Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas
Herausgegeben im Auftrag des Osteuropa-Instituts Regensburg
von Martin Schulze Wessel und Dietmar Neutatz
Band 58 (2010) H. 3, S. 442-443
Ludmila V. Charipova Latin books and the Eastern Orthodox clerical elite in Kiev 1632–1780. Manchester University Press Manchester, New York 2006. 272 S. = Studies in Early Modern European History. ISBN: 978-0-7190-7296-3.
Dr. Charipova of University College, Dublin, has a problem: in the same way that a biographer might use the titles in a personal library to elucidate the interests, priorities, and intellectual heritage of his subject, so the “printed Western literature” held by the library of the Kiev-Mohyla Academy should make “it possible to determine what the objectives for the founding of the library and its subsequent operation […] may have been.” The problem is that the library of some 8,632 books and its only catalogue were almost “completely destroyed” in a great fire on February 29, 1780. It’s not entirely clear how its books were catalogued and shelved, whether it was divided into an ‘old’ and a ‘new’ section, or whether there was a students’ section, a lending library, and a non-circulating research division. Therefore the few surviving volumes cannot be reliably be considered representative of the lost collection. Diligent searching by Charipova has produced just “203 volumes (262 titles some bound together) of printed books and eleven manuscripts that belonged to the pre-fire” collection. This dismally meager list can be supplemented with incomplete records of the Latin books in the private collection of Metropolitan Peter Mohyla, subsequently donated to his school (extant about 30 titles of an original collection of some 2,000 volumes); and the detailed records of the donations of Kiev-educated divines made in the decade before the catastrophic fire.
Around this slender, hard-won body of evidence, Dr. Charipova has constructed an admirable monograph. She ably surveys recent work on the history of the book and early-modern librarianship. She tells the story of Mohyla and his Latin school succinctly and well. Above all she reports on the nature and content of extant and identifiable books from Mohyla’s collection, from subsequent acquisitions, and among those books that survived the fire. She concludes that the library was essential to the Jesuit-modeled education of the Academy, and that it aided the survival of the Orthodox community in the hostile Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. She finds its theological strengths predictably in Jesuit, and more surprisingly in German Protestant writers. She argues that while Kiev’s Orthodox Latinism fostered a neo-Aristotelian, neo-scholastic humanism based on Jesuit prototypes, theologically it also reflected Mohyla’s own ecumenism: “He did not see any real difference between Orthodoxy and Rome.” Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the library attests to the role of the Academy in raising generations of Ruthenian youths in a love for the Latin classics, and especially for the vocabulary, imagery, and symbolism imparted in its courses in poetics and rhetoric. This Ukrainian humanism transformed the Orthodox of the Commonwealth in the seventeenth century and of Russia after Peter the Great.
Serendipitously, just as fire consumed the Kievan collection, Catherine II’s great school reform was preparing to end the century-old struggle of Latin humanism to take hold in the Russian empire.
Max J. Okenfuss, St. Louis
Zitierweise: Max J. Okenfuss über: Ludmila V. Charipova: Latin books and the Eastern Orthodox clerical elite in Kiev 1632–1780. Manchester University Press Manchester, New York 2006. = Studies in Early Modern European History. ISBN: 978-0-7190-7296-3, in: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas. Neue Folge, 58 (2010) H. 3, S. 442-443: http://www.oei-dokumente/JGO/Rez/Okenfuss_Charipova_Latin_Books.html (Datum des Seitenbesuchs)