Collected Works of Meletij Smotryc'kyj


Book Description

Meletij Smotryc ́kyj (ca. 1577-1633), a man of great learning and wide cultural horizons, was one of the outstanding figures of the cultural revival in the Ukrainian and Belorussian lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. First as a staunch advocate of Orthodoxy and then after 1627 as an equally ardent defender of the Uniates, Smotryc ́kyj wrote numerous polemical, homiletic, philological, and theological works that well illustrate the complexity of the intense confessional and cultural competition between Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox. This volume reproduces in facsimile the original printed editions of eleven of his most important religious writings, beginning with the famous Threnos (1610) and concluding with Exaethesis (1629). The Introduction surveys the controversial details of Smotryc ́kyj's biography and critically analyzes the corpus of works attributed to him.




The Jevanhelije Učytelnoje of Meletij Smotryc'kyj


Book Description

Meletij Smotryc ́kyj viewed his Homilary Gospel as a crucial requirement for the "spiritual good" of the Ruthenian nation. The work, presented here with the original printed edition, is important as a critical polemical text from the Catholic-Orthodox debate and also as a monument of early Ukrainian literature.




Making Contact


Book Description

When civilizations first encounter each other a cascade of change is triggered that both challenges and reinforces the identities of all parties. Making Contact revisits key encounters between cultures in the medieval and early modern world. Contributors cross disciplinary boundaries to explore the implications of contact. Scott D. Westrem examines the imagined Africa depicted in the Bell Mappamundi. Day-to-day accommodations between the religious identities of Vilnius, in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, are explored by David Frick. Steven F. Kruger argues that medieval Christian identity was destabilized by the living Talmudic tradition. Individual Jesuits who were critical to the success of contact in Japan are evaluated by Nakai Ayako. Linda Woodbridge argues that Elizabethan attitudes towards aboriginals paralleled their attitudes towards English vagrants. Despite a nod to Arcadian conventions, travel narratives of Virginia were preoccupied with finding wealth, according to Paul W. DePasquale’s research. Rick H. Lee examines the conflicting loyalties of Pierre Raddisson in the New World. Richard A. Young demonstrates that the Florida shipwreck narratives of Cabeza de Vaca were groomed for intended audiences, past and present. This rich interdisciplinary collaboration contributes to the debate on boundaries between disciplines, as well as boundaries between the Middle Ages and the early modern period, and also between historical and theoretical perspectives. Making Contact draws our attention to the important ways in which historic encounters with contrasting ‘others’ have shaped the identities of both individual and corporate ‘selves’ over a span of five centuries.




Meletij Smotryc'kyj


Book Description

Meletij Smotryc'kyj was one of the outstanding figures in the great flourishing of Orthodox spirituality that occurred in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century in response to the challenge posed first by Polish heterodox religious movements, and later by the Polish Counter-Reformation. His biography reflects the tensions and contradictions that characterized his "nation"--the Ruthenians, the Orthodox Christians of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Ruthenian patriots were torn between various allegiances to nation, church, and traditions. Thus, in Smotryc'kyj's life we witness one of the later acts in the drama of the European Age of Reform, all the more important because for the first time the Reformation and Counter-Reformation came into direct daily contact with the Byzantine world of Orthodox Slavdom. David Frick's biography--the first major English-language work on Smotryc'kyj--examines the ways in which established cultures were altered by cross-cultural understandings and misunderstandings, resulting from the confrontation and mutual adaptation of two or more diverse cultures. This study, which has affinities with the "microhistorical approach," seeks to reconstruct details in the lives of individuals and pays special attention to the ways in which individual world views conflicted with each other and with various higher authorities. Meletij Smotryc'kyj will be of interest to scholars and students of Ukraine, Belarus, Poland-Lithuania, and those researching the history of the Uniate, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic Churches in Eastern Europe.




The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine


Book Description

The Ukrainian Cossacks, often compared in historical literature to the pirates of the Mediterranean and the frontiersmen of the American West, constituted one of the largest Cossack hosts in the European steppe borderland. They became famous as ferocious warriors, their fighting skills developed in their religious wars against the Tartars, Turks, Poles, and Russians. By and large the Cossacks were Orthodox Christians, and quite early in their history they adopted a religious ideology in their struggle against those of other faiths. Their acceptance of the Muscovite protectorate in 1654 was also influenced by their religious ideas. In this pioneering study, Serhii Plokhy examines the confessionalization of religious life in the early modern period, and shows how Cossack involvment in the religious struggle between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicisim helped shape not only Ukrainian but also Russian and Polish cultural identities.







Kith, Kin, and Neighbors


Book Description

In the mid-seventeenth century, Wilno (Vilnius), the second capital of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, was home to Poles, Lithuanians, Germans, Ruthenians, Jews, and Tatars, who worshiped in Catholic, Uniate, Orthodox, Calvinist, and Lutheran churches, one synagogue, and one mosque. Visitors regularly commented on the relatively peaceful coexistence of this bewildering array of peoples, languages, and faiths. In Kith, Kin, and Neighbors, David Frick shows how Wilno’s inhabitants navigated and negotiated these differences in their public and private lives. This remarkable book opens with a walk through the streets of Wilno, offering a look over the royal quartermaster’s shoulder as he made his survey of the city’s intramural houses in preparation for King Władysław IV’s visit in 1636. These surveys (Lustrations) provide concise descriptions of each house within the city walls that, in concert with court and church records, enable Frick to accurately discern Wilno’s neighborhoods and human networks, ascertain the extent to which such networks were bounded confessionally and culturally, determine when citizens crossed these boundaries, and conclude which kinds of cross-confessional constellations were more likely than others. These maps provide the backdrops against which the dramas of Wilno lives played out: birth, baptism, education, marriage, separation or divorce, guild membership, poor relief, and death and funeral practices. Perhaps the most complete reconstruction ever written of life in an early modern European city, Kith, Kin, and Neighbors sets a new standard for urban history and for work on the religious and communal life of Eastern Europe.







Print Culture at the Crossroads


Book Description

This book investigates the importance of printing in early-modern Central Europe, revealing a complicated web of connections linking printers and scholars, Jews and Christians, from the Baltic to the Adriatic.




Litauen und Ruthenien


Book Description

Der Band setzt sich zum Ziel, exemplarisch transkulturelle Kommunikationsprozesse im Grossfurstentum Litauen sowie in den ostlichen Gebieten der polnischen Krone im spaten Mittelalter und in der fruhen Neuzeit zu untersuchen. Die Beitrage richten das Augenmerk auf interkonfessionelle Vorgange, auf trans- oder uberkonfessionelle Interaktion und hybride, heterogene Entwicklungen. Auch Bereiche der ostslavischen bzw. ruthenischen, polnischen, litauischen, armenischen sowie der orthodoxen, unierten, katholischen, judischen und frankistischen Geschichte, die sich auf den ersten Blick von zwischenethnischen oder interkonfessionellen Interaktionsfeldern isoliert hielten, werden neu beleuchtet. Der Band fuhrt internationale Spezialisten zu Adel, Stadt, Kirche und Klerus, Kult, Gesang sowie Malerei zusammen und gibt Einblicke in die jeweiligen Forschungswerkstatten. The goal of this volume is to investigate examples of transcultural communication processes in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as well as in the eastern territories of the Polish Crown in the late Middle Ages and early modern period. The essays focus on interconfessional contacts, trans- and supraconfessional interactions, and hybrid, heterogenous developments. In addition, fi elds of east Slavic, Ruthenian, Polish, Lithuanian, Armenian, as well as Orthodox, Uniate, Catholic, Jewish, and Frankist history, which might seem at fi rst glance isolated from interethnic or interconfessional fields of interaction, will be examined anew. The volume presents the work of international specialists on nobility, city, Church and clergy, liturgy, hymnography, as well as painting, and it offers insight into the respective research workshops.