Abstracts
The Troubled Career of Sister Asklipiodata, a Convert Nun in Eighteenth-Century Kiev
This paper is a study in micro-history, which considers the case of Sister Asklipiodata, a Jewish convert to Christianity who took the veil in an Orthodox convent in the Ukrainian Hetmanate in the second half of the eighteenth century. Despite the abolition of Ukrainian political autonomy in 1764, individuals in holy orders continued to enjoy a special legal status until the secularisation of ecclesiastical properties in 1786 signalled a major weather change in monastic organisation in the Hetmanate’s former territories. Ukrainian monasteries’ relatively lax regime under the benevolent rule of local clerical hierarchy was replaced with a communal way of life, effectively controlled by the imperial state through the offices of the Holy Synod. Under the archaic ideorrhythmic (non-communal) regime, once admitted to the community, nuns purchased their own ‘cells’ in monastery grounds, which could subsequently be sold on or even inherited by next of kin, traded their own handiwork, continued to oversee private financial interests outside monastery walls, and each had a share in certain types of the monastery’s produce, especially alcohol. To a great extent, personal property conferred status and became the engine of social interaction both within and without convent grounds. Property relationships thus naturally morphed into social relations.
While benefitting individuals, whose financial standing was secure enough to afford them comfortable living within monastery walls, ideorrhythmic practices often proved deleterious to monastic discipline. Possession of money, goods and chattels by monks and nuns contradicted the most basic principles of monastic life such as the rule of poverty and obedience to superiors, complicated hierarchical relationships, created the sense of inequality among the inmates, and distracted them from the daily regimen of prayer and contemplation. The only two areas that remained common to the inmates within the ideorrythmically-organised monastic community, were liturgical services and the cemetery. Prior to the secularisations of the late eighteenth century, no expectation existed of Orthodox nuns engaging in charitable activities such as work in hospitals or orphanages. As often as not, property-centred conflicts became internal disputes about authority, as well as personal and communal rights. Most importantly, property relationships kept the sisters wedded to the world of secular concerns they were supposed to shun. The case study examined in this paper amply demonstrates that the idea of property even extended to a woman’s right to regulate interference with her body in a variety of contexts – familial, professional and legal.
Sister Asklipiodata’s Jewish and foreign origins afford an insight through the eyes of a convert from another religion into the state of Orthodox monasticism before the secularisations of the eighteenth century. Initially pulled in by the promise of ‘angelic life’, she underestimated its daily struggles and became frustrated when her expectations appeared not to have been met. Above all, Asklipiodata’s life story is a poignant illustration that property relationships, which permeated Orthodox monastic life under the old ideorrhythmic regime affected not just individual members of convent communities. On the level of quotidian concerns they shaped monastic life by creating a dense web of interactions between the monastery and the secular world. On the higher level of ecclesiastical structures, attachment to personal property often stood in the way of maintaining basic monastic principles, upset relationships within communities, impacted on the way individual nuns thought about themselves and regarded their ecclesiastical superiors, and opened up opportunities for manipulation on all sides. The official Orthodox Church was reluctant to press the rule of poverty on its monastic personnel. Monasticism had always been, and still remained, a mainstay of its claim of spiritual authority and moral superiority. An attempt at internal reform would have been tantamount to an implicit criticism of the status quo and grist to the mill of the proponents of further secularisation. For an individual under such conditions realising the higher calling of monastic life in full often proved to be an unsurmountable challenge.
– Liudmyla Sharipova, University of Nottingham
A full version of this paper was published as: "Of Meat, Men and Property: A Troubled Career of a Convert Nun in Eighteenth-Century Kiev", Journal of Ecclesiastical History, vol. 69, no. 2 (2017), pp. 278-99
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