Imperial Saint: The Cult of St. Catherine and the Dawn of Female Rule in Russia (review)

In Russia’s new capital of St. Petersburg, at the intersection of religion, politics, and gender, the cult of St. Catherine arose as a major aspect of court life under Peter I and his successors. This is the subject of Gary Marker’s book Imperial Saint: The Cult of St. Catherine and the Dawn of Female Rule in Russia. As a study of the symbiotic relationship between two novel institutions—the “foreign” (read feminized) European-style court and the growing popularity among the elite of what was then a little-known saint for the Russian Orthodox Church, St. Catherine of Alexandria—this book confirms the importance of religion in the conceptual development of the modern state paradigm.

As a historian, Marker admirably refuses to treat religion merely as an Aesopian means for expressing the new language of secular power and presents the cult of St. Catherine within the cultural context of its own time: “this study concentrates on religious and faith-centered expressions of legitimation, it treats these expressions as texts or symbols in their own right, with God and salvation at their core, rather than as midwives of secular statecraft” (p. 4).Thus Marker’s book is in the mainstream of post-Soviet Petrine scholarship that has turned away from the simplistic paradigm of Peter the Great as a secularist destroying the Muscovite theocracy in the name of progress and enlightenment, in favor of a more nuanced approach that acknowledges Peter’s own dependence, both semiotic and psychological, on the discourse of Orthodoxy in general and the cult of St. Catherine of Alexandria in particular. Using a vast array of primary sources—sermons, church services, icons, engravings, architectural drawings, and naval lists—Marker traces the personal efforts of Peter I in cultivating and expanding St. Catherine’s cult as an integral aspect of his program of Westernization.

The organization of the book into three clearly defined sections helps the reader to delineate the multifarious ways in which religion, gender, and politics overlapped in Peter’s expression of his Westernization project. The introduction deals with the problem of expressing female rule within the Russian cultural system. Part 1, “The Saint,” traces the development of the cult of St. Catherine in the West and in Russia from the early- Middle Ages through the eighteenth century. Part 2, “The Tsaritsa,” focuses on Empress Catherine I, Peter’s consort, whose presence at court served as a living testament to her husband’s devotion to the saint (originally Catholic, Marfa Skovronska was given the Orthodox baptismal name of Catherine specifically at the request of her royal husband). The fact that Peter’s death in 1725 was followed by a virtual gynecocracy—Catherine I, Anna, Elizabeth, and Catherine II, with the reign of Paul I (1796–1801) as next male reign of any considerable duration—provides Marker with the central theme of the book: What were the available tropes for female authority in the Russian cultural tradition prior to Peter I and in which ways did the cult of St. Catherine, as an alien Western import, pave the way for the acceptability of female executive authority in what had been, and remains to this day, a deeply patriarchal political culture?

As the living link between court and cult—indeed, its metonymic embodiment—Empress Catherine I is the focus of Marker’s attention. He treats her astonishing rise from prisoner of war to anointed ruler as a testament both to the modern/revolutionary nature of her husband’s self-image and to its basic underlying religious premise—that the heart of the czar and whoever touches said heart lies in God’s hands (p. 200), and thus they are beyond all appeals to precedent and tradition. The founding of the Order of St. Catherine by Peter in 1714, as a commemoration of his wife’s unusually “masculine...