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Property among Elite Women in 17th-Century Russia Daniel H. Kaiser In his landmark study of the 17th-century Russian elite, Robert Crummey observed that the families of the boyar elite were organized around men whose ancestors had founded patrilines and begun the accumulation of properties with which to sustain these lineages. But despite this orientation, he continued , women played an important part in Muscovite society and politics. As mothers, women might aim to emulate the fecundity of the spouses of Aleksei Mikhailovich, regularly generating children in an age of high mortality and thereby guaranteeing the survival of the lineage. Secondly, as links to other clans, women "formed the cement that held the Russian high nobility together ," establishing bonds among families anxious either to scale the social ladder or to hold onto advantageous positions already gained. Contributions like these, however, rarely found their way into official sources, with the result that few women appear in this narrative of elite political power; their part in the complicated politics of the age seems screened from view, reduced to the private rather than public sphere.1 Subsequently several scholars have attempted to identify and articulate the precise contributions that elite women made to Muscovite politics. Nancy Kollmann, for example, argued that, although Women's roles in Muscovite politics and society ... were not publicly acknowledged, ... women were nevertheless significant. Their seclusion enhanced their value as brides and mothers, and their ability to forge bonds between families allowed kin groups to function as units in political life. Their friendships with other women gave them the opportunity to influence marriage making and to supplement male communication networks. Women, however secluded, were integrated into the life of the elite2 This insight derived from Edward Keenan's claim that in early modern Russia "the politics of betrothals and marriages was in fact the politics of power in 1 Robert O. Crummey, Aristocrats and Servitors: The Boyar Elite in Russia 1613- 1698 (Princeton, Nl: Princeton University Press, 1983),65-81, here 75. 2 Nancy Shields Kollmann, "The Seclusion of Elite Muscovite Women," Russian History /Histoire ru sse vol. 10, pI. 2 (1983): 186. Rude & Barbarous Kingdom Revisited: Essays in Russian History and Culture in Honor of Robert 0. Crummey. Chester 5. L. Dunning, Russell E. Martin, and Daniel Row land, eds. Bloomington, IN: siavica Publi shers, 2008, 427- 40. 428 DANIEL H. KAISER the Kremlin.,,3 In tracing weddings of the sovereigns, Russell Martin has shown exactly how marrying into the royal house depended upon calculation and court politics. But doing so did not mean that the women themselves were important actors; instead, these brides emerge as stand-ins for the patrilines from which they sprang. As Keenan famously put it, "it was the brothers , uncles, and fathers of the lucky brides who formed the innermost circle of power.,,4 Isolde Thyret, however, attempted to expose the contributions of elite women themselves, decoding the symbolic and ritual world of the Kremlin. Employing both literary and artistic texts, Thyret persuasively demonstrated that elite women deeply and powerfully influenced Muscovite politics, even if their roles were rarely made explicit in conventional political evidence5 Nada Boskovska, too, was not content to think of women as mere pawns in men's games. She aimed to explode the myth that "noble ladies were held like prisoners ... [who] whiled their time away with sewing and embroidering, and were not even allowed to manage their own household, which was run by stewards." Dissenting vigorously from this caricature, Boskovska affirmed women's "full legal capacity," and cited instances in which women contracted debts, owned, managed, and alienated large bodies of land. In this reading of the evidence, women in Muscovy-and not only elite women-exercised considerable power independent of their fathers, brothers, and husbands6 In her study of honor, Nancy Kollmann makes the same point, noting the apparent disconnect between the expression of patriarchal prejudice and the reality of women's real power: "Patriarchy existed as a cultural code affirming men's psychological sense of superiority, regardless of its economic or social instrumentality.,,7 I myself have argued that, although it would be unfair to characterize Muscovite women as brutalized victims, they were nevertheless far from free agents. In particular, even though there was evidence for change over the course of the century, 17th-century statutes severely constrained women's right to landed property in order to assuage the interests of patrilines: "Law 3 Edward L. Keenan, "Muscovite Political Folkways," Russiml Review 45 (1986): 144. 4...

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