“Time to Attend to the Wedding”

Abstract

This chapter takes Grand Prince Vasilii III and Elena Glinskaia's wedding as a starting point. It explores the origins, structural elements, and symbolism of the wedding ritual over the course of the sixteenth century. It compares Muscovite weddings with ancient Greek, Roman, and Byzantine weddings and explores the question of the origins of these rituals in the East Slavic space. The chapter also plots Muscovite weddings according to Arnold van Gennep's model of les rites de passage — separation, liminality, and incorporation — which turns out to be a very useful lens for interpreting Muscovite weddings. When Muscovite secretaries and scribes developed a discrete set of documents to describe royal weddings at the turn of the sixteenth century, they created, perhaps unintentionally, a ritual template that lasted without much modification for more than a hundred years. The chapter describes and dissects that template.