Ruthenia - Courland: Transregional Exchanges in the Early Modern Eastern Europe

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

For the last two decades, late medieval and early modern cross-regional exchanges in Eastern Europe have not enjoyed thorough attention from social, cultural, or intellectual historians, even though the so-called "global turn" promised attention to every region's interconnections. On the one hand, the lack of attention to transregional communications shaping Eastern Europe in the 14th and 17th centuries can be explained by the challenging nature of multilingual sources. On the other hand, the study of premodern communicative patterns has been neglected because of fragmented sources that frequently do not allow for broader contextualization. With this in mind, the proposed panel seeks to address the social, political, and cultural communicative models in Silesia, Ruthenia, and Courland during the late medieval and early modern periods. The panel addresses the communicative nature of late medieval revolt, intercultural patterns of early modern library-making, and the trans-regional replication of colonial models. The panel argues that though Silesia, Ruthenia, and Courland were situated in divergent linguistic and cultural frameworks, these regions nevertheless shared comparable political, social, religious, and intellectual practices that were exported both within Eastern Europe and abroad. The panel underlines that late medieval and early modern Eastern Europe contained various structurally divergent sub-regions that enjoyed regional and trans-regional connections as much as disconnection and many other liminal communicative forms.

Sub Unit

• Early Slavic Studies

Chair

• Andrii Bovgyria, Institute of History, NASU (Ukraine)

Papers

• Inter-connected Colonial Thinking?: The Duchy of Courland’s Seventeenth Century Expansion and Its Influences - John Freeman, U of Warsaw (Poland)

• The Making of a Polymorphic Collection of Books: Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Armenian, and Jewish Books in the Early Modern University of Zamość Library - Stepan Blinder, U of Cambridge (UK)

• The Interpreter’s Invisibility: Paradoxes of Oral Translation in Early Modern Lviv - Bogdan Pavlish, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Discussant

• Nataliia Sinkevych, Ludwig-Maximilians-U Munich (Germany)

Session Manager

• Maureen Waters O'Neill, Sorbonne Nouvelle