Narrating Mary's Miracles and the Politics of Location in Late 17th-Century East Slavic Orthodoxy

The subject of this paper is miracles, specifically Marian miracle tales that, between the mid-1660s and the early 18th century, emanated from the pens of Ukrainian monks in such profusion that they, along with several other new works of Mariology produced over a somewhat longer period, constituted an imposing body of literature, in some senses unprecedented within East Slavic Orthodoxy.1 The monks in question, Ioanykii Haliatovs'kyi, Lazar' Baranovych, and Dimitrii Tuptalo (Saint Dimitrii Rostovskii) were astoundingly prolific, and several of their works gained extensive visibility throughout the East Slavic world, including some of the Marian texts. Accounts of the miraculous suffused the sacral narratives of Byzantine and Roman Christianity, of course, and they comprised much of the corpus of Rus' Orthodoxy. But the appearance and circulation of so many new compilations and even completely original texts of Marian miracles over such a short time should pique our interest. Emerging from one small corner of Orthodox Christendom, these books radiated in several directions, some