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The article focuses on the issue of using the Latin and “Slavensky” (that is, the combined Russian and Church Slavonic) languages in primary ecclesiastical education in the 18th century. By the 1740s, seminary education in Latin had established itself in Russia. But primary teaching of reading and writing in Russian and Church Slavonic was the tradition until the end of the 18th century, regardless of where the teaching was taking place, either at home or at a Russian school affiliated with a seminary. Russian schools were organized for teaching illiterate or semiliterate children. But by the late 18th century, several seminaries attempted to reorganize “Russian schools” into ecclesiastical schools in which Russian would be the only language of instruction. Junior classes at seminaries were fully focused on teaching Latin, but Latin was by no means a complete replacement for Russian. The principal method of instruction was translation, and the administrators of many seminaries demanded attention to the quality of the students’ translations into Russian. Thus, Russian and Latin were functionally distributed in primary education. Only Church Slavonic was practically excluded from teaching after the primary courses of reading and church singing, and that preconditioned its conservation as a language used only for church services, leading to the extinction of the hybrid form.

This paper is devoted to the question of the spread of court sermons in 18th-century Russian society. The author describes three types that had been formed by the 1740s: court, seminary, and parish homilies. The main question is how and by what means did the court homilies in Elizabeth Petrovna’s time spread the cultural models, thoughts, and ideas created by court preachers throughout Russian society as a whole? Did these texts penetrate traditional culture and how were they adopted? Who read the court sermons, apart from members of the court? To answer these questions, the author describes how court homilies were published and sold, and how they entered the manuscript tradition. The analysis of archival and published materials allows the author to conclude that in the second half of the 18th century, the court sermon was only beginning to penetrate the “traditional” culture. The genre spread primarily in the seminaries, where texts by court preachers functioned as a “library” of panegyrical and theological elements to be used by students and teachers in their own compositions. With few exceptions, the court tradition does not intersect with texts originating from Old Russian and classical theological traditions, although all such texts are called slovo (literally ‘word,’ i.e., ‘sermon’). However, by the end of the 18th century, the new genre became more widely disseminated, following the spread of seminary education and the increase in the number of priests educated in this tradition.