ABSTRACT
Russian women have been writing, in the broadest sense, if not producing literature, for many centuries. Female signatures have been found on some of the earliest documents in the Russian language yet discovered – the letters written on birchbark by inhabitants of Novgorod in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. Another ‘private’genre of writing practised by women (though much more rarely) was autobiography. But the ecclesiastical and political nature of much pre-Petrine writing (sermons, hagiography, chronicles) meant that women were largely excluded from the public tradition, and that the named ‘bookmen’ (knizhniki) of the medieval period included no women whatever.
