Between God and Tsar: Religious Symbolism and the Royal Women of Muscovite Russia, and: La Hierarchie des egaux: La noblesse russe d'Ancien Regime (XVIe-XVIIe siecles) (review)

With her magnificent study of the symbolic roles and representations of the royal women of the grand princely and tsarist court, Isolde Thyrêt makes an extraordinarily important contribution: she has altered the way that we will understand both gender and politics in Muscovy henceforth. Those of us who have had the pleasure of hearing her presentations prior to the publication of this book may be lulled into thinking that much of what we read in these pages is already familiar. It is indeed familiar, but only because Thyrêt has generously shared her findings along the way. Between God and Tsar does nothing less than to force us to rethink the meaning of power and the understandings of the political-religious order of Muscovy from the late 14th to the late 17th centuries.

Working her way through the grand princesses and royal mothers of Muscovite Rus' chronologically^—from Dmitrii Donskoi's wife, Evdokiia, to Sofiia Alekseevna, half-sister of Peter the Great^—Thyrêt argues against entrenched ideas about the role of women in early modern Russia. She takes on the notions that women were systematically denigrated in Muscovite culture, that the seclusion of elite women necessarily constricted and trivialized their lives, and that there were no culturally accepted models of female authority in Muscovite Rus'. Thyrêt has identified surprisingly numerous and varied sources on royal women: wills and testaments, letters, religious texts, mural cycles, icons, embroideries, donation charters, saints' lives, petitions, decrees, and panegyrics. Through close examination of these sources, she finds that symbolic representations produced by men in the centers of power situated royal women at the conjuncture of political and religious spheres and conferred on them a degree of effective authority undetected in any earlier studies of Muscovite women.

In the early centuries, sources stressed the grand princess's role as mother or potential mother of the future sovereign, a role that the grand princesses themselves deliberately fostered and elaborated into a myth of the "tsaritsa's blessed womb." The maternal role expanded in the symbolic vocabulary of Muscovy to extend beyond the actual fruit of the tsaritsa's womb and to include the entire tsardom. This extension of the maternal role opened to the royal wives opportunities for political involvement and importance far beyond the limits of their own fertility. Thyrêt documents, for example, that the childless Grand Princess Solomoniia Saburova was able to play on her role as mother to the realm, even after her husband forced her to enter a convent.

Building out from this maternal basis, royal wives also publicly served as "helpmates" to their husbands. This second function further solidified their image as serving their husbands, children, and people as mediators between God and tsar. Their prayers were assumed to have particular potency because, through their common experiences as women and mothers, they were understood to enjoy a special connection with the Mother of God, who in turn could intercede on their behalf with the powers on high. In her fascinating second chapter, Thyrêt explores these themes as they are illustrated by visual sources. Interpreting the iconography and unexplored textual evidence of these works, Thyrêt describes a division of labor in the politics of piety or the spiritual economy of tsar and tsaritsa, in which the tsar stands as petitioner to God, seeking the benefit of...