Peter the Great’s Project for the Publication of Secular Textbooks

Abstract

This article attempts to reconstruct the readership of the first printed secular textbooks published at the initiative of Peter I during his Grand Embassy (1697–1698). Seven of the textbooks were printed in Amsterdam in the printing house of Jan Thesing (1659–1701), a local merchant to whom Peter granted a monopoly on the sale of educational books in Russia. Later, Ilya Fedorovich Kopievsky (c. 1651–1714), the compiler of these books and in practice the founder of Thesing’s printing house, published four more books in other printing houses and sent them to Russia. It is generally accepted that these books did not reach a mass readership and therefore did not play a significant role in Peter’s reforms. Justifying this opinion, researchers usually refer to the data of bibliographers and book historians of the nineteenth and centuries, who insisted that such books were rare. However, the new copies that have been discovered recently and new historical evidence about their circulation in Russia have led to doubts about the validity of this generally accepted point of view. The purpose of this study is to reconstruct the distribution and readers of Kopievsky’s books in the light of the data available today. In addition to books themselves, the study refers to catalogues of old printed books, archival materials, and historiсal surveys. Additionally, it outlines the context in which the books appeared, questions the prevailing view that they were little-known in Russia, and summarises the data about their distribution and readership accumulated by historians between the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries. In the conclusion, the author explains the need to return to the question of the role of these first printed textbooks in the transformations of Russian culture during the first decades of the eighteenth century. It also assumes that the readership of these books was wider than has long been believed and that their contribution to the history of Russian education and science was more significant.