Year: 2019
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Coup D'état as Cross-DressingT he eighteenth century was, for the most part, a time of female rule in Russia.In order to attain the throne and maintain power, however, the female monarchs had to exhibit masculine behavior.The French diplomat Charles Masson devoted a whole chapter of his Secret Memoirs of the Court of St. Petersburg to women in positions of power at the Russian court.Repudiating the "gynecocracy," as he called the reign of six successive Russian tsarinas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Sophia, Catherine I, Anna Ivanovna, Anna Leopol'dovna, Elizabeth, and Catherine II), he compared Russia to the kingdom of the Amazons: "The existence of the Amazons no longer seemed a fable after I beheld the Russian women.Had the succession of empresses continued, we might perhaps have seen this nation of female warriors replicated on Russian soil, in the same climate where they had previously flourished." 1 The medieval formula of "the King's two bodies," which implied the notion of the Emperor as God-Man, 2 developed in interesting fashion in the Russian context.The church, which equated the tsar with Christ and considered him an incarnation of celestial rule, denied women the right to be anointed sovereign.3 1 Charles François P. Masson, Secret Memoirs of the Court of Petersburg, particularly towards the end of the reign of Catherine II and the commencement of that of Paul I (London, 1801), 307. 2 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies.
Source: Academic Studies Press eBooks
Author: Vera Proskurina
Language: English
Topic: Soviet and Russian History
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4230972467