of competence to New Hampshire through the professionalization of the bench and the bar—ambitions that were fought vigorously by both Jeffersonian legislators and anti-Federalists in the private sector alike, but ultimately to no avail.

The Tsar's Happy Occasion

The Tsar's Happy Occasion PDF

Author: Russell E. Martin

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2021-05-15

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 1501754858

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The Tsar's Happy Occasion shows how the vast, ornate affairs that were royal weddings in early modern Russia were choreographed to broadcast powerful images of monarchy and dynasty. Processions and speeches emphasized dynastic continuity and legitimacy. Fertility rites blended Christian and pre-Christian symbols to assure the birth of heirs. Gift exchanges created and affirmed social solidarity among the elite. The bride performed rituals that integrated herself and her family into the inner circle of the court. Using an array of archival sources, Russell E. Martin demonstrates how royal weddings reflected and shaped court politics during a time of dramatic cultural and dynastic change. As Martin shows, the rites of passage in these ceremonies were dazzling displays of monarchical power unlike any other ritual at the Muscovite court. And as dynasties came and went and the political culture evolved, so too did wedding rituals. Martin relates how Peter the Great first mocked, then remade wedding rituals to symbolize and empower his efforts to westernize Russia. After Peter, the two branches of the Romanov dynasty used weddings to solidify their claims to the throne. The Tsar's Happy Occasion offers a sweeping, yet penetrating cultural history of the power of rituals and the rituals of power in early modern Russia.

Russia Of The Tsars

Russia Of The Tsars PDF

Author: Peter Waldron

Publisher: Thames and Hudson

Published: 2011-04-26

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780500289297

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Between the seventeenth century and the 1917 revolution, the Russian Tsars became absolute rulers of the largest and most diverse empire in the world. The splendor of their court and their capital city, St. Petersburg, was extraordinary, but this imperial edifice was supported by the toil of millions of serfs tied to the land and brutally repressed. The vast majority of the people were uneducated, yet Russia produced writers, artists, and composers of world importance. The Tsars created a mighty army, but it failed them in the Crimea and in World War I. This empire of contradictions was to have a profound influence on both Europe and Asia. Peter Waldron tells the stories of all the Russians, exploring how the vastness of the empire and its extremes of climate affected the lives of rulers and peasants alike. He recounts how Peter the Great and later Tsars built the empire, and describes some of the individuals who worked for and against social change in Russia. Box features on specific people, places, and events and many quotations from Russian sources bring this saga vividly to life. The ten facsimile documents include a 1710 map of St. Petersburg, a newspaper report on the Crimean War, and the announcement of Nicholas II’s abdication in 1917.

Between God and Tsar

Between God and Tsar PDF

Author: Isolde Thyret

Publisher:

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 9780875802749

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Challenging traditional interpretations of the roles of royal women in patriarchal Muscovite society, Between God and Tsar opens a new approach to understanding medieval Russia. Drawing upon a wide range of sources in anthropology, sociology, art history, and literature, it sheds light on the lives of the tsaritsy, about which little has been known, and on the culture surrounding them. This pioneering study demonstrates that the wives of the early tsars played complex roles in government, especially during times of crisis, and shows how religious culture perpetuated the expressions of their legitimacy as female rulers. Muscovite Russia's values were sanctioned by religion, and it is through religious images that the royal women's claims to rulership can be seen most clearly. Thyrêt explores Orthodox iconography--such as that of the Golden Palace of the Tsaritsy, which proclaims Irina Godunova's right to act as an independent ruler--and shows how the Muscovite court used gendered images to reveal the spiritual power of female rulers. Myths and legends adapted from one generation to another also underscore royal wives' claim to authority based on their great spiritual power. Illuminating medieval Russia's art, literature, and culture, Between God and Tsar opens new ways to understand the tsaritsy. Students of Russian history have often wondered how and why, under the Romanovs, female rulers governed so often. Thyrêt's broadly researched study provides an answer. Between God and Tsar offers stimulating insights into the power of Russia's royal women and how it was manifest in Muscovite culture.

The Tsar's Last Armada

The Tsar's Last Armada PDF

Author: Constantine Pleshakov

Publisher:

Published: 2003-04-24

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 0465057926

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A lively account of one of the greatest naval battles in history retraces the fateful journey of the Tsar's armada from the Suez Canal to the Korea Straight, where it was destroyed by the Japanese Navy in 1905. Reprint.

The Public Image of Eastern Orthodoxy

The Public Image of Eastern Orthodoxy PDF

Author: Heather L. Bailey

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2020-06-15

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1501749528

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Focusing on the period between the revolutions of 1848-1849 and the First Vatican Council (1869-1870), The Public Image of Eastern Orthodoxy explores the circumstances under which westerners, concerned about the fate of the papacy, the Ottoman Empire, Poland, and Russian imperial power, began to conflate the Russian Orthodox Church with the state and to portray the Church as the political tool of despotic tsars. As Heather L. Bailey demonstrates, in response to this reductionist view, Russian Orthodox publicists launched a public relations campaign in the West, especially in France, in the 1850s and 1860s. The linchpin of their campaign was the building of the impressive Saint Alexander Nevsky Church in Paris, consecrated in 1861. Bailey posits that, as the embodiment of the belief that Russia had a great historical purpose inextricably tied to Orthodoxy, the Paris church both reflected and contributed to the rise of religious nationalism in Russia that followed the Crimean War. At the same time, the confrontation with westerners' negative ideas about the Eastern Church fueled a reformist spirit in Russia while contributing to a better understanding of Eastern Orthodoxy in the West.