Thursday, October 17, 2024
Silesia – Ruthenia – Courland: Transregional Exchanges in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Eastern Europe
8:30 to 10:15am EDT, Virtual Convention, VR6
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.
Chair: Andrii Bovgyria (Institute of History, NASU, Ukraine)
Papers: Stanislaw Banach (U of Cambridge, UK), The Anti-Hussite Movement in Fifteenth-Century Wrocław: Local Reflections of a European Conflict; John Freeman (U of Warsaw, Poland) Inter-connected Colonial Thinking?: The Duchy of Courland’s Seventeenth Century Expansion and Its Influences; Stepan Blinder (U of Cambridge, UK), The Making of a Polymorphic Collection of Books: Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Armenian, and Jewish Books in the Early Modern University of Zamość Library
Discussant: Olenka Z. Pevny (U of Cambridge, UK)
Thursday, October 17, 2024
Early Eastern European Queer: Sources, Interpretation, Visibility
8:30 to 10:15am EDT, Virtual Convention, VR7
What do we know about the Eastern European queer history in the epoch before the most or at least substantial part of the population of this territory became more or less literate, and before bureaucratic paperwork allowed queer voices to be heard? Existing research, in regional and global languages, suggests a near absence of coherent narratives until the mid-19th century. This is not just a historical matter; recent criminalization of LGBTQ+ identities and the anti-transgender legislation in Russia and anti-LGBTQ+ policies throughout the region threaten visibility and, consequently, the health and lives of these communities. To some extent this threat is due to the lack of the historical visibility of the group. Change is necessary, and historians can contribute by questioning the sources, ways of looking for them more effectively and interpreting them – the last task being especially complicated for the epoch, in which queer subjects tend to be rendered in ambiguities. The panel, through three papers, deliberately probes the search for the Medieval and Early Modern queer sources, bridging the gap between academic history and activism to foster greater visibility.
Chair: Irina Roldugina (U of Bristol, UK)
Papers: Andrei Kostin (U of Grenoble-Alpes, France), A Book, a Flower, a Grave, and Others: Signs of Same-Sex Unions in the Late 18th-Century Russia; Hanna Filipova (U of Gothenburg, Sweden), ‘Male Same-Sex Relations and the Court of Peter I. Turning Muscovite’: Research, Book, Actualization, Nick Mayhew (U of Glasgow, UK), Queer Orthodox History in Russian LGBTQ+ Activism
Discussant: Jacob Bell (Texas Tech U)
Friday, October 18, 2024
Book Discussion: The Routledge Handbook of Byzantine Visual Culture in the Danube Regions, 1300-1600, by eds. Maria Alessia Rossi and Alice Isabella Sullivan
10:45am to 12:30pm EDT, Virtual Convention, VR8
This roundtable discussion focuses on the recently published Routledge Handbook of Byzantine Visual Culture in the Danube Regions, 1300–1600 (2024), which aims to broaden knowledge about the history, art, and heritage of Eastern Europe relative to Byzantium. The interdisciplinary framework of this handbook, covering history, literature, art history, architecture, philology, material culture, and theology, offers an in depth examination of the visual culture of regions of modern Greece, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia, among others, in between local traditions, the Byzantine heritage, and cultural forms adopted from other models in the medieval and early modern periods.
By gathering five of the authors that contributed to various sections of the volume, we aim to spark a discussion about the interconnectedness of this broad geographical area too often either studied in parts or neglected altogether, emphasizing its shared history and heritage. In addition, we aim to offer a fresh and original approach to the history, literature, and art history of the Danube regions.
The roundtable participants reflect the international nature of the volume, including diverse speakers from Romania, Italy, and USA at different scholarly levels, ranging from senior researchers and tenure-track professors to graduate students. The discussion will cover the rich material culture of the Danube, from Wallachian and Moldavian monumental art, to icon painting and metalwork, and the reach of the Danubian lands to Greece and Egypt.
Chair: Maria Alessia Rossi (Princeton U)
Participants: Andrei Dumitrescu (Stanford U), Elisabeta Negrau (George Oprescu Institute of Art History, Romania), Anita Paolicchi (U of Pisa, Italy), Alice Isabella Sullivan (Tufts U).
