Saint-Making in Early Modern Russia

Based on a case study of the formation of the cult of the Russian saint Nil Stolobenskii in the seventeenth century, this book provides insight into the complex dynamics of the saint-making process in early modern Russia. Utilizing a large array of documentary, literary, and visual sources, the author investigates the importance of a growing patronage network for the cults of early Russian saints and the role that local laymen and monks and high-ranking Russian Orthodox church officials played in the development of the hagiographic, liturgical, and iconographic image of individual saints and in the creation of the physical infrastructure of their cults. Saint-Making in Early Modern Russia challenges the prevailing view that the Russian Orthodox Church hierarchy determined the success of a saint’s cult in the Muscovite period by demonstrating the crucial contribution of the leaders of the Nilov Hermitage to the development of Nil Stolobenskii’s cult in the seventeenth century. By placing the achievements of these monastic figures within the wider theological, spiritual, and artistic framework of Eastern Orthodoxy that they operated in, this study affords the reader a rare view into the creativity of native Russian religious culture before the influx of Western ideas started to reshape the Russian Orthodox spiritual experience in the later seventeenth century. In light of its interdisciplinary and comparative approach to the topic, this book will appeal to historians, art historians, and experts in religious studies who are interested in the cult of saints in both Russia and the West.