Cultural Tropes and Political Power in Early Modern Russia

Political power, elite support for the throne, and political ideologies were not solely represented by institutional rules or developed in polemical texts anywhere in early modern Europe. The two books reviewed below discuss, in different ways, how the vast and “undergoverned” early modern Russian Empire mustered its cultural resources to project political power and promote diffuse, if widely shared, political ideals outside of institutions and polemical texts. Instead, the ruling dynasties used art, architecture, and symbolic ritual to reinforce their divine authority and promote the related goals of unity, security, and social stability. The results contribute in important ways not only to understanding the ideals projected, but also to ongoing discussion about the dating of important transformations (“modernization”) in Russian society of the early modern period.  