Under the Virgin's Veil: Monastic Spirituality, Gender, and Power in Stefan Iavors'kyi's Sermon to the Nuns of the Ascension Convent in Kyiv

A lecture by Maria Grazia Bartolini, Associate Professor of Medieval Slavic Culture and Slavic Linguistics at the University of Milan and Visiting Associate Professor, Department of Slavic Languages and Literature at Harvard

Moderated by Michael S. Flier, Oleksandr Potebnja Professor of Ukrainian Philology - Emeritus, Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures, Harvard University

About the Lecture

In this lecture, Dr. Maria Grazia Bartolini provides a detailed analysis of a sermon on the Intercession of the Theotokos, preached in 1694 by Stefan Iavors’kyi to the nuns of the prestigious Ascension Convent in Kyiv, the sister house of the male Monastery of the Caves. The sermon places exceptional emphasis on clothing metaphors. Nuns wore special clothes that defined their identity, and textile production was considered emblematic of female and monastic virtue. Using this observation as a starting point, Bartolini will embark on an examination of the identity, intentions, and anxieties of the sermon’s audience, clarifying how gender and power relations motivated the production of a text that emphasized monastic values while negotiating clerical expectations for the nuns’ lives and self-reflection.

About the Speaker

Maria Grazia Bartolini is an Associate Professor of Medieval Slavic Culture and Slavic Linguistics at the University of Milan. She received her Ph.D. in Slavic Language and Literatures from the University of Milan in 2010 and Dr. Habil in Slavic studies in 2017. She has a BA degree with honors from the University of Bologna. Her research focuses on the religious culture of early modern Ukraine, with special attention to the intersection of preaching, memory, and visual arts in seventeenth-century Ukraine, the political and social aspects of homiletic and hagiographical texts, and the reception of Christian Neoplatonism in the East Slavic region. Her monographs include Piznai samoho sebe (2017), a study on Hryhorii Skovoroda and Christian Neoplatonism, which was awarded the 2019 Ivan Franko International Prize; In the Tight Triangle of the Night. The Early Poetry of Yuriy Tarnawsky between Modernism and Postmodernism (Academic Studies Press, 2024); and The Eye of the Mind: Vision, Memory, and Meditation in Seventeenth-Century Ukrainian Preaching (Harvard Ukrainian Studies Series; forthcoming 2026). Her articles on memory, meditation, and visual imagery in early modern Ukraine were awarded the Early Slavic Studies Association (ESSA) Best Article Prize in 2017 and 2020 and an Honorable Mention from the American Association for Ukrainian Studies in 2021. Dr. Bartolini was a Research Fellow at HURI in 2024 and is currently a Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures at Harvard for the Fall 2025 term. 

This event is organized by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute as part of the Seminar in Ukrainian Studies public event series. It is co-sponsored by the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures.

Persons with disabilities who wish to request accommodations or who have questions about access should contact HURI Programs Manager, Megan K. Duncan Smith, at least two weeks in advance of the session.

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