{"product_id":"the-transfigured-kingdom-2","title":"The Transfigured Kingdom","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn this richly comparative analysis of late Muscovite and early Imperial court culture, Ernest A. Zitser provides a corrective to the secular bias of the scholarly literature about the reforms of Peter the Great. Zitser demonstrates that the tsar's supposedly \"secularizing\" reforms rested on a fundamentally religious conception of his personal political mission. In particular, Zitser shows that the carnivalesque (and often obscene) activities of the so-called Most Comical All-Drunken Council served as a type of Baroque political sacrament—a monarchical rite of power that elevated the tsar's person above normal men, guaranteed his prerogative over church affairs, and bound the participants into a community of believers in his God-given authority (\"charisma\"). The author suggests that by implicating Peter's \"royal priesthood\" in taboo-breaking, libertine ceremonies, the organizers of such \"sacred parodies\" inducted select members of the Russian political elite into a new system of distinctions between nobility and baseness, sacrality and profanity, tradition and modernity.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTracing the ways in which the tsar and his courtiers appropriated aspects of Muscovite and European traditions to suit their needs and aspirations, \u003ci\u003eThe Transfigured Kingdom\u003c\/i\u003e offers one of the first discussions of the gendered nature of political power at the court of Russia's self-proclaimed \"Father of the Fatherland\" and reveals the role of symbolism, myth, and ritual in shaping political order in early modern Europe.\u003c\/p\u003e\n","brand":"Ernest A. Zitser","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43573345616054,"sku":"9781501711084","price":40.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0251\/4980\/0541\/files\/9781501711084.jpg?v=1729174455","url":"https:\/\/combined-academic.myshopify.com\/products\/the-transfigured-kingdom-2","provider":"Combined Academic Publishers - Mare Nostrum Group","version":"1.0","type":"link"}