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Chapter Six—Trinity’s Female Venerators
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Chapter Six Trinity’s Female Venerators In 1570/71 Boiarina Matrena zabolotskaia dictated to her scribe a testament that began, “I Matrena, the wife of Grigor Ivanovich zabolotskii, during my lifetime by the will and testament of my husband . . . give the village of Novoe to the House of the Life-giving Trinity.”1 The village was a substantial property in Pereiaslavl’. It included 12 hamlets, 6 settlements, and 2 uninhabited properties. On it stood a church dedicated to St. Nicholas. In the same testament, employing identical phrasing but surviving separately from the other document, Matrena bequeathed to Trinity a large hereditary estate in the Novosil’ land, one that the tsar had given her husband in exchange for a hereditary estate in Dmitrov. The testament, recorded in both documents, requested that she, her husband, their children, and “all our ancestors” (po nashikh po vsekh roditelekh)—that is, Grigor’s and Matrena’s—be commemorated at Trinity. In addition she asked that “she be tonsured as a nun, and that Archimandrite Pamba and brothers . . . grant that wish to me [and] order the tonsure [to take place] at the convent of the [Dormition] of the Most Pure [Mother of God] ‘Under the pine’” (Pod sosnnoiu); that is, in the village of Podsosenie.2 Matrena’s testament contains central (but not all of the) elements that defined the relationship of well-born women to the Trinity-Sergius Monastery. The property in each instance was that of her husband and she disposed of it according to his wishes. The grants were for commemorative prayers. Also, that Matrena commemorated her ancestors as well as Grigor’s was not at all unusual. Trinity’s charters attest to a tradition in which women commemorated their ancestors as well as their husbands’. Nor is there reason to believe that Matrena did not act on her own volition when she asked to be tonsured at one of Trinity’s subsidiary convents. How the cult of St. Sergius and the monastery that maintained it gave meaning to the lives of women—and how women found ways to act in the public sphere by embracing the cult—is the subject of this chapter. SAINT SERGIUS OF RAD ONEzH 170 * Familial relations in medieval and early-modern Russia were patriarchal. That said, it is well known that women exercised considerable power, even in public affairs, but only in spheres defined by custom. The conventional wisdom is that over time, the rise in property values and the development of more sophisticated legal systems eroded women’s independence.3 It would be folly to look for a single cause for this. As in medieval and early-modern western Europe, patriarchy initially revealed itself in sources that document the settling of elites on agricultural estates in an era of rising land values and the growth of a money economy. Historians of the family in western Europe generally hold that the superimposition of patrilineal customs on older forms of spousal condominium in inheritance and control of property was a means to concentrate and preserve the unity of landed and commercial wealth.4 This also held true in Muscovite Rus’ in the economic expansion and money economy that appeared around 1500. Excepting the custom of transmitting property by partible inheritance, patrilineal customs and the modes of controlling property would be familiar to students of comparable trends in the West. Still, women wielded considerable control of property and my evidence offers little indication that it eroded over time. Worshiping a saint was one of few ways in which women might assert themselves as individuals. This held true both in practical matters and in creative endeavors. As Peter Brown has observed, in worshiping saints “the compartments segregating sexes in public broke down”; in a society ordered by bonds of kinship, as Brown, citing St. Ambrose, so aptly noted, “saints were the only in-laws [women] were free to choose.”5 Even if Brown’s emendation on St. Ambrose exaggerated, it remains that women became visible in ways that were unlikely, even unthinkable, in any other context. This was no more so than in the giving of commemorative benefices to enhance the political and social prestige of their line or that of their spouses.6 Examining evidence of female devotion to Sergius we can discern the degree to which and under what circumstances women exercised control over property—be it dowry, family, or purchased. Worshipping Sergius’s relics also exposed to public scrutiny women’s concerns and obligations within kinship traditions...