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  • Imperial Saint: The Cult of St. Catherine and the Dawn of Female Rule in Russia
  • Ruth P. Dawson
Gary Marker , Imperial Saint: The Cult of St. Catherine and the Dawn of Female Rule in Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007). Pp. xvii, 309. $42.00.

How could it be that Russia, after centuries of male rule, from Vladimir to Ivan the Terrible to Peter the Great, was suddenly willing to accept women on the throne of the tsars? How could it be that from early in 1725, when Peter the Great's wife assumed power as Catherine I, until late 1796, when Catherine II died, women ruled Russia for all but five years? Gary Marker argues that the explanation depends in significant part both on the gradual emergence in Russia of a particular saint, Catherine of Alexandria, and on the way that the image and story of the Byzantine saint were reshuffled and retold for various religious and political purposes over centuries. He especially maps how Saint Catherine was used in Peter I's campaign to render his scandalous second wife acceptable to key audiences.

Saint Catherine had several advantages. She was decidedly obscure, indeed probably apocryphal, a fact that made her biography usefully elastic. She was associated positively with learning, intellect, and valor, in a life that culminated in her torture and execution. Since she was not a nun, she was more available for secular purposes and had gradually acquired an association with the women of the Romanov dynasty. During the seventeenth century, a chapel that royal women especially used in the Kremlin was dedicated to her; princesses began to be named Catherine; the official church calendar added her name day—all indications of [End Page 276] church and state buttressing each other. For Peter I, the growing Catherine tradition became an excellent tool as he sought to gain legitimacy for the mistress he wanted to make his wife, even though she was neither Russian nor royal, and whom he had baptized into the Russian church under the name Catherine. He established a knightly order specifically for women, the Order of St. Catherine, which helped to conflate the earthly and the saintly Catherines and which the earthly one was the first to receive. Most unusual of all, he insisted that Catherine have an official coronation as his empress-consort.

Important as these steps were for Peter's purpose, Marker argues, their real significance far exceeded what he originally intended, since they soon gave the Russian elite and the Russian church authorities an unexpected option for addressing the appalling fact that Peter died without a male heir. When his anxious coterie of former cronies, desperate to avoid losing power, chose to support Catherine's ascent to the throne, Saint Catherine's roles and meanings could once again be manipulated to legitimize and give the props of precedence to their stunning deed.

Focusing on the interplay of state and religion, Marker examines a richly textured array of sources, from sermons to Sinai pilgrimage records to knightly orders to icons. Attention to visual materials enriches the argument but is also a weak point in the book since the text contains no explicit references to the strangely unnumbered and barely labeled illustrations. For example, a discussion on p. 118 of an elaborate Catherine icon contains no hint that the image is reproduced on p. 86. (Bafflingly, the persons in the engraved portrait of the tsarist family on p. 158 are certainly misidentified in the caption since gender and names do not match.) W hile the book investigates the gender-related question of how women gained legitimate authority in a highly patriarchal society, it makes almost no use of gender theory. Marker notices moments when Saint Catherine and her namesake empress are identified as showing manly qualities but offers little analysis of how and why that attribution functioned. He pays minimal attention to the way that the period's notions of masculinity affected and limited the male participants in this history, and he barely explores how constructions of Catherine I's femininity interacted with political and social circumstances. Sometimes neglecting readers who are not Slavicists, Marker uses many Russian words with...

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