The Origins of the Domostroi: A Study in Manuscript History

Abstract

Sometime in the 1540s,1 a priest named Sil'vestr left his Novgorodian birthplace and traveled to Moscow to take up a post at the Cathedral of the Annunciation in the Kremlin. He supposedly brought with him a book titled the Domostroi (house order-i.e., domestic management), which he himself had written or edited and which offered advice on domestic matters. Since Sil'vestr is often portrayed as Ivan the Terrible's confessor and as the main architect of the 1550s governmental reforms, the possibility that the Domostroi influenced the Terrible Tsar's thinking and policies has assured it a place in Muscovite history.2 The work has, however, received little attention since 1917, so current views on its origins and its place in Muscovite society rest on preliminary, even impressionistic, studies written before the revolution.3 Because the Domostroi is such a potentially useful source for understanding the views of sixteenth-century Muscovites, and because it has been so long since any detailed study of it was made, this article takes an inventory of current views on the text. Using only the extant copies as data, it assesses what information these copies contain about the history of the Domostroi. This assessment reveals that much of the received opinion about the text should be reexamined.