Education in early modern Russia has been traditionally described as imported from the West; secular; imposed by the state – or more specifically, by Peter I himself – from above on the unwilling population; driven by the military needs, and therefore, technical. This chapter seeks to...

This paper reconstructs the origins and the meaning of the “Most Illustrious and Incomparable Order of Antisobres,” that was to be instituted in 1728 in St Petersburg by Duke de Liria, the Spanish ambassador. While this unusual fraternal society might have never taken off the ground and...