Monastic community and spiritual families in Rus' (11th-15th century)

Rus', the medieval East Slavonic state, adopted Christianity from Byzantium in the late tenth century and quickly became a centre of Orthodox monasticism. My thesis will examine the role of spiritual families in the development of Rus' monasticism prior to the rise of Moscow in the 15th century. Spiritual families were pairs of monks who modelled their relationships on the biological family, despite not being related by blood. They could exist within monasteries as well as across vast distances, thus forming spiritual networks connecting monks of all ranks. For example, Simon, a 13th-century monk turned bishop in northern Rus', used letters to admonish his spiritual son Polikarp, a monk in distant Kiev, providing insights on modes of instruction and social and geographical mobility. Another kind of monastic family was developed by the 13th-century monk Efrem, who created a spiritual father for himself and his audience by writing the hagiography of his master Avraamij. Both of these collections will be core components of my research.

Despite ample evidence for their importance in Rus' monastic culture, spiritual families remain poorly understood. Religious history was neglected in the Soviet period, and earlier scholarship studied monasteries independently from each other. Approaching the subject of monasticism through the lens of the spiritual family, by contrast, provides a grassroots perspective on physical connections and cultural
exchanges between religious institutions across space and time. This approach will be supported by scholarship on other aspects of Rus' monastic culture (e.g. Romanchuk 2007) and on spiritual families in Byzantium and other medieval regions (Talbot 1990). Building on these works and my own training in medieval history, my thesis will offer a new understanding of the family as the structure that underpinned the Rus' monastic network.

Key to my research will be comparative analysis of religious literature, liturgical books, and monastic administrative documents, whether Rus', Byzantine works translated into Slavonic, or Byzantine texts which are not known in Slavonic translation, but were influential in the Orthodox monastic tradition. My methodology will rest on analysis of these sources as objects at the heart of religious practices, because literature provided monks with models of behaviours (Kruger 2004). Monastic writers used texts to craft relationships and turn fellow monks into holy men. Thus, whether as daily interactions, long-distance relationships or literary devices, spiritual families constituted the building blocks of Rus' religious culture.

This approach will allow me to assess the impact of spiritual families on the entire monastic community, rather than just the individuals represented in the texts, which will provide an important corrective to scholarship traditionally focused on institutions.

I will start my PhD in February 2022. By September, I will have outlined my thesis chapters and written the historiography of my topic. Depending on availability, in summer 2022 I will attend the Medieval Slavic Summer Institute or the Dan Slusanschi School for Classical and Oriental Languages in order to gain skills in Slavonic palaeography and Old Church Slavonic. This will allow me to undertake research
with unpublished manuscripts in early 2023.