The infosphere of theological schools of the Russian Empire in the 19th — early 20th century

Abstract

The article explores a field quite new for Russian religious studies: research into the infosphere of religious institutions. In our case, the term “infosphere” defines a totality of institutions and informational resources of various origin, as well as channels of research communications, including verbal communication, those providing the development of this infosphere. At that, we rely on works by one of the creators of contemporary philosophy of information Luciano Floridi, who built that neologism according to the pattern of the term “biosphere” and put it in the research circulation in the mid 1990s, in the context of studying the new informational reality. In this work, we consider a small segment of the research of infosphere: studying the infosphere of the Orthodox theological schools of the Russian Empire of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We analyze the main methodological approaches to studying the noosphere of seminaries and theological academies, the historiography, and the sources of that topic. The scale of the tasks requires the involvement of a wide range of sources. There are various written materials, both printed matters and manuscripts. There are catalogues of libraries collected in seminaries and theological academies, lists of personal libraries of teachers of theological educational institutions. Another valuable source of data on the infosphere of theological schools is a variety of notes and plans of lectures, journals of meetings of councils and conferences organized in theological academies, correspondence, and memoirs. Analysis of the content of periodicals makes it possible to reconstruct the informational field of teachers and students of theological educational institutions of the Russian Empire. It allows us to make a complex research of the circle of reading of representatives of the clergy, which played a significant role in the Russian culture of the pre-Soviet period.