Short description of the project. This project turns to such a phenomenon of world culture as God's fools. Till this day it has not been paid too much attention by the Russian scholarly world. The main goal is to combine various information about this matter in a unified informational project; God's fools have played a significant role not only in history of the Russian Church in particular, but also in Russian history in general and shaped some particular features of Russian mentality too. The authors aim not only at showing the point of view that is leading for research and description literature but also at presenting the institute of God's fools in culturological (comparing with European God's fools, with traditional "laughter culture" of old Russia, with "people's" Orthodoxy etc.) and historical perspective; to trace the roots of this occurence from Biblical and Antique times through the Byzantine tradition (where it took up its shape as an institution), medieval Russia (where it found specific national traits) and through the schism of the Old Believers to appearance of clinical psychiatry in Russia which changed the status of followers of this movement. A separate theme of the research is the phenomenon of "God's fools from intelligence" which we can observe in Russia starting in the beginning of the 19th century; the image of a God's fool in art and fiction.

People working on the project: Ekaterina Novikova, Marina Vorobjova.

The address of the project on the Internet: http://jurodstvo.upelsinka.com