ePub The Nazi Germany Sourcebook: An Anthology of Texts by From Routledge in History

Description

This book dispels the widely-held view that paganism survived in Russia alongside Orthodox Christianity; demonstrating that 'double belief'; dvoeverie; is in fact an academic myth. Scholars; citing the medieval origins of the term; have often portrayed Russian Christianity as uniquely muddied by paganism; with 'double-believing' Christians consciously or unconsciously preserving pagan traditions even into the twentieth century. This volume shows how the concept of dvoeverie arose with nineteenth-century scholars obsessed with the Russian 'folk' and was perpetuated as a propaganda tool in the Soviet period; colouring our perception of both popular faith in Russian and medieval Russian culture for over a century. It surveys the wide variety of uses of the term from the eleventh to the seventeenth century; and contrasts them to its use in modern historiography; concluding that our modern interpretation of dvoeverie would not have been recognized by medieval clerics; and that 'double-belief' is a modern academic construct. Furthermore; it offers a brief foray into medieval Orthodoxy via the mind of the believer; through the language and literature of the period.