Simon Franklin

Holy fools in Byzantium and beyond

Introduction 1. The Precursors and Emergence of Holy Foolery 2. Early Holy Foolery 3. The Golden Age of Holy Foolery 4. The Decline of Byzantine Holy Foolery 5. Holy Foolerys Eastern Periphery 6. Holy Foolerys Western Periphery 7. Old Russian Iurodstvo 8. The Iurodivyi and the Tsar 9. Iurodstvo in Transition 10. Iurodstvo Meets Modernity

Identity and religion

Russia is unthinkable without Orthodoxy. The spirit of Russia rose from Byzantium. Constantinople, the Imperial City … passed on to Moscow the honour of being the capital of the Orthodox Kingdom … (enjoining) us to preserve this Kingdom as Gods gift, as a barrier in the path of the spread of evil in the Universe. Archbishop Iuvenalii of Kursk and Rylsk This chapter is not about the nature of Russian faith or Russian spirituality or the ‘Russian soul’, nor even about the place of religion in Russian culture. The aim is much narrower. We are not concerned with belief, but with identity (in a sense, with beliefs about beliefs, or at least with declarations about beliefs). Nor are we even concerned with the ‘actual’ role of religion in Russian national identity, but merely with the roles which have been ascribed to it, with its representations, whether explicit in ideology and thought and propaganda, or implicit in other forms of cultural production. We start with a broad survey over the course of a millennium, before looking more closely at some of the ways in which the issue is reflected in specific materials. OVERVIEW: BELIEFS ABOUT BELIEFS Towards the end of the tenth century – the conventional date is 988 – Prince Vladimir Sviatoslavich of Kiev ‘officially’ converted his people, the Rus ( Russia was originally a Latin word meaning the Land of the Rus) to Christianity.

Printing and Social Control in Russia 1: Passports

Studies of the history of print in Russia tend to focus on the printing of books, and to a lesser extent pictures. However, the implications of the spread of information technologies extend beyond their cultural uses. In particular, the adoption of printing (like the spread of writing before it, and the spread of electronic and digital technologies in recent decades) has potential implications for administration and social control. This study – the first in a series on related themes – considers the introduction and uses of print in one category of document, the passport, in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The main sources are legislative. The printing of passports was not just an administrative practice but a legislative issue and a recurrent problem. The use of print for specified types of passport was first decreed in 1726, as an anti-forgery measure, but successive revisions and modifications of the legislation show that precisely the feature which made print attractive as a device to combat fraud - centralised State control of the means of production - also created logistical difficulties which could obstruct the effective operations of the passport system itself. The final section of the survey is comparative, setting Russias practices and preoccupations in the printing of passports in a wider European and American context, in order to identify what may have been distinctive to Russia.

Printing and Social Control in Russia 2: Decrees

On 16 March 1714 Peter I issued a decree on the printing of decrees. Previously all decrees (ukazy), and indeed almost all legislative texts apart from the 1649 law code (Ulozhenie) of Aleksei Mikhailovich, had been issued in manuscript and disseminated through hand-written copies and oral proclamation. Peters decree on the use of print was a landmark in the administrative uses of printing in Russia. It was intended as such by Peter, and perceived as such by his successors. The continued success of this initiative is contrasted with the repeated failure of other projects for the systematic use of printing in legislation: the attempts to produce a new systematic code, and to publish regular chronological compilations of laws. This article considers the context, implications, and consequences of Peters innovative ruling. The main questions under consideration are: why had printing not been used for these purposes earlier? what specific functions was the technology called upon to fulfil? and what were its relations with other technologies? Particular attention is paid to the perceived and actual roles of printing as an aid to (i) distribution, (ii) standardization, and (iii) the emblematic projection of authority. In each case, printing is considered not in isolation, but in its relations with the uses of manuscript and speech. A final section considers some ways in which Peters instruction was followed or adapted by his 18th-century successors.

Printing and Social Control in Russia 3: Blank Forms

This is the accepted manuscript for a paper published in Russian History, Volume 42, Issue 1, pages 114 – 135, doi: 10.1163/18763316-04201010

Information and Empire: Mechanisms of Communication in Russia, 1600-1850

From the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century Russia was transformed from a moderate-sized, land-locked principality into the largest empire on earth. How did systems of information and communication shape and reflect this extraordinary change? Information and Mechanisms of Communication in Russia, 1600-1850 brings together a range of contributions to shed some light on this complex question. Communication networks such as the postal service and the gathering and circulation of news are examined alongside the growth of a bureaucratic apparatus that informed the government about its country and its people. The inscription of space is considered from the point of view of mapping and the changing public ‘graphosphere’ of signs and monuments. More than a series of institutional histories, this book is concerned with the way Russia discovered itself, envisioned itself and represented itself to its people. Innovative and scholarly, this collection breaks new ground in its approach to communication and information as a field of study in Russia. More broadly, it is an accessible contribution to pre-modern information studies, taking as its basis a country whose history often serves to challenge habitual Western models of development. It is important reading not only for specialists in Russian Studies, but also for students and non-Russianists who are interested in the history of information and communications.Muscovy and the European Information Revolution : Creating the Mechanisms for Obtaining Foreign News

Three Types of Asymmetry in the Muscovite Engagement with Print

Muscovite awareness and use of printed books both predated and extended beyond the scope of native Muscovite printing. The three types of “asymmetry” explored in this survey relate to the wider reception of print in Muscovy. The first and most widely noted is the chronological and cultural mismatch between the spread of print culture in Russia and in Western Europe. The second is the differential chronology and repertoire of local print production by comparison with the use of imported printed materials. The third – the main focus of the survey – is the phenomenon of “reverse technology transfer,” whereby West European printed materials were appropriated into manuscript culture in Muscovy. Examples are adduced from diverse and unrelated fields: medical knowledge, newspapers, and biblical illustration. Taken together, these patterns of asymmetry not only pose a challenge to “techno-determinist” approaches to the history of writing and print, but reflect a distinctive ecology of media, a distinctive set of cultural filters in the translation of print to Muscovy.