Immaculate Conception(s): The Virgin, the Purity of the Political Body, and the Building of a New Orthodox Piety in Early Modern Ukraine

The article examines how seventeenth-century Ukrainian Orthodox intellectuals creatively defined, appropriated, and popularized the doctrine of Mary’s Immaculate Conception, looking at the different religious, political, and ecclesiastical interests that intersect in their textual and visual representations of the Immaculate Virgin. What can the use of this controversial doctrine tell us about the broader changes in religion and theology that pervaded the territories of the Kyiv Metropolitanate during the second half of the seventeenth century, changes that historians of other regions have examined from the perspective of “confessionalization”? In tracing the varied contours of the discourse of immaculacy, the article tests the explanatory possibilities of two propositions. First, it argues that the idea of purity encapsulated in the doctrine is to be interpreted in a larger political frame – as a reflection of the Kyiv Metropolitanate and the Hetmanate as political entities deeply entangled in religious, confessional, and political problems. Second, it argues that in the last decades of the seventeenth century, there is a transference of Immaculist iconography and symbols to subjects other than the Virgin Mary. This shift invariably takes place in rhetorical contexts charged with political meanings, bringing together abstract theological propositions, devotional practices, and local and supernational politics. This speaks to the existence of what the author terms a Pietas Kiovensis.