Education and Westernization in Eastern Orthodoxy: The Case of the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy of Moscow, 1685-1725

FAIN: FB-54341-09

Nikolaos Chrissidis
Southern Connecticut State University (New Haven, CT 06515-1330)

This book project concentrates on the first phase of the activity of the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy in Moscow (1685-1694), the first institution of higher education established in Russian history. The book chronicles the Academy's foundation and function; analyzes its contribution to Russian educational practice and to the secularization of Russian elite culture; and situates the Academy in the contexts of Russian-Greek cultural relations and of the increased contact between Russia and Western Europe in the seventeenth century. This first ever book-length study on the Academy in English will be of use not only to scholars of Russian, Balkan and Greek history, but also to specialists on religion and to historians of education. Given that the intersection of education and secularization is a central problem of humanistic scholarship and investigation, I also believe that my book will be of considerable interest to both scholars and general audiences in the humanities.

Associated Products

An Academy at the Court of the Tsars: Greek Scholars and Jesuit Education in Early Modern Russia (Book)
Title: An Academy at the Court of the Tsars: Greek Scholars and Jesuit Education in Early Modern Russia
Author: Nikolaos A. Chrissidis
Abstract: 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.
Year: 2016
Publisher: DeKalb: Northern Illinois Univbersity Press
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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