Maria Grazia Bartolini

HURI Research Fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University

September - December 2024
Supported by HURI with the Lev and Oksana Iwanna Sijak Szczur Ukrainian Fund

 

HURI Research Project

Immaculate Conception(s): The Virgin, the Purity of the Political Body, and the Building of a Pietas Kiovensis in Early Modern Ukraine

The project examines how Ukrainian Orthodox intellectuals creatively defined, appropriated, and popularized the doctrine of Mary’s Immaculate Conception, looking at the different religious, political, and ecclesiastical interests that intersect in their textual and visual representations of the Immaculate Virgin. This study centers on the premise that the Immaculate Conception is a particularly useful symbol to “think with”— an ideological space in which individuals and communities could articulate their Orthodox selves and view larger questions such as confessional purity, Church and State authority, and the unity of the political body. What can the use of this controversial doctrine can tell us about the broader changes in religion and theology that pervaded the territories of the Kyiv Metropolitanate during the second half of the seventeenth century, which historians of other regions have examined from the perspective of “confessionalization”? In tracing the varied contours of the discourse of immaculacy, this project tests the explanatory possibilities of two propositions. First, it argues that the idea of purity encapsulated in the doctrine is to be interpreted in a larger political frame — as a reflection of the Kyiv Metropolitanate and the Hetmanate as political entities deeply entangled in religious, confessional, and political problems. Second, it argues that in the last decades of the seventeenth century, there is a transference of Immaculist iconography and symbols to subjects other than the Virgin Mary. This shift invariably takes place in rhetorical contexts charged with political meanings, bringing together abstract theological propositions, devotional practices, and local and supernational politics. This speaks to the existence of what the author terms a “Pietas Kiovensis” (Kyivan piety), a specific set of beliefs, doctrines, and rituals that was distinctive of Kyivan Orthodoxy, and in which the Immaculate Conception played an important role.

Biography

Dr. 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 Bologna University. 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; The Eye of the Mind: Vision, Memory, and Meditation in Seventeenth-Century Ukrainian Preaching (forthcoming in late 2024) and In the Tight Triangle of the Night. The Early Poetry of Yuriy Tarnawsky between Modernism and Postmodernism (forthcoming in February 2024). 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.