"An Epidemic of Demonic Possession in a Russian Foundry Town, 1839-40" with Christine Worobec

The presentation will focus on a rare clerical description of an epidemic of demonic possession that unfolded in 1839 in the town of Nizhnaia Utkinskaia. The total number of possessed individuals, almost all of whom were women, reached forty-four. In contrast to Roman Catholicism, Russian Orthodoxy had not developed a theology of demonology. Academic theological writing was also relatively new. Father Florovskii's1840 account presents an unusual insight into clerical thinking as well as popular understandings of demonic possession. As had been true for the previous century and a third, clergy and laity associated possession or what they referred to as "shrieking" with witchcraft. Sharing a belief in the real possibility of demonic possession, Father Florovskii and the settlement’s inhabitants participated in a possession drama, interpreting behaviors and signs as indicative of demonic and magical activity which could be overcome by empathetic spiritual means. Such thinking contrasted sharply to that of the secular authorities and medical doctors who in subscribing to the criminal definition of shrieking as fraudulent behavior sought to unmask it.

Christine D. Worobec is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of History at Northern Illinois University. She has published widely on nineteenth-century Russian and Ukrainian peasants, women and gender issues, and religious history. Her monographs, Peasant Russia: Family and Community in Post-Emancipation Russia (1991) and Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons (2001), have both won the Association for Women in Slavic Studies' (AWSS) Heldt Book Prize. Dr. Worobec is also the recipient of the 2008 AWSS Outstanding Achievement Award and the 2017 Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies' Distinguished Contributions Award. Her 2020 Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, 1000-1900: A Sourcebook, co-edited with Valerie A. Kivelson, received an honorable mention from the 2021 East Slavic Studies Association Book Prize committee. Dr. Worobec continues to conduct research on and write about Orthodox pilgrimages and other religious practices in Ukraine and Russia from 1700 to the present.

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