The Image of Apocalyptic Woman in the Publicism of the First Half of the Sixteenth Century in Russia

Abstract

From the end of the fifteenth century, a wider presence and use of the Apocalypse can be observed in Russia, probably due to cultural influences from the West, where this New Testament book and its exegesis were much more widespread in the context of medieval prophethood and reform trends. Certainly, the question of dating the end of the world, which troubled the consciences of the time and which in the East Slavic world appears to be connected to the question of the seventh millennium (1492), had to play an important role.
It is in this context that the author proposes to interpret the different use of the image of the Apocalyptic Woman found in the writing On offences against the Church, in the Letter of the Pskov starec Filofei to the d’jak M.G. Misjur’ Munechin, as well as in the Discourse on instability and chaos by Maximus the Greek. While in the former, the anonymous author keeps the eschatological horizon in the foreground with a strong appeal to fidelity to the Christian tradition not only in doctrinal, but also in moral terms, in his Letter, the starec Filofej adopts this image to illustrate his idea of the transfer of the Christian Church and at the same time of imperial power to Moscow. In his turn, the Athonite monk transforms the image of the woman into a figure of the charisma of power, constructing a dialogue in which the protagonist Vasilija illustrates the moral decadence of the empires and kingdoms of his time by calling for the conversion of the rulers and following an approach that remains alien to the idea of the Third Rome.