The article deals with the analysis of the origins and features of the formation of the “black legend” about Valentina Visconti, the wife of Duke Louis of Orleans and the sister-in-law of Charles VI. The author studies in detail all the sources of the turn of the 14th–15th centuries, which retold rumors that the Duchess was a witch who brought a spell on the French king, and disputes the point of view prevailing in historiography, according to which the creator of that “black legend” was one and the only person – the Hennegau chronicler Jean Froissart. According to the author of the article, rumors about Valentina Visconti arose much earlier than Froissart took up the compilation of his “Chronicles”, they were initially oral in nature and were primarily associated with the political propaganda of the Dukes of Burgundy, who were trying to gain full power in the French Kingdom.

This article attempts to reconstruct the historical context in which the well-known verses on “distant love” (amor de lohn), composed by the Provençal poet Jaufré Rudel, gave rise to a legend that became popular in medieval literature. A romantic story about a troubadour who fell in love with a Beautiful Lady gained extraordinary popularity among the romantics of the 19^th century. It was used in a number of literary works of various genres – from the poems of Francesco Petrarca, Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Uhland, to Edmond Rostand’s play “The Distant Princess” (La Princesse Lointaine). For the first time the Distant Princess, with whom the troubadour supposedly fell in love without ever seeing her, was identified with the Countess of Tripoli in the legendary vida of the troubadour dating from the mid-13^th century. Later, we see the story repeated many times in the literary monuments including the works of romantics of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Traditionally, literary scholars debate the question whether the Countess of Tripoli should be considered as a fictitious character or a historical figure. Avoiding that dispute, the author seeks to single out those events and facts in the history of the house of Tripoli and its members that could be reinterpreted in the folk imagination and historical memory.

The paper considers the votive practices and gifts known in the Russian religious tradition. The author gives an overview of individual and collective vows common in medieval and imperial Russia, as well as the main types of votive gifts: buildings (churches, chapels), crosses, icons, reliquaries, icon salaries, church embroidery, fabrics, anatomical weights, precious gifts to icons, etc. Votive actions were the most important social tool for creating a variety of religious objects, from monumental (like monastery buildings and city cathedrals) to small (like shawls, towels or pendants in the form of a diseased organ). At the same time, the action of making, bringing, using the votive object and the material object itself were inextricably linked – the word ‘vow’ in Russia meant not only a promise, but also a monetary contribution to a monastery or church, and a votive object, and animals fattened for a sacrifice to a saint (holiday), and any other kind of gift, material or actional. As the author notes, a review of these traditions helps to better understand modern votive practices that have actively spread in Russia in the last decade.

The paper deals with the genesis and local traditions of handmade icons of the Soviet era in the Southwest of the Nizhny Novgorod region. It is based on the material from the expeditions carried in 2021. The Kulebak-Gremyachevsky tradition is characterized by Soviet icons decorated with silver foil with an abundance of small elements: foil and paper flowers, clusters of paraffin berries. Those are typical features of the so-called ‘rustic’ style. The main technique of applying an ornament to foil (honeycomb-shaped, finelyrounded, vegetable) is an imprint on a metal matrix base. The Arzamas tradition is characterized by a strict, laconic ‘urban’ style: there are no flowers and berries, the ornament on silver foil was minted. In another type of ‘urban’ icon, foil was not used; instead the masters made a wooden frame and covered it with bronze (‘golden’) paint. For Diveevskaya and Tashino-Ponetaevskaya traditions, a brighter design is characteristic: the frames and small elements were made of foil of different colors, and geometric and floral ornaments were drawn with a stylus. Frequently recurring images are grapes and multipath ‘stars’ resembling large elements of Mordovian embroidery. The Ardatov tradition was a contact zone of the western, northern and eastern styles of the Soviet icon. The author traces the revealed visual and technical features in the descriptions of the pre-revolutionary (before 1917) Russian craft of creating the foil (folezhnye, podfolezhki) icons and the cheap (raskhozhaya) icons made by icon masters in the Vyaznikovsky district of the Vladimir province (villages Mstyora, Kholuy, Palekh) in the 19th century – early 20th centuries.

The paper, based on the material s of scientific expeditions, describes the post-Soviet fate of handmade icons created by icon-makers of the Soviet era. The authors focus on the places in which ‘Soviet icons’ have existed since the collapse of the USSR, and on the roles they are assigned in the post-Soviet socio-cultural space. Whereas during the Soviet era hand-made icons functioned primarily in the private homes, the last decades have seen some new sites of their existence, as churches, chapels, natural shrines, utility rooms of churches and monasteries, antique stores, flea markets, online-services for the sale of collectible and second-hand goods; finally, the abandoned houses. In some places Soviet icons serve a praying and protective function; form the iconostasis and spaces of rural natural sanctuaries. In other cases they lose their role as sacred objects and gradually disappear from the social space – either by falling into disrepair or through ritualized disposal. The authors describe also a practice of turning Soviet icons into a symbolic and material resource, as it happens in the case of the St. Nicholas Convent in Arzamas town.

The article analyzes folk ideas about the manifestations of grace in spatial (landscape) shrines associated with the names and paths of locally venerated saints in the village of Suvorovo (before 1965 Strakhova Puza) of the Diveyevsky district – Blessed Dunyushka Sheikova / Shikova and her three companions – Daria, Daria and Maria, the new Martyrs of Puza. It describes the topography of the “Shrines of Dunyushka”, the ideas of local residents about the manifestation of grace at different loci and objects of those shrines, as well as the practice of using (appropriation) of grace at those shrines. For that purpose, in the first part of the article, several concepts are introduced and justified: a complex shrine, the path the saint (via sancti), widespread grace and the second invisible “body” of the saint. A complex shrine is a network, a “constellation” of shrines united by the grace of the righteous. Its elements (natural or man-made) can be located at a considerable distance from each other, these are the most important places of the saint’s lifetime and posthumous stay. The topography of the complex shrine and pilgrimage routes is formed by the grace spread by the ascetic moving in space or his relics. Such a dynamic state of the shrine is considered as the second “body” of the saint, who invisibly resides on earth. In that aspect, the second part of the article considers not so much the topography as the dynamics of the existence and development of the “Shrinesof Dunyushka”, based on the manifestation and appropriation of grace emanating from them. In different historical epochs, the significance of different loci of the complex “Shrines of Dunyushka” (cell, grave, church with relics) as a center of religious practices and manifestations of grace has changed.

The article focuses on the case of revered icon of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker from Kylasovo village of Perm Region. The author introduces the importance of legends in creating the existence of an icon as a sacral object and the ways the “breaks” of tradition are symbolically overcome. The paper outlines etiological plots related to the icon and the forms of its veneration as well as the history of the loss and re-acquisition of the shrine in the 20th century and reconstruction of the local tradition at the present stage. The earliest legends about the Kylasovo icon of St. Nicholas the Wonder-worker (a phenomenon on the periphery of the cultural space, blinding of blasphemers) show that the plots have already become widely known and are updated in the south of the Perm region with the processes and events of the 17th–18th centuries. The realities of the Soviet era (the closure of a rural church, disappearance and discovery of a miraculous image hidden in a village house) contribute to a new round of the development of the oral tradition. The history of the salvation of the shrine was published on the official website of the church of Kylosovo village. It can be considered as the beginning of the inclusion of modern oral legends about this icon into the fields of official church culture. In the 2000s another problematic situation was the restoration (in fact, rewriting) of the revered icon. It should be noted about a link of a significant part of folk legends with “crisis points” in the life of the parish, caused by the “instability of being” of the local shrine (loss, transfer to another church, radical restoration). In such situations the legitimation of the current changes and confirmation of the miraculous nature of a religious relic as functions of religious become the important functions of religious narratives. Such functions are generally inherent in legends about shrines when modern material highlights their pragmatics more obvious.