The New Muscovite Cultural History: A Collection in Honor of Daniel B. Rowland

Images of the White Cowl

The New Muscovite Cultural History: A Collection in Honor of Daniel B. Rowland. Valerie Kivelson, Karen Petrone, Nancy Shields Kollmann, and Michael S. Flier, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2009, 271–84. Images of the White Cowl Donald Ostrowski Failed opposition movements are as complex as, and often more difficult to study than, the stories that the winners provide of their victories. The victors, as we know, write the history, relegating inconvenient evidence to the shredder while putting their own spin on the source testimony that remains. The losers generally have their story told for them by the winners. Being attuned to evidence of neglected areas or futile resistances of the past is part of the historian’s responsibility. Although not much can be done with the destroyed evidence, the interpretative spin that the victors have imposed on extant testimony can be deconstructed and perhaps to a certain extent unspun. The history of the non-Moscow principalities has not been given as much attention as that of the center (although that is now changing), nor has there been much discussion of the on-going resistance after these principalities were annexed by Moscow. In the writing and redacting of the Tale of the White Cowl (Povest’ o Belom klobuke) can be found evidence of late 16th-century Novgorod resistance to external domination after its conquest by Moscow a hundred years earlier. This particular conflict manifested itself over issues of rank and status among prelates of the Church and in the visible display of that rank and status. The Tale of the White Cowl describes the peregrinations of a head garb reputedly given to Pope Sylvester (314–35) by the Emperor Constantine the Great (312–37). The white cowl was bestowed in gratitude for Sylvester’s curing Constantine of an affliction and as a symbol of the pope’s religious preeminence . According to the author of the Tale, Sylvester revered the white cowl, but subsequent popes were unworthy of the honor of its possession. The Tale explains how, as a result of divine visitations and instructions, the white cowl ends up in the hands of the Novgorodian archbishop Vasilii in the mid-14th century, who, as the true spiritual representative of the Rus' land, was the prelate most worthy of its possession. N. N. Rozov initially identified five redactions of the Tale and a sixth category of “Fragments” based on his study of 209 of around 300 extant MSS.1 In 1 N. N. Rozov, “Povest' o novgorodskom belom klobuke kak pamiatnik obshcherusskoi publitsistiki XV veka,” Trudy Otdela drevnerusskoi literatury 9 (1953): 208–17. Later, he stated that over 300 MSS are extant and can be divided into four redactions, but he did not indicate which redactions he was eliminating or collapsing from the ones he had previously identified. N. N. Rozov, “Povest' o Novgorodskom belom klobuke,” in 272 DONALD OSTROWSKI this article, I use only three redactions that Rozov identified—the Short, the First Long, and the Second Long—and ground my discussion to a large extent on analysis I did for an earlier article on the Tale. In that article, I concluded that the Short Redaction is the earliest, followed by the Second Long, then the First Long on the basis of their respective textual relationships to the Donation of Constantine, a source text of the Tale.2 Both the Second Long and the First Long redactions were likely composed after 1589. This terminus ante quem non can be established on the basis of the appearance in both Long redactions of a “prediction” that some day Rus' will have a tsar and a patriarch, which did not occur until 1589. Such post-facto predictions are a commonplace in apocryphal literature and are intended to give the appearance of foreknowledge. We can also conclude that the Short Redaction precedes the Long redactions. First, the “prediction” does not occur in the Short Redaction. Second, both of the Long redactions have the Third Rome formulation, which also does not appear in the Short Redaction . It is unlikely that either the “prediction” or the Third Rome formulation would have been dropped from the Short Redaction if it were derivative from the Long redactions. It is more likely both the “prediction” and the Third Rome formulation were added when the Short Redaction was reworked into the Second Long Redaction.3 In addition, the Long redactions mention the polistaurion (a cross-adorned chasuble), which does not appear in the Short Redaction. The polistaurion...