‘So They Will Love Me and Pine for Me’: Intimacy and Distance in Early Modern Russian Magic

Abstract

In early modern Russia, intimacy and physical contact were essential to the efficacy of enchantment. Yet Muscovites also moved in a broader world populated by strangers. Judges, officers, ‘powerful people’, or the tsar himself were manipulated by spells that would make them ‘love me and pine for me’, the spell-caster. In a society reliant on kinship, patronage, and protection, power was negotiated through the language of filial love, childish dependency, and patriarchal obligation. Love magic transferred its passion play into the political sphere, working its emotional enchantments on an expansive spatial and social plane. This chapter explores the translation of love magic from the proximate and intimate to the generic and political and the power of emotion in both arenas.