Russian Folk Religious Imagination

FAIN: HD-50038-07

University of Kentucky Research Foundation (Lexington, KY 40506-0004)
Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby (Project Director: November 2006 to May 2009)

A robust web-based multimedia resource combining folk legends on saints and biblical figures, songs and religious rituals, and iconography of Russian Orthodoxy.

Russian Orthodoxy has been the source of a great deal of speculation about the extent of duoeverie (dual faith). Since the fall of the Soviet Union, scholars have undertaken the study of folk religion in earnest, but there is as yet no comprehensive study of the interrelations between various folk genres. Typically folklorists study either oral literature (e.g., legends and songs), or folk ritual and iconography. This separation of genres inhibits a full understanding of the complexity of the complete religious belief system. Our multimedia critical edition will feature an innovative cross-disciplinary approach combining the study of legends on saints and biblical figures, songs and religious rituals, and folk iconography into a single, comprehensive research project that will be published in a new digital framework designed to integrate text and multimedia into a coherent whole.