The medieval Devil is not only the father of lies but also the father of illusions and expert in transformations assuming multiple masks (from insects and wild beasts to humans and angels) lengthy described in the Byzantine and Old Russian hagiography. The article explores the role of the illusionist transformations in the Old Russian demonological imagery and compares their functions in Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic contexts. It focuses also on the methods the medieval artists used for visualizing the illusions described in the lives of saints and explores the inevitable gap between the textual and visual narrative strategies.

In the second part of the article the authors continue to explore the functions the concept of devilish illusions played in the Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic religious imagaries. They analyze the methods the Medieval artists used to visualise the demonic transformations and explore the inevitable gap between the textual and visual narrative strategies.

The cult of Michael the Archangel is one the central elements of Medieval Russian religiosity. The first of archangels played an important role both in strictly orthodox ecclesiastical teaching and syncretic popular beliefs / magical practices. He was regarded as a vanquisher of the Devil in the first days of Creation, the Satan’s most powerful enemy in this world, principal protector of humans against the ruses and attacks of demons, demon-slayer and angel-exorcist. Common to the Christian East and West, this set of beliefs and corresponding practices wasn’t, however, uniform in various parts of the Christian world and depended on the cultural context of every region. The present article proposes to trace the history of Michael the Archangel as demon-slayer and protector against the Devil in Medieval Russian culture. It will also analyze the rapports between the cult of Michael and the cults of other saints — demon fighters and the possible ties between the syncretic demonology of so called «zmeeviki» and the demonological motifs in hagiography.

Visions of the other world played a very important role in the Medieval Europe’s culture. They let a person to penetrate the next life’s mysteries, were visual illustrations of the ecclesiastical eschatology, established links between the world of the living and that of the dead and performed many other functions as well. Historians for a long time and fruitfully have used texts of visions as the sources for investigation of the Medieval culture, religious life and psychology of a Medieval person. However it is for from easy to work with these texts. They speak a very complicated language of the visual images that have deep roots in the Christian symbolics and are not clear and plain to a present day researcher. Too often we do not know how these texts were read in the Medieval time and who constituted the audience for such texts. How attitude to them changed over the time? How these texts had to be understood, in the literal or allegorical sense? What was the perception of the other world visions in the popular and scholarly cultures? The author attempts to give answers to these questions.

The author attempts to reconstruct the basic elements if the death mythology which existed in the Muskovite state of the 15th-17th centuries and provides answers to a series of questions that normally are left out of this historians' view. What was the death in the medieval Russian culture? How did people explained the reasons of death and terms of its arrival? How did an ancient Russian imagine his/her transition to the other world and posthumous existence of the soul? How did he/she prepare for leaving the vale of tears? In the medieval time the world of the dead and the world of the alive were not tightly separated from each other. The dead' souls could appear to the alive to pray the alive for protection while the alive did not lose the hope to help their dead and believed in their ability to affect their lot beyond the grave. The Church taught the whole life of a human being, from the cradle to the gray hairs had to be subordinated to the thought about forthcoming death and devoted to the spiritual preparation for the end. However to deserve the salvation it was not enough to pass the life through righteously. On the very verge of death a person who could never known whether he had confessed in all sins and washed them away with repentance or not had to perform a series of «the transition rites»: to make a her confession, to take the last communion, to ask for pardon from his relatives and to bless them or monk fraternity which gathered at his/her death-bed. It was precisely why a sudden death (or an accidental death far from the people) was considered to be the true sign of the God’s wrath against the deceased and of the eternal torment that waited for the deceased beyond the grave. The author analyzes notions of death and the other world within the framework of an ancient Russian’s ideas of the Universe, the human nature and the Providence as the driving force of history.

In Part 2 of his article the author develops his investigation of the medieval Russian eschatology further and makes an attempt to provide answers to several interrelated questions. How did a medieval Russian imagine the arrangement and geography of the world beyond the grave? How did these ideas transform in the 12th-17th centuries? Since the earliest centuries of Christianity the Church writers put a tough question and tried to find answer to it. The question was where souls of the deceased abode from the moment of their separation from the bodies and until the Day of Judgment which would have to follow at the end of times. To answer the question a doctrine of the «private» judgment beyond the grave was elaborated. According to the doctrine, souls of the deceased were divided at this judgment and left in waiting for the final retribution between the Heaven and the hell. In result of this doctrine not one but two judgments appeared in minds of believers and too often it was difficult to separate functions and meaning of these two judgments. Over the greater part of the Russian Middle Ages the fear of death and of the afterlife judgment was suppressed in consciousness of believers by the intense anticipation of the end of times, of advent of Antichrist and the Doomsday. In the second half of the 17th century a gradual change of eschatological paradigm occurred. The image of death was getting to be increasingly appalling. By the beginning of the 18th century the Russian Church gradually accepted the belief that the Day of Judgment which was promised in the Gospel and the Apocalypse would happen not soon and a human was able neither to calculate nor know the time of its advent. In order to acquire the salvation a pious Christian had to be always prepared for his/her death, to think of it and to feel the constant fear of it. The death became a substitute for the Day of Judgment. As the Middle Ages passed to the New time an individualization of the religious experience occurred and this process may testify the profound transformations in the depths of the whole Russian culture and public consciousness.

The author of the big review of the article by A. L. Yurganov considers prospects for the modern humanitarian studies development and, in particular, perspectives for the science of history. The reviewer is sure that contraposition of two trends in the contemporary historical studies in the sphere of cultural practices studies, i.e., contraposition of historical anthropology and historical phenomenology is a rather fruitless enterprise. The only way out of the emerged methodological collision is reconciliation of two points of view. History of mentalities and the new practice of direct statements study are to co-exist in the future. The reviewer considers the basic cognitive assumptions of such remarkable phenomenon of the new European science as the «Annales» school.