queer masculinities

114 Queer Masculinities, 1550–1800
The regulation of homosociability offers an initial way to approach
same-sex relations in these spaces. In Muscovy, two key homosocial
institutions were men’s monasteries and the military. From the Kievan
era, monastic regulation demonstrated an awareness of the possibility
of sex between men or between men and boys, as Levin’s work in this
area attests. 33 Levin argues that it was not the object-choice in sexual
encounters between monks that worried monastic leaders, but the fact
of sexual contact in an environment so constructed to exclude women
and therefore supposedly the temptation to lustful sin. (Paradoxically,
the dietary advantages of life in religious communities may have stimulated
and not suppressed libidinous appetites.) Penitential manuals
for monastic confessors present a menu of acts deemed to endanger
the souls of men together: touching one’s own genitals, showing them
to another man, sleeping in the same bed with a fellow monastic. In
the late tsarist decades a regime of mutual scrutiny operated in
Orthodox monasteries and seminaries to deter male–male intimacies. 34
It would be profitable to compare what may be gleaned from earlier
monastic regulation with what could be discovered about the planning,
construction and operation of monasteries and other religious
communities, to develop an understanding of the homosocial world of
these spaces, and the same-sex relations they harbored.
The masculine world of war was another homosocial arena in
Muscovite society. It was not until Peter the Great’s Military Articles of
1716 that sodomy was formally prohibited between soldiers in Russia.
Peter’s re-casting of Muscovy’s comparatively irregular and ill-equipped
standing armies consolidated Russia’s acceptance of the lessons of the
European military revolution. 35 Military life before Peter, despite the
adoption of standing armies in the mid-seventeenth century, was generally
marked by patron–client hierarchies, and supported by the
soldier’s own economic resources or activities in agriculture and commerce.
36 A potentially productive line of research for historians of
gender and sexuality might inquire into the structuring of Muscovite
military formations, their recruitment, training, and periods when men
were quartered in barracks and billeted among the population at
large. 37 Looking just beyond our period, further investigation into the
reconstruction of masculinity brought by Peter the Great’s transformations
of military organization is certainly possible given the array of
sources surviving from his activist reign. 38
Military and political leadership was closely interconnected in
Muscovy, and the tsar’s court was another social environment with a
pronounced homosocial character. Among the many ranks and titles