Orthodox Sisters: Religion, Community, and the Challenge of Modernity in Imperial and Early Soviet Russia
William G. Wagner, "Orthodox Sisters: Religion, Community, and the Challenge of Modernity in Imperial and Early Soviet Russia "
English | ISBN: 1501775723 | 2024 | 434 pages | PDF | 18 MB
English | ISBN: 1501775723 | 2024 | 434 pages | PDF | 18 MB
Orthodox Sisters explores the relationship between women, religion, and social, cultural, and economic change between 1700 and 1935 through the experiences of Orthodox convents in Nizhnii Novgorod diocese. Focusing primarily on the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross, William G. Wagner places the women's experiences in the broader context of developments in female monasticism and religious life in Russia, as well as in Europe and North America over the same period.
This is the first comprehensive study that follows a Russian convent through all the stages of its life―from its origins in the eighteenth century to its flourishing at the turn of the twentieth century, to its resistance to Soviet assault, and, finally, to its rebirth in the 1920s. By the late nineteenth century, the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross and the other convents and women's religious communities in Nizhnii Novgorod diocese constituted a reimagined form of a traditional Orthodox monastic community. Wagner shows how these nuns and novices adapted to the conditions of emergent modernity in a distinctively Orthodox way.
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