An Academy at the Court of the Tsars

The first formally organized educational institution in Russia was established in 1685 by two Greek hieromonks, Ioannikios and Sophronios Leichoudes. Like many of their Greek contemporaries in the seventeenth century, the brothers acquired part of their schooling in colleges of post-Renaissance Italy under a precise copy of the Jesuit curriculum. When they created a school in Moscow, known as the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy, they emulated the structural characteristics, pedagogical methods, and program of studies of Jesuit prototypes. In this original work, Nikolaos A. Chrissidis analyzes the academy's impact on Russian educational practice and situates it in the contexts of Russian-Greek cultural relations and increased contact between Russia and Western Europe in the seventeenth century. Chrissidis demonstrates that Greek academic and cultural influences on Russia in the second half of the seventeenth century were Western in character, though Orthodox in doctrinal terms. He also shows that Russian and Greek educational enterprises were part of the larger European pattern of Jesuit academic activities that impacted Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox educational establishments and curricular choices. An Academy at the Court of the Tsars is the first study of the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy in English and the only one based on primary sources in Russian, Church Slavonic, Greek, and Latin. It will interest scholars and students of early modern Russian and Greek history, of early modern European intellectual history and the history of science, of Jesuit education, and of Eastern Orthodox history and culture.

Open Access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities

Nikolaos A. Chrissidis is professor of Russian history at Southern Connecticut State University. He is coeditor of Religion and Identity in Russia and the Soviet Union and has published articles and essays on Russian pilgrimage to the Holy Land, ritual drinking, tobacco smoking, and public penance.

Chrissidis's research is an engaging scholarly endeavor, which will be useful to those interested in early modern Russian history, the history of education and intellectual life in Russia, and Russia's relations with Western Europe and the Orthodox East.

This important monograph comprises a valuable study on the roots of western-oriented education in Russia, and, indeed, on the intellectual development of the Orthodox East.

Chrissidis should be commended for preparing an approachable text for an audience beyond Russian studies that investigates knowledge networks and the reception of new scientific philosophies in Russia.

In addition to its very important contribution to the history of education in Russia, this book is a testament to the genius of Jesuit pedagogical principles and their adaptability to a variety of social and religious contexts.

An Academy at the Court of the Tsars is insightful, well-researched, and persuasive. For Russian historians it reveals a new side of late Muscovy. For scholars of Jesuit studies it provides a vivid demonstration of the influence and flexibility of the Jesuit educational model.

The title of this fine monograph may obscure for nonspecialists its subject's larger historical significance. No less than the origins of higher education in Russia, or college-level training in theology, philosophy, science, and the humanities, are being examined here. Put otherwise, the book recounts in detail the arrival in late seventeenth-century Russia of one major element of post-Renaissance, post-Reformation European high culture, a development that worked eventually to bring Russia, with often spectacular results, into the modern intellectual mainstream.

Valerie Kivelson, University of Michigan:

An important, original, and well-written work, with a major contribution to make. Chrissidis's immersion in the sources, both archival and published, and his familiarity with the secondary literature are extraordinary.

Robert Collis, University of Sheffield:

Chrissidis should be commended for producing a highly readable text on a complex topic. At no point is the reader overwhelmed by the intricacies of Aristotelianism, Orthodox theology, or the machinations of the Muscovite State. Instead, Chrissidis elucidates his arguments in an accessible and engaging manner.