ABSTRACT
It is a challenge to define how Muscovite society was structured or how people expressed their identity, because Muscovy was not self-reflective. Muscovites did not produce such theoretical visions of society as the medieval European “great chain of being” or Peter the Chanter’s commentaries on the social order.1 Nor did they write empirical studies of their realm’s social structure, economic resources or territorial expanse. Nevertheless, seventeenth-century sources do exist from which one can reconstruct social structure, individuals’ sense of identity and prescriptive visions of the social whole. In this essay our intent is to give an overview of society and identity for the general reader by first describing Muscovy’s social structure and then analyzing how prescriptive sources envisioned the social community and how individuals negotiated that code.
