People and Lands of the Russian Monastery on the Way to the Early Modern Period Review of Troitse-Sergiev monastyr' v XV–XVIII vv. [Trinity–St. Sergius Monastery in the 15th–18th centuries], by M.S. Cherkasova (Vologda: Drevnosti Severa, 2024)

The book by Marina S. Cherkasova, Professor of Vologda State University, published in 2024, is the third monograph in her scientific work devoted to the social and economic history of the Trinity–St. Sergius Monastery. While the previous books were based on the materials of the author’s PhD and doctoral dissertations, the present one, unlike them, is a collection of thematic regional essays compiled from previously published and new articles. Summing up the results of many years of research and outlining the prospects for further research work, M. Cherkasova presents to the reader not a complete picture but rather a mosaic of the life of the main Russian monastic community and its vast patrimony for four centuries and tries to answer the question about the reasons for the phenomenally long continuous growth of the monastery’s estate. Not only did the transition from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period hardly interrupt it, but it lent this process a new impetus. Consistently adhering to the formational approach in the version of the Soviet historical and agrarian tradition, the author proves that the reasons for the stability of the entire monastic organism up to the 1760s lay in the gradual strengthening of the elements of monetary economy and the priority of serf ownership over land ownership. The Trinity’s patrimony was an autonomous multitier highly differentiated system capable of self-regulation that developed asynchronously. Its structural basis was formed by a complex interweaving of power-proprietary and immune principles, which made it possible to achieve “unity through diversity,” harmonizing the archaic and the innovative.
Being based on extensive and professionally researched material and sources, the book by M. Cherkasova demonstrates that both as a concept and a derivative of the Marxist methodology, feudalism in a creative rather than dogmatic interpretation still retains its potential in a comprehensive analysis of Russian historical dynamics.

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