Queerness in the Early Modern Russian Orthodox Church

“As a Russian, a lesbian, and a historian of Russia’s queer past, I had long believed that the Russian Orthodox Church was never a space where queer lives could be found. Nick Mayhew’s insightful book shattered that assumption, offering compelling sources and analysis to show that the Orthodox Church in early modern Russia was, in fact, an institution with which many queer individuals engaged and identified. This is groundbreaking both intellectually and politically, as contemporary Russian attacks on queer people are often justified by framing queerness as a Western import and a deviation from so-called 'traditional values'."
—Irina Roldugina, Leverhulme Research Fellow in Russian, University of Bristol, UK


Representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church today often frame queer genders and sexualities as perverse deviations from ‘tradition’. While historians often assume the Church has always condemned homosexuality, this book reassesses the supposed incompatibility of Russian Orthodoxy and queerness. Focusing on a range of primary sources from canonical texts to unpublished archival materials, it shows that the Russian Orthodox Church consistently permitted and celebrated non-normative genders and sexualities, including the veneration of transmasculinity in hagiography, the liturgical consecration of same-sex unions, and the Church’s broad lack of interest in policing homosexuality. Paradoxically, Queerness in the Early Modern Russian Orthodox Church highlights how patriarchy breeds queerness.


Nick Mayhew is Lecturer in Russian at the University of Glasgow, UK. His research explores queerness in Russophone and Church Slavonic cultures, and his publications have appeared in academic journals including Palaeoslavica, Slavonic and East European Review, Feminist Critique: East European Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and The Medieval History Journal.