“Delight in Exposing the Old Methods of the Country”

This chapter shows how Russia's first emperor drew on a range of antecedents — Muscovite weddings, parodic weddings of jesters and fools, and foreign models — to retool royal wedding rites for his own purposes. The chapter, however, treats the weddings of the Petrine era as a unit. It explores how royal weddings were linked to the parodic weddings both to create a new ritual rubric for royal weddings and to help Peter I not only advance his reforms but establish a model of monarchy rooted in his own charismatic authority, rather than traditional dynastic rule. It also situates the weddings of the era in the context of their immediate precursors — the weddings of Peter's elder brothers and the second wedding of his father, which were themselves a departure from the traditional nuptial rites of passage that had been performed in the sixteenth and most of the seventeenth centuries. Ultimately, the chapter brings many of the themes that the previous chapters have explored — ritual, dynasty, religion, and women at weddings and in the larger political culture — into the Petrine era, revealing that, for all the changes in form, the function of the tsar's (and later, emperor's) happy occasion remained much the same: politics and power.