Virginity Is Good but Marriage Is Better: Stefan Iavors´kyi’s Vynohrad Khrystov (1698) as Emblematic Praise of Marriage

The only Ukrainian sermon printed during Stefan Iavors´kyi’s lifetime, Vynohrad Khrystov trema litorasliamy divstvuiushchykh, vdovstvuiushchykh i supruzhnykh […] (Kyiv, 1698) was preached to Ivan Mazepa and his courtiers in Trinity Church in Baturyn in January 1698 to celebrate the wedding of Ivan Obydovs´kyi, Mazepa’s nephew. The sermon is prefaced by an allegorical picture that departs from convention. Students of Stefan Iavors´kyi have paid some attention to Vynohrad Khrystov but they have treated its textual and visual components as distinct parts. The present article analyzes the text and its illustration as part of a single discourse, one that creates that mutually illuminating combination of word and picture that is central to the emblematic method. Marriage in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was an object of criticism and religious reform among all Christian denominations, and Vynohrad Khrystov, as well as other Ukrainian marriage sermons, is a rich source for the history of early modern marriage doctrines and the way they were disseminated among ordinary men and women. While this sermon cannot tell us about the nature of early modern marriage, it does provide a useful insight into the changes, continuities, and contradictions of its representation. More important, it shows how Iavors´kyi combined the visual and the verbal to offer his audience a carefully constructed system of images that would foster acceptance of marriage as both a spiritual and a social institution.