Against the veritable explosion of research in Catholic women's communities over the last several decades, female monasticism in the Eastern Orthodox Church still remains a relatively understudied subject.Footnote ¹ This essay aims to redress this imbalance by considering the case of Sr Asklipiodata, a Jewish convert to Christianity who took the veil in an Orthodox convent in the Ukrainian Hetmanate in the second half of the eighteenth century. A semi-autonomous state that included territories to the east of the Dnieper river with the city of Kiev on its right, western, bank, the Hetmanate was ruled by elective hetmans who recognised the tsar of Muscovy as their suzerain. The 1654 Pereiaslav Treaty that created the Hetmanate recognised Russian protectorate over the Ukrainian lands in return for the tsar's guarantee of the traditional rights and privileges that their Orthodox population exercised under Polish-Lithuanian rule, including local ecclesiastical practices, property rights of religious institutions and individual freedoms of monastic and clerical personnel.Footnote ² Despite the abolition of Ukrainian political autonomy in 1764, individuals in holy orders continued to enjoy a special legal status secured under the treaty until the secularisation of ecclesiastical properties in 1786 signalled a major weather change in monastic organisation in the Hetmanate's former territories. Ukrainian monasteries’ non-communal and relatively lax regime under the benevolent rule of the local clerical hierarchy gave way to a communal way of life effectively controlled by the imperial state through the offices of the Holy Synod based in St Petersburg.Footnote ³

In the rest of the Russian Empire the archaic non-communal (ideorrhythmic) monastic regime had been replaced with communal living after the secularisation of monasteries in 1764. The latter refers ‘not only to a common table and church services in common, but also to a common distribution both of work and of all necessary provisions’. The monastic individual, whether working with others or alone, gave his or her work over to his or her superior; s/he received no individual pay or goods, but only what s/he needed from the common stores.Footnote ⁴ Under the ideorrhythmic way of monastic organisation, not being able to support herself financially was a significant obstacle for a woman who wished to retire to a convent. Once admitted to the community, many novices purchased their own ‘cells’ (these were stand-alone or semi-detached structures that could range between a primitive hut and a palatial house) in monastery grounds, which could subsequently be sold on or even inherited by next of kin.Footnote ⁵ Nuns traded their own handiwork, continued to oversee private financial interests outside monastery walls, and each had a share in certain types of the monastery's produce, especially alcohol. To a great extent personal property conferred status and became the engine of social interaction both within and without convent grounds. ‘Property … involves rights, privileges, powers, and immunities that govern the relative power of individuals over tangible and intangible things.’Footnote ⁶ Property relationships thus naturally morphed into social relations.

While benefitting individuals whose financial standing was secure enough to afford them comfortable living within monastery walls, ideorrhythmic practices often proved deleterious to monastic discipline. Sophia Senyk describes the absence of common life as ‘one of the ills of eastern monasticism, in all countries and at all periods’.Footnote ⁷ Possession of money, goods and chattels by monks and nuns contradicted the most basic principles of monastic life such as the rule of poverty and obedience to superiors, complicated hierarchical relationships, created the sense of inequality among the inmates, and distracted them from the daily regimen of prayer and contemplation.Footnote ⁸ The only two areas that remained common to the inmates within the ideorrythmically-organised monastic community were liturgic services and the cemetery.Footnote ⁹ Prior to the secularisations of the late eighteenth century, no expectation existed of Orthodox nuns engaging in charitable activities such as work in hospitals or orphanages. As often as not, property-centred conflicts became internal disputes about authority, as well as personal and communal rights. Most importantly, property relationships kept the sisters wedded to the world of secular concerns that they were supposed to shun. The case study examined here amply demonstrates that the idea of property even extended to a woman's right to regulate interference with her body in a variety of contexts – familial, professional and legal.

The problems and contradictions that blighted Sr Asklipiodata's life as a nun were not unique to her and were to a great extent the consequence of the fact that pre-1786 monastic existence in the Ukrainian Hetmanate was based on archaic, poorly articulated principles. A revision of these principles was required in order to repair the cleavage between commonly shared traditional perceptions of monasticism as the highest expression of Christian life and the often mundane experience of convent living; to effect a paradigm shift in the social function of women's monasteries; and to address the persistence both within and without the convent walls of property-based relationships that frequently clashed with spiritual values. Asklipiodata's Jewish origins and her conversionary experience that occurred just a few decades prior to the Partititons of Poland (1772–93) and the institution of the Pale of Settlement, however, are comparatively unusual.Footnote ¹⁰ As such they offer a rare glimpse of the largely neglected question of Jewish-Christian relations in the empire before the Partitions brought the sizeable Jewish population of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's eastern borderlands in immediate contact with the Russian state.Footnote ¹¹ In addition, the cultural and religious values of Asklipiodata's younger years must have had a bearing on the way in which she later related to her life in an Orthodox monastery.

Born in about 1715 into the ancient Jewish community of Prague, known at the time as ‘a mother-city in Israel’, Sr Asklipiodata's provenance was fairly exotic by the standards of eighteenth-century Kiev.Footnote ¹² Her late husband had been a burgess in Kiev and ‘Jewish’ (‘мещанин … Ивреянин’).Footnote ¹³ Her family had probably been forced to leave Prague in 1745, the year that saw the expulsion of Jews from the city.Footnote ¹⁴ The description of her husband as ‘Jewish’, however, may be misleading. An interconfessional marriage between a man who was Jewish by religion and a Christian Orthodox woman was impossible. Like anywhere else in Europe at the time, ‘conversion was necessary because civil marriage did not exist’.Footnote ¹⁵ Jewish survival in the Russian Empire came at a price, as following the publication of Empress Elizabeth i’s 1742 manifesto proscribing Jewish habitation in the imperial territories, legitimate settlement in the Empire, particularly the Ukrainian borderlands east of the Dnieper River, was only allowed to Jews willing to convert to the Orthodox religion. Those refusing to apostatise were ordered to leave, their liquid assets in gold and silver coinage confiscated at the border and exchanged for low-value copper money or paper promissory notes (вексель).Footnote ¹⁶ No statistics throwing light on pre-1791 Jewish residency in Kiev are available, since the settlement of unconverted Jews in the Russian Empire was illegal, Jewish converts to Christianity were no longer officially classified as Jews by religion, and ethnic qualifications at law did not exist. Thus a legitimate status as a Kievan burgess and householder enjoyed by her husband implies an earlier conversion from Judaism to Christianity. Moreover, conversion involved an extended family, not just Asklipiodata and her husband. The use of the descriptor ‘Jewish’ with regard to her husband thus supplies a useful reminder that, despite the legal principle that any Jew who had formally converted to Christianity ceased to be Jewish in the eyes of the imperial law, from the point of view of the society that accepted them, the memory of the convert's former identity could not be shed instantly.

If the future Sr Asklipiodata had left Prague in the ‘disaster year’ of 1745, when she was around thirty years of age, she would have already been married by then. It therefore seems probable that decisions regarding her movements on leaving Bohemia rested with her husband. Going eastward toward Poland-Lithuania was sensible, for during times of peace the Commonwealth offered a degree of tolerance and chances to earn a livelihood to the many Ashkenazi Jews who inhabited its provinces.Footnote ¹⁷ Poland's eastern borderlands, encompassing the troubled Right-Bank Ukraine, however, both opened up advantageous employment and trade opportunities for Jews, and were increasingly a dangerous place due to the growth of the popular haidamak movement.Footnote ¹⁸ The haidamak rebellion of 1750 could have driven Bohemian Jewish refugees farther east, into the relative safety and security of the Russian-controlled Left-Bank Ukraine.

Medieval canon law stipulated that ‘Jews be wooed to the church not by physical compulsion but with softer forms of persuasion (blandimentis), including an enforced level of marked social and legal inferiority’.Footnote ¹⁹ In Central Europe, with its long tradition of Jewish settlement, the hardening of religious lines came to replace the lively, if rarely balanced, Jewish-Christian debates of the first decades after Luther's Reformation. What followed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a complex pattern of conversions, in which sincere conviction could not always be easily distinguished from the compulsion to apostatise determined by external factors. Motives behind Jewish conversions thus became increasingly mixed, but for most of the eighteenth century it was the less socially and economically protected who sought refuge from persecution and discrimination through the drastic option of changing their religion.Footnote ²⁰ The available archival records of female Jewish conversions in the Metropolitanate of Kiev back up this hypothesis. For all of them, without exception, conversion became a choice after losing their family or guardians, being repudiated by a Jewish husband, or running away from home.Footnote ²¹ Whether unmarried, divorced or widowed, left on her own, a Jewish woman with no independent income and no place to go had to rely on the kindness of strangers, either Jewish or gentile.Footnote ²² At the other end of the spectrum, an Orthodox identity assumed on conversion, especially when it was combined with the ownership of property, provided women with a degree of independence and a range of choices.

It is impossible to trace either Sr Asklipiodata's original Jewish name, or the secular Christian name that she adopted on conversion. The 1771 list of monastic personnel on which her full monastic name appears as ‘Asklipiodata Grigorieva Kashporovna’, however, offers a glimpse of the names of her husband: ‘Grigorii’ (with its Greek roots, this was almost certainly the name that he received on conversion to Orthodoxy), and father: ‘Kashpor’ or ‘Kasper’ (it sounds Central European and has Hebrew origins).Footnote ²³

Asklipiodata's husband must have been dead by 1766, the year when she is known to have entered the St Nicholas Holy Jordan Monastery and started her novitiate, made possible by her status as a widow. Her ownership of a house in the nearby Podil district was likewise a useful qualification, as, due to Orthodox monasteries’ persistent attachment to the non-communal regime, very poor women found attaining monastic profession impossible.Footnote ²⁴ That she was not destitute makes it improbable that the prospect of homelessness and starvation drove her to the convent. The motivation behind this life-changing decision is likely to have been a combination of factors, including the evident absence of living children, loneliness in an adoptive country, Asklipiodata's deep, if possibly mixed, religiosity, and considerations of prestige and status associated with the high regard traditionally accorded to monks and nuns in Orthodox society. The Church and popular religion regarded people who adopted ‘angelic status’ (ангельский чин), i.e. took monastic vows, as exceptional individuals who entered a monastery in search of salvation, as well as praying for the souls of those in the outside world.

Unlike Asklipiodata's ancestral religion, Christianity held out to its followers a systematically developed promise of an afterlife beyond the grave.Footnote ²⁵ If she had had no ambition beyond living out her days in peace, but feared the emptiness of a solitary existence in her own home, she could arguably have moved in with relatives or settled near them. Instead, to cite the famous New Testament phrase, she chose the ‘small gate’ and ‘narrow road’ (Matthew vii.14) of monasticism to earn salvation. To what extent she appreciated the finer theological points of Christianity, or whether she ever came to think of Judaism as inherently wrong, is impossible to tell. Anyway, ‘[d]octrinal theology rarely offers a solution in … emotional crises’, and when she found herself at a crossroads of life, the future Sr Asklipiodata faced a range of options from which to choose her future.Footnote ²⁶

Similar to other ‘religions of the book’, the devotional cycle of Judaism is regulated by clock and calendar (morning, afternoon and evening prayers, weekday, Sabbath and festival prayers). The existence of tkhines, distinctive voluntary prayers in Yiddish, written for women and occasionally even by women, not only makes clear that Judaism had a specific place allocated to female devotion (even if it was reserved for the domestic and private spheres), but also that deliberate attempts were undertaken to make the purpose of this devotion intelligible to women. Notably, after the first collection of tkhines appeared in print in Asklipiodata's native Prague in 1590, the city remained one of the main centres of their publication between 1648 and the first decades of the eighteenth century.Footnote ²⁷

Although the idea of celibacy, in the sense of sexual abstinence for religious reasons, was known in Judaism, it was reserved for men, as women were not considered to be sufficiently evolved spiritually to benefit from it, and were actively discouraged from practising a celibate lifestyle. At the same time, Jewish women who had spiritual pretensions sometimes deliberately played with it either by specifically abstaining from sex or otherwise secluding themselves from the bustle of everyday life.Footnote ²⁸ In the early nineteenth century, while spending time in solitude at her mother's grave – a distinctly female activity in Judaism – Hannah Rachel Werbermacher, the famous Maiden of Ludmir, was wondering about her ‘right to possess all of the [spiritual] levels that men possess’.Footnote ²⁹ The future nun Asklipiodata, a Jewish convert entering an Orthodox monastery, may have felt that by doing so she was raising herself above the station traditionally ascribed to women in her ancestral faith. As such her monastic career represents an interesting case of Judaeo-Christian religious syncretism.

The prestige of monastic profession permeating Orthodox society, which in Asklipiodata's case was very likely associated with an aspiration to a higher social status, without a doubt provided an additional strong incentive. The future Sr Asklipiodata's extraordinarily ambitious choice of monastic career in the Orthodox Church could also have been a reflection of an irrepressible sense of self-worth on her part. According to Gershon David Hundert, ‘Self-affirmation and a feeling of Jewish superiority … dominated the spectrum of self-evaluation of eastern European Jews … despite their contradictory and manifold adaptations and acculturations’.Footnote ³⁰ Ownership of property both provided her with financial security and indicated that her motives for taking the veil could be spiritual and idealistic, as even her apparent desire of social advancement entailed hardly any pragmatic benefits beyond the acquisition of the sought-after ‘angelic status’.

The two years following Asklipiodata's entry to the monastery witnessed her meteoric rise to becoming a fully professed nun in 1769.Footnote ³¹ The available statistical data about admission to the novitiate and profession in Ukrainian female monasteries in the 1760s help to contextualise this advanced career progression under the fluctuating conditions of state-regulated access to monastic status. In accordance with basic canonical rules reinforced by the Petrine 1722 Addendum to the Spiritual Regulations (Духовный регламент), specifically aimed at monastic individuals, the minimum period of novitiate was set at three years, although in the first half of the eighteenth century few aspirants managed to attain monastic status as quickly as that. The average wait between entering a monastery and profession constituted seven to ten years, but some women had to possess their souls in patience for fifteen or even twenty years.Footnote ³² It was easier for a woman in her fifties to achieve profession than for a younger candidate, whose age fell short of the constantly moving goal posts of between forty and sixty years of age, which the imperial legislation stipulated as suitable for monastic admission.Footnote ³³ The year of Asklipiodata's entry to the convent, 1766, saw a small rise in admissions after a temporary lull that followed the secularisation of monasteries in Great Russia in 1764, which did not apply to the Ukrainian territories but none the less visibly affected the Kiev church authorities’ confidence in drawing new monastic recruits.Footnote ³⁴

1769, the year of Asklipiodata's profession, was a veritable annus mirabilis for the Holy Jordan community of nuns: as many as eighteen sisters achieved monastic status that year.Footnote ³⁵ That, unlike Asklipiodata, some of them had had to wait between six and sixteen years for that day, underscores the speed of her progression to full profession. Above all, it serves as a testimony to her urgent desire to become a nun: in the eighteenth century candidates who wished to take the veil had to appeal to the consistory authorities for permission to do so.Footnote ³⁶ Since instant success was extremely rare, and unsuccessful repeat applications not unknown, some women resorted to desperate underhand tactics to become professed nuns, such as travelling abroad to take the veil in Orthodox convents in Poland or Moldavia, obtaining profession in men's monasteries, or lying about their marital status.Footnote ³⁷ At the same time, the consistory authorities’ evident appreciation of Asklipiodata's qualities as a monastic candidate, despite her unorthodox origins, is manifest in their eagerness to admit her to monastic profession even before the statutory term of her novitiate came to an end.

Settling in the female community of St Nicholas Holy Jordan most probably was not Asklipiodata's own choice, but a ruling on the part of the consistory authorities. The convent held an unenviable position at the bottom of the Kievan ecclesiastical structure, below the other two women's monasteries in the city. A monastery's place in the hierarchy was determined by the time of its foundation, but men's monasteries preceded convents in the pecking order, and, unlike their male counterparts, mothers superior had no ex officio position as members of the consistory. Older monastic communities tended to be more affluent and attracted more upper-class entrants.Footnote ³⁸ While, in the later 1770s, thirteen (11 per cent) of the 121 sisters who inhabited the SS Florus and Laurus community, Kiev's oldest, were noble, the St Nicholas Holy Jordan Monastery could only boast three (2.5 per cent) elite nuns.Footnote ³⁹ The available evidence amply demonstrates that eighteenth-century female monasticism in the Hetmanate territories was largely the preserve of commoners.Footnote ⁴⁰ It is not impossible that, while accepting of the future Asklipiodata's desire to take the veil, her status as an outsider dictated the metropolitan's decision to assign her to the St Nicholas Holy Jordan Monastery rather than to the older and more prestigious SS Florus and Laurus or St John the Evangelist. Another female Jewish convert who wished to take monastic vows in a Kievan convent, known under her adopted Christian name, Anastasiia Ivanova, was recorded as a novice in the St Nicholas Holy Jordan in 1782.Footnote ⁴¹

The résumé of Asklipiodata's career on the 1771 list of the inmates of the St Nicholas Holy Jordan Monastery is a picture of a near-exemplary nun. Aged fifty-six, she was described as ‘meek and persevering’ (‘жития кроткого и терпеливого’), able-bodied, in good health and suited for the communal religious or general domestic tasks (послушания). Asklipiodata was ‘of little letters’ (‘грамоте мало изучена’), could sew and spin, and had had no penalties imposed on her for misdemeanors.Footnote ⁴² Her semi-literate status was not unusual, although the language then spoken in Kiev which the documents of the time refer as ‘the Little Russian dialect’ (‘Малороссийское наречие’) was, of course, at best a second language to her.Footnote ⁴³ It is hard to tell to what extent this highly formulaic character description reflects the real Sr Asklipiodata, but it is clear enough that two years after her profession the then mother superior viewed her as a respectable member of the community, even if Asklipiodata had not been asked to carry out any specific communal tasks around the convent. In any event, under the non-communal regime such jobs were few and far between, and a foreigner with an unconventional religious background may not have been an ideal choice for a conciliar nun, a choir-mistress or a baker of the prosphora (small loaves of leavened bread used in the Orthodox eucharist). Administrative positions such as the superior's deputy (наместница), bursar (казначея) and store keeper (шафарка), went to the individuals chosen by the mother as best suited for the job and perhaps most affable to her. Their holders tended to become ‘career nuns’, often progressing from one role to another until they reached the top as mother superior. Such physical labour or crafts as the self-supporting nuns performed in their own households did not count as communal duties.

In the early hours of the morning of 14 November 1776 the nuns of the St Nicholas Holy Jordan Monastery were woken up by the shouts and commotion that came from Asklipiodata's cell. Soon the astonished community witnessed Mother Alexandra's manservant Joseph Tertichnik struggling to restrain a loudly protesting Asklipiodata. When the nun's sympathisers approached the pair, one of the women was carrying a stick, which she used to hit Joseph, while the rest were pulling Asklipiodata away. Eventually freed from his grasp, a dishevelled and bloodied Asklipiodata was shouting rude insults at the mother superior.Footnote ⁴⁴ No inhabitant of the nearly one hundred individual nuns’ cells situated on convent grounds could have been left unaware of the disturbance.Footnote ⁴⁵

Unsurprisingly, the two accounts that survive of the scandalous event, one supplied by Mother Alexandra, the other found in Sr Asklipiodata's formal complaint to the Metropolitan of Kiev Gavriil Kremenetskii, the highest ecclesiastical authority in the Hetmanate, provide very different versions of the incident. Addressing her plea to Fr Cyril, the Archimandrite of the Kiev St Cyril Monastery and her immediate administrative superior, Alexandra begged to defend her honour, which, she claimed, had been injured by the public insults that Asklipiodata had hurled at her following the confrontation. Alexandra wrote that from the time that she had assumed the office approximately a year earlier, Asklipiodata had been known to have frequently gone away from the convent without leave and come back repulsively drunk (‘безобразно пьяная’). She also brought assorted secular persons back to her cell at all hours, where noisy drinking parties were held. As if this was not enough, she also struck up an inappropriate relationship with the handyman Avram Nedelshchenko, a person of ill repute (‘худого обращения’), whom the convent had engaged to perform major repairs on the old wooden church of St Nicholas. Mother Alexandra more than once had summoned Asklipiodata to give account of her behaviour and had asked her to stop disturbing the peace of the community. All she claimed to have received from the sister by way of an explanation, was the defiant statement that without ‘meat and men … her dissolute nature could not do’ (‘без мяса и без мужеского пола … обойтися по своей страсти не может’). When Alexandra was informed that Nedelshchenko was spending the night of 13 November in Asklipiodata's cell, she sent her servant Joseph to break up the company, reprimand the nun on the mother's behalf, and threaten her with imprisonment for the breach of discipline. In response, Asklipiodata attacked the manservant. Amidst the commotion, Nedelshchenko managed to escape, while several other nuns, among them a certain sister armed with a stick, who was herself under an ongoing consistory investigation, rushed to Asklipiodata's help.Footnote ⁴⁶

The formal complaint that Sr Asklipiodata dictated to a scribe stated that she had been asleep when a wild banging on the door of her cell started. She had assumed that the convent was on fire or under attack from brigands ‘trying to break into her cell and steal her belongings’. Even by her own account, Asklipiodata's uppermost concern was thus about her own possessions rather than the relics or other religious paraphernalia kept in the monastery church. When a candle was finally lit and the door unlocked, an ‘insensibly drunk’ Joseph, servant of Mother Alexandra, barged into the cell and, apparently without provocation, dealt Asklipiodata a heavy blow in the chest, knocking her down. When he proceeded to drag the half-naked sister from the house and march her in the direction of the superior's cell, the beating continued along the way. Fearing for her life, Asklipiodata shouted for help, but Mother Alexandra stifled her cries by holding the nun's mouth with her hand. The superior also hit her several times with the iron tip of her staff, which tore her flesh. Alexandra then ordered Joseph to take Asklipiodata to prison, but the sisters who heard her calls for help, rushed to her rescue.

Having lived to an old age, the nun wrote, she had never known such beatings and such shame, not even from her late husband (‘немалое увечье и безчестие, которого я и чрез всю мою жизнь еще на себе и в жизнь мужа моего никогда не видала’).Footnote ⁴⁷ The phrasing of this statement is significant, as in it Asklipiodata evidently acknowledged her late husband's inherent right to administer humiliating bodily punishment that he may have considered appropriate as her master, but denied the same right to her monastic superior. Asklipiodata left no clear indication of what she thought about the vow of obedience to her superiors, the central rule of monastic life, but it seems obvious that she saw her body as inviolable to any unwarranted outside interference. It also seems meaningful that, prior to subjecting her to a degrading treatment in public, Joseph Tertichnik assaulted Asklipiodata within the confines of her own cell, whereby not only the rules of propriety, but her legal rights as its owner were violated.

The certificate of physical examination (квит), issued by Vasilii Blazhevskii, the Kiev beadle (возный), a middle-ranking officer responsible for maintaining law and order in the city, drawn on the following day, 15 November, recorded extensive bruising on Asklipiodata's chest and upper arms, as well as two wounds inflicted with a sharp instrument, presumably the iron tip of Alexandra's staff, the traditional and highly visible marker of her authority.Footnote ⁴⁸ The incident and its aftermath also highlight a surprising lack of regard for monastic and indeed womanly modesty on the part of all involved in the incident: not only was Asklipiodata reportedly dragged through the convent grounds dishevelled and half-naked by the servant Joseph, but this woman in her early sixties also willingly submitted herself to a close physical examination by the city official in order to obtain a formal record of her injuries. The latter yet again underscores the nun's strategic deployment of her body as property with defined rights and limitations attached to it. When this was likely to serve her interests, Asklipiodata did not hesitate to reveal her upper body, baring the chest, shoulders and upper arms in front of a male stranger for the purposes of a legal investigation.

Careful analysis of the two reports makes it clear that neither can be taken at face value, as the issues that either woman chose to reveal in her submission are as important as those that they were anxious to evade. Mother Alexandra's emphasis on Asklipiodata's drunkenness and offensive behaviour was meant to divert attention from the cruel and illicit physical punishment that the nun had received at her hands. In turn, Asklipiodata's legitimate complaints about the beating were also an attempt at silencing allegations of impropriety against her, which are not even mentioned in the petition that she filed with the consistory.Footnote ⁴⁹ While the startling statement about the nun's alleged inability to stay away from ‘meat and men’ was almost certainly Mother Alexandra's own free interpretation of Asklipiodata's original wording which is lost to us, this fleshy reference could be a testimony to the simple truth that Sr Asklipiodata wished to reclaim the ownership of both her body and her soul from what she had come to regard as an oppressive and sterile monastic regime. For all the numerous examples of monastic transgressions found in the archives of the Kiev Metropolitan Consistory, the case of Sr Asklipiodata appears unusual and extreme in her unabashed defiance of accepted norms.

Among other things, the story might be a demonstration that for a nun being on good terms with her mother superior could make a difference between living in peace and knowing no peace. Unlike the universally respected Taisia Gorkovskaia, whose leadership of the St Nicholas Holy Jordan Monastery (1762–75) gave rise to no recorded complaints from members of the community, the very first year of her successor Mother Alexandra's rule (1775–86) brought two separate conflicts.Footnote ⁵⁰ Alexandra proved to be either a more demanding or less tolerant monastic superior than her predecessor. While the list of monastic inmates that Taisia compiled in 1771 does not contain a single negative characteristic of any of the sisters, all of whom were described as being ‘meek and persevering’ or ‘honest and steady’, a similar list composed in 1777 under Alexandra paints the picture of a community that had some distinctly rotten apples. It is true that she provided the majority of the sisters with positive characteristics (‘качеств хороших’).Footnote ⁵¹ This included Sophia, with whom she had had an altercation the previous year. But the monastic qualities of four nuns were described as ‘undistinguished’ (‘качеств средственных’ or ‘качеств средних’), whereas four others, including Asklipiodata, received bluntly unfavourable reports (‘качеств нехороших’).Footnote ⁵² Alexandra's forceful attitude is further illustrated by two formal complaints against her filed in September and October 1784, in which a secular priest who served the monastic community claimed that she withheld the money that was due to him, and a sister complained of the beating that she had received at the mother's hands.Footnote ⁵³ As many as three complaints against Alexandra were submitted between 9 and 11 June 1786, the last year of her rule, one of them a collective denunciation by a group of sisters who accused her of purloining a large sum from the monastery treasury.Footnote ⁵⁴ As a rule, allegations of financial impropriety against mothers superior concealed internal struggles for power within a monastic community, with only a few of them proving to be genuine cases of the misappropriation of communal funds. These were often complicated because mothers superior, many of whom were women of private means, occasionally had to bail out convents in a state of financial distress, but expected various forms of gratitude in return.Footnote ⁵⁵ Under such circumstances distinguishing between the monastery treasury and the mother's private purse was no easy task.

Although Mother Alexandra's dislike of Asklipiodata is manifest, as is her style of management markedly different from that of her predecessor, it is doubtful that Asklipiodata's spectacular fall from grace was precipitated by the change at the top. It seems that Alexandra's arrival merely put her troubles in sharp relief. The year when she took over as the convent's head witnessed another significant event in Asklipiodata's monastic career: her first formal application for a period of leave away from the monastery. She wished to travel to the city of Elisavetgrad to collect eighty-five roubles which she had lent to her nephew, the local merchant Dmitrii Tishkov, and to visit other relatives who lived there.Footnote ⁵⁶ A substantial sum of money, enough to purchase at least two monastic cells, it shows that Asklipiodata was sufficiently well off to extend a long-term loan of this size.

The principle of enclosure for monastic women was outside Orthodox tradition, but the Petrine 1722 Addition to the Spiritual Regulation attempted to limit admission to convent grounds to priests and confessors, and to institute a blanket prohibition on ordinary nuns leaving their monasteries.Footnote ⁵⁷ In the Ukrainian Hetmanate, with its peculiar legal regime, however, exact boundaries within which imperial legislation applied remained a grey area. No gender-based distinction between the monks’ and the nuns’ freedom of movement can be observed, and, in spite of local ecclesiastical authorities’ half-hearted attempts throughout the eighteenth century to regulate it, Ukrainian nuns were generally free to come and go during the day, although a prolonged stay away from the convent required a travel permit (пашпорт) issued by the metropolitan consistory. The attempt to enclose monastic women seems to have proved unworkable even in Great Russia, especially for the poor provincial monasteries, whose inmates had to go out to sell their crafts or beg for food; local bishops protested that the measure was unenforceable.Footnote ⁵⁸

With Mother Alexandra's assent, Asklipiodata was granted two months’ leave and issued with the necessary travel documentation in August 1775.Footnote ⁵⁹ Her destination, Elisavetgrad (now Kropyvnyts'kyi, Ukraine) had been founded in 1752 as the Fortress of St Elizabeth. It played a pivotal role in the internalisation of the borderland territory located at the intersection of the Russian-Polish border and the ‘Wild Field’, a wide strip of no-man's land at the southern frontier of the Russian Empire, which had been loosely controlled by the Cossacks of the Zaporozhian Host before its abolition in 1775. Elisavetgrad achieved official status as the provincial capital in 1775.Footnote ⁶⁰ Due to its favourable yet liminal situation at the intersection of trade routes, the city could have evolved into a place of de facto Jewish settlement from the time of its foundation.Footnote ⁶¹ Asklipiodata's nephew, Dmitry Tishkov, who, judging by his first name of a distinctly Greek origin, was, like her, an earlier convert from Judaism, could have provided useful links between the local Christian merchant community and his enterprising former co-religionists, whose existence in the Empire continued to be precarious.

In the early summer of 1777, less than two years after she had been granted permision to travel to Elisavetgrad, Asklipiodata again petitioned the consistory to be allowed to visit the city of Kaluga, a historic Russian town where her nephew had moved, under the pretext that she had to collect the money that he owed her on a promissory note, and stating that she had a ‘special need’ (‘особливую нужду’) to stay away for three months.Footnote ⁶² Advantageously situated at the intersection of several major roads and waterways, Kaluga was a hub on the trade routes to St Petersburg, Moscow, Ukraine, the Volga region and as far afield as Britain, Holland, Turkey, Persia and China. Transferring his business there was a sign of Dmitrii Tishkov's upward mobility and success as a merchant. Kaluga's proximity to Moscow, whose population, although not ethnically and religiously uniform, was certainly less heterogeneous than the motley populace of a frontier town like Elisavetgrad, possibly also implies a gradual fading away of his old Jewish identity.

The timing of Asklipiodata's two applications for travel permits in 1775 and 1777 may be significant. A sudden intensity of the nun's desire to reconnect with her family could be interpreted as a sign of disillusionment over her decision to enter an Orthodox monastery nearly a decade earlier. No evidence exists of her taking leave from the monastery to visit relatives in the first nine years since her entry there as a novice in 1766. Mother Alexandra stated in her report to the consistory about the night incident with Asklipiodata that the nun had already been known for her dissolute behaviour and drunkenness by the time that Alexandra assumed her duties as the mother superior in 1775. It is likely, therefore, that Asklipiodata's life had begun to unravel under Taisia Gorkovskaia's more benevolent (and perhaps also increasingly less effective) rule.Footnote ⁶³ Rather than being the cause of her downfall, Alexandra's firmer grip on the reins of power may have provoked in the sister a growing resentment and loss of control over her already existing attachment to alcohol.

With regard to her alleged attraction to drink, it should be noted that monastic status in the Orthodox Church was never supposed to be synonymous with a teetotal existence. Like the rest of traditional European societies, in the East Slavic lands alcohol fulfilled a multiplicity of functions that included the dietary, the recreational, the therapeutic and the economic, not to mention its role as a ‘social lubricant’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Apart from running distilleries on their estates, where alcohol was produced for sale and barter, all monasteries also purchased various types of intoxicating drink: imported wine for use in the church, mead for consumption on feast days, as well as vodka (usually called ‘вино’, ‘wine’, ‘хлебное вино’, ‘grain wine’ or ‘горелка’, literally translated as ‘combustible liquid’, in early modern documents) and its humble relative, poorly distilled and evil-smelling hooch (сивуха).Footnote ⁶⁵ They could be used for internal consumption, gift giving or commerce.Footnote ⁶⁶ Mothers superior were allocated a generous annual measure of several bucketfuls of the ‘wine’ produced on their convents’ estates.Footnote ⁶⁷ The rest of the sisters received smaller quantities of alcohol several times a year and used it for consumption or barter.Footnote ⁶⁸ Throughout the eighteenth century Kievan metropolitans undertook measures to combat senseless drinking on the part of monastic personnel.Footnote ⁶⁹ Their approach to the problem, however, was moderate, as in Metropolitan Zaborovskii's warning to his fellow monastic not to frequent taverns, be seen drunk in public or miss church services: ‘And if you should take a drink, do this for God's glory.’Footnote ⁷⁰ In short, it can be safely assumed that alcohol and drinking per se were sufficiently part of the everyday reality not to elicit much comment. Contemporary archival records often mention drunkenness, but rarely as a stand-alone offence. For example, the priest Pavel Lobko claimed that he had locked up Sr Efrosiniia, a nun at the SS Florus and Laurus Monastery, whom he had discovered taking a short-cut through the cemetery of his church, because he had taken her for a drunken vagrant.Footnote ⁷¹ The nun Makariia, accused of swearing at other sisters in a drunken state, denied the accusation as an attempt at character assassination, and claimed, in turn, that one of her detractors was a drunk.Footnote ⁷² Asklipiodata herself alleged that Mother Alexandra's attendant Joseph was ‘insensibly drunk’ when he beat her up.Footnote ⁷³

As a cultural reference meant to bolster the impression that the individuals against whom such accusations were made behaved in a generally disreputable manner, they should be approached with caution. To understand the context of reprehensible drinking behaviour is, therefore, more important than to establish that drink was actually taken.Footnote ⁷⁴ The offence caused by Asklipiodata's ostensible attachment to alcohol consisted in its public and demonstrative nature. This makes her stand out from other monastic individuals, references to whose drunken behaviour are found on the consistory files, none of whom was reported to consume alcohol in the company of other people or make a public display of themselves in a drunken state. Asklipiodata was said to have often wandered off from the convent without leave, come back late inebriated, and to have brought in unauthorised visitors, with whom she continued drinking in her cell. Interestingly, she also never explicitly denied these accusations. In short, if Asklipiodata was a drinker, she was a social drinker, somebody who sought solace in the company of strangers, rather than drowning her sorrows on her own or passing a glass or two on the quiet with some of her sisters in the convent. As well as a way to socialise, her drinking could have been a form of escape from the frustrating emptiness of life in a convent.

To return to the fleshy allusions in the defiant statement that Mother Alexandra quoted her as making about the impossibility of life ‘without meat and men’, while judging the strength of Asklipiodata's sexual appetite is impossible, it is not unreasonable to assume that at the age of sixty-one in 1776, her need of human contact was greater than erotic urges. Following the death of her husband, Asklipiodata had been left with an emotional void, occasioned both by the loss of a life-time companion and by the absence of whatever communal and spiritual support they could have been enjoying as a couple. Under such circumstances religion could be expected to provide the necessary succour, and on entering convent Asklipiodata could have been hoping to start sharing in the cycle of communal life. It would seem, however, that the status of an Orthodox nun that she had ardently desired to achieve just a decade earlier, and had obtained sooner than could have been anticipated, failed to deliver on its promise, because she had set her expectations too high. Monasticism was traditionally hailed as the pinnacle of Orthodox religious life, but, echoing Hertz in her study of female Jewish conversions in Berlin at the dawn of modernity, one might wonder ‘whether anyone who has shut the door on so much of her past and her heritage can ever really be happy in a radically new identity. To change one's social position and belief structure simultaneously and fundamentally seems to have made life emotionally confusing and painful for the women involved’.Footnote ⁷⁵ The ups and downs of Asklipiodata's monastic career highlight her search for an engagement with religion that had to be grounded in emotion to carry a meaning.

A foreigner and outsider who, on taking the veil, found herself nominally living in a community, but was in fact trapped in one of a hundred-plus monastic cells, whose predominantly lower-middle class inhabitants mostly minded their own business, ate their own meals and only occasionally met in church for the liturgy, Asklipiodata would have felt no less lonely in her monastic life than she had been as a widow left in an empty house. Staying away from ‘meat and men’, that is, observing Orthodox fasts that lasted for up to six weeks at at time, and only keeping the company of women, offered an uncertain path to eternal salvation. Asklipiodata's problem appears to have been in a clash between the idealised representation proliferated by the society around her, and the actual lived experience of an unreformed and shapeless monastic existence in an eighteenth-century Orthodox convent, a conflict between the intangible essence of faith and the often contradictory substance of religious life.

The last we hear about her is in December 1777. Just over a year after the night-time disturbance in the St Nicholas Holy Jordan Monastery, which left her physically and emotionally scarred, Asklipiodata quit the convent, sold her cell to a secular woman who wished to settle there, and was moving between the houses of various secular acquaintances in the nearby Podil district, who offered her shelter.Footnote ⁷⁶ Asklipiodata's name is absent from the list of the St Nicholas Holy Jordan's inmates, composed in 1780.Footnote ⁷⁷ Since monastic status in the Orthodox Church is indelible and cannot be renounced or taken away, her position was untenable in the long run, and ecclesiastical authorities would have to interfere. A forcible transfer to a provincial convent was a likely outcome of her spectacular downfall. It is also possible, however, that ready cash in hand – the money that Asklipiodata had obtained for her cell and any other liquid assets that remained within her reach – could have provided the means to escape detention and punishment. Private property and personal wealth thus served not only as a gateway to monastic profession and acquisition of specific social privileges, it also gave sisters independent means to maintain themselves within convent walls and relative freedom of movement, as well as becoming a potential lifebuoy for the disobedient and the disillusioned.

Sr Asklipiodata's Jewish and foreign origins afford an insight through the eyes of a convert from another religion into the state of Orthodox monasticism before the secularisations of the eighteenth century. Initially pulled in by the promise of ‘angelic life’, she underestimated its daily struggles and became frustrated when her expectations appeared not to have been met. Above all, Asklipiodata's life story is a poignant illustration that the property relationships which permeated Orthodox monastic life under the old ideorrhythmic regime affected not just individual members of convent communities. On the level of quotidian concerns they shaped monastic life by creating a dense web of interactions between the monastery and the secular world. On the higher level of ecclesiastical structures, attachment to personal property often stood in the way of maintaining basic monastic principles, upset relationships within communities, impacted on the way in which individual nuns thought about themselves and regarded their ecclesiastical superiors, and opened up opportunities for manipulation on all sides. The official Orthodox Church was reluctant to press the rule of poverty on its monastic personnel. Monasticism had always been, and still remained, a mainstay of its claim to spiritual authority and moral superiority. An attempt at internal reform would have been tantamount to an implicit criticism of the status quo and grist to the mill of the proponents of further secularisation. For an individual under such conditions realising the higher calling of monastic life in full must have been no easier than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.