“Whose Wife Will She Be at the Resurrection?” Marriage and Remarriage in Early Modern Russia

Abstract

Although historians and publicists have frequentiy criticized the Orthodox Church for its failure to implant in parishioners much religious sensibility, Daniel H. Kaiser argues that the seventeenth-century church was much more successful than critics have contended. Examining litigation over bigamy and remarriage from the Russian north, Kaiser argues that clerics largely succeeded in articulating and enforcing a doctrine that affirmed the sacramental primacy of first marriage. In prosecuting bigamists and tracking down fugitives, church courts showed themselves fully competent to ascertain the facts surrounding marital disputes and then impose decisions upon the principals, many of whom, even while resisting the church's directives, betrayed knowledge of and appreciation for the church's view. Therefore, Kaiser concludes, we need to revise our estimate of the church's effectiveness in regulating domestic life in early modern Russia.