La reclusione volontaria nelle terre slavo-orientali. Approccio al problema e spunti di riflessione

The paper deals with the phenomenon of ‘voluntary reclusion’ (in Russian zatvorničestvo) – an extreme form of asceticism, attested both in male and female monasticism since the fourth century in Egypt and Syria, and developed in all Christian traditions – in order to investigate its presence in the eastern Slavic lands in 11th-17th c. The study takes into account those holy monks explicitly defined as ‘recluses’ (zatvorniki), in order to reconstruct a preliminary overview of the reasons, the practice and the risks of such a choice. Lastly, the author tries to understand whether cases of female reclusion are conceivable in the East Slavic world in the centuries indicated.