Iurodstvo in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Rus'

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My doctoral research intends to define Muscovite holy foolery (iurodstvo) and its functions in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, considering it from hagiographical, as well as political and social perspectives.Russian holy fools (iurodivye) descended from the Byzantine tradition of saloi and its most famous representatives, Symeon of Emesa and Andrew of Constantinople. Pushing liminality to the extreme, the hagiographically defined salos existed in an ambivalent space between perceived public scandal and salvific mission, private devotion and social intervention: the fool's shocking behaviour was, on one hand, an ascetic exercise attracting beatings and humiliations reminiscent of those endured by Christ; and, on the other, a mystical riddle intended to show his coreligionists the way to spiritual salvation.Iurodstvo in Rus' - unlike its Byzantine counterpart - developed into a major cultural paradigm relevant to this day. From the seventeenth century, and especially in Soviet and contemporary times, holy fools have been interpreted as socio-political rebels, a connotation often unhelpful to the analysis of pre-modern iurodstvo.This retrospective bias is reinforced by the scholarly tendency to produce overviews of holy foolery across time. High-standard Russian-language works have been published from pre-revolutionary times (Aleksii (Kuznetsov) 1913), and taken phenomenological (Likhachev, Panchenko, Ponyrko 1984) and historical (Ivanov 2006, Russian reedition 2019) approaches to iurodstvo. English-language scholarship has tended towards literary (Kobets 2001) or cultural (Thompson 1987; Hunt & Kobets 2011) analysis, recently complemented by a challenging interdisciplinary study of Byzantine holy foolery (Rotman 2016). Though such thematic or chronological narratives are indispensable, they necessarily iron out period-specific nuances and gloss over regional variation.My research will therefore narrow the framework of study to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century individuals perceived as iurodivye and primarily active in northern Rus'. Building on my MPhil thesis, which examined the Lives and cults of Isidor of Rostov and Ioann of Ustiug, I will look at the individual careers of holy fools such as Maksim of Moscow, Mikhail of Klopsk, Arsenii of Novgorod, or Artemii Tret'iak. Rather than measuring saints against Byzantine 'models', who, it has often been pointed out, were considerably more shocking in behaviour than their Muscovite counterparts, I will present iurodstvo as a spectrum where mildly foolish individuals more reminiscent of Alexius the Man of God than of Symeon of Emesa are regarded as legitimate iurodivye if referred as such by their contemporaries.In order to arrive at a definition of iurodstvo as performed in each case study, I will use hagiography - despite its problematic relationship with historical reality -, as well as material culture, especially icons and shrines. The latter, often known only through textual or visual descriptions, are an important embodiment of the saint's relationship with the community they were attached to. Furthermore, sixteenth-century travellers' accounts - including the works of Fletcher, Horsey, Staden, and Taube and Kruse - offer a glimpse of the place of iurodstvo in early-modern Muscovite society. Finally, liturgical texts (sluzhby), mostly unedited, have been neglected by scholarship though they offer unique insights into cults as performed rituals, which can be compared with those of 'mainstream' saints. Holy fools are too often studied in isolation: by looking at regional cult clusters, I also intend to put the popularity of iurodivye - often crushed by that of more powerful thaumaturges like bishops - into perspective.