Early Russian Hagiography: The Lives of Prince Fedor the Black by Gail Lenhoff (review)

book reviews297 This study provides insight into the way in which the leaders of the late medieval Church dealt with what they saw as the threat that women's spirituaUty posed to the Church and how to control it. To that extent alone, it is a valuable contribution to scholarship. It also raises some related issues. For example, because the appUcation of Periculoso affected the abiUty of an abbess to visit the properties owned by the community, it raises questions about the economics of religious life. Just how much did it cost to support a monk or nun? Were there significant differences in the economic bases of male and female communities? As Makowski's discussion of the canonistic commentaries on Periculoso also demonstrates, the later canonists had important things to say. While it may be true that these lawyers were not as creative as those in the classical period of canon law, 1140-1375 (not 1250 as she states, p. 5 n. 10), nevertheless they were quite capable of developing the impUcations of the work of the classical period to meet the needs of their own day. Study of the canon law flourished in these later centuries as the number of lengthy commentaries and treatises indicates . With the exception of the literature generated by the conciliar movement , however, this later canonistic material has generaUy been neglected. In her discussion of Periculoso, Makowski follows a path pioneered by Brian Tierney and Kenneth Pennington that is adding to our understanding of the debt that the legal world of the early modern era owes to the medieval canonists. James Muldoon John Carter Brown Library Early Russian Hagiography: The Lives of Prince Fedor the Black. By Gail Lenhoff. [Slavistische VeröffentUchungen, Fachbereich Neuere Fremdsprachliche Philologien der Freien Universität Berlin, Band 82.] (Wiesbaden : Harrassowitz Verlag. 1997. Pp. xi, 496. Paperback.) Prince Fedor Rostislavich of Smolensk and Jaroslav!, who after his deathbed tonsure was known as "the Black," was one of the most venerated of the "sovereign " saints of imperial Russia. His death, on September 19, 1299, and the inventio of his uncorrupted relics and those of his sons, Konstantin and David, on March 5, 1463, were commemorated widely, and the large corpus of writings associated with his cult extends over several centuries. The significance of Fedor's cult makes it an effective subject for Gail Lenhoff's comprehensive and thorough study, which addresses the question of how a saint's life in its sociocultural development inspired a variety of texts over an extended period of time. Part I of the study describes the sociocultural context of Fedor's cult and estabUshes the methodology employed by Lenhoff in her investigation. In contrast to other diachronic approaches that assume that texts originally created for religious purposes evolve over time into literary narratives, Lenhoff appUes the notion of Sitz im Leben developed by Formgeschichte critics and investi- 298BOOK REVIEWS gates Fedor's cult in the context of sociocultural factors such as local customs, behavior, and experiences. She shows that Jaroslavl, located in what she caUs a "multicultural zone," was able to develop a distinctive regional culture that provided a foundation for the cults of Fedor and other local princes and affected their development long after the demise of the appanage system and the consoUdation of central authority in Moscow. The analysis of the texts associated with Fedor Rostislavich begins with chronicle accounts. Little of saintly promise is present in these rather bleak records of a mercenary soldier, but they do provide a foundation for the later biographies . The investigation of the texts associated with the cult of Fyodor Rostislavich follows and comprises Parts II and III of the study dealing with regional and national veneration respectively. Regional veneration is examined using a synaxarion lection, reports of miracles, vitae, and liturgical commemoration . National veneration is traced through the versions in the Velikie Minei Cetii of Metropolitan Makarij and Stepennaja kniga, and in manifestations of private veneration such as references to the cult in the correspondence between Tsar Ivan IV and Prince Andrej Kurbskij. In the seventeenth century a significant proliferation of writing about the prince occurred among diverse strata of the population. Most intriguing in this regard is...