This talk explores the wide spectrum of motivations for Ivan Mazepa’s connection to his namesake, John the Baptist, offering new approaches to understanding Mazepa’s saintly venerations, how they accorded with early modern Ukrainian political thought and religious culture as well as with the hetman’s political aspirations, and the way they were reflected in the verbal and visual texts of the time. Bartolini examines a set of little-known printed and manuscript sources, showing that the Baptist's role as precursor of Christ was used by contemporary writers to conceptualize Mazepa’s ambiguous position vis-à-vis the Muscovite tsar, creating what she proposes to call a "model of plural authority."

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Maria Grazia Bartolini is an Associate Professor of Medieval Slavic Culture at the University of Milan. Her research focuses on the religious culture of early modern Ukraine, with special attention to the intersection of preaching, memory, and visual arts in seventeenth-century Ukraine, the political and social aspects of homiletic and hagiographical texts, and the reception of Christian Neoplatonism in the East Slavic region. Her monographs include Piznai samoho sebe (Kyiv, 2017), a study on Hryhorii Skovoroda and Christian Neoplatonism, which was awarded the 2019 Ivan Franko International Prize, and The Eye of the Mind: Vision, Memory, and Meditation in Seventeenth-Century Ukrainian Preaching (Harvard Ukrainian Studies Series; forthcoming 2026). Her articles on memory, meditation, and visual imagery in early modern Ukraine were awarded the Early Slavic Studies Association (ESSA) Best Article Prize in 2017 and 2020 and an Honorable Mention from the American Association for Ukrainian Studies in 2021. Dr. Bartolini is currently a Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures at Harvard for the Fall 2025 term.