Winner:
Justin Willson, Ashley Morse, Transferring Jerusalem to Moscow: Maksim Grek’s Letter and Its Afterlife, The Russian Review, 82 (2023), pp.248–262.
Willson and Morse eloquently explain the role of a sixteenth-century letter by the Greek-born Slavic translator Maksim Grek in the critiques of the naming of the “New Jerusalem” Monastery (1656) during the Moscow Synod of 1666/67. The authors carefully contextualise the text of the letter and trace its layers of reception in Moscow through the work of later Ruthenian authors, underscoring the reception of the Jerusalem ideology in early modern Russia. Unlike other European towns with churches and monasteries that replicated the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, Russian hierarchs, taking seriously Maksim’s views, opposed this trend of invoking the Jerusalem epithet. The authors have thoroughly engaged with their sources, putting forth a clearly written and convincingly argued contribution. This deeply learned article is also a prime example of collaborative scholarship.
Honourable mention:
Nick Mayhew, ‘Petr and Fevroniia’s Unorthodox Marriage’, The Slavonic and East European Review, 100 (2022), pp.654–673.
Mayhew’s article presents an impressive and persuasive argument on Orthodoxy, marriage and their contemporary refractions in Russia today through the life of Petr and Fevroniia. He successfully disentangles a number of key threads that too often come paired together, to demonstrate the nuance in understanding of marriage between the Muscovite elite, the Orthodox Church and then the two saints and their image in the earliest life. The article demonstrates how the earliest account of Petr and Fevroniia’s life and marriage disrupts both church and aristocratic norms of female docility and other elite marriage rituals, but also how this subversive nature was worn down by subsequent re-writings, as homogeneising custom domesticated the unusual saints. The last re-writing was in 2012: a poignant reminder of the lasting significance of saintly models, but also the ease with which their subversive origins could be polished back into the contemporary consensus of those in power.
