Description
Book SynopsisThe first formally organized educational institution in Russia was established in 1685 by two Greek hieromonks, Ioannikios and Sophronios Leichoudes. Like many of their Greek contemporaries in the seventeenth century, the brothers acquired part of their schooling in colleges of post-Renaissance Italy under a precise copy of the Jesuit curriculum. When they created a school in Moscow, known as the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy, they emulated the structural characteristics, pedagogical methods, and program of studies of Jesuit prototypes. In this original work, Nikolaos A. Chrissidis analyzes the academy''s impact on Russian educational practice and situates it in the contexts of Russian-Greek cultural relations and increased contact between Russia and Western Europe in the seventeenth century. Chrissidis demonstrates that Greek academic and cultural influences on Russia in the second half of the seventeenth century were Western in character, though Orthodox in doctrinal terms. He
Trade Review
The title of this fine monograph may obscure for nonspecialists its subject's larger historical significance. No less than the origins of higher education in Russia, or college-level training in theology, philosophy, science, and the humanities, are being examined here. Put otherwise, the book recounts in detail the arrival in late seventeenth-century Russia of one major element of post-Renaissance, post-Reformation European high culture, a development that worked eventually to bring Russia, with often spectacular results, into the modern intellectual mainstream.
* The Catholic Historical Review *
An Academy at the Court of the Tsars is insightful, well-researched, and persuasive. For Russian historians it reveals a new side of late Muscovy. For scholars of Jesuit studies it provides a vivid demonstration of the influence and flexibility of the Jesuit educational model.
* Journal of Jesuit Studies *
In addition to its very important contribution to the history of education in Russia, this book is a testament to the genius of Jesuit pedagogical principles and their adaptability to a variety of social and religious contexts.
* The Russian Review *
Chrissidis should be commended for preparing an approachable text for an audience beyond Russian studies that investigates knowledge networks and the reception of new scientific philosophies in Russia.
* Journal of Early Modern History *
This important monograph comprises a valuable study on the roots of western-oriented education in Russia, and, indeed, on the intellectual development of the Orthodox East.
* Slavic Review *
Chrissidis's research is an engaging scholarly endeavor, which will be useful to those interested in early modern Russian history, the history of education and intellectual life in Russia, and Russia's relations with Western Europe and the Orthodox East.
* Slavic and East European Journa *
