OLD BELIEVERS.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Composite sbornik. A remarkable Old Believers' miscellany with dozens of devotional and theological texts, half of which apparently unrecorded, dating mostly from the 18th and 19th centuries.The community of the Old Believers (Raskolniki) developed after the religious reforms introduced by Patriarch Nikon in 1652, which advocated greater alignment with the practices of the Greek Orthodox Church. Nikon's reforms met with strong resistance by the supporters of the old Russian ritual in Moscow. The Pan-Orthodox Synod (1666), spearheaded by Tsar Alexis, precipitated the situation towards a schism (raskol) of the Russian Orthodox Church; previously imprisoned Old Believers were declared heretics and sentenced to exile and imprisonment. "The mass flight of Old Believers from persecution by the authorities, towards the outskirts of Russia, contributed to the creation of centres of Old Believer manuscript literature" (Medvedeva, p. 69), especially in remote areas of the country.Old Believers' manuscripts typically blended the biblical, the hagiographic, and the didactic, canonical and traditional motifs, as well as scriptural, apocryphal, and popular sources. While they saw printing itself "as a symbol of detested Tsarist authority" (Carey, p. 207), they also "rejected many liturgical and orthographic reforms in the Russian Orthodox Church... and often held on to the oldest available editions and produced new texts in the oldest possible styles" (Rogers, p. 28). This miscellany inclu

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