Search

This article examines how the Black Death is represented visually in the Illustrated Chronicle Compilation (Litsevoi letopisnyi svod), a many-tomed account of the history of Russia compiled and lavishly illustrated at the court of Ivan the Terrible in the 1560s or 1570s. Illustrators and chroniclers depicted ordinary plague victims differently from those of high rank. Lofty individuals, like Grand Prince Semen Ivanovich and his sons, were shown apart from the mass deaths and their deaths were not explicitly attributed to plague. This may be because plague was understood as divine punishment. Nonetheless, the illustrations show the common humanity of plague victims. Illustrators also expressed an appreciation of the organic connections between human and natural spheres and the fragile relations between the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the Litsevoi letopisnyi svod , a massive illustrated chronicle of the history of the world and of Russia was produced in a single manuscript. Consisting of over 20,000 pages, with over 17,000 illustrations, the work should be a treasure trove for visually-minded scholarship. However, at first glance, the figures appear rigid and formulaic, offering little promise for interpretation. This article examines a small subset of these images that depict the Russian conquest of the Muslim Khanate of Astrakhan in 1556. The images deploy an unexpectedly powerful language of emotion, expressed through gesture. The Astrakhan images provide opportunities not only to explore early modern Russian ideas about emotion, but also to consider human connections across the Christian-Muslim divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article surveys the few witchcraft trials from the Novogrod region that survive in central archives of the Razriadnyi prikaz from the seventeenth century to determine whether or not there is some particular skew to the cases from that region. Although the number of cases is very small, they all show an uncommon willingness on the part of community members to accept benign, medical explanations for the use of roots and grasses instead of attributing malevolent supernatural powers to those ingredients and their users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spotty and dilapidated record of single trial of an alleged witch in the outskirts of Galich in 1636 serves as a window through which to view the workings of the highly stratified society, its interactions with local courts and central tsarist authorities, and, most importantly, the beliefs, fears, and interpersonal dynamics that drove low-ranking people to turn to the courts. Particularly valuable are the tangential references to common practices that normally did not reach the courts and therefore eluded the historical record. The case of the landlord Gorikhvostov and the "known witch" Mitroshka Khramoi, with its dramatic canvass of devilish spirits and supernatural havoc, reveals the universal acceptance, at the height of Muscovite witchcraft prosecutions, of healers working with roots and herbs, spells and prayers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction briefly surveys the vast literature on the history of witchcraft in Europe and the far more limited historiography of Russian and East European witchcraft. It highlights a number of common themes emerging from the essays, including the interactions of religion and witchcraft beliefs, modes of persecution, the role of literacy and of gender, the mutability or stability of witchcraft belief over time, and the significance of ethnicity in beliefs about magic. The introduction identifies points of agreement and divergence among the authors and comments on the value of collecting detailed case studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]