An inquiry into the girls school at Serbian Queen Helen’s court

Abstract

Archbishop Daniel II wrote The Life of Queen Helen about ten years after the death of this Serbian queen (1314), wife to King Uros I. It is a work of complex structure which features a harmonious intertwining of information from the biography of queen and nun Helen with an extensive exposition of the author. The work depicts the Queen?s early commencement of good deeds: she fed the poor, clothed the naked, hosted the homeless and richly donated to churches and priests. ?She was not pleased only with this,? says the Life at a later place, ?but she also added another virtue to that; she ordered that in all of her lands the daughters of poor parents should be assembled, and feeding them at her court, she brought them up in all good manners and handiwork befitting the female sex.? This place drew critical attention very early on, having been interpreted as the foundation of the first girls school in Serbia, and it remains the most popular part of the Life until the present day. However, that passage can only be found in one copy of the Life of Queen Helen - the most recent one, from 1780 (The Library of the Serbian Patriarchate in Belgrade, Cod. 51). That circumstance, as well as the fact that the quoted passage contains words not used by Archbishop Daniel II, may lead us to a conclusion that it is actually an interpolation into the Life?s original text. The story of a girls school at Queen Helen court was taken from Zaharija Orfelin?s book The History of Peter the Great, printed in 1772, which copiously described Tsarina Catherine II?s merits in educating female and poor children in Russia. The information from Orfelin?s book was transposed and adapted to the style of Daniel II?s text, and the characteristics of the enlightened Russian Tsarina were projected onto the person of Serbian Queen Helen. That was done very skilfully, due to which this interpolation in The Life of Queen Helen has so far been undetected.