Funding for this work was provided by the International Research and Exchanges Board and by a Faculty Development Grant, Westminster College. I thank both, especially Sandra Webster, Faculty Development Officer at Westminster College, for her continuing support of my research, and Connie Davis, of McGill Library at Westminster College, who routinely works magic for me on all matters bibliographical. I also wish to thank the staff of the Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov (RGADA) in Moscow for their assistance in locating the archival materials that form the core of this work. I am enormously grateful for the suggestions for revision from the editor, Mark D. Steinberg, and from two anonymous readers. Finally, I thankjean Getchell and Maynard Forbes, whose tranquil abode in rustic, coastal Maine provided the ideal and necessary setting to think and write about the problems of periodization in early modern Russia.

1. Grazia, Margreta de, “The Modern Divide: From Either Side,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 453.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. The literature on periodization is substantial, but some of the more recent and important tides include: Corfield, Penelope J., Time and the Shape of History (New Haven, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jameson, Fredric, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (New York, 2002)Google Scholar; Besserman, Lawrence, ed., The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (New York, 1996)Google Scholar; and the special issues of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (entitled “Medieval/Renaissance: After Periodization“) 37, no. 3 (Fall 2007) and the Modern Language Quarterly (entided “Periodization: Cutting Up the Past“) 62, no. 4 (December 2001). On Russia, see, for a start: Jarmo Kotilaine and Marshall Poe, eds., Modernizing Muscovy: Reform and Social Change in Seventeenth-Century Russia (London, 2004); and Daniel Clark Waugh, “We Have Never Been Modern: Approaches to the Study of Russia in die Age of Peter the Great,” Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas, n.s. 49, no. 3 (2001): 321–45.

3. See, for example, the classic textbook by Nicholas V Riasanovsky and Mark D. Steinberg, A History of Russia, 7th ed. (New York, 2005); or Auty, Robert and Obolensky, Dimitry, Companion to Russian Studies, vol. 1, An Introduction to Russian History (Cambridge, Eng., 1976).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. See Ocherki istorii SSSR, 9 vols. (Moscow, 1953–1958); and M. N. Pokrovskii, hbrannyeproizvedeniia, 4 vols. (Moscow, 1965–1967).

5. For an overview of the historiography on Peter I, see Riasanovsky, Nicholas V., The Image of Peter the Great in Russian History and Thought (New York, 1985)Google Scholar. The most dramatic expression of this view is perhaps that of the historian Mikhail P. Pogodin, whose paean to Peter I is quoted in Riasanovsky and Steinberg, History of Russia, 240–41.

6. Poe, Marshall T., The Russian Moment in World History (Princeton, 2006)Google Scholar.

7. No better illustration of the continuing lack of consensus on periodization can be offered than the titles of recent survey textbooks—each of them treating the chronological boundaries of Rus’ very differently: Maureen Perrie, ed., The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 1, FromEarly Rus’ to 1689 (Cambridge, Eng., 2006);Janet Martin, Medieval Russia, 980–1584, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Eng., 2008); Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200 (London, 1996); John Fennell, The Crisis of Medieval Russia, 1200–1304 (London, 1983); Crummey, Robert O., The Formation of Muscovy, 1304–1613 (London, 1987)Google Scholar; Dukes, Paul, The Making of Russian Absolutism, 1613–1801 (London, 1982)Google Scholar. See also Kaiser, Daniel H. and Marker, Gary, eds., Reinterpreting Russian History: Readings, 860–1860s (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; and Dmytryshyn, Basil, ed., Medieval Russia: A Source Book, 850–1700 (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 2000)Google Scholar.

8. Keenan, Edward L., “Muscovite Political Folkways,” Russian Review 45, no. 2 (April 1986): 115-81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Keenan, “An Approach to Russian History,” in Abraham Ascher, ed., Studying Russian and Soviet History (Boulder, Colo., 1987), 1–8; and Keenan, “The Trouble with Muscovy: Some Observations upon Problems of the Comparative Study of Form and Genre in Historical Writing,” Medievalia et Humanistica. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Culture, n.s., no. 5 (1974): 103–26; Kollmann, Nancy Shields, Kinship and Politics: The Making of the Muscovite Political System, 1345–1547 (Stanford, 1987)Google Scholar. One can trace the view advanced by Keenan and Kollmann back to the works of the distinguished Soviet historian Stepan Borisovich Veselovskii for perhaps the earliest hints of an interpretive paradigm of Muscovite political culture based on marriage and kinship. Stepan Borisovich Veselovskii, Issledovaniia po istorii klassa sluzhilykh zemlevladel'tsev (Moscow, 1969); Veselovskii, Issledovaniia po istorii oprichniny (Moscow, 1963); Veselovskii, , “Iz istorii drevnerusskogo zemlevladeniia: Rod Dmitriia Aleksandrovicha Zernova (Saburovy, Godunovy i Vel'iaminovy-Zernovy),” Isloricheskie zapiski, 1946, no. 18: 56–91.Google Scholar

9. Robert O. Crummey and Sergei Bogatyrev agree that kinship was a significant feature of Muscovite political culture, though they do not go so far as to embrace fully the anthropological model advanced by Keenan, Kollmann, and others. See Crummey, Robert O., Aristocrats and Servitors: The Boyar Elite in Russia, 1613–1689 (Princeton, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sergei Bogatyrev, The Sovereign and His Counsellors: Ritualised Consultations in Muscovite Political Culture, 1350s-1570s (Helsinki, 2000). See also the four responses to Keenan's “Muscovite Political Folkways” in Russian Review 46, no. 2 (April 1987): Robert O. Crummey, “The Silence of Muscovy,” 157–64; Robert V Daniels, “Russian Political Culture and the Post- Revolutionary Impasse,” 165–76; Richard Hellie, “Edward Keenan's Scholarly Ways,” 177- 90; and Richard Wortman, “'Muscovite Political Folkways’ and the Problem of Russian Political Culture,” 191–97. An alternative model for Muscovite court politics that all but ignores kinship and marriage is reflected and assumed in Richard Hellie, “Thoughts on the Absence of Elite Resistance in Muscovy,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 5–20; and Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York, 1974).

10. The best recent articulation of this view is in the monumental three-volume work by James Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery (Chicago, 1997); and Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Architecture (Chicago, 1988).

11. See, for example, Zitser, Ernest, The Transfigured Kingdom: Sacred Parody and Charismatic Authority at the Court of Peter the Great (Ithaca, 2004)Google Scholar; and Zitser, “The Difference That Peter Made,” in Simon Dixon, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Modern Russian History (Oxford, 2010).

12. See, for example, Ostrowski, Donald, Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, 1304–1589 (Cambridge, Eng., 1998)Google Scholar.

13. Kollmann, Nancy, By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (Ithaca, 1999), 251-52.Google Scholar

14. Kollmann, Kinship and Politics, 143.

15. Bibilioteka Rossiiskoi akademii nauk (BAN), 32.4.21, fol. 23v (a manuscript wedding compilation). Copies of the dowry inventory survive in one fragmentary original in Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov (RGADA), f. 135 (the Treasure Room, or Drevlekhranilishche), section IV, rubric II, no. 1, and in later manuscript copies in BAN, 16.15.15, fols. l-26v; BAN, 32.4.21, fols. 6–23v. Publications of these and related texts include Sbornik Imperatorskogo russkogo istoricheskogo obshchestva, 148 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1867–1916), 35:71–192; Nikolai [Ivanovich] Novikov, ed., Drevniaia rossiiskaia vivliofika: Soderzhashchaia v sebe sobranie drevnostei rossiiskikh, do istorii geografii, i genealogii rossiiskoi kasaiushchikhsia, 2d ed., 20 vols. (Moscow, 1788–1791; hereafter, DRV), 14:1–15; and V. I. Buganov, gen. ed., Razriadnaia kniga 1475–1606 gg., 3 vols. (Moscow, 1977–1989), 1:40–42.

16. On the marriage, see Russell E. Martin, “Ritual and Religion in the Foreign Marriages of Three Muscovite Princesses,” Russian History/Histoire RusseZb, nos. 3 - 4 (2008): 357–81; Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Zimin, Rossiia na rubezhe XV-XVIstoletii: Ocherki po solsial'no- politicheskoi istorii (Moscow, 1982); Zimin, Rossiia na poroge novogo vremeni (Ocherki politicheskoi istorii Rossii pervoi treti XVI v.) (Moscow, 1972);John L. I. Fennell, Ivan the Great, of Moscow (London, 1963); Konstantin Vasil'evich Bazilevich, Vneshniaia politika tsentralizovannogo gosudarstva (vtoraia polovina XV veka) (Leningrad, 1952).

17. See Martin, Russell E., “Gifts for the Bride: Dowries, Diplomacy, and Marriage Politics in Muscovy,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 119-45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. Allen, W. E. D., “The Georgian Marriage Projects of Boris Godunov,” Oxford Slavonic Papers 12 (1965)Google Scholar; and Allen, ed., Russian Embassies to the Georgian Kings (1589–1605), 2 vols., 2d series (Cambridge, Eng., 1970). See also Karamzin, Nikolai Mikhailovich, Istoriia Gosudarstvarossiiskogo, 5th ed. (Moscow, 1842-1843; reprint, 4 vols., Moscow, 1988), vol. 11, col. 28, and notes 59 and 77.Google Scholar

19. The classic work on the Valdemar affair remains Golubtsov, A. P., Preniia o vere, vyzvannyia delom korolevicha Val'demara i tsarevny Iriny Mikhailovny (Moscow, 1891)Google Scholar. See also “Pamiatniki prenii o vere, voznikshikh po delu korolevicha Val'demara i tsarevny Iriny Mikhailovny,” Chteniia v Imperatorshom obshchestva istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikhpri Moskovskom universitele. Sbornik, no. 161, (1892, Bk. 2): 1–305 (II. Materialy istoriko-literaturnye).

20. On religion as an obstacle to dynastic marriages, see Martin, “Ritual and Religion“; and Martin, “Gifts for the Bride.“

21. Anna Petrovna's wedding to Karl Friedrich of Holstein-Gottorp took place just months after Peter I's death, but the marriage alliance was negotiated by Peter I in the last years of his life. See Martin, “Ritual and Religion.“

22. See Hughes, Lindsey, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven, 1998), 51, 261–62,405–6,411–15.Google ScholarPubMed

23. See Hughes, Lindsey, The Romanovs: Ruling Russia, 1613–1917 (London, 2008), 86.Google Scholar

24. Crummey, Aristocrats and Servitors, 77.

25. See Martin, Russell E., “Dynastic Marriage in Muscovy, 1500–1729,” 2 vols. (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1996), 1:30–74 Google Scholar; Nazarov, V. D., “Svadebnye dela XVI v.,” Voprosy istorii, 1976, no. 10: 110-23Google Scholar; and Zabelin, Ivan Egorovich, Domashnii byt russkikh tsarist (Moscow, 1869), 207-69.Google Scholar

26. Grigorii Kotoshikhin provides a vivid, and somewhat resentful, image of how this worked. See Grigorij K. Kotosixin, o Rossii v carstvovanie Alekseja Mixajlovica, ed. A. E. Pennington (Oxford, 1980), 29.

27. See Martin, “Dynastic Marriage,” 1:68–72.

28. On the seclusion of elite women in Muscovy, see Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols, 64–84; and Nancy Kallmann, “The Seclusion of Elite Muscovite Women,” Russian History/'HistoireRusselO, nos. 1–2 (1983): 170–87.

29. LeDonne, John P., “Ruling Families in the Russian Political Order, 1689–1825,” Cahiers du Monde russeet sovietique 28 (1987): 233–322.Google Scholar

30. The persistence of traditional notions of marriage politics in the post-Petrine court is also demonstrated by a document compiled by or on the orders of Menshikov in June 1727, shortly after Catherine I's death, containing a list of all the former empress's relatives: RGADA, f. 156 (Ceremonial Collection), op. 1, no. 197. The document's clear purpose was to have at hand a list of royal relatives who might now be positioned to play a role at court or in the marriage market precisely because they were the relatives of Peter I's wife. Compare this document with the text drawn up in December 1546 or January 1547 describing the kinship network of Ovdot'ia Vasil'evna Gundorova, a candidate for Ivan Pv“s first marriage: RGADA, f. 135, sec. IV, rub. II, no. 5, fol. 58; and Nazarov, “Svadebnye dela XVI v.,” 116 (document no. 1)

31. For the Petrine Law of Succession, see Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii (PSZ), series 1 (1649–1825), 45 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1830), 6:496–97, no. 3893 (5 February 1722). Succession in Kievan Rus’ has been studied by many of the most important scholars of the period, but the finest treatments of it are the most recent: Donald Ostrowski, “Systems of Kinship Succession in Rus’ and Steppe Societies” (unpublished paper, 2008); and Martin, Medieval Russia. Succession in Muscovy has been ably studied by many as well, among the best of which remains Peter Nitsche, Grossfiirst und Thronfolger: Die Nachfolgefmlitik der Moskauer Herrscher bis zum Ende der Rjurikenhauses (Cologne, 1972).

32. Gary Marker, Imperial Saint: The Cult of St. Catherine and the Dawn of Female Rule in Russia (DeKalb, 2007), 218–19.

33. See Hughes, Romanovs, 137–38. Paul I's tenth child, a daughter Ol'ga, died young. See also the texts of the law and early decrees on the succession at the official Web site of the Russian Imperial House: www.imperialhouse.ru (uanslations from Russian to English by the author). See also the study of the imperial succession by Brien Horan, “The Russian Imperial Succession,” at www.riuo.org/RussianImperialSuccession/russianimperialsuccession.html (last accessed 28 February 2010).

34. PSZ, series 1, 24:587–89, no. 17.910 (5 April 1797).

35. PSZ, series 1, 37:129–30, no. 28.208 (20 March 1820).

36. On the Pauline law and Alexander I's amendment, see Richard Wortman, “The 'Fundamental State Laws’ of 1832 as Symbolic Act,” in Miscellanea slavica: Sbornik statei k 70-letiiu Borisa Andreevicha Uspenskogo (Moscow, 2008); Wortman, , “Russian Monarchy and the Rule of Law: New Considerations of the Court Reform of 1864,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 145-70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wortman, , Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in the Russian Monarchy, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1995 and 2000), 1:176-78Google Scholar.

37. The old families would remain prominent, even as they had to make room at the top of the government for new families that had risen through the ranks of the bureaucracy. On this, see the excellent study by Dominic Lieven, Russia's Ruleis under the Old Regime (New Haven, 1989).

38. The requirement for Ebenbiirtigkeit under the Pauline law was such that even Alexander I I's second marriage, to Ekaterina Mikhailovna Dolgorukova, who was a princess of the Riurikid dynasty and of the same family as Tsar Mikhail Romanov's first wife, was deemed morganatic, with their children having no rights of succession. Morganatic marriages became the norm among Romanovs after 1917 and today membership in the family is reduced to three members: the legal claimant, Grand Duchess Mariia Vladimirovna (Nicholas I I's first cousin, twice removed), her mother, Grand Duchess Leonida Georg'evna (of the Georgian royal house of Bagration-Mukhranskii), and her son, Grand Duke Georgii Mikhailovich.

39. See Zitser, Transfigured Kingdom; and Zitser, “The Difference That Peter Made.“

40. The literature on these groups and this process of social stratification and elaboration is substantial. See, for a start, Pintner, Walter McKenzie and Rowney, Don Karl, eds., Russian Officialdom: The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gregory L. Freeze, “The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History,” American Historical Review 91, no. 1 (February 1986): 11–36; Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Structures of Society: Imperial Russia's “People of Various Ranks“ (DeKalb, 1994); and Hughes, Romanovs, 4, 139.

41. Keenan, “Muscovite Political Folkways,” 116; Kollmann, Kinship and Politics, 1, 72, 146–51. See also Russell E. Martin, “Political Folkways and Praying for the Dead in Muscovy: Reconsidering Edward Keenan's ‘Slight’ against the Church,” Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes 48, nos. 3 - 4 (September-December 2006): 269–90; and Moss, Walter G., A History of Russia, vol. 1, To 1917, 2d ed. (London, 2005), 176.Google Scholar