Trivent Publishing © Trivent (2018) Available online at http://trivent-publishing.eu/ Bricks to Bones: Royal Women and the Construction of Holy Place in the Stepennaia Kniga1 Rosie Finlinson Department of Slavonic Studies, University of Cambridge, U.K.,
[email protected] Abstract This essay explores the symbolic envisioning of the royal woman in the sixteenth-century Muscovite “Book of Royal Degrees.” It argues that the princesses figure as carriers not only of royal heirs but also as signifiers of spiritual capital and territorial legitimacy for the ruling dynasty, as they map the physical and spiritual borders of Orthodox Muscovy through their association with holy sites. The terms of their veneration move with the geo-political imperatives of the text, and the consolidation of political power in the Kremlin manifests itself in the body, and eventually the womb, of the woman carrying the Muscovite autocrat. Keywords: female sanctity; Early Modern Russia; Book of Royal Degrees; place; body. 1 I would like to thank CEELBAS AHRC Centre for Doctoral Training for funding this research. This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0) license, which permits others to copy or share the article, provided original work is properly cited and that this is not done for commercial purposes. Users may not remix, transform, or build upon the material and may not distribute the modified material (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) Bricks to Bones: Royal Women and the Construction of Holy Place in the Stepennaia Kniga1 Rosie Finlinson University of Cambridge, United Kingdom Introduction The Stepennaia Kniga or the “Book of Royal Degrees” (hereafter SK) is a sixteenth-century historical compendium produced under the rule of Ivan IV of Muscovy.2 Work on the SK began around the mid-1550s and it was compiled between 1560 and 1563.