The Late Medieval Era · c. 1340-1517 · Russian north
Muscovite Monastic Christianity
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About This Movement
Sergius of Radonezh withdrew into the woods north of Moscow in the 1340s to live alone. Within a generation the monastery that grew up around him had sent out disciples who founded dozens more, pushing ever deeper into the northern forests in what later Russians called the northern Thebaid. The texts followed — Epiphanius the Wise's life of Sergius, the skete rules of Nil Sorsky. And so did the art, since Andrei Rublev's Trinity was painted in Sergius's memory for his own monastery. The period also produced the sharpest argument in Russian church history. Nil Sorsky and the non-possessors held that monasteries should own no land and no peasants and should live by their own labour, while Joseph of Volotsk and the possessors held that endowed monasteries could feed the poor, train clergy and carry the church's work. The possessors won it at the council of 1503. In the middle of all this, in 1448, Russian bishops elected their own metropolitan without waiting on Constantinople — the beginning of an independent Russian church.
Sources
- Epiphanius the Wise, Life of Sergius of Radonezh (c. 1417-18) (primary) — The movement's founding hagiography, by Sergius's own disciple. It survives only as reworked through Pachomius the Serb's redactions. English translation is available only in abridged form, in Zenkovsky's Medieval Russia's Epics, Chronicles, and Tales.
- Nil Sorsky, The Authentic Writings (trans. David Goldfrank, Cistercian Studies 221, 2008; alt. Maloney, CWS) (primary) — The non-possessor leader's own writings: the Predanie, the Ustav, and four authentic letters - the hesychast tradition transplanted north.
- Joseph of Volokolamsk, The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky (trans. Goldfrank, Cistercian, 1983) (primary) — The possessor side's own legislation, so both sides of the possessors/non-possessors dispute are represented in their own words, not through summary.
- The monastic colonization record: northern founders' lives (Kirill of Beloozero; Zosima and Savvatii of Solovki), foundation charters and land acts; Stoglav (1551) retrospectives (primary) — Expansion into the Russian north as the movement's lived, economic form. The Stoglav-era (1551) material reflects back on this period from about a century later. The voice of ordinary peasants appears only indirectly, filtered through monastic land documents.
- David B. Miller, Saint Sergius of Radonezh, His Trinity Monastery, and the Formation of the Russian Identity (2010) (secondary) — Current standard study of cult and colonization together.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 5, 'Russian piety and Orthodox culture 1380-1589' (Stella Rock) (reference) — This chapter's time span covers this period directly.