SUMMARY:

Liudmila Posokhova’s article deals with the phenomenon of the Orthodox colleges (pravoslavnye kollegiumy) of the eighteenth–early nineteenth centuries. Orthodox colleges were created in the towns of Chernigov, Kharkov, and Pereiaslav in Ukrainian lands in the first third of the eighteenth century. Together with the better known Kiev Mogila Academy, they developed and preserved the original education model, generically connected with Jesuit education as practiced in European Catholic universities. This model persisted in the Russian Empire up to the 1808 reform of religious educational institutions. The article shows how the crisis of the European medieval university model affected the search for ways to modernize the Orthodox colleges in the Russian Empire. Leaving the general institutional arrangement intact, since the mid-eighteenth century, all attempts to reform the Orthodox colleges concentrated on their curricula. Drawing on a variety of unique archival materials, the author traces the process of Russian Orthodox colleges’ adaptation of the educational paradigms developed by German Protestant universities and grammar schools. She concludes that the classical model of the Orthodox college exemplified the southeastern vector of development of the European university. However, by absorbing the programs and educational standards of German Protestant universities, they prepared grounds for the appearance in the Russian Empire of the classical type of university in the early nineteenth century.