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Cultural Crisis in Orthodox Rus' in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries as a Problem in Education and Social Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

William K. Medlin
William K. Medlin*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Extract

Although the sixteenth century is more popularly known in the accounts of Russian history as a time of internal crises largely perpetrated by a bloody autocracy and boyar intrigues, those violent events were no more significant than developments in the social and cultural reconstruction of life among the peoples of Orthodox Rus' during the same period. Prominent among these developments was the gradual formation of small centers of learning, largely outside the confines of the Moscow Tsardom but yet within the larger community of Eastern Orthodox Slavdom. Both within and between the nationality areas, communication and the pursuit of learning not only continued to function while they existed under different state administrations, but even began to intensify and to expand, especially during the latter half of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth. This intensification of cultural life had its sources and foundations in the geographic, political, economic, social and intellectual realities in the lands of Orthodox Rus’. It both reflected and helped shape the growing crisis faced by leaders of the Orthodox clergies of Rus'.

Type
Research Article
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , Spring 1969 , pp. 28 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © 1969 by New York University 

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References

Notes

1. Rus' here refers to lands then inhabited by those faithful to the Eastern Orthodox rite who spoke a dialect of Russian Slavonic, extending from what are historically known as Ruthenia—or Chervonaia Rus'—Belorussia (Belata Rus'), Western Ukraine (Malaia Rus') and Lithuania, thence northeasterly to central Russia, or Moskovskaia Rus'. Google Scholar

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24. Ibid., p. 240.Google Scholar

25. Ibid., p. 413; Zernova, op. cit., p. 67; Istoriia Ukrainskoi literatury (Kiev, 1954), I, 71.Google Scholar

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27. A good number of Russian sources attest to the fact that the number of Orthodox conversions to Catholicism was at the time a growing problem.Google Scholar

28. Hrushevsky, op. cit., pp. 3100ff., and esp. p. 314; Karataev, II, 271–72. Testimony on these conditions appeared also in M. Smotritskii's Threnos. Google Scholar

29. Ustav of Lutsk Bratstvo, reproduced with commentary in Pamiatniki, I, op. cit., 1845, pp. 114–15. Cf. also the L'vov Ustav given in Medynskii, op. cit. Google Scholar

30. Kharlampovich, K. Zapadnorusskiia pravoslavnie shkoly XVI i nachalo XVII veka (Kazan', 1898), pp. 417ff. Google Scholar

31. Lutsk, Ustav, op. cit., p. 106.Google Scholar

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34. Kharlampovich, op. cit., p. 345. For evidence of lay support of this trend by new social elements, cf. ibid., pp. 333, 361; and Papkov, op. cit., p. 195.Google Scholar

35. Kharlampovich, op. cit., p. 316; Golubev, op. cit., I. Prilozheniia, p. 245.Google Scholar

36. Kharlampovich, op. cit., p. 345.Google Scholar

37. Ukrainska Radianska Entsiklopediia, vol. 7, p. 210.Google Scholar

38. All examples and citations on these matters are taken from the Lutsk Ustav. Google Scholar

39. Linchevskii, M. “Pedagogiia drevnikh bratskikh shkol i preimush-chestvenno drevnei Kievskoi Akademii,“ Trudy Kievskoi Dukhovnoi Akademii, July 1870, III, 108.Google Scholar