Thursday, November 10, 2022
Languages of the Non-human in Early Modern Muscovy and Poland-
Lithuania
1:00 to 2:45pm CST (9:00 to 10:45pm EET), The Palmer House Hilton, Floor:
7th Floor, LaSalle 3
Our panel discusses how the fluidity of the boundaries between the human and the
non-human was conceptualized in the early modern Slavic world. By choosing the
primary sources from early modern Muscovy, Poland and Ukraine, we aim at
presenting the ways in which the interactions between the human world and the world
of gods, the world of animals, and the world of demons were depicted, analyzed and
employed. At the same time, we show that the portrayal of such interactions by
sixteenth and seventeenth century intellectuals was conceived as exploration of the
human condition in the inequitable social order and in the times of uncertainty and
precarity, which ultimately meant addressing and questioning the limitations,
vulnerability, and liminality of the human.
Chair: Valerie Ann Kivelson (U of Michigan)
Papers: Elena Boeck (DePaul U), Intersecting Worlds: Managing Human-
Divine Communications in the Trojan Illustrations of the Litsevoi Letopisnyi Svod;
Tom Grusiecki (Boise State U), Can the Wolf Speak?: Dumb Peasants, Articulate
Animals, and the Polish Aesop (1578); Maria Ivanova (McGill U, Canada), The
Language the Devil Speaks
Discussant: Simon Franklin, (U of Cambridge, UK)
Thursday, November 10, 2022
A Journey out of Precarity: New Perspectives on the Ukrainian Literary,
Religious, and Social Culture of the Mazepa Era (1687–1708)
3:15 to 5:00pm CST (Thu, November 10, 11:15pm to Fri, November 11, 1:00am
EET), The Palmer House Hilton, Floor: 7th Floor, LaSalle 3
This panel brings together historians and literary scholars to explore the dynamic
intellectual and social history of the Ukrainian Hetmanate under the rule of Ivan
Mazepa. Drawing from a multidisciplinary range of sources, including hagiographic
texts, panegyrics, and civil documents, we aim to show the ways in which Ukrainian
intellectuals in the late seventeenth-century Hetmanate sought stability despite an
environment both politically and socially unstable. The first paper explores the new
and prominent role of the Song of Songs in the religious discourse of seventeenthcentury
Ukraine, showing that the popularity of this Biblical book may have prepared
the way for the concept of the saint’s mystic marriage to Christ – an idea of Western
import that, until that point, did not feature as a part of East Slavic Orthodox
theology. This paper argues that a legal and theological rethinking of marriage
encouraged the use of the marriage metaphor, one with emotional and psychological
appeal during unstable times. The second paper explores how feelings of love,
friendship, and mentorship were creatively constructed through complex poetic forms
that helped Ukrainian intellectuals respond to an age of crisis. In addition, it examines
the role of poetry as a privileged means of communication between members of the
intellectual elite in the Hetmanate. The third paper focuses on the impact of Ivan
Mazepa’s educational and cultural policies on the Russian Empire and explores
Ukrainian intellectuals’ quest for stability along the porous borders between Ukrainian
Orthodoxy and Russian imperial culture.
Chair: Maria Ivanova, (McGill U, Canada)
Papers: Maria Grazia Bartolini (U of Milan, Italy), 'I Gave My Consent to
Marry Christ': Dmytryi Tuptalo’s Life of Saint Agnes, the Language of Affect, and
Bridal Self-imaging in Early Modern Ukraine; Jakub Niedzwiedz (Jagiellonian U,
Poland), How Did Stefan Iavors’kyi Construct His Love for Barlaam Iasins’kyi in His
Panegryric 'The Fullness of Never Decreasing Glory' (Pełnia nieubywającej chwały,
1691)?; Tatiana Tairova-Yakovleva (St Petersburg State U, Russia), Mazepa's Policy
and Peter's Church Reform
Discussant: Giovanna Brogi (U of Milan, Italy)
Thursday, November 10, 2022
Facing the East, Facing the West: Knowledge Transfer and Cultural
Encounters in Early Modern Eastern Europe
3:15 to 5:00pm CST (Thu, November 10, 11:15pm to Fri, November 11, 1:00am
EET), The Palmer House Hilton, Floor: 7th Floor, Sandburg 2
The early modern era was a time of diverse encounters for the lands and people
throughout the world. In Eastern Europe, it was an era of migration of ideas,
knowledge, books, and people, that contributed to the far-reaching contacts between
the global East and the West. This panel is devoted to the region of Poland-Lithuania
and Muscovy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and its reception and use of
Western and Eastern knowledge (broadly defined) and culture. We provide a
perspective on early modern Eastern Europe and its cultural entanglements from
diverse thematic (philosophy, education, diplomacy, “sciences”) and regional (Poland,
Lithuania, Muscovy) angles and engage in a broader conversation on cultural
differences and knowledge in this period. The panelists look specifically at humanistic
thought, noble library collections, intellectual tastes, and baroque cuisine, reflecting
some of the most recent research trends on the region, its history, and culture.
Chair: Olenka Z. Pevny (U of Cambridge, UK)
Papers: Karolina Grzybczak (Jagiellonian U, Poland), The Polish Reception of
European Dispute on Free Will in the 16th Century: Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski's
Libri tres; Oleksii Rudenko (Central European U Vienna, Austria), Laboratories of
Knowledge and History-Writing: Aristocratic Libraries in the Sixteenth-Century
Grand Duchy of Lithuania; Stefan Schneck (U of Zürich, Switzerland), How to
Write a Bestseller in Moscow in the 17th Century?; Ewelina Sikora (Central
European U, Hungary), Taste(s) of Poland-Lithuania in the 17th Century
Discussant: Barbara J. Skinner (Indiana State U)
Friday, November 11, 2022
The Legacies of Nikon’s Patriarchate (1652-1666)
10:15am to 12:00pm CST (6:15 to 8:00pm EET), The Palmer House Hilton,
Floor: 7th Floor, LaSalle 3
Nikon has been controversial since his own time for effecting what became Russia’s
lasting ritual reforms, as well as for his pride of office. His concrete effects were the
subject of a 2021 ASEEES Virtual Convention panel initiating work on a collective
volume, which two speakers on this roundtable are spearheading. The formal
presentations there examined only three specific aspects: a) his relevance for Russia’s
last pre-modern patriarch Adrian; b) Peter the Great’s retention of Nikonian military16
religious rituals; and c) Old Believer mass suicides. The current roundtable will, as if a
preliminary to a workshop, explore a much wider range of other subjects which merit
inclusion in the collective volume and will invite active participation from the
audience. Such brainstorming at AAASS/ASEEES conventions has worked in the
past for this type of collective project. The speakers themselves have researched
specifically the rituals Nikon promoted, the monasteries he founded, his domestic
ideology, his foreign policy goals, his impact abroad in the Orthodox Balkans and the
Greek patriarchates, the writings attributed to the most famous Old Believer leader,
and the locus of the most serious violent Old Believer rebellion. They intend to go
well beyond these issues in their presentations.
Chair: David Goldfrank (Georgetown U)
Roundtable Members: Priscilla Hart Hunt (U of Massachusetts Amherst), Kevin
Michael Kain (U of Wisconsin-Green Bay), Ovidiu Olar (Austrian Academy of
Sciences, Austria), Roy Raymond Robson (Pennsylvania State U)
Friday, November 11, 2022
Of Myths and Men: Precarity of Memory in Sixteenth-century Muscovy
2:00 to 3:45pm CST (10:00 to 11:45pm EET), The Palmer House Hilton, Floor:
7th Floor, LaSalle 3
This round table discusses comparative construction of royal authority in the Litsevoi
Letopisnyi Svod produced at the court of Ivan IV. Taking as examples a fictional ruler
(Trojan Priam), a historical legend (Alexander the Great), and a historical conundrum
(Ivan IV), the contributors discuss how medieval East Slavic narratives imaginatively
represented royal power, court culture and charismatic authority. Priam, Alexander,
and Ivan IV became didactic examples, whose deeds were deemed worthy to live on
in memory at the Muscovite court. The contributors to the round table illuminate
dynamic complexities of intellectual discourse on the boundaries of authority in the
East Slavic world.
Chair: Justin Willson (Princeton U)
Roundtable Members: Brian James Boeck (DePaul U), Elena Boeck (DePaul
U), Susana Torres Prieto (IE U, Spain)
Friday, November 11, 2022
Language, Tradition, and Authority in the Pre-modern Slavic World
2:00 to 3:45pm CST (10:00 to 11:45pm EET), The Palmer House Hilton, Floor:
7th Floor, Sandburg 2
This panel will trace the intersections between textual tradition and forms of
authority—political, legal, spiritual—in the pre-modern Slavic world. Spanning the
Kyivan, Mongol and Muscovite periods of Rus’ history, the papers presented here
highlight the mutually constructive possibilities of macro and micro analyses: on the
one hand, how the language of surviving texts can be understood as a vector of cross17
cultural political change, grounded in either Byzantine or Mongol models; on the
other, how texts themselves were the site of contested notions of spiritual authority,
to either buttress prevailing norms (in the case of liturgical poetry) or to challenge
them (in the case of iurodstvo). By juxtaposing temporally discrete case studies, this
panel seeks to show how authority can neither be defined nor analysed singly in premodern
texts, but reflects often discordant manifestations of power.
Chair: Angus Russell (U of Cambridge, UK)
Papers: Olga Grinchenko (U of Nottingham, UK), The Authority of Byzantine
Liturgy in Early Slavonic Liturgical Manuscripts; Sofia Simões Coelho (U of Oxford,
UK), Holy Foolery (Iurodstvo) and the Transformations of Sixteenth-century Rus';
Vera Gagarina (U of Cambridge, UK), The Authority of the Nomocanon in Early
Rus' in the 11th-13th Centuries; Angus Russell (U of Cambridge, UK), Institutional
Genealogies in Post-Mongol Moscow
Discussant: Yulia Mikhailova (New Mexico Institute of Mining and
Technology)
Friday, November 11, 2022
Between Translation and Creation: Compositional Strategies in pre-Modern
Slavonic Literature
4:15 to 6:00pm CST (Sat, November 12, 12:15 to 2:00am EET), The Palmer
House Hilton, Floor: 7th Floor, LaSalle 3
By looking at two Slavonic epic works traditionally labelled as translations, the Digenis
Akritis and the Alexander Romance, and at a pseudo-historical legend considered an
original Rus’ian work, the Legend of the Calling of the Varangians, this panel intends
to understand strategies of literary composition in the medieval Slavonic world.
Chair: Jennifer B. Spock (Eastern Kentucky U)
Papers: Robert Romanchuk (Florida State U), The Old Slavic Digenis Akritis
and the Story-Patterns of Greek and Slavic Oral-Traditional Epic Song; Susana
Torres Prieto (IE U, Spain), 'Without Hesitation, Repetition, or Deviation':
Innovation in Kyivan Rus’ scriptoria; Ines Garcia de la Puente (Boston U),
Translating the Origins: The Legend of the Foundation of Rus’ as Re-Writing
Discussant: Simon Franklin (U of Cambridge, UK)
Saturday November 12,
Why and Why-Nots of Early Russian Development: Some Counter-Factual
Peeking
12:30 to 2:15pm CST (8:30 to 10:15pm EET), The Palmer House Hilton, Floor:
3rd Floor, Salon 8
Counter-factual history is an intriguing method to investigate contingencies that
plausibly could have happened. Like any history, counter-factual history involves close
reading of primary and secondary sources in order to detect “shifts” or “outcomes”
that even easily could have transpired and produced momentous changes in the
received wisdom of historical records. Jeremy M. Black, in his introduction to Other
Pasts, Different Presents, Alternative Futures (2015), proposed three criteria for
determining whether a counter-factual is helpful: (1) it must have been considered by
contemporaries, (2) it must be probable, and (3) it must “illuminate” the “uncertainty”
of the time. Whether helpful or not, a counter-factual must also be in the subjunctive
(“What if?”) mood. Newer research (archeology, population density studies, textology,
land tenure systems) continue to refine our comprehension of counterfactual
alternatives in Early Eastern Slavic history. Our three presentations not only are
cognizant of advances in these disciplines, they propel them further with their
synchronic and diachronic re-interpretive approaches and their skepticism towards
historiographical tropes. Our first paper portrays how a variety of political models
might have come into play (suppositionally different from those that did appear) in
the lands of Rusʹ had the thirteenth-century Mongol invasions never taken place. The
second paper analyses a concocted legend about a Roman-era aristocrat and his family
who fled Italy for a new abode in the Eastern Baltic lands. This presentation will show
how this tale became embedded in a fifteenth-century Lithuanian chronicle as a
counter-claim to Russian chronicles’ enshrinement of the Rurikid Dynasty’s
genealogical right to rule over the lands of Rusʹ. The third presentation portrays the
process and the conceivable effects of a shift to peasant, wage-labor and attendant
peasant freedom of movement in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Russia.
Our panel nests well within this year’s ASEEES theme of “Precarity” and its
attendant description. The three papers explicitly and implicitly will raise issues of
instability and uncertainty surrounding a host of biological, cultural, agnatic, and
economic uncertainties, and in so doing sharpen our insights into the precariousness
of existence during the Medieval and Early Modern Eastern Slavic and Eastern
European time frame. An extensive range of methodological knowledge and
techniques have long infused the scholarship of our three presenters and of our Chair
and Discussant.
Chair: Ines Garcia de la Puente (Boston U)
Papers: Yulia Mikhailova (New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology),
What if the Mongol Conquest Had Not Happened?; Donald Ostrowski (Harvard U),
Fifteenth-Century Claims to Inherit Rus′: Counter-factuals and Alternative Facts;
Peter B. Brown (Rhode Island College), Why Not Hired Labor Instead of Serfdom?:
An Alternative Look at Muscovite and Early Imperial Russia
Discussant: Jennifer B. Spock (Eastern Kentucky U)
