Burn, Baby, Burn:

Popular Culture and Heresy in Late Medieval Russia

David M. Goldfrank

Do popular culture and heresy go together like a horse and droshky?

This is not easy to answer for early Russia. Paucity of sources leaves us
guessing as to the real nature of the three movements that the native
Church deemed heretical from the drowning of three Strigolniki in
Novgorod in 1375, through the flourishing and persecution of the so-
called “Novgorod Heretics” (“Judaizers”) during 1470-1505, down to
the railings of the monk Zinovii Otenskii against the purported “new, ...
slave doctrine” of the runaway Feodosii Kosoi in the 1560s.’
The evidence is contradictory. Zinovii’s confident dismissal of such
teachings due to their servile origin points to some intersection between
popular culture and religious dissidence. His lament that abuse of power
and wealth has stimulated religious turbulence among the plebs points to
different juncture. Still another is indicated by the official synodal com-
plaint of “false prophets” who frequent rural communities and urge,
inter aliu, abstinence from work on Wednesdays and Fridays.2 And, of
course, the well documented, diverse manifestations of spiritual rebel-
lion and popular utopianism from seventeenth-century Russia reveal yet
one more.3Mututis rnutundis, Middle Muscovy’s most militant champion
of the pure faith, the abbot Iosif Volotskii, is reported to have viewed
official Orthodoxy as the special preserve of the uppermost ~ t r a t a : ~

Nevertheless, this same Iosif, ever pragmatic as well as conscious of man’s

fallen state, knew better than to trust people of any stratum to hold to the requi-
site straight and narrow path without strict supervision-even within his own
c l ~ i s t e r ( ! )Let
: ~ us not, then, prejudice our investigation with preconceived
notions about social classes and heresies.

In the pages that follow, I shall seek only from primary sources,
without much historiographical excursus, links between accused heretics
and popular culture in late medieval Russia. The conclusions may sur-
prise. First, though, let me present our theutrum and drumatis personae.
I7
18 - Journal of Popular Culture
The action takes place chiefly in Moscow, in the republics of
Novgorod and Pskov, which Moscow annexes in 1477 and 1510, and in
several other Russian towns and regions-but above all in Novgorod. An
enumeration of the named individuals whom church authorities consid-
ered heretics leaves no doubt that by and large we are dealing with the
middle and lower middle orders, mainly clerics attached to different
parish churches.
For the first stirrings of organized dissent, the Strigolniki, two of the
three culprits hurled to their deaths from the bridge connecting the two
sides of Novgorod in 1375 are the deacons Mikita and Karp, and the
third is the latter’s servant or slave.6 Laymen of some means, as well as
secular clergy, figure among the later Pskovian Strigolniki.’
The next action is kicked off by a quartet of accused Novgorodians
in 1487-88: the parish priests Grigorii of St. Simon’s and Eresim of St.
Nicholas’s and the subdeacons Samsonko and Grigorii’s son Gridia of
Sts. Boris and Gleb. Two years later the Moscow synodal tribunal adds
to this tally the priests Denis, Maksim of St. John’s, and Vasilii of
Pokrov, the deacon Makar of St. Nicholas’s, and the subdeacons Vasiuk
Sukhoi (Denis’s brother-in-law) and Samukha. Further charges implicate
more Novgorodians: the priests Aleksei of St. Michael’s, Iakov of the
Holy Apostles, Ivan of Resurrection, and Feodor and Naum, as well as
the cantor Stepan and the unspecified Lavresha, Mikusha Sobaka, Iurko
Dolgovich Semenov, Avdei, and Aleksii’s brother-in-law Ivan Maksimov
(the son of Maksim of St. John’s).* The disease spreads to Moscow and
engulfs two Kremlin subdeacons, Istoma and Sverchek, and the
cleridbook-copyist Ivan Chernyi. Subsequent official anathemas list
another deacon, one more subdeacon, and a monk.9 Standing behind
these clerics may have been a large number of their flock or other lay
adherents, but we do not know.’O
The numerical preponderance of parish priests and lower clergy
masks the fact that the movement as such, if it was not simply the fiction
of inquisitors and political hacks,” reached further up in society, much
further up, and also outward. Among the Novgorodians involved in the
1480s were the dean of white clergy, Archpriest Gavril of St. Sofiia, the
dean of the black clergy, Archimandrite Kassian of Iurev Monastery, and
the latter’s brother Samochernyi. A Pskovian linked to this movement
was the monk and latter day Strigolnik Zakhar from the local
Nemchinov monastery. He had the audacity to tonsure a magnate’s
slaves, withhold communion from them, and then engage in a literary
smear campaign against his clerical superior, the powerful Archbishop
Gennadii of Novgorod. Three of our Novgorodian clerics made it big in
Moscow. Grand Prince Ivan 111appointed Aleksei and Denis respectively
 Burn, Baby, Burn - 19

archpriest of Uspenskii Sobor and head priest of neighboring

Arkhangelskii, and Ivan Maksimov reportedly converted the sovereign’s
daughter-in-law Elena of Moldavia to “Judaism.” Metropolitan Zosima
(1490-94) himself hung out with of some of the leading free-thinkers in
Moscow. He was accused of both buggery and denying the general res-
urrection, but not prosecuted.
The laity was not far behind. The first-generation dCclassC Grigorii
Mikhailovich Tuchin of Novgorodian boyar stock signed on. Likewise,
reportedly, did one or two state under-secretaries, who held newly estab-
lished service estates in Novgorod: Alekseiko Kostev and Nekras
Rukavov. Among the middle- and upper-level Moscovites attracted or
somehow involved were the merchants Ignat Zubov and Semen Klenov
and the influential state secretaries Feodor Kuritsyn and his brother Ivan
Volk. Two other apparently substantial Novgorodian laymen, Gridia
Kvashnia and Mitia Pustoselov, were listed among the “heretics,” as was
Archimandrite Feognost Chernoi “of the Sands.”’*
The social picture remains diverse but the loci more diffuse for our
third batch of dissenters in the mid-sixteenth century. The centers
include formerly independent Tver, the eremitic scetes of Russia’s
septentrional silva, and the western provincial regions, as well as
Novgorod, Pskov, and Moscow. Indicted non-conformists include the
servicemen Matvei Bashkin and two Boris-Borozdin brothers from Tver,
our runaway Moscow slave-monk Feodosii Kosoi, and five or six other
ascetics. Among these are the learned Artemii of Pskov, who was Abbot
of Troitse-Sergiev (Russia’s premier shrine) for half a year and later a
defender of Orthodoxy in Lithuanian-controlled Belaru~.’~
The Russian Church by this time was subjecting Orthodox oppo-
nents of the party line to political justice under the guise of heresy
trials,I4so it is difficult to determine the degree of genuine, manifest
opposition to fundamental doctrines, rather than to certain practices or to
rough political or material conditions. One abbot wrote around 1558 that
many priests and laymen wavered over “a certain heresy” due to the
teachings of “Artemii and his disciple Feodo~ii.”’~ Many? The evidence
is literary. When Feodosii was operating as a vocal Protestant in the
safety of Poland-Lithuania in the 1560s, and his doctrines reportedly cir-
culated in the Novgorod lands, Zinovii, as the Church’s regional sage,
went on the attack with his pen. He constructed a systematic, verbose
apologia in the form of an genuine dialogue with Gerasim and Afanasii,
two gullible cantors from the western provincial town of Staraia Rusa,
and with the like-minded lay iconographer Feodor, a member of their
choir.I6 At roughly the same time, a certain Pseudo-Zinovii directed a
lengthy epistolary refutation to “Lithuanian (i.e., Belarusian)
20 * Journal of Popular Culture
Christians,” who had addressed him concerning Feodosii’s views.” It
seems, then, that the mid-sixteenth Russian century “heresies” were led
by middle class clerics and appealed to a variety of non-elite strata,
though not specifically to peasants.

Was any of this dissent a product of popular culture? For our answer
we must separate reformist and sectarian motifs, which constitute ple-
beian elements of Christian culture, non-Christian folk aspects, which
may or may not have crept into these movements, and such literate secu-
lar phenonema as astrology.
The Strigofnik leitmotif is uncompromising theological Donatism,
that is, the rejection of the entire priesthood as disqualified. In Russia the
issue is not (as with the original Donatism) acquiescence to persecuting
pagan authorities, but simply the customary ordination fees and gifts-in
Western parlance, simony. This problem was so serious that at least one
Byzantine patriarch, one Moscow metropolitan, and one provincial
Russian bishop composed polemics and admonitions to prove the ritual
efficacy of the priest, regardless of his personal worthiness.’8A second,
related issue for the Strigofniki was the sale of requiems.
References to distinctly non-Orthodox, Strigofnik practices with pos-
sible popular origins appear in two places. Around 1386, the missionary
bishop Stefan of Perm accuses the Novgorod Strigofniki, who reject the
confession-communion process, of repenting to the earth.19 Forty years
later Metroplitan Fotii lambastes their Pskovian counterparts for spurn-
ing father-confessors, “gazing away from the earth into the air, and call-
ing upon God the Father for themselves.’’2oPraying to the earth, if this be
credible, ought to be some type of pagan relic or earth cult. Direct repen-
tance and prayers towards heaven, however, is far more consistent with
the Strigofnik mode of written argumentation (as reported by Stefan him-
self). Such devotions, though, do not contradict traditional Orthodox and
Novgorodian iconographic depictions of prayer.
B.A. Rybakov has recently attempted to identify as Strigofnik some
of the variegated artistic finds from late medieval Novgorod, including a
series of book decorations, sculpted and painted iconography, and an
elaborate wooden crucifix (Liudogoshchinskii)from 1359/1360.22
Manipulating his data beyond recognition, however, Rybakov fails to
distinguish the heterodox from the Orthodox or the (then) acceptable and
complementary from the opp~sitional.~~ On far more cautious ground are
N.A. Kazakova and A.I. Klibanov, who viewed the evidence of wide-
spread religious individualism and criticism of clerical abuses and
authority as creating the proper environment for spiritual rebellion.24
There is simply no evidence for Novgorod or Pskov of the chiefly
 Burn, Baby, Burn - 21
Strigolnik intellectual scene, which Rybakov sees behind Stefan’s initial
charge that the Strigolniki venerate of the “tree of understanding” and
reject the “tree of life” (Gn 2.9).25Stefan is bothered by the heretics’
counterposing reason to spiritual authority, which, according to the
Church, secures eternal life for the believers.
The Strigolniki thus appear as part of the local fabric of Novgorod
and Pskov, two of Russia’s most dynamic and free-spirited late medieval
towns. But let us not idealize too much. Pskov also witnessed the burn-
ing of a dozen suspected witches during a bout of the plague in 1412.26
In this regard, it is telling that Metropolitan Fotii, following his Pskovian
correspondents, wrote about a host of other local issues, including fre-
quent remarrying, nuns-even skimnitsiz7-returning to secular life,
laymen choosing alternate father-confessors, neglect of fasting and com-
munion regulations, monastic indiscipline, use of “German” clerical
garb, dancing, and “diabolical” games.28One can easily grasp why
people accustomed to skirting canon law on sexual matters might on
their own find little objectionable in a sect that rejected priestly confes-
sion, so long as the sectarians were not nosy proselytizer^.^^
If we leave the Strigolniki behind, bypass for the moment the late
fifteenth century, and catapult ourselves directly into the mid-sixteenth
century, we find now in some accounts a full blown quasi-Protestant
movement. The accusations of the synodal tribunal against one leader
describe what I have called elsewhere “Lutheranism without justification
by faith.”30This is also quite close to Pseudo-Zinovii’s sketch: an icono-
clastic, relic-scoffing, anti-sacramental, anti-monastic, cult with a leader-
ship that opposes state as well as church and solicits the material support
of the faithf~l.~’ By and large, then, the mid-sixteenth century dissidents,
according to these sources, appear as an even more extreme continuation
of the popular, anti-clerical Christianity exhibited by the Strigolniki. The
key novelty in the records for the 1550s-1560s is the self-enriching
prophetic type of spiritual leader, who is known in both medieval Europe
and fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Russia, but not necessarily as a
heretic.32
What about folk religion? Heathen elements and so-called “dual
belief’ flourished in Russia during the fourteenth-sixteenth centuries, but
there were no spectacular cases of oppositional pagan movements or
wild prophesy with chiliastic overtones, as in the eleventh
Rather, Aron Gurevich’s observation about medieval Europe seems to
cover Russia too: “early medieval pseudo-saints...revived pre-Christian
cults and their inherent magical practices, which had not yet been forgot-
ten,” while “the later heresies demanded a return to primitive
Christianity.’’MOr is there more to our story?
22 - Journal of Popular Culture
The “Jewish-thinking Novgorod Heretics” of ca. 1470-1505 present
a more complex problem, as does Feodosii Kosoi sixty years later in the
depiction of the real Zinovii. In both cases, the hodge-podge of argu-
ments attributed to the dissenters by their opponents is internally incon-
sistent. They lump together a) disbelief in basic Christian dogmas such
as the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the passing of Mosaic Law; b)
Protestant-like opposition to worship via material objects, such as icons
and relics; c) rejection of some of the basic Orthodox authorities, among
them, a few New Testament works attributed to St. Paul; d) spurning of
at least monasticism, if not the rest of the clergy and other so-called
“human tradition^;"^^ and e) attacks on the Russian Church for its exer-
cise of authority, including persecuting heretics.36For our purposes, we
can navigate this morass of contradictions, if we assume that Iosif
Volotskii and later his indirect disciple Zinovii used dissidence as pretext
for composing comprehensive theological and practical treatises to bol-
ster the Orthodoxy against all comers.37On the other hand, little that they
present and contest indicates anything other than serious religious oppo-
sition to the established Church. What is not mainline Christian is book-
ish, either Judaic or, for Zinovii, rational is ti^.^^ Archbishop Gennadii’s
claim that the Novgorod Heretics were Messalians and Marcionites (i.e.,
quasi-Manicheans or Enthusiasts and hence, perhaps, in some way folk-
ish), is based on the similarity not of doctrine but of tactics, as recorded
by John of Damascus. The heretics pretend to be Orthodox and even
curse their own heresy in front the learned, but then reveal themselves to
the ignorant.39
Three widely differing but suggestive reports, however, may link the
later dissidents to popular religion and superstitions inside Christianity,
on its borders, or outside of it. First of all, Zinovii’s interlocutors
repeated Feodosii Kosoi’s charge that the Church conceals the Books of
Moses, as if self-serving hierarchs withheld from believers canonical
works necessary for salvation.40The credulity of lower clerics points to a
permanent rumor machine that simply mistrusted the Church authori-
ties-a phenomenon that undoubtedly existed and formed the back-
ground to popular receptivity to dissent. Seventy years earlier, Gennadii
had complained that he was the victim of the false circulars of the
strigolnik Zakhar, who seems to have made counter-charges of heresy
against the ar~hbishop.~’ It was around this time as well that some
people, either Orthodox or free-thinkers, ridiculed a few key written
authorities, since the Orthodox “year 7000” (1491/92) passed without
any sign of the Antichrist, the Second Coming, or the end of the world,
as predicted in the Russia’s apocalyptic corpus.42Here we should
remember that our inquisition-promoting Iosif contended that laymen
 Burn, Baby, Burn - 23

and especially nobles were prone to sneer at unruly monks.43Such could

only have been true if important segments of society had scant respect
for the black clergy.
Second, on a completely different plane, the archpriest Aleksei and
the state secretary Feodor Kuritsyn, two of the chief nonconformists in
the late fifteenth century, were accused of being devotees of astronomy,
astrology, sorcery, occult books, and belles lettres-in all but the last of
these, following the lead of the Kievan Jew Skharii.” Kuritsyn’s brief
and cryptic “Laodician Epistle” and the list of books that Gennadii
claimed that the Novgorod heretics possessed indicate that they at least
dabbled in literature, astronomy, and philosophy, as well as theology.45
Sorcery and magic, for good purposes as well as bad, were deeply
entrenched beliefs in Russia among all social orders at this time and later
as well.&Astrology, including the Jewish-authored Shestokryl (“The Six
Wings” or “Seraph”), whereby the “heretics” allegedly calculated the
years in the 1480s, was popular in the 1550s despite condemnation by
the Church.“’ Thus, the cerebral endeavors of some of these mavericks
intersected with contemporary Russia’s secular culture and apparently
contributed to their appeal, as well as to the hostility of militant church-
men, who were less open to astrology than the more sophisticated
Byzantines had been.48Indeed, in the light of Iosif’s attacks on
Metropolitan Zosima for sodomy, a certain (nekii) Professor Richard
Stites may not have been far off the mark in the late 1970s, when he
lampooned the inquisitors and their accusations as an early version of
the modem anti-effetist snipe, “Jews, gays, and intellectuals,” though we
might add “stargazers” to his l i ~ t . 4 ~
And finally, from the heavens to the swamp. Archbishop Gennadii
also charged the state under-secretary Alekseiko Kostev, albeit when
drunk, with urinating on a Dormition icon and then stomping on several
other holy images.5oThe energetic prelate-inquisitor hoped to rouse the
Moscow synodal tribunal against his indictees with this story. It may,
however, reveal something along the lines of the ritualized medieval
European custom of attacking a relic or some other holy object in
response to an unanswered supplication, as if the saint had not honored a
fealty contract.” Kostev does not appear in other sources as a heretic,
and the farthest one ought venture in this direction is to ask if free-think-
ing and disdain for rituals may not have emboldened him, just as Iosif
claimed such scoffing encouraged rampant, uncontrolled, lascivious
hedonism.52Curiously, though, such “humiliation of saints” was hardly
subjective sacrilege, but rather a move intended to prod them over to a
favorable response. So our tipsy Alekseiko may have been an angry
believer in sacred objects, rather than the principled iconoclast of
24 * Journal of Popular Culture
Gennadii’s invective. Tsar Ivan IV is rumored to have done something
similar on a more grandiose scale-cannonading into smitherines the
cupola of a church, after its patron saint failed to prevent Russia’s defeat
at the hands of the Poles.S3

The evidence thus shows that despite the largely plebeian origin of
the recorded heretics of ca. 1370-1570, the verifiable role of popular cul-
ture within these oppositional movements is rather limited. The dis-
senters do not seem to have had anything to do with folk witchcraft and
medicine or with the protection of home-grown, provincial rituals and
saints’ cults against the expansive tentacles of Nor, as later, in
the seventeenth century, was there an outbreak of popular chiliasm or
apocalyptic excesses, even when the year “7000,” like the proverbial
good cook, came and went, and the world kept on turning beyond 1492
despite several authoritative predictions. What we know of the culture of
the accused appears as basically Christian, at times stripped of ornamen-
tation, sacraments, and rituals, and even heading back towards Judaism
or over to rationalism. On the other hand, the role of manipulated popu-
lar culture in the inquisitorial movement may have been substantial, and
this should not surprise us at all. Pre-modern authorities everywhere
were adept in involving the masses in public punishments, and popular
religious notions thrived on both sides of the Reformation in Europe.ss
We witness, with Archbishop Gennadii’s missive address to the 1490
synod, a reinvention of the principles of the Western Inquisition. The
haughty hierarch argues for death, not on the basis of a systematic expo-
sition of canon law or a scholastic summa, but from the practical
grounds that these icon-smashing culprits are oath-breakers-outlaws in
the widest sense of the word-against whom there is no other
Russians, however, are not to be trusted with the underlying issues:s7

People here are simple and rhetorically incompetent, so no discourse with them
about religion would be fruitful. The only reason for a council is to punish [the
heretics]-burn and hang them! For the heretics solemnly repented and received
penance from me, and then abandoned everything and fled.

The synod duly condemns the culprits, and its circular presents them
as Satan’s helpmates, to be opposed by all the faithful:58

Let all Orthodox Christians know ...that now for our sins, in these last times, the
evil serpent and ancient destroyer of humans souls, the Devil, has sown the
seeds of bitter fruit in the hearts of the weak-minded. These are heretics and
enemies of the Church of Christ, tricksters and apostates, destroyers of the souls
of many Orthodox people.
 Burn,Baby,Burn * 25

Gennadii, for his part, would not get his executions for fourteen
years. An improvised auto-da-fe’in Novgorod was the best that could be
pulled off in 1490 by this admirer of Spain’s crowd-indulging inquisi-
tors. The convicted locals were dressed as demons and placed on horses
in a carnivalesque manner, “This is Satan’s army” having been inscribed
on their conical hats that were then set ablaze. When these spiritual vil-
lains were paraded into Novgorod-facing westward in order to as “gaze
upon the fire prepared for them” (as could be imagined from standard
Last Judgment iconography)-the spectators were instructed to spit on
them and say: “These are God’s enemies and Christian blasphemer^."^^
The equally virulent Iosif would emphasize the “heretics’ ” dissimu-
lation and diabolical aspects and point to examples of divine judgment
against them. One was the report of the archpriest Aleksei’s gruesome
illness and death, another a physician’s(!) testimony that Istoma’s incur-
ably ruptured intestine represented God’s wrath.60This type of
demonology meshed perfectly with the clerics’ propaganda of heroic,
beleaguered, holy forces facing the menacing satanic. Miracle-laden elo-
cution harmonized with popular religious notions, as in the mythic
aspects of the cult of Archangel Michael, among others, and in the folk-
loric aspects of contemporary saints lives.6’Since the authorities lacked
then the administrative clout to enforce their will in a consistent manner
throughout Muscovy, they also needed persuasion and cooperation.
Hence the Church had to convince the faithful of the heretics’ danger
and resorted to scare tactics. According to the official report of one of
the synodal tribunals of the 1550s, a tolerant bishop suffered a stroke,
when he attacked Iosif’s inquisitorial handbook. The prosecution then
clinched its case with an attestation of a miracle by one of the new
Russian “wonder-workers.”62Synodus populusque moscoviticus?

All indications point to a spicy and juicy late medieval and early
modern Russian world, with banquets, drinking, dancing, cursing,
debauchery, minstrels, mummers, bear-trainers, sorcery, divination,
paganism, folk healers, mixed-gender monasteries, and rowdy church-
goers, as well as popular prophets and conflicts over cults of specific
saints-the stock and trade of normal existence.63Accused heretics, how-
ever, save for the elite clique in Moscow, were never charged with par-
taking in that life-just with spuming fasts and legitimizing satiation.@
As for the Russian inquisition and its appeal, in the last analysis, we
cannot know how the parishioners of a dozen or so Novgorodian
churches reacted when their priests and deacons were indicted, humili-
ated, and anathematized. It is quite possible that normal, superstitious
sinners did not lift an eyelash when such “heretics” were persecuted or
26 * Journal of Popular Culture
even converted to soot like the witches of Pskov a century earlier. We
might even imagine that many common Novgorodians rather turned to
their officiating local priests, to their standing father-confessors, or to a
respected monk, when it was time to cease enjoying forbidden fruits they
had been admonished to shun and to devise a strategy to escape the tor-
ments and hellfire they had been taught to expect. But at the same time,
it is almost certain that in some quarters, away from the erratically
vicious arms of the Church and state, p o p u l a r C h r i s t i a n d i s s e n t
remained alive, kicking and ready to emerge with vengeance in the mid
seventeenth century.

The author would like to thank Professors Catherine Evtuhov, Jo-Ann Hoeppner
Moran, Donald Ostrowski, and Elizabeth Zelensky for their suggestions, and
also Professor Richard Stites for being Richard Stites.

Notes

‘Polnoe sobranie russkikh letopisei (hereafter PSRL: St. Petersburg-

Petrograd-Moscow, 1841--) 4: 72; Istiny pokazanie k voprosivshim o novom
uchenii, Sochinenie inoka Zinoviia (Kazan, 1863, also in Pravoslavnyi sobesed-
nik, 1863-64), 26,48.
2A.A. Zimin, Ivan S. Peresvetov i ego sovremenniki (Moscow, 1958), 182-
89; Stoglav (Ed. D.E. Kozhanchikov, St. Petersburg, 1863),GI. 41, vop. 20.
3A.I. Klibanov, Narodnaia sotsial ‘naia utopiia v Rossii: Period feodalizma
(MOSCOW, 1977), 83-163.
4Poslaniia Iosifa Volotskogo (Ed. 1a.S. Lur’e and A.A. Zimin, Moscow-
Leningrad, 1959), 367: If monasteries did not have villages, then why would a
nobleman take vows? And if there were no noble elders, whence could we
obtain a metropolitan, archbishop, bishop, or any other prestigious hierarch? So
if there were no noble elders, there would be wavering in belief.
510sif Volotsky ’s Monastic Rule (Trans. and ed. D.M. Goldfrank,
Kalamazoo, 1983), 101, 204: “No one shall inscribe anything in a book without
the authorization of the superior or the choirmaster: from this spring distur-
bances, trouble, corruption of the Divine Writings, discord and cliques, and then
oaths and curses.”
6PSRL4:72: Karp and hence his servant may have come from Pskov.
7N.A. Kazakova and Ia. S . Lur’e, Antifeodal’nye ereticheskie dvizheniia nu
Rusi XIV-nachula XVI veka (hereafter AfED, Moscow-Leningrad, 1957, 243-
46,252-53.
*AfED, 313-15, 373-78, 383, 385, 469, 479-82; the surnames here refer to
the churches where the priests and deacons served.
 Burn, Baby, Burn * 27
9AfED, 155, 376-78,469-73,477-82.
IOAccording to the untrustworthy Iosif Volotskii, the heresiarchs
“enticed...many.. service cavalry, merchants, and commoners...and were fruitful
and multiplied their Jewish doctrine in many towns and villages:” AED, 506,
508.
]‘The best exposition of the crookedness of invectives, indictments, and
apologetics against these dissidents remains, 1a.S. Lur’e, Ideologicheskaia
bor’ba v russkoi publitsistike kontsa XV - nachala XVI veka (Moscow-
Leningrad, 1960).
”AED, 155, 380, 385, 426-29,436, 469, 471-73, 479, 506; PSRL 6149-50.
It is impossible completely to reconcile the names found in the three groups of
sources for these “heretics”: the chronicle report of the 1504-1505 executions,
the later official anathemas, and cycle that includes the writings of Archbishop
Gennadii of Novgorod and Iosif Volotskii and the synodal tribunals of 1488 and
1490. Names found in chronicles and the anathemas ought to have been found
in the lost tribunal proceedings from 1504, but these names differ as well.
Nekras Rukavov is identified sans source as holding a pomestie in Vodskaia
piatina by R.G. Skrynnikov, Tragediia Novgoroda (Moscow, 1994), 39.
I3Akty sobrannye v bibliotekakh i arkhivakh Rossiiskoi Arkheograjicheskoi
ekspeditsiei imperatorskoi Akademii nauk (hereafter AAE, 4 vols., St.
Petersburg, 1836), 1: 239.
14D.M.Goldfrank, “Theocratic Imperatives, the Transcendent, the Worldly,
and Political Justice in Russia’s Early Inquisitions,” Religious and Secular
Forces in Late Tsarist Russia (Ed. Charles E. Timberlake, Seattle, 1992), 36-46.
W t e d in Zimin, Peresvetov, 188.
I6Istinypokazanie, op. cit.
”Poslanie mnogoslovnoe. Sochinenie inoka Zinoviia PO rukopisi X V I veka
(Ed. A.N. Popov). Chtenie v Imperatorskom obshchestve istorii i drevnostei
rossiiskikh 1880. kn. 2. My use of “Pseudo-Zinovii” is based on the perception
among many scholars (including Metr. Makarii, F. Kalugin, and A.A. Zimin)
that Zinovii Otenskii was the author; I accept the arguments to the contrary of
Nancy Yanoshak, “The Author of Poslanie Mnogoslovnioe: A Fontological
Inquiry”’ Slavic Review 50.3 (1991), 621-36.
I8AfED,230-255.
I9AED, 24 1.
20AED,254. The text reads: “...ot zemle k v’zdukhy zriashche, boga ottsa
sobe naritsaiushche ....” Fotii, who in his missives regularly responds to the
complaints of the Pskovian authorities, interprets this as if each of them were
calling himself, instead of the clergy, “Father;” the overall sense of this passage,
however, is that the Strigolniki are confessing directly to God and thereby
bypassing the clergy. According to 1.1. Sreznevskii, sobehebe can be dative,
prepositionaIAocative, and instrumental, as well as genitive and accusative:
28 - Journal of Popular Culture
Materialy dlia slovaria drevnerusskogo iazyka (3 vols., St Petersburg, 1893/rpt.
Graz, 1955), 3: 317-20.
Z‘Forexample, depictions of St. Luke in the Ostromir Gospel of 1056-57 or
the apostles in a mid-sixteenth century Ascension icon. Vladimir Gormin,
Liudmila Yarosh, et al., Novgorod. Art Treasures and Architectural
Monuments, 11th-18th Centuries (Leningrad, 1984), pl. 195, 199.
22B.A. Rybakov, Strigol ’niki. Russkie gumanisty XIV stoletiia (Moscow,
1993), 108-49,223-49.
Z3F~ example,
r open-air, wooden crucifixes with Jesus survive from north-
ern Russia from as least as late as the end of the sixteenth century: information
supplied by the Kirov (Viatka) Regional Art Museum.
“AfED, 34-73; A.I. Klibanov, Reformatsionnye dvizheniia v Rossii v XIV-
pervoi polovine XVI vv. (MOSCOW, 1960), 12-33, 85-136.
2SRybakov,op. cit. 150-222. It should be noted that Rybakov has revived
the earlier views of N.P. Popov and A.D. Sedel’nikov concerning the Strigolnik
authorship of some of the works under consideration, such as the Trifonovskii
sbornik.
26Pskovskieletopisi (Ed. A.N. Nasonov, 2 vols., Moscow, 1941-55), 2~36.
The Strigolniki at first may have bothered the Muscovite authorities even more
than the local leaders. No fourteenth- or fifteenth-century Novgorodian or
Pskovian authored so much as a brief apologetic missive, which local or
Moscow ecclesiastical chanceries deemed worthy of preservation. Rybakov
makes a fair argument for the case that the Strigolniki were originally attacked
from without, not within Novgorod: op. cit., 333-34.
27Tho~e who have taken the ultimate vows and now wear the schema.
”AED, 247-51.
z9See,for example, the types of prying questions into sex lives that priests
were expected ask both genders at confession: A. Almazov, Tainaia lspoved’ v
Pravoslavnoi vostochnoi tserkvi. Opyt vneshnei istorii (3 vols., Odessa, 1894),
3: 144ff.
’OGoldfrank, “Inquisitions,” 43; AAE 1.239: the trial of Matvei Bashkin.
“Poslanie mnogoslovnoe, loc. cit.
3 Z A r ~Ia.
n Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and
Perception (orig. Problemy srednevekoi narodnoi kul’tury, trans. JBnos M. Bak
and Paul A. Hollingsworth, Cambridge, Eng., etc., 1988), 70-75.
V. Ikonnikov, Opyt izsledovaniia o kul’turnom znachenii Vizantii v
russkoi istorii (Kiev, 1869/rpt HagueParis, 1970), 217-18; V. Malinin, Starets
Eleazaova monastyria Filofei i ego poslaniia. Istoriko-literaturnoe izsledovanie
(Kiev, 190l/rpt 1971), 122-27. For the eleventh century, see D. M. Goldfrank,
“Pre-Enlightenment Utopianism in Russian History,” Russian History/Histoire
rune 11.2-3 (1984), 124-25.
”Gurevich, op. cit., 75.
 Burn, Baby, Burn * 29
’SProsvetitel’ili oblichenie eresi zhidostvuiushchikh. Tvorenie Iosifa igu-
menu (4th ed., Kazan, 1903), S1. 1-11; Istinypokazanie, GI. 5-46.
3 b P r ~ ~ ~ e t (extended
itel’ redaction only), S1. 12-16; Istiny pokazanie, GI. 47.
3710sifused Slovo 7 to outline the basic beliefs and ritual and ethcal duties
of the Orthodox Christian. Zinovii appended to his theological treatise his opin-
ions on a variety of ritualist questions, including differences between
Novgorodian and Muscovite versions of the same chant: AfED, 335-60; Istiny
pokazanie, G1. 48-56.
38Amongthe rationalistic points he counters are the basic philosophical
stance of an uncreated (samobytnyi) world (though elsewhere he affirms
Feodosii’s belief in a unitarian God-creator), and the radical, scholarly, philo-
logical conclusion that the St. Paul of most of the Epistles was not the author of
Hebrews: Istiny pokazanie, 63, 74, 353-54.
39AfED,310; St. John of Damascus. Writings (trans. Frederick H. Chase,
Jr.). Fathers of the Church 37 (New York, 1958), 135.
401stinypokazanie, GI. 21. Professor Jo-Ann Hoeppner Moran, one of
Professor Stites’s and my colleagues, suggests that the notion of concealed
Books of Moses may refer to something else bookish, namely the revived
Hermetic tradition.
4’AfED,378-80.
42AfED,394-414; M.D. Kagan, N.V, Ponyrko, M.V. Rozhdestvenskaia,
“Opisanie sbornikov XV v. knigopistsa Efrosina,” Trudy Otdela drevnerusskoi
literatury 35 (1980), 21, 214.
4310sifVolotsky’sMonastic Rule, 75-76, 174.
“AfED, 47 1. The occult or “black” books (chernoknizhniia) might also
refer to something Hermetic.
“AfED, 265-76, 311, 318-20: these books included the works of five
Orthodox theologians, part of the Old Testament and Old Testament apocrypha,
Menander, and a version of Maimonides’s Logic.
&Makarii, Istoriia russkoi tserkvi (12 vols., St. Petersburg, 1877-89, rpt.,
Diisseldorf 1968-69), 8: 313-15; Russll Zguta. “Witchcraft and Medicine in Pre-
Petrine Russia,” Russian Review 37.4 (1978): 438-39.
47AfED, 311, 319; Stoglav, gl. 41.32; Malinin, op. cit., 252-316; V.S.
Ikonnikov, Maksim Grek i ego vremia (2nd ed., Kiev, 1915), 269-90; Lur’e,
Ideologicheskaia bor’ba, 83; George Sarton, Introduction to the History of
Science (3 vols. in 5, Baltimore, 1927-48), 111: 1517-20; P. Solon, “The Six
Wings of Immanuel Bonfils and Michael Chrysokokkes,” Centaurus 15 (1970):
1-28. The “Russian” Shestokryl, translated directly from Hebrew by the 1480s
in Belarus or Ukraine, may not have been a static text. At this time Archbishop
Gennadii was bothered about the calendrical problems associated with
Shestokryl, not astrology, which was the issue seventy years later. As for the
original, Immanuel Bonfils of Tarascon-sur-RhBne (fl. c. 1340-65) was a Jewish
30 * Journal of Popular Culture
mathematician, whose up-to-date, six-table astronomical-calendrical work was
translated by Chrysokokkes into Greek in 1435, with conversion tables for both
the C h s t i a n calendar and the Ptolomaic coordinates of Constantinople. Hebrew
versions often circulated with astrological tables attached. (Gratitude to
Professor Donald Ostrowski for the Solon article.)
4sLur’e, Ideologicheskaia bor’ba, 185-203; The Oxford Dictionary of
Byzantium (3 vols., New York/Oxford, 1991), 3: 214-16; for the availability of
Byzantine astrology, see Ihor Sevcenko, “Remarks on the Diffusion of
Byzantine Scientific and Pseudo-Scientific Literature among the Orthodox
Slavs,” Slavonic and East European Review 59.3 (1981): 337-40.
49Ri~hard Stites, Gloss from 1978 on an offprint of D.M. Goldfrank,
“Judaizers,” The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History 15: 143-
46.
”AfED, 380.
51PatrickGeary, “L’humiliation des saints,” Annales. Economies, Socie‘tis,
Cultures 34 (1979): 27-42; it was outlawed by the 1274 Synod of Lyons.
S2AfED,47 1.
53N.G.Ustrialov, Skazaniia sovremennikov o Dmitrii samozvantse (2 vols.,
3rd ed., Kiev, 1859) 2: 27 (gratitude to Professor Isolde Thyret for this juicy
tidbit.)
s4See,for example, G.P. Filimonov, “Ocherki russkoi khristianskoi ikono-
grafii. 1. Sofiia Premudrost’ Bozhiia.” Vestnik Obshchestva drevnerusskogo
iskusstva pri Moskovskom publichnom muzei, 1 (1874), 1-6 (gratitude to
Professor Elizabeth Zelensky for this reference).
SSMichelFoucault, Discipline and Punish. the Birth of Prison (Trans. Alan
Sheridan, orig. 1975, New York, 1979), 42-69.; R. W. Scribner, Popular
Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (LondonJRonceverte,
1987).
T f . Thomas Acquinas, Summa theologica, translated by the Fathers of the
English Dominican Province (New York, 1947), 1218-19 (11-11, question 10,
article S), which mandates death for relapsed heretics.
”AfED, 381-82.
”AfED, 384.
59AfED.482. To apply a risky interpretation to Novgorodian Last Judgment
icons, where sinners are indeed being pushed by angels into the hellfire: if the
lower part of representation is a map, and Paradise is necessarily to the east,
then Satan’s abode must lie to the west: Gormin and Yarosh, Novgorod, pl. 175,
197.
60AfED472.
61Notethe analysis in L.A. Dmitriev, Zhitiinye povesti russkogo severa kak
pamiatniki literatury XIII-XVII v. (MOSCOW, 1973).
620. Bodianskii, “Moskovskie sobory na eretikov XVI-go veka,” ChOIDR
1847, 3.211-2.
 Burn, Baby, Burn 31

63Stoglav,G1. 5.18,22,27,37; 33, 41.16-23; Jack E. Kollmann, Jr., The

Moscow Stoglav (“Hundred Chapters”) Council of 1551 (2 vols, diss. Univ. of
Michigan, 1978), 526-67; cf. Makarii, lstoriia russkoi tserkvi, 5: 268-74.
W.1. Koretskii, “Vnov’ naidennoe protivoereticheskoe proizvedenie
Zinoviia Otenskogo,” Trudy otdela drevnerusskoi literatury 21 (1965): 171-72,
175-76. Zinovii also talks in general, but not specifically, of “heretics of whom
he has heard now, who are called ‘frogs,’ because they are less rational than
pigs, sound like snakes, and not only do not understand grammar or the great
philosophers, but do not even command the common writ and cannot read: they
only fatten themselves incessantly with inebriation, gluttony, and filth-as frogs
in a swamp.”

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David M. Goldfrank is Professor of History at Georgetown University, and

author of The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky (Kalamazoo, 1982) and The
Origins of the Crimean War (New York, 1993). He, Richard Stites, and
Catherine Evtuhov are currently writing a textbook of Russian history from the
origins to the present.