My paper examines the transmission and dissemination of the
Sibylline prophetic literature in the Orthodox Slavic world. Unlike in
the medieval and early modern West, where the prophetic tales of the
famous female seers of ancient Greece and Rome were widely popular and
highly regarded, their history among the Orthodox Slavs was rather
slow in developing. While a well-known legend associated with the
Tiburtine Sibyl entered Orthodox Slavdom from Byzantium relatively
early (in the 13th century), a more complete corpus of Sibylline
legends and prophecies came to the Eastern Slavs from the West only in
the second half of the sixteenth century, with the Ruthenian (and
later, Russian) translation of the
Once Bielski's West-Russian,
Second,
and Third
redactions) the
reputation of the Sibyls throughout the Eastern Slavic lands was
assured. And indeed, in the seventeenth century there appeared
numerous (more or less similar) copies of the
The culmination of the Sibyls' popularity in Russia occurred in the
second half of the seventeenth century, when Nikolaj Milescu Spafarij,
a Moldavian writer and translator working in Moscow at the
posol&soft;skij prikaz
who was in charge of producing
books for the Tsarist court, found it worthwhile to compile a richly
decorated and bound
Thus, the appearance of the Sibylline prophecies in Russia coincided with the opening of its literary culture to the West. Byzantine Sibylline writings, with one significant exception, did not migrate to the Orthodox Slavs directly, but rather did so long after the fall of Constantinople through Western sources compiled by Bielski and collected by him together with the Sibylline tales from the medieval West. Spafarij greatly expanded upon Bielski's work, providing an exhaustive Muscovite survey of the Sibyls' lives and deeds that rivaled the best of the Western scholastic tradition. Although the Sibylline writings did not have a long career in Slavia Orthodoxa (certainly not as long or as distinguished as they had in the Latin West), their flourishing in seventeenth-century Russia argues for a closer look at their history on the Orthodox Slavic literary scene.