Russian Prerevolutionary Historiography about Medieval Individual Religiosity

Abstract

The article is devoted to a number of Russian studies regarding the medieval religiosity of the individual. As a rule, the development of this direction is associated with the Annales school, which in the 20th century had a serious influence on various historical research aspects not only in Europe. In the framework of this article, the attention is focused on the research work of Guerrier, Karsavin, Kudryavtsev, and Bitsilli. In the national historical scholarship at the time, the term “mentality” was absent. However, such concepts as “consciousness”, “religiosity” were repeatedly used. The researchers sought to explain not only the formation and significance of this phenomenon in the context of social history, but also paid attention to its cultural specificity, in particular, referring to the symbolism of the medieval individual’s thinking. Some of the Russian historians of medieval European history the late 19th — first decade of the 20th century made a significant contribution to the work on the subject. The interest in the man in history emerged in Russian medieval studies of the time. It is important to note that in analyzing the religiousness of an individual, Russian scholars focused on the views of certain outstanding personalities: as a rule, those of the elite, the chroniclers and the theologians. Further development of research in this direction was interrupted by political events and the later formation of a new historical pattern. Russian scholarship addressed this problem again only in the 1980s.