September 21, 2019
Ievgeniia Sakal
Ph. D. Candidate at Yale University.
Ievgeniia Sakal
Ph. D. Candidate at Yale University.
Ievgeniia Sakal works on the religious history of early modern Ukraine, Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Her research investigates the circulation and availability of religious books, the use of patristic writings, and the culture of learned correspondence and doctrinal debates. A sixteenth-century Western theologian once said that the Reformation was carried out by books, not swords. The statement turned out to be correct for Eastern Europe as well. In the seventeenth century, a search for true Orthodoxy, initiated in Kyiv, spread north to Moscow as Ukrainian learned monks occupied positions at the tsarist court. There is little doubt that doctrinal debates required books.