KINSHIP, PROPERTY RELATIONS, AND THE SURVIVAL OF DOUBLE MONASTERIES IN THE EASTERN CHURCH

Abstract The article examines the enduring phenomenon of double monasticism, the type of religious organization whereby a single monastic unit combined a male and a female community that followed the same rule, recognized the authority of the same superior, and functioned within the boundaries of the same monastic compound or in close proximity to each other, but not in shared quarters. After centuries of evolution since late antiquity, double monasteries effectively ceased to exist in the Latin West by the high middle ages, but demonstrated remarkable staying powers in the sphere of historic Byzantine cultural influences, particularly in Orthodox Eastern Europe and Christian Middle East, where this archaic type of monastic institution survived into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Based on previously unexplored archival material from the Orthodox lands of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and later the Ukrainian Hetmanate, a semi-autonomous state ruled by elective officers who recognized the tsar of Muscovy as their suzerain, the article analyses the place of kinship structures, economic and political factors, legal frameworks, and the role of the imperial state in the evolution and ultimate decline of the double monastery.


I
The double monastery, 'a single monastic unit of monks and nuns following the same rule, under the same superior, living in the same locality, but in separate quarters', had effectively ceased to exist in Catholic Europe by the late thirteenth century.  At the same time, despite sporadic prohibitions and limitations imposed on them by secular and church authorities, double monasteries demonstrated remarkable staying powers in the sphere of historic Byzantine cultural influences. Despite the imperial authorities' uniform disapproval, centrifugal tendencies that accompanied the slow disintegration and demise of Byzantium, and the effectively decentralized nature of Muscovite state administration, left them equally incapable of controlling the emergence and survival of double monasteries.  The decrees of Emperor Justinian issued in , , and  apparently forbade double monasteries, although reference to cohabitation led several scholars to conclude that the legislation was probably directed against 'mixed' monasteries, a different type of organization that allowed monks and nuns to sleep in shared quarters.  A few centuries later, the Seventh Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in  issued an approbation of the Basilian Rule, but decreed that no new double monasteries be established. As  This definition is in Stramara, 'Double monasticism in the Greek East, fourth through eighth centuries', p. ; cf. Robert H. Trone, 'A Constantinopolitan double monastery of the fourteenth century: the Philanthropic Saviour', Byzantine Studies,  (), p. ; and Saliba, Les monastères maronites doubles du Liban, pp. , . Alison Jeppesen, however, calls for a further clarification of the term 'double monastery', arguing that emphasis should be placed not on the degree of the separation of sexes, but on the level of subordination between the heads of the male and the female communities: Alison Jeppesen, 'A reassessment of monastic organisation', Studia Patristica,  (), pp. -. For the disappearance of double monasticism in the medieval Latin West, see Patricia Ranft, Women and the religious life in premodern Europe (New York, NY, ), pp. , , -.  Despite the earlier historiographical tendency to regard Muscovy as a fairly centralized state, a growing consensus exists that effective control from the centre could have been an illusion deliberately created by Muscovite state and church administration to impress the tsars' subjects into willing obedience. For example, see Marshall Poe, 'The central government and its institutions', in Maureen Perrie, ed., The Cambridge history of Russia: from early Rus' to  (Cambridge, ), pp. -; Brian Davies, 'Local government and administration', in ibid., pp. -; Georg Michels, 'The patriarch's rivals: local strongmen and the limits of church reform during the seventeenth century', in J. Kotilaine and M. Poe, eds., Modernizing Muscovy: reform and social change in seventeenth-century Russia (London, ), pp. -.  Stramara, 'Double monasticism in the Greek East, fourth through eighth centuries', pp. -; for a discussion of the nomenclature, see ibid., pp. -. before, the dangers of sexual impropriety between monks and nuns sharing quarters were cited as the reason; however, this description fits mixed rather than double monasteries, where the male and the female communities coexisted in separate spaces.  Patriarch Nikephoros made another attempt to abolish cohabitation of monks and nuns c. , but the troubled Palaeologan period (-) saw the resurgence of double monasteries in Byzantium.  This form of monastic existence was likewise frowned upon in Muscovy, where it had been repeatedly, if ineffectively, proscribed by the church synods as early as  and . Despite the prohibitions, evidence exists of the survival of double or even mixed monasteries in Muscovy and early imperial Russia well into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  In the Middle East, where the Ottoman state's interference in Christian affairs was often minimal, provided that their communities complied with the millet rules, double monasteries continued to flourish up until the first quarter of the nineteenth century.
Addressing the question of the decline of double monasticism in the Greek East in an article published in , Daniel F. Stramara suggests that the answer lies in the broader context of their existence: 'the double monastery as an institution disappeared because of social and economic factors rather than as a result of sexual impropriety or systemic flaws necessitating ecclesiastical proscriptions'.  This article aims to look into the reasons for the survival of this seemingly archaic principle of monastic organization within the Eastern Church into modernity. While agreeing with Stramara's general point about the importance of context, I would like to take it further and argue that double monasteries fulfilled an important socio-religious function and went out of existence when this function itself became obsolete. This argument is supported by a range of examples and a case-study, based on archival material from the Orthodox lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and later the Ukrainian Hetmanate.
In the period between  and , the Ukrainian Hetmanate was a semiautonomous state that included territories to the east of the Dnieper River with the city of Kiev on its right, western, bank, and was ruled by the holders of an  Ibid., pp. -.  Daniel F. Stramara Jr, 'Double monasticism in the Greek East: eighth through fifteenth centuries', Greek Orthodox Theological Review,  (), pp. -; cf. Alice-Mary Talbot elective office of the hetman, who recognized the tsar of Muscovy as their suzerain.  It emerged as a result of the Ukrainian Cossack revolt of -, which permanently shattered the Commonwealth's integrity. A notable feature of the Hetmanate's political autonomy was wholesale preservation in its territory of the legal system originally established by the Union of Lublin, which had brought Poland and Lithuania into the 'Commonwealth of the two nations' in .  The relevant archival material from the Hetmanate period, particularly the records of the Kiev Consistory, an ecclesiastical court, has an important advantage over Byzantine and earlier Slavonic sources in that it reflects the nuns' everyday life compared to the earlier documentation's predominantly regulatory nature. It also helps to highlight the centrality of familial structures, economic factors, and legal framework in the evolution and ultimate decline of the double monastery, an institution whose potential had not been fully exhausted until the turn of the eighteenth century, when it finally succumbed to the forces of state centralization and the growing competition for resources between monks and nuns.
Historiographic coverage of double monasteries in the East is both thin and patchy. Only a few specialized studies dedicated to their operation in the geographical areas where Eastern Christianity was traditionally practised exist. This being said, the modestly sized historiography of double monasteries in the Byzantine empire appears extensive against the paucity of research that covers other places.  The bulk of scholarship related to double monasteries in Muscovite Russia mentions them briefly in the course of addressing other  Here and subsequently, with the exception of the place names, whose spelling, especially with regard to a given historic time period, is long established in academic English (e.g. 'Kiev' rather than 'Kyiv', 'Wilno' rather than 'Vilnius', and 'Moscow' rather than 'Moskva'), toponyms in this article are presented in the language of their country.   concerns.  In her survey of the history of Greek Catholic and Greek Orthodox female monasticism in Ukraine and Belarus in the early modern period, Sr Sophia Senyk, OSBM, makes no reference to double monasteries, but applies the generic term 'groupings' to what she describes as some mothers' superior administrative subjection to the heads of men's houses.  Research on premodern monasticism in the Middle East tends to focus primarily on the period of late antiquity, when double monasteries flourished there.  Sabine Mohasseb Saliba's recent book, throwing light on the history of Maronite double monasteries in Lebanon between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, is a welcome, but rare exception.  Saliba's observation that double monasteries emerged in conditions of 'the probable absence or at least the shortage of exclusively female houses' is key.  Where the support of the state or of local elites was insufficient to ensure the independent existence of convents, double monasteries provided a favourable setting for the emergence and survival of female monastic communities. Ensuring essential safeguards for nuns, their personal property and monastic estates, double monasteries also enabled male clerics to provide spiritual services to the nuns as priests and confessors, which women were canonically incapable of performing themselves. Even in the absence of physical threats from hostile neighbours, the lack of male clerical personnel in remote areas could automatically spell the end of a rural convent that failed to secure the permanent services of a consecrated priest.

I I
The history of women's monasticism in the Ukrainian lands of Poland-Lithuania and the Ukrainian Hetmanate offers a good illustration of Saliba's hypothesis. The first documentary references to pre-Mongol convents in and around Kiev, the cradle of East Slav Christianity since , date back to the eleventh century, and evidently describe some of them as part of double monasteries.  Apart from their names and approximate locations, however, very little is known about these early convents.  The Life of Evfrosiniia Polotskaia reveals that the saint founded a double monastery in her native Polotsk in the first half of the twelfth century.  As a result of Mongol attacks, the disintegration of the Kievan Rus' state, and Lithuanian take-over that followed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Orthodox convents virtually disappeared from historical record. Their re-emergence in the sixteenth century took place predominantly within the supporting framework of double monasteries and marked the revival of female monasticism both in the Orthodox lands of the grand duchy of Lithuania and in Muscovy. The resurgence of Orthodox female houses in the Ukrainian lands is attested by documentary evidence from the s onward. The Sts Florus and Laurus Monastery in Kiev was founded in  as a private convent that belonged to the Hul'kevych family, later passed under the authority of the metropoitan of Kiev as an independent monastic foundation, and as such was never part of a double monastery.  The other three Kievan monasteries for women, founded between the mid-sixteenth and the late seventeenth centuries: the St Michael (Golden Domed), the Ascension, and the St Nicholas (Holy Jordan) each formed part of a double house. Other such communities were established in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries outside the ecclesiastical centre of Kiev in places such as Peresopnytsia, Lviv, Kuteino, Dubno, Wilno, Baturyn, Poltava, Liubar in Volhynia, and Zhabotyn and Motrenivka, both near Chyhyryn.  The Lviv St Onuphrius Confraternity Monastery founded c.  originally had two communities for men and women co-existing side by side and sharing the income from specific pieces of urban property and rural estates. This arrangement lasted until about , when the women are reported to have moved to a location outside the city, and references in the sources to the 'nuns of St Onuphrius monastery' dry up.   community was relocated, the nuns were given a plot of land the monastery had recently obtained from a benefactor.  Such an arrangement almost certainly harked back to the Second Lithuanian Statute (), the main legal code operational in the Ukrainian lands after they had passed under direct Polish control following the  Union of Lublin.  Primarily intended to shore up the status and traditional privileges of the gentry, the Statute regulated the relationship between the individual and the state, inheritance patterns and property ownership, criminal and civil law, and defined legal procedure. The basic premise of noble inheritance as it was laid out in the Lithuanian Statute was that only newly acquired property could be disposed of via testamentary dispositions outside the family, while the hereditary estates had to be passed on through the bloodline. This tendency, moreover, is reflective of the gendered pattern of the distribution of property within and outside kinship groups, characteristic of most of the rest of Europe, whereby 'landed properties included in dowries often comprised more or less recent acquisitions', seen as '"marginal", geographically isolated, and in any case peripheral to the ancestral lands of the family, the basis of its identity and its status'.  A similar paternalistic model of land distribution among members of the same noble family, whereby 'property law opted to withhold patrimonial land from women whenever possible', was reflected in the Muscovite legal code of .  The  foundation charter for a convent of nuns in Dubno (Volhynia) by the Orthodox magnate Prince Constantine Ostrozski expressly stated that the new establishment had to be placed under the authority of the abbot. Notably, the document repeatedly references the Rule of St Basil as the principal guide to the double foundation's existence.  The Kiev Ascension Monastery for women, founded in , was situated across the road from the ancient Monastery of the Caves and supervised by its archimandrites.  Sources occasionally refer to it as the 'women's Caves Monastery', a curious  Senyk, Women's monasteries, p. .  N. Iakovenko, 'Shliakhets'ka pravosvidomist' u dzerkali obihu pravnychoi literatury na Volyni i Naddniprianshchyni', in eadem, Paralel'nyi svit: doslidzhennia z istorii uiavlen' ta idei v Ukraini XVI-XVII st.  'Panegirik Pecherskomu arkhimandrity Elisseiu Pletenetskomu, sostavlennyi v  g. A. Mituroiu', in K. Titov, ed., Materialy dlia istorii knyzhnoi spravy na Vkraini v XVI-XVIII vv.: vsezbirka peredmov do ukrains'kykh starodrukiv (Kiev, ), p. []. The superiors of principal men's monasteries, in particular those who had jurisdiction over smaller monastic foundations, held the prestigious title of archimandrite, which is synonymous with the title of abbot in the misnomer with regard to the convent.  While the men's house, situated on the slopes of the Dnieper River, was famous for its network of caves dating back to the monastery's foundation in the eleventh century, the convent, whose location was on a plane ground, had none. In the s, the Ascension Monastery was merged with the other of Kiev's two large convents, the Sts Florus and Laurus, on the orders of Tsar Peter I. Anxious to consolidate his victory at the Battle of Poltava in  and curtail the Hetmanate's special privileges, he wished to use the strategic location of the former for the construction of a new city arsenal. The Pushkarivka Ascension Monastery for women, first founded in Poltava in  in close association with the men's Monastery of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, was part of the town's life until its eventual relocation to the country in .  Archival records also testify to the long-term survival of double monasteries in the 'Right-Bank' territories under Polish rule. In the first half of the eighteenth century, a male and a female community co-existed side by side in Liubar, Volhynia.  Later in the century, the monks and the nuns of the Zhabotyn St Onuphrius Monastery in the Polish-controlled part of the former Kiev Palatinate clamoured for help from the metropolitan of Kiev and the Russian ambassador to Poland against Catholic oppression.  At nearby Motrenivka, the Trinity Monastery's male and female communities equally suffered from Tatar and bandit raids that drove some of the nuns to seek a quieter life in Kiev.  In this way, apart from the physical proximity of the male and the female communities that formed a double monastery, and the male superior's leading role, the prevailing mode of their co-existence also assumed shared ownership and use of real estate that could be either ecclesiastical (e.g. a church building) or purely income-generating (e.g. a field, some form of urban property, or a ferry). Under pressure from the state that insisted on the separation of sexes, double houses in the Hetmanate territories gradually changed their status to that of twin monasteries. Once the physical link between them had been severed early in the eighteenth century, they became distinct monastic units, whose abiding relic from the shared past was administrative supervision of the Catholic church. No corresponding title for the mothers superior of important women's monasteries existed, even when their authority extended to more than one convent.   convent head by her male counterpart. Finally, the abolition of Ukrainian autonomy, the secularization of monastic estates in -, and the passing of all surviving monastic institutions in the Russian empire under direct government control through the system of state grants eliminated the last traces of double monasticism. In a parallel process, transition from Orthodoxy to Greek Catholicism in western areas such as Red Ruthenia (later known as Eastern Galicia) led to the disappearance by the eighteenth century of double houses as a form of monastic organization proscribed by the Catholic church. 

I I I
From the dawn of their existence, the enduring characteristic of double monasteries was their familial origins. Canon Twenty of the Seventh Council of Nicaea attested to 'one of the prevailing reasons for the erection of a double monasteryfamilies devoting themselves to a monastic mode of life', which had been envisioned by St Basil in his Rule.  Seventeen out of the twenty-seven double monasteries that functioned in Lebanon from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries were 'familial' monasteries, founded either jointly by several middle-class families, or by a magnate clan prominent in a particular region.  Similar arrangements obtained in the Ukrainian lands. In , Isaiah Kopinsky, the pluralist father superior of three monasteries founded on the private estates of the Wisńiowiecki family in the Chernihiv region, whom he served as a long-term confessor, was allowed to transform one of them into a convent where his sister Alexandra became mother superior under her brother's supervision.  In this way, a person entering a double monastery could hope to find 'brothers' and 'sisters' there both as members of a monastic community, and in a more immediate sense as blood relations. Sometimes monastic status even  Greek Catholic (or 'Uniate') church emerged as a result of the Church Union of Brest (). Under its terms, the Greek Orthodox church accepted certain dogmatic teachings of Roman Catholicism (such as the filioque clause and papal primacy), but was allowed to retain its traditional system of religious rites. Supported by the Polish-Lithuanian state, Greek Catholicism flourished in the areas of Ukraine controlled by Poland, but was promptly stamped out of existence in the Hetmanate. A concise analysis of the origins of the Union of Brest is provided in Mikhail V. created 'brothers' and 'sisters' out of former spouses. This duality could also have legal and economic implications for convents, since in 'early modern law, inheritance was decided not only by the degree of relation of a person to the deceased…but also by their gender'.  Fathers superior often passed parcels of their monasteries' real estate to their natural sisters who acted as heads of convents; however, as mentioned above, generic rules of noble inheritance, whereby daughters rarely stood to obtain their family's hereditary estates that had to be passed through patrilinear descent, were maintained by ensuring that the property in question was newly acquired rather than owned for considerable periods of time.
The St Michael (Golden Domed) Monastery in Kiev, which for part of its history was a doubleor possibly even mixedhouse, provides a good example of the evolution of double monasteries in the Ukrainian lands. The existence of a women's community there is first registered in the s.  From  until his death in , the head of the monastery was Job Boretsky, whom Patriarch Theophanes III of Jerusalem made the metropolitan of Kiev, Halych, and All of Rus' on a passing visit to Ukraine in . The ordination was considered invalid by the state because after the establishment of the Greek Catholic church at the  Union of Brest, the king of Poland refused to recognize the existence of a separate Greek Orthodox hierarchy in his realm.  Job's former wife Nikifora Chekhovichovna, who, in accordance with the canonical requirement, had assumed monastic status at the same time as her husband two years earlier, became the superior of the St Michael's female community.  The familial link at the top had disappeared, and the relationship between the two communities had evidently soured by , when the then convent head Mother Agafia submitted her petition to Tsars Ivan V and Peter I in person on a visit to Moscow (the young tsars ruled in a diarchy between  and ). The petition contained a string of complaints against the monastery's father superior and brothers, who allegedly forced the nuns to perform backbreaking agricultural labour and otherwise mistreated them. These complaints seem to be indicative of a dispute about the nuns' status, as well as any implied hardship. She also pointed out that in the absence of a separate church for the use of women they had to pray together with the monks (a state of affairs the sisters obviously viewed as unsatisfactory) and asked that the nuns be allowed to take over a derelict church nearby.  It is interesting to compare Mother Agafia's complaints to the testimony Paul of Aleppo left in his travel diary written in the mid-s that, despite having a church of their own, the mother superior and the sisters from the Ascension Convent, another of Kiev's double monasteries, willingly went to the main church of the men's Monastery of the Caves on festive dates and took communion with the monks.  The tsarist decree took three years to arrive, but when it did, the message was unambiguous: In the upper city of Kiev, the St Michael's Convent for women, including the cells they presently inhabit, must be partitioned from the men's St Michael Monastery with a strong fence that should not be low [my emphasis]. No gateway between the two monasteries must exist. The ten monks' cells on the right from the entrance to the women's monastery should be demolished and rebuilt on the opposite side … at the city's expense.  The document, however, makes no reference to the all-important matter of a separate church for the female community. Presumably the nuns were still reduced to praying in the monks' church, but now had to walk farther to get there. Although the women's community was not entirely penniless, as they are known to have held property in the countryside, the proceeds were evidently not enough for the construction of even a modest church. The situation was eventually resolved with the help of the former Muscovite regent Tsarevna Sophia (-), who donated funds to the women's monastery sufficient to build a small wooden church. Completed around  and named after St Sophia, it also temporarily gave the monastery the double-barrelled name of St Michael and St Sophia.  Finally, during a passing visit to Kiev in , Tsar Peter I, by then already a sole ruler in his own right, ordered that the nuns be moved elsewhere, and in  the convent began the tortuous process of relocation to the downtown area of Podil, where it was refounded under the name of St John the Evangelist. At the time of its foundation around the turn of the seventeenth century, the Kiev St Nicholas (Holy Jordan) Monastery for women may have represented an intermediate stage between being part of a double monastery proper and a convent twinned with (i.e. made administratively dependent upon) a male monastic community. The St Nicholas (Holy Jordan) church had belonged to the ancient men's St Cyril Monastery and, along with its landed properties, was confirmed as part of its traditional possessions when the monastery that had stood derelict for centuries was restored in -.  A women's community attached itself to it toward the end of the seventeenth century and was given the church to use; its official name thus derived from that of the church rather than the men's monastery. Occasional references to it as the 'Kiev St Cyril Convent' found in the Consistory records, however, point out an unmistakable association between the male and the female communities in the mind of contemporaries.  At that time, Sava and Maria Tuptalo, the parents of the future St Dimitry of Rostov (canonized in ), extended their charity to the St Cyril Monastery, in whose main church both of them would subsequently be buried. Dimitry himself briefly held the office of the St Cyril father superior between February and June ; three of his sisters took the veil and ended their days as nuns of the St Nicholas (Holy Jordan) community. While the two elder sisters died in an epidemic of , the youngest, Paraskeva, was the convent's mother superior when she passed away in .  In her testament, she left a request to the Holy Jordan sisters that they look after her orphaned child, who was either a boy or a disabled male adult.  The way the dying Paraskeva entrusted her son to the care of the convent's women suggests that she literally viewed it as an extension of her family.
Double monasteries may have been fading away in the Hetmanate territories by the s, but they left an important legacy in the way some women's convents continued to be governed. This basic administrative model involved twinning women's and men's houses, whereby the mother superior reported directly to the abbot and received instructions from higher authorities indirectly through him.  An eighteenth-century file containing copies of decrees for- consecrations.  The Consistory decrees, even those specifically related to the female house, went to him first, only subsequently to be forwarded to the mother superior. Occasionally, instructions were attached to the documents requesting that copies be taken from them and originals returned to the men's monastery. The Consistory's mailing list provides a clear idea of the church hierarchy in Kiev and the place of the city's convents in it. The highest rank was afforded the four archimandrites of the Caves, the St Nicholas, the St Michael (Golden Domed), and the Epiphany Confraternity Teaching monasteries. In the order of diminishing importance, there followed superiors of other men's monasteries, the vicar of the metropolitan see, and the three overseers appointed to supervise the city parish priests. Finally, at the bottom of the administrative structure stood the mother superiors of the Sts Florus and Laurus, St John the Evangelist, and St Nicholas (Holy Jordan) convents.  Within its particular category (i.e. monasteries headed by archimandrites, other monastic foundations for men, and female communities), a monastery's rank depended on the date of its foundation.  Following its enforced merger with the Ascension Convent c.  that had been associated with the ancient men's Monastery of the Caves, the affairs of the Sts Florus and Laurus Monastery continued to be overseen by the metropolitan of Kiev. Its origins as an independent privately owned religious foundation that was subsequently subordinated to the metropolitan under a perpetual ad hoc arrangement, and the fact that the convent had a higher than average proportion of noble women in the community, help to explain this irregularity.  As stated above, the affairs of the St Nicholas (Holy Jordan) were supervised by the abbot of the neighbouring St Cyril Monastery. Following its relocation to a different part of the city and the change of name to the St John the Evangelist, the former St Michael's Convent was also placed under his authority.  This unusual development can be explained by the fact that for several years the St Nicholas (Holy Jordan) and the erstwhile St Michael communities were huddled together in the monastery grounds of the former while the new St John the Evangelist Convent was under construction.  The order of command for the rural women's houses is harder to define, but documents testify that as late as , fifty years after its transfer to the country, the Pushkarivka Ascension Monastery was still under the tutelage of the  Liudmila V. Charipova, 'Virgins and widows: imperial legislation and practices of admission to the novitiate and profession in Ukrainian women's monasteries', Slavonic and East European Review,  (), p. .   superiors of the Poltava Exaltation of the Holy Cross Monastery for men.  The available evidence strongly suggests that in the eighteenth century the pairing arrangement only applied to those male and female communities that had previously formed parts of a double monastery, while the rest of the female monastic houses were placed directly under a local bishop. It is possible that at the root of this two-tier structure was joint ownership of property in the past. If, following the separation and relocation, a convent fell into decline, its estates would revert to the men's monastery as a direct legal heir.

I V
As Sophia Senyk wrote in , 'Only when … [the extent of the applicability of Russian legislation regarding ecclesiastical matters in pre- Ukraine] has been studied in detail can more than vague generalities and isolated examples illustrate the particular problem of women's monasteries.'  Maksym Iaremenko used similar methodology in his recent study of eighteenthcentury men's monastic houses in Kiev, which demonstrates the appropriateness of applying a broader legal framework to the historical analysis of ecclesiastical affairs in the autonomy.  Any discussion of female monasticism in early modern Ukraine should therefore take into consideration 'the universal importance of questions of cultural and religious difference as structuring elements of the law'.  The Second Lithuanian Statute () remained the backbone of the Hetmanate's legal system until the last traces of Ukrainian political and legal autonomy in the Russian empire were dismantled in -.  In Poland-Lithuania, it had been integrated with other legal sources, such as variants of the so-called Saxon Code applicable to the urban localities that enjoyed the rights associated with the Magdeburg Law, and various common law statutes.  Individuals, religious associations, monasteries and whole confessions could also be affected, directly or indirectly, by royal and parliamentary legislation, decrees of provincial diets, as well as the wiles of local nobility, which had the force of law in their domains under the law of patronage.  The legal regime in place in the Ukrainian Hetmanate thus had a multicentric character, whereby 'the pursuit of legal strategies to take advantage of the complexities of the legal order acted to make a relatively fluid legal order more fluid still'.  The result was a fiercely litigious society.
On accepting the sovereignty and protection of the tsar of Muscovy under the  Treaty of Pereiaslav, Ukraine retained both its traditional system of law and peculiar socio-military organization, whereby its territory was subdivided into Cossack regiments rather than provinces; no serfdom on the classic Russian model existed. An attempt at creating a code of law that would unify and thus embed the features of the old system, based on the Lithuanian Statute, Saxon, and common law, was undertaken as late as , but failed to pass the imperial legislation, whose tendency throughout the eighteenth century was to promote a centralized legal regime rather than upholding pluralistic regional legal orders.  The system of church organization was no less complex. In , the Orthodox hierarchy in Kiev finally agreed to relinquish the affiliation with the Patriarchate of Constantinople it maintained since the tenth century, and instead subjected itself to the Patriarchate of Moscow (created in ) as an independent local church. A special tsarist decree issued at the time of the transfer affirmed the Kievan metropolitan's traditional privileges: maintenance of independent ecclesiastical courts, educational system, and press, free election of the metropolitan, and his continued direct jurisdiction over the subordinate dioceses, bishops, and monasteries, preservation of local ecclesiastical practices, and confirmation of all the property rights of the Ukrainian clergy and monasteries.  The Kiev metropolitan also retained a nominal jurisdiction over the lands in the 'Right-Bank Ukraine' and Belarus, which remained under Poland-Lithuania. His authority thus extended to the vast area that included two 'Left-Bank' dioceses under Russian protectorate: Kiev and Chernihiv, and four in the 'foreign' territory: Lviv, Lutsk, Przemysł, and Mogilev-Mstsislav. By the s, the metropolitan had shed all the subordinate dioceses, except for his own. As such he still exercised limited ecclesiastical jurisdiction over a handful of Orthodox monasteries and parishes in the 'Right Bank'.  The creation of the Holy Governing Synod subordinated to the centralized state by Emperor Peter I marked the period of a temporary abolition of the Kiev metropolitan see between  and , and its transformation into a regular diocese of the Russian Orthodox church. But the problem for the Holy Synod remained in that asserting its authority over monastic institutions, whose inhabitants continued to enjoy the rights afforded them by a different legal system, was not straightforward. For example, the dictates of the Petrine  Benton, Law and colonial cultures, p. .  K. Vyslobokov, 'Vyznachna pam'iatka ukrains'koho prava: dzherela, zmist, systema ta sotsial'no-politychni peredumovy stvorennia', in idem, ed., Prava, za iakymy sudyt'sia malorosiis'kyi narod (Kiev, ), pp. xii-xli.  Addendum to the Spiritual Regulation (Dukhovnyi reglament), which attempted a drastic reform of monastic life in the empire, were not adhered to even in the emperor's lifetime. Likewise, the secularization of the church and monastery lands in the Russian empire carried out by Catherine II from  did not directly apply to the Ukrainian territories. As a result, until  Ukrainian monasteries and clergy continued to exercise personal, property, and customary rights that distinguished them from their counterparts in Great Russia.  Up until the penultimate decade of the eighteenth century, problems and disagreements with the imperial authorities and discrepancies between the imperial law and Ukrainian traditional privileges continued to be resolved by way of negotiation and compromise.  In her study of the interaction between imperial law and colonial cultures between  and , the American legal historian Lauren Benton juxtaposes the strategies of imperial rule with the preservation of elements of native institutions as a way of sustaining a workable, balanced legal regime. Due to the weight she attributes to the importance of local cultures, Benton's methodology provides a suitable framework for the discussion of the relationship between Russian imperial authority and the Hetmanate's monastic institutions. A long-drawn legal suit that involved the Orthodox Novi Mlyny Assumption Monastery for women, which had once formed part of a double house, provides a good illustration of how grey areas of sibling relations, patronage, and overlapping legislation affected this type of monastic institution.
The men's Baturyn St Michael's Monastery had been founded in the medieval period, but the first documentary mention of a women's community dates back to the late s. Its first mother superior Eugenia Khlevinskaia (fl. -) was a natural sister of the then superior of the men's monastery, the monastic priest (ieromonakh) Ioann Iesifovich (d. ). It would seem that the female and the male communities shared the same monastery grounds. It is even possible that at least for part of their history they co-existed under mixed rather than double-monastery arrangements. Because of their apparent penury, the nuns were allowed to collect half the income from the ferry across the River Seim near Baturyn, which the monastery had owned since . It was part of the gift of real estate made by the Polish Catholic Crown Deputy Chancellor Jerzi Ossolinśki (-).  A monk and a nun sat at the ferry collecting  Ibid., p. .  Charipova, 'Virgins and widows', pp. -. The process of gradual transformation of the Metropolitanate of Kiev into a part of the unified and disciplined synodal church in the eighteenth century is analysed in Maksym Iaremenko's important recent book Pered vyklykamy unifikatsii ta distsiplinuvannia: Kyivs'ka mytropoliia u XVIII stolitti (Lviv, ).  See the ferry dispute court file: CSHAUK: fonds , op. , no. , fo. . As follows from the text of Ossolinśki's charter, the properties had previously been in the monastery's possession, and were given back on the request from the Greek Orthodox Palatine of Kiev Adam Kysil (c. -), known both for his great political influence and patronage of the church: N. P. Vasilenko, Materialy dlia istorii ekonomicheskogo, iuridicheskogo i obshchestvennogo byta staroi Malorossii ( vols., Chernihiv, -), I, p. . fees and split the income at the end of the day.  In , another set of benefactors, a certain Christoph Silech (Sylych) and his wife presented the St Michael Monastery with a property situated near the village of Novi Mlyny, which included fields of arable land, woods, and meadows. For reasons that the documents do not specify, Mother Eugenia with the sisters were given that land to build a 'cell' on, while part of the women's community apparently stayed put in Baturyn until the s.  Again, generic principles of noble kinship and patronage seem to have obtained, whereby the heir or 'eldest brother had a lifelong responsibility for the welfare of his siblings…He was obliged to guarantee them financial support to allow a living according to their rank.'  It seems clear that as part of a double house the female community headed by the father superior's natural sister could not be left to starve next to the prosperous men's monastery.  Arrangements of this kind had the potential to backfire, however, when the familial connection at the top ceased to exist with the passing of the male superior.  An important feature of the laws of property ownership in Poland-Lithuania, along with the obvious significance of the original charters, was the need for the property holder to obtain a reconfirmation of his or her rights by a new royal incumbent. Following the formation of the Cossack autonomy under Russian protectorate in , these confirmatory rights came to rest with the holder of the office of the Ukrainian hetman, the nominal head of state, who answered to the tsar as his liege lord. An attempt at further legitimation of this arrangement was undertaken in the abortive Articles of Hlukhiv (), which stipulated that grants of real estate made by the hetman were subject to automatic confirmation by the tsar if the recipient subsequently petitioned him with such a request.   CSHAUK, fonds , op. , no. , fo. v.  CSHAUK, fonds , op. , no. , fo.  v; CSHAUL, fonds , op. , no. , fo. . The word 'cell' is used here to describe a rural outpost of an urban monastic foundation, usually established for economic reasons. Because the heads of the Assumption female community retained the name of the original monastery in their title for some time (as mothers superior of the 'Baturyn and Novi Mlyny Monastery'), Senyk argues that the community of nuns was initially divided between the two locations and that the eventual parting of the ways occurred when the women's portion of the monastery complex in Baturyn burned down in : Senyk, Women's monasteries, p. ; cf. the entry for  Oct.  in Dimitry Tuptalo's diary: 'Dnevnye zapiski sviatogo Dimitriia, mitropolita Rostovskogo', Dushepoleznoe chtenie,  (), p. .  Sophie Ruppel, 'Subordinates, patrons, and most beloved: sibling relationships in seventeenth-century German court society', in Johnson and Sabean, eds., Sibling relations and the transformations of European kinship, p. .  Cf. Ruppel's observation that younger siblings, too, had the duty to live honourably so as not to damage the family's reputation: ibid., p. .
 As Marrese observes, in Muscovite and imperial Russia, the death of a brother likewise had the tendency to supply the catalyst for a dispute with his heirs about rights for secular property, Marrese, A woman's kingdom, p. .  Vasilenko, Materialy dlia istorii, I, p. .
The monks of the Baturyn Monastery obtained a summary confirmation of their property rights, including Ossolinśki's gift, from Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytskyi (-) in .  The two monastic communities continued to share the income from the ferry across the Seim, but the relationship had evidently not been the same since the death of Mother Eugenia's brother, the abbot, in . Two years later, the women's community managed to secure exclusive rights to the crossing from Hetman Ivan Briukhovetskyi (-), against the monks' protests that the confirmation was invalid since the nuns had not held the title deed.  In  or , Mother Eugenia Khlevinskaia, the long-serving first superior of the women's community, travelled to Moscow in person successfully to petition Tsar Alexis for the confirmation of their existing property rights, including the disputed ferry crossing.  His initial decree was somewhat Solomonic: the nuns could keep the ferry, provided that the men's monastery did not object to it.  However, the second tsarist charter issued shortly after the first cites no conditions to their ownership of the property.  Most importantly, Alexis's interference created a significant precedent, which subsequently affected the case. 'Multiple forums meant multiple sources of law', so by intervening and in fact exceeding his remit with regard to the Ukrainian jurisdiction, where his rights were essentially confirmatory, Alexis established himself as an additional source of law, imperceptibly upsetting the existing pluralistic legal order.  Actions such as this gave his tsarist successors the possibility of further expanding their role as imperial law-makers and promoting the creation of a state-centred legal regime in the century that followed. Benton's observation that 'the legal status of seemingly marginal actors in the legal order became symbolically central to multisided struggles over the structure and scope' of imperial authority clearly applies here.  In actual fact, the monks raised no formal objections at the time to the transfer of ferry ownership to the female community, although they later explained their failure to do so by frequent changes of abbots and their general laxity of v. By that time, the women's monastery was reasonably well off, as the charter also lists two villages, four mills, some urban properties and plots of land. See also Senyk, Women's monasteries, pp. -. A hundred years later, the convent had  peasants working on its estates; in addition to the personal possessions they held on entering the convent and kept, the twenty-six nuns enjoyed the income derived from the villages, and the mother superior's quarters consisted of six rooms: ibid., pp. , .  Benton, Law and colonial cultures, p. .  Ibid., p. .
rule.  The former was certainly true; as to the latter, the diary of Dimitry Tuptalo, who served as superior in Baturyn twice (- and -), is indeed testimony to his repeated absences from the monastery; these included a visit to Moscow in , and his continued preoccupation with composing his celebrated lives of the Orthodox saints.  Notably, Dimitry's diary also fails to register any kind of disagreement with the nuns, whom he mentions several times in a businesslike manner. The men's monastery was old, prosperous, and famously patronized by the hetmans, whose capital was transferred from Chyhyryn in the 'Right-Bank' Ukraine to Baturyn late in the seventeenth century. Perhaps not all of its abbots considered squabbles over a ferry crossing as a good investment of their time. A summary confirmation in  of all previously existing property rights attached to the men's monastery in Baturyn, issued by Ivan V, Peter I, and Tsarevna Sophia who acted as regent, however, did not include the ferry crossing over the River Seim on the list of estates it owned.  But a similar confirmatory charter given to the women's monastery the following year repeatedly mentions the ferry as part of their estate.  Nonetheless, litigation over the ownership of the ferry continued for the best part of the eighteenth century. In , the Kiev metropolitan set up a commission to settle the dispute, but without success.  The parties are also known to have had recourse to local courts, although decisions of courts, particularly in civil cases, were not guaranteed, and were in effect unenforceable.  Thus, on  February , the Baturyn povet (district) court declared itself unable to reach a clear-cut verdict in the ferry crossing dispute. The prevailing opinion was that the property rights belonged to the men's monastery, presumably because they were in possession of the original deed from Ossolinśki.  However, since the women's community held tsarist charters confirming their ownership, and in view of the fact that the nuns were in actual possession of the ferry, the court acknowledged their continued enjoyment of the property and the proceeds from it.  The court advised the men's monastery to present their case to Empress Catherine II as the only way out of this legal  CSHAUK, fonds , op. , no. , fo. v.  'Dnevnye zapiski sviatogo Dimitriia', pp. -, -. The first edition of Dimitry's Lives of the Saints (Chet'i minei) appeared between  and .    Although no information on the income from the ferry is available, one in close proximity to a large city like Baturyn would undoubtedly have turned out a handsome profit. By comparison, in the second half of the eighteenth century a ferry that belonged to a different monastery and did not boast such a prime location could bring its owners up to  roubles in one summer: Senyk, Women's monasteries, p. . At that time, a work horse could be purchased for  roubles: CSHAUK, fonds , op. , no. , fo. .
conundrum.  Although the Ukrainian Hetmanate's political autonomy, abolished in , was already a thing of the past by the time when this legal advice was issued, the rights of ecclesiastical poperty it had secured would hold until the secularization of .
The set of conditions that made possible the foundation and survival of the monastic community for women in Baturyn underscores the centrality of familial ties in the establishment of double monasteries. That Mother Eugenia, its first superior, was the abbot's biological sister explains his eagerness both to allow her fledging community to attach itself to the older monastery for men, and especially to dole out property to the nuns. In addition, it was certainly not accidental that the land Khlevinskaia and her convent sisters received for settlement was newly donated property rather than something the men's monastery had owned for a period of time. This seems to be consonant with the basic premise of noble inheritance laid out in the Lithuanian Statute that secured the ownership of hereditary estates to immediate family through patrilinear descent, but allowed for wider disposal of newly acquired property to more distant kin or even outside kinship structures. Evidently a rudiment of the legal system characteristic of strong links between property relations, blood ties, and agnatic seniority, the application of this principle to monastic estates passed from brother to sister as heads of their respective communities points out a curious blurring of boundaries between the private and the communal in Ukrainian monastic institutions. V From its origins in late antiquity, the double monastery as a form of religious institution provided a mechanism of support for the nuns in an uncertain world. Double monasteries flourished in the Ukrainian lands between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. Their key features can be identified as follows: a combined male and female community () functioned under the same name and under the same overall authority of the male superior, () existed within the same walled monastic compound or in immediate spatial proximity, and () enjoyed the ownership of some type of property in common. When a new monastic community attached itself to an older one, it was the men's monastery that played host and often provided the nuns with a starter property package from recently acquired real estate. The removal of any one of the above three conditions registered in the sources marks the branching out of the women's community and its change of status to a separate, but dependent (or twin) monastery, operating under a different name. As a rule, the nuns' access to the proceeds of monastic landholdings and urban property was secured through the link between members of the same family, who in their respective roles as 'heir'/ 'eldest brother', and 'sister' ruled the  CSHAUK, fonds , op. , no. , fo. v. community as the senior male and the subordinate female superiors, but it became problematic almost as soon as the relationship of kinship at the top was removed.  In Orthodox Eastern Europe and Christian Middle East alike, devolution of state power meant that, in anthropological terms, the prevalent social model at work was one of gendered dominance supported by familial structure and culture.  As long as formal mechanisms and structures of the centralized, bureaucratized state remained weak, arrangements based on kinship took precedence.  In the second half of the seventeenth century the growth of double monasteries in the Hetmanate began to slow, heralding their gradual disappearance as a feature of religious life over the century that followed. Few foundations took place in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, and no double monasteries in a proper sense remained in existence in the Russian-controlled 'Left-Bank' Ukraine following the foundation of the Holy Governing Synod, an imperial state department that since  directly oversaw church affairs. A combination of Eastern Orthodoxy's assured status as the state religion in Muscovy and the territories it controlled, the creation of stable hierarchical structures of ecclesiastical administration, and close supervision of convents by local church authorities made religious women less acutely dependent on the monks. There is compelling evidence, moreover, that male and female communities, which had peacefully co-existed within the double monastery framework in earlier periods, were being pulled apart by internal divisions determined by the rapidly changing social and political context of the eighteenth century. Property disputes that emerged toward the end of the seventeenth century demarcated two distinct stages in the development of double monasteries in the Hetmanate: the initial period of insecurity and the women's dependence on the monks, and the time when the combination of female reassurance and a favourable legal regime began to encourage competition for resources. In the Polish-controlled 'Right-Bank' Ukraine, where the weak state was unable to put much pressure on local ecclesiastical institutions and provincial elites, and confessional tensions made the nuns' need for protection greater, double monasteries remained in existence until the end of the eighteenth century. The Partitions of Poland (-) by the centralizing Habsburg and Romanov powers heralded a complete and swift disappearance of this type of monastic institution in all these territories.
Across the Orthodox world, the growth of double monasteries was stimulated by prolonged periods of political uncertainty, devolution of power, religious intolerance, and physical insecurity, all of which inhibited the development of independent female communities. Under such conditions, double monasteries fulfilled an important social function by allowing the women attracted by cloistered existence as monastic individuals a realistic option of achieving this goal. Double monasteries fared best in conditions of loose or even virtually absent state controls characteristic of pre-modern composite states that were held together by negotiation and compromise between the centre and the periphery. In the constant ebb and flow of efforts to build and maintain political structures of the empire, double monasteries came under pressure to reform when the state was in a position to flex its muscles, but quickly regained vitality when imperial powers became distracted by war or political turmoil. Vague accusations of immorality concealed thinly veiled anxieties over the power of economically independent agents supported by local networks of elite kin, and were reflective of wider struggles for political autonomy of the provinces against the authority of imperial metropolis, succintly described by John Elliott in a seminal article. In earlier periods, he writes, there was no alternative to heavy dependence on political elites, whose loyalty could only be won, and kept, by patronage. This in turn gave provincial elites … substantive leverage, which could be used…to exert pressure on the crown, and…to extend their social and economic dominance over their own communities.  Already in the seventeenth century, however, heads of large European states were showing signs of growing impatience with ruling by slow, pragmatic methods of the past, which became an impediment to maximizing resources, centralizing military power, and effective government.  By the eighteenth century, traditional privileges of local elites began to look like annoying and unaffordable luxury.
Double monasteries' inevitable proximity of men and women rendered them open to suspicions of impropriety, but their ultimate decline was not the consequence of official censure. It happened because the evolution of modern imperial state with its trappings in the form of centralized administrative control over ecclesiastical affairs, secularization of church property, the weakening of patron-client networks against increasing reliance on bureaucratic procedures, and assurance of law and order rendered them obsolete. The corollary that, at first glance, had little to do with the evolution of empire into a nation-state, but nevertheless became a direct result of the centripetal tendencies it unleashed, was that women who chose monastic life in this new purposefully run state had other options for the pursuit of the straight and narrow path of  J. H. Elliott, 'A Europe of composite monarchies', Past and Present,  (), p. .  Ibid., pp. -.