Russian Peasant Women Who Refused to Marry Spasovite Old Believers in the 18th-19th Centuries

This is very much a book worth reading. It sheds interesting new light on sectarian practices in the countryside, and in the process forces us to revise the ways in which we think about the most basic aspects of rural life in imperial Russia.

An analysis of a previously understudied phenomenon, the book constitutes a significant contribution to the study of Russian peasant, religious, and matrimonial history.

Drawing mainly on tax census and parish records, John Bushnell has produced an impressive study of marriage practices among Old Believer peasants in several districts in Vladimir, Kostroma, and Nizhnii Novgorod provinces between the early eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries.

Bushnell's study makes for remarkably interesting and engaging reading

Bushnell is to be greatly commended for broadening the discussion on rural life in Russia.

This archival study makes a very interesting and important discovery: many peasant women in the Volga region did not marry during the 18th and 19th centuries-at least until the emancipation of serfs when this study breaks off. . . . The data on marriage aversion that Bushnell has collected in this study are extremely valuable. . . . And Bushnell's conlcuding observation that this phenomenon was not limited to Old Believer settlements in the Volga region makes further study of peasant marriage avoidance all the more important.