Gender and Salvation: Representations of Difference in Old Believer Writings from the Late Seventeenth Century to the 1820s

Abstract

Old Belief was the result of the seventeenth-century Schism (Raskol) in the Russian Orthodox Church. The Old Believers were those members of the Church who refused to accept the liturgical changes introduced by the patriarch Nikon and enforced by the state. From the seventeenth century this oppositional religious movement spread all over the Russian Empire and split into numerous inner divisions. The main division was between popovtsy (priestly) and bespopovtsy (priestless). The bespopovtsy declared that in the ‘last days’ the apostolic succession was interrupted; thus there were only two sacraments available to Christians — those of baptism and confession, both of which could be performed by a layman.