La diffusione delle opere antilatine di Nilo Cabasilas in manoscritti russi nel XVII secolo

In the 17th century, Neilos Kabasilas’s anti-Latin works, along with Gregory Palamas’s Contro Becco, were considerably widespread in Russia. The first copy was made for Arseniĭ Sukhanov in the 1630s, another copy – supplemented with several polemical texts – was then prepared for the Patriarchal Library. Four manuscripts are associated with the activity of the monks Simon Azar’in, Efrem Kvašnin and Sergij Šelonin, who were in Moscow in the 1640s, and are perhaps related to the question of the religious confession of Prince Valdemar, who was designated to marry the Tsar’s daughter. In mid-seventeenth century another manuscript appeared in Ukraine, marked at that time by the controversies which followed the Union of Brest. In the 1660s, two copies were made in the Solovetskiĭ Monastery. At the end of the century, Archbishop Atanasiĭ Kholmogorskij, involved in the controversy over Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, made further three copies of these works. Four manuscripts from the first half of the eighteenth century testify in their turn to the interest of particular individuals in this collection of texts on the Procession of the Holy Spirit.