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In the 17th century, St. Ibar, Ailbe, Ciaran, and Declan were called quattuor sanctissimi episcopi (‘the four most holy bishops’). It is thought that they played a pivotal role in the conversion of Ireland, especially its southern parts, and were preaching Christianity there before or at the same time as St. Patrick. We learn about them from a number of sources, including Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae, Martyrology of Oengus, Martyrology of Donegal, Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland by the Four Masters, Book of Leinster, and Speckled Book. They are the founders of monasteries and the episcopal sees in Saigir (St. Ciaran), Emly (St. Ailbe), and Ardmore (St. Declan). St. Ibar founded the monastery on the Isle of Begerin. Their veneration is slowly building up again. The paper represents an attempt at systemising what we know about "the four bishops" from their Lives, the annals, and other sources mentioning them. The aim of the article is to place the aforementioned Saints within the life of the Irish society and Church; distill their distinctive features, spiritual, and social role within the early Medieval Church of Ireland (by analysing narrative patterns, genealogies, and mentions); and describe the development of their modern-day cult. While not claiming to present a definitive and exhaustive answer to these questions, the present paper is nevertheless part of an ongoing research into the subject.

The article is devoted to the penetration of the concept of ecclesiastical refuge into the British Isles, its spread and regional peculiarities. The focus is on the origin and realization of the right of ecclesiastical refuge in the territory of the Welsh kingdoms from the early Middle Ages, when sources record the first signs of the allocation of the temple territory as a place with a special legal status, until the XV century, when the charters of the English kings approved the traditional privilege of Welsh religious centers to provide security to those in need. Being one of the most important achievements of church diplomacy, the right of ecclesiastical refuge was directly related to the status of a religious center: documents confirming it were preserved and copied, if there were no documents, they were forged or episodes in which they hid someone from persecution within the walls of their cell or monastery were included in the lives of the patron saints. The almost simultaneous appearance of such plots in the Lives of the late XI–XII centuries. It suggests that this was one of the main arguments of the Welsh religious communities in the struggle to maintain their position in the face of the changes that began with the arrival of the Normans on the island. For representatives of the secular authorities, the right of ecclesiastical refuge was an inconspicuous but very effective political tool that allowed, on the one hand, to control local religious communities, allowing them to exercise the privilege they needed or violating it, on the other hand, creating an opportunity at the right moment to ensure the safety of both themselves and other participants in political processes.

The article is devoted to the concepts contributed by Alexander Smirnov about the Irish Church and the role of Christian culture to the Old Irish narrative tradition in general. Archival records shows that so-called "Christian element" was entirely accepted by him and was emphasized in an initially neutral formula; later, however, passages about the ‘undoubted Christian influence’ related to some motifs were replaced by such markers as "late interpolations" or "artificial insertions". The turn from a comprehensive approach to an intensive search for the archaic "Celtic basis" has affected all aspects of Smirnov’s discourse: from the interpretation of particular motifs to the characteristics of Christianization and Irish Church organization in general. Due to these observations, we suppose to depict such Smirnov’s conceptions as the truly ‘nativist’ position.The author gives special gratitude to the National Library of Russia, the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) of the Russian Academy of Sciences for an opportunity to work and consult with their founds and record series.

The article examines the book "The Antiquities of Ireland" by Edward Ledwich, published in two editions — in 1790 and 1804. The work, which was very popular at the time, is now almost forgotten, but nevertheless, the figure of Ledwich still arouses the interest of specialists in Irish historiography and the history of thought. The main topic of the work is the analysis of the history of the Irish Church in Ledwich’s book and Ledwich’s use of Irish historical sources proper.

The work examines the actions taken by the Scottish Church during the First War of Scottish Independence (1296– 1328), as well as the preliminary period starting from 1286. The main objectives are to determine the direct role of the Scottish clergy in diplomatic and political activities, to assess the impact on the national liberation movement, as well as to study the position of the Scottish Church in the Christian world at the end of the First War of Independence. Great attention is given to the propaganda activities of the bishops, as well as the relationship of the secular and spiritual authorities with the Roman Church before and after 1302. The transformation of the position and structure of the Scottish Church in relation to the Roman See and the entire Christian world, both legally and spiritually, is analyzed.

Christianity, as a set of ideas and an institutional state, is formed in the practical vocabulary of its time — the early principate, the semantics of which is influenced by the meaning of some terms and their use, established and wellestablished in the era of Hellenism.The article examines the change in the category of citizenship, which lost its original meaning in the dominant era, with a change in political practice, and almost completely lost its meaning in the Middle Ages, with the radical transformation of the foundations of social organization in the European civilizational area.

The book "Revelations of Blessed Angela" ("The Phenomenon of the gifts of the Almighty sent down in the Spirit of Blessed Mother Angela of Foligno", hereinafter — "Revelations...") as a historical source attracts very little attention in Russian literature, and in Western literature all research is focused around the religious component of revelations, the cult of the personality of God. Angela and the questions of finding the unknown and mystical in her visions. For some, bl. Angela is a real saint, for others she is a woman who suffered from hysteria, and all her visions are the fruit of a sick fantasy.The work analyzed the first two parts of the book "Revelations..." by bl. Angela, which are key to understanding the teaching. The experience described in the chapters on visions is closely related to the problem of authorship. Solving the issue of authorship may provide an opportunity to take a fresh look at historical time and similar works. It is proposed to consider the book as evidence of an attempt to create a cult of the holy new formation, which turned out to be very successful: under the developed doctrine of salvation, the life of the saint was compiled, who directly accepted divine revelations, fully confirming the views of certain groups of spirituals in the Franciscan order.

The purpose of the proposed article is to reveal the content and study using paleographic methods and analysis of the historical and cultural context of the original letter of Tsar Peter I, unknown to date, which touches on the fate of one of the founders of the Vygovsky Old Believer community — Daniil Vikulin. The purpose of this article is to show the source value of the newly found unique document, as well as to emphasize the factual nature of Ivan Filippov’s "History of the Vygovsky Monastery", which has been the only source on this topic up to now. The newly found letter sheds new light on the circumstances of Daniil Vikulin’s arrest and release.

The experience of describing the corpus of cyrillic printed books of the 16–18th, belonging to three regions, allowed to introduce several thousand sources into scientific circulation and raise fundamental issues of classification and further study of book culture. Several thousand sources were introduced into scientific circulation, which allowed for the first time to raise or solve fundamental issues of book culture, traditionally defining not only spiritual, but also and the state life of Russia.The article offers an excursion into the history of the study of the distribution of cyrillic old printed books in the 16–18th and the methodology of their description developed by the staff of the Archeographic Laboratory of the Lomonosov Moscow State University. The purpose of this study is to disseminate the positive experience gained from the theoretical and practical application of the methodology for further work on cataloging and describing cyrillic printed books in other regions of the Russian Federation.

Hans Seybolt was a monastery scribe from Lower Bavaria who lived in the second half of the 15th century. In 1476, he attended the wedding between the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus and the Neapolitan princess Beatrix as an envoy of the count of the Palatinate. He left a detailed report about that event, which is preserved as a transcript in the only copy that is in the State Library of Bavaria under the signature Cgm 331. Seybolt's report also contains brief information about the Bosnian king Nicholas of Ilok and his son Lawrence, which are the subject of this paper's analysis.

During the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina 1992-1995, the special library of the Oriental Institute was destroyed. A significant contribution in the process of restoration and replenishment of the library fund in the post-war period was made by the Hamid Hadžibegić’s personal library, which arrived as a gift at the Oriental Institute in 2001. The library has over 1,000 publications that belonged to this established scientist and researcher of the past of Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose basic research had a strong influence in the scientific universe of Ottoman history researchers. This paper presents the dedications of colleagues and friends in his books and journals as cultural reminders and documentary records that, with their structure, text, dating and signature, represent a source of significant information about the life and work of this scientist.

When Austria-Hungary occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina, it brought many social and cultural changes. One of them was suppressing the widespread culture of holding and carrying arms that existed in Ottoman Bosnia. Holding arms was still possible but under strict control. Firearm holders were, therefore, a very tiny, privileged group inside society. In this paper, we analyze the ethnic/religious and social structure of this group in the case of the Tuzla Circle in 1904. How large was this group? Were there differences along ethnic and social lines in terms of firearm holding rates? These are the key questions we are seeking answers to in this paper, with an aim to get the first insight into the broader picture of firearm holding in the entire province under the Monarchy’s control.

In this article, the author analyzes the place and role of prominent Bosnian Muslim religious authority Husein Ðozo in the 13th SS Division, the background and reasons for his joining this division, his views on current issues and challenges of the Second World War, as well as his fate after returning to Yugoslavia and being arrested in 1945. The author points out that Ðozo’s postwar involvement, in his fundamental ideas, does not represent a radical break with the tendencies and views he advocated in the thirties and forties, but rather a continuity of efforts to realize and reflect on the position and perspective of Islam and Muslims in the contemporary world.

The supply of food to the army and the civilian population during the First World War was a major problem for the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Food shortages plagued the population of Bosnia and Herzegovina throughout the war, and the worst famine was in 1917. The pronounced problem with nutrition was a consequence of underdeveloped agriculture, which could not produce sufficient quantities of food even in peaceful times, so the deficit had to be imported. Although the authorities immediately after the outbreak of war took into their own hands the management of the most important articles of food, it quickly became clear that the supply and nutrition of the population would become one of the most important and difficult issues of the state. In the procurement of food and its distribution in the country through provisioning, the authorities faced numerous problems, such as insufficient and irregular transport, abuses, etc. However, its immediate consumers had the most trouble with provisioning. Due to the shortage of the most necessary foodstuffs, the population was forced to manage as best they knew how to survive. The most difficult situation, however, was in the passive parts of the country, where the people were dying of hunger.

In the text, the author provides an overview of the history of the Serbs in the Požega valley using archival material, literature and interviews with the remaining members of the Serbian national minority. The author first brings information about the circumstances of Serb immigration to the area of the Požega valley, and then deals with the customs and way of life of the Serbs. He devoted a special chapter to the Second World War. The socialist period was covered in the following chapter, which also covered the culture of remembrance of the Second World War and the neglect of religion. The last chapter deals with the Homeland War in the Požega valley and the suffering of Serbs in that area.

The Doukhobors (Spirit Wrestlers), a heterogeneous group of Christians in Russia and Canada, whose anti-war stance became well known when they organized a Burning of Arms ceremony in 1895, inhabit an undisputed placein the history of the peace churches and religious denominations. We argue, however, that the connection between the Doukhobors and twentieth century pacifists such as Jane Addams (1860–1935), Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi(1869–1948), and George Woodcock (1912–1995), deserves more attention. We then aim to raise awareness of Peter Nikolaevich Maloff (1900–1971), who authentically carried on the pacifist spirit of the group as he interacted not only with Gandhi and Woodcock, but also with Alexander Berkman (1870–1936), Dorothy Day (1897–1980),A. J. Muste (1885–1967), and Scott and Helen Nearing (1883–1983 and 1904–1995), among others. We finally highlight some instances of Doukhobor relations with the War Resisters’ International and the International Vegetarian Union in Europe during the late–1920s and early–1930s. In all this we draw out "Christ’s law of nonresistance to evil by violence" (Leo Tolstoy) that may be obscured to the public eye, not only because the number of self-identified Doukhobors has continually decreased due to the forces of assimilation, but also because "the scourge of war"(Preamble, Charter of the United Nations, 1945) continues to threaten the survival of life on Earth.

The article is devoted to the history of the participation of Old Believers in the Great Patriotic War and consecrates the little-studied issue of desertion for religious reasons. The article is based on the materials of field research conductedby the participants of the expedition of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Archeographic Laboratory of the Faculty of History of Lomonosov Moscow State University among the Old Believers-"Bespopovtsy",residents of Kilinsk. The source base was audio records of interviews collected during field research in 2003-2015, focusing on the study of everyday religiosity. The article analyzes the case of Mitrofan Kondratievich Kozlov, a strict mentor of the community of Old Believers-"Bespopovtsy" of the chapel of concord from the Kemerovo region. Mitrofan Kondratievich built his whole life and the life of his family in accordance with his own understanding ofChristian rules and strict prohibitions.

The article presents opinions in global Pentecostalism about pacifism and nonviolence. In most European countries and the United States, the topic of pacifism became relevant during the World Wars. Over time, pacifism as a dominant was replaced by the possibility of independent choice of believers in accordance with their convictions of conscience. The Global Pentecostal movement has developed different strategies of action in relation to participation in military operations: from categorical refusal to total acceptance of the need for military service. Those strategies were influenced by changes in the views of religious leaders, and the power position on statements from individual churches. In the Soviet Union, Pentecostals already in the 1920s held loyalist views on the military issue. The Soviet state forced Pentecostals to declare the need to fulfill civic obligations, including with arms in hand. Soviet Pentecostals officially proclaimed the principle of personal responsibility for one’s choices and the need to comply with state laws. In the late Soviet period, for most believers, military service was a way to test the "perseverance of faith" and at the same time demonstrate law-abidingness and inclusion in the life of Soviet society.

The article presents an attempt at historical understanding of the experience gained by a united Germany, extracted from the idea of peace, both at the state and at the public level, with its own German characteristics — East and West Germany. The evangelical churches in the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic perceived the nuclear threat as a casus confessionis and led the fight against it.

This contribution outlines catholic peace work in Weimar Republic and after the Second World War. It analyses how spirituality and political engagement connect and how the conviction that peace includes more than cease-fire — but requires a commitment to social justice — becomes a leitmotif.

Historically, the Joseph Volokolamsk Monastery in all periods of its existence played a significant role not only in the spiritual, political, ideological, and economic life of Russia, but was also an important educational center. The monastery continues development of these traditions, founded by venerable Joseph Volotsky, to this day. The article examines a new phenomenon for Russia, social orphanhood, as a problem of modern society. Legislative acts defining the status of a social orphan and his relationship with society are given. Based on archival documents, a retrospective of the activities of the Joseph Volokolamsk Monastery in working with youth and helping orphans and the suffering is given. The historical aspects of Orthodox rehabilitation pedagogy in relation to orphans are indicated. Statistics of these activities and a historical retrospective of the relationship between the church and the state in the pre-revolutionary years and the years of Soviet power are given. The works of a number of Orthodox authors — teachers, ascetics, philosophers and educators, providing the basis for the development of Orthodox rehabilitation pedagogy — are examined in retrospective. The patristic foundations of the spiritual and moral education of modern teenagers — social orphans in Russia are indicated. The historical foundations and principles of modern educational, spiritual and moral rehabilitation mission of the brethren of the monastery in collaboration with the teams of social rehabilitation centers for minors are given. Individual programs for spiritual and moral rehabilitation of social orphans are offered.

Russian Orthodox Diocese of Finland, taking advantage of the church and international policy, illegally transferred to the Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1923 and its relations with the Russian Church were interrupted for two decades. At the end of the Great Patriotic War, a movement for the reunification of the two churches began, but there was no unity within the Finnish Church on this issue, and the efforts of the Moscow Patriarchate’s hierarchy led to limited results. The article reveals the history of the participation of Petter Nortamo, a Finnish pastor who converted to Orthodoxy and tried to speed up the process of the return of the Finnish Archdiocese to the Russian Orthodox Church, unknown to Russian scientists. One of the characteristic features of his activity was the active involvement in this process of political parties and associations of socialist orientation, as well as the press (in particular, the Democratic Union of the People of Finland). The article disputes the reading of this story by the Finnish historian Juha Riikonen, who sees this primarily as a political background. Nortamo’s active contacts with Metropolitan Grigory (Chukov) and Patriarch Alexy I, his ordination to holy orders in Leningrad indicate that the church component was decisive in his activities. However, Nortamo’s efforts were not enough to solve the problem of the relationship between the Finnish and Russian Orthodox Churches, and his death coincided with the end of such attempts. The Patriarchate of Constantinople played a significant role in freezing the process of church reunification. To this day, the figure of Nortamo remains unknown in Russian historical science.

The publication introduces documents from the internal records of the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church related to the preparation and implementation of the visit of the delegation of the Russian Church headed by Patriarch Alexy I (Simansky) of Moscow and All Russia to the Middle East and Egypt in May-June 1945. One of the published documents is the notes of the Chairman of the Council G. G. Karpov on the preparation and progress of the visit. In fact, it is a diary of the trip, which reflects previously unknown episodes. Another document contains translations of all foreign press notes on the visit, which were provided to the Council by TASS. What attracts particular attention in these documents is the resonance that the visit had in the Middle East, as well as the way in which church and political figures interpreted the prospects for the Moscow Patriarchate’s international activity, in particular its possible claim to be the Centre of universal Orthodoxy. The documents are published for the first time.

The present article analyses Pope Pius XI’s encyclics against Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, as well as encyclics on social issues in general that touch upon the said ideologies. Among them are, respectively, Non abbiamo bisogno and Mit brennender Sorge, and Quadragesimo anno and Divini illius Magistri. Analysing their contents reveals two major avenues of criticism levelled against Italian Fascism: one, that a state cannot supersede the family in matters of the raising of children and position itself as the source of morals and an object of unconditional obedience; and two, that a state constantly projecting its authority into the private life of an individual runs contrary to freedom of association and freedom of contract inherent to it. With regards to German National Socialism, this is complemented by a third avenue expounding on the unacceptability of racism.

The purpose of this article is to give a general overview of narrative sources of internal origin on the history of the religious movement of spiritual Christians of Molokans for 1905-1917, to establish the main types of these sources. The relevance of the article is due to the lack of source studies on the history of Molokanism, with the exception of brief reviews in dissertation research and monographs.

The article analyzes the content of the handwritten Synodic, which has belonged to one of the most important Serbian monasteries — Studenica — since the middle of the XVII century. Such manuscripts are known in single copies in the repositories of the Balkan Peninsula and Greece, all of them reflect the history of Russia’s relations with the South Slavic and other Orthodox peoples of southern Europe during the reign, mainly, of the Romanov dynasty.The value of this manuscript is that it marks the beginning of the establishment of the regular practice of the clergy of the Studenitsa for alms in Russia, which lasted a century. Synodic contains a wealth of material on the genealogy of many Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian and other families that played a historical role in the events of Southern and Eastern Europe in the second half of the XVII-XVIII centuries.

The features of development and the main vectors of the transformation of historical memory of the Old Believer segment of modern Russian society are analyzed. It is shown that the Old Believer intellectuals are active in the formation of their own versions of the collective historical memory. The author analyzes the perception of community experience by Old Believer intellectuals in collective memory, constructed the concepts of "self" and "sacrifice". The grand narrative used in writing the history of the Old Believers is analyzed also. It is considered how the culture of memory of the Russian Old Believers actualizes the political and ideological contradictions of society, actualizing collective historical traumas and images of the Other in the memorial spaces. It is shown that the model of the collective memory of the Old Believers stimulates the development of the politics of memory in a religiously-centric coordinate system, where the Church itself and its figures are imagined as the main participants in the historical process, becoming objects of memorial reflection and symbolic canonization in the identity of the Old Believers.

The article introduces into scientific circulation a number of newly found historically valuable records on Russian old printed books, which contain new information from the history of the development of Siberia and the Urals. The conquest of these territories at the end of the XVI — XVII centuries was accompanied by the advancement of Cyrillic books to the east, including printed books, which were produced by the first Russian printers, and later by the Moscow Printing Yard. This fact is very vividly illustrated for the first time in historiography by the published book contribution of the last Khanty ruler of the principality of Koda Dmitry Alachev, which is also connected with the history of the Samarovsky Yam (the forerunner of Khanty-Mansiysk). The Stroganov dynasty played a key role in the conquest of the Ural-Siberian lands and the spread of Orthodox literature there, previously unknown book contributions and memorial records of representatives of which, in addition, are investigated in the article. No less valuable is the contribution inscription of the voevoda Prokopy Elizarov to the Kassianov monastery, which we discovered.

The collection of the Museum of the Russian Icons contains icons of prophetic and forefatherly ranks, which form part of a certain iconostasis, dated in the first publication about 1700 (the end of the XVII century). The purpose of this article is to clarify the attribution of the monument based on information received from the previous owner and archival documents.

The history of the pseudo-Apostles movement has come down to our time in the presentation of those who defeated them. The personalities of Gerard Segarelli and Fra Dolcino, the leaders of the pseudo-Apostles movement, can also be considered from the perspective of the presence of elements inherent in the lifetime cult of saints in the dogmatic Christian understanding, which are similar to the worship cults formed around the leaders of religious associations in the XIII-XIV centuries.

In the modern educational process, additional lectures are increasingly being introduced into the mandatory postgraduate education programme, aimed at developing the personal qualities of a physician, increasing the motivation of students towards the profession, and increasing the attractiveness of the image of a medical professional and a scientist. To that end, certain moral and ethical reference points are selected from the biographies of physicians of the "past", which are elevated to an ideal and repeated in every biographical article without proper professional evaluation. The mythologisation of the image of the physician in the professional community and in the mass consciousness is thus the subject of a separate study. In this article, the author examines the biography of Friedrich Joseph Haass, a nineteenth-century Moscow physician beatified by the Roman Catholic Church, in the context of the emergence of the biography of a new type of "saint" and examples of new secular spiritual and moral reference points, different from the traditionally established Church attributes of holiness, and in the absence of a close connection to the religious institution of the Church.

The author analyses the attribution error made by Vasily Grigorovich-Barsky in his pilgrimage notes. It lies in the fact that he mistook three Italian basilicas, namely San Marco in Venice, St Anthony and Santa Giustina in Padua, for Orthodox cathedrals turned into Catholic churches. The aim of the study is to identify the reasons behind the his conclusion. To answer the question, the author resorts to the qualitative method of analysing the source text. She concludes that the error results from the interpretation of the dome completions and the style of painting of these churches as corresponding to the Orthodox tradition. In addition, the interpretation of San Marco may have been influenced by the oral testimony of the Venetian Greeks, which Barsky may have falsely interpreted.