A landmark study of republican discourse in sixteenth-century Poland-Lithuania and its original contribution to early modern republicanism.

This book is available in open access thanks to the generous support of the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań Defining the Identity of the Younger Europe gathers studies that shed new light on the rich tapestry of early modern “Younger Europe” — Byzantine-Slavic and Scandinavian territories. It unearths the multi-dimensional aspects of the period, revealing the formation and transformation of nations that shared common threads, the establishment of political systems, and the enduring legacies of religious movements. Immersive, enlightening, and thought-provoking, the book promises to be an indispensable resource for anyone interested in the complexities of early modern Europe. This collection does not just retell history; it provokes readers to rethink it. Contributors: Giovanna Brogi, Piotr Chmiel,Karin Friedrich, Anna Grześkowiak-Krwawicz, Mirosława Hanusiewicz-Lavallee, Robert Aleksander Maryks, Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, Maciej Ptaszyński, Paul Shore, and Frank E. Sysyn.

A major new assessment of the "vanished kingdom" of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth--one which recognizes its achievements before its destruction Richard Butterwick tells the compelling story of the last decades of one of Europe's largest and least understood polities: the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Drawing on the latest research, Butterwick vividly portrays the turbulence the Commonwealth experienced. Far from seeing it as a failed state, he shows the ways in which it overcame the stranglehold of Russia and briefly regained its sovereignty, the crowning success of which took place on 3 May 1791--the passing of the first Constitution of modern Europe.

This book makes a contribution to ongoing European research into the political discourse of the early modern era, analyzing the political discourse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1795). The sources comprise the broadly understood political literature from the end of the sixteenth century until the end of the eighteenth century. The author has selected and analysed concepts and ideas that are particularly important for the noble political discourse, with the aim of understanding what these concepts meant for the participants in public debate, who used them, how they explained and described the world, how they allowed for the formulation of political postulates and ideals, whether their meaning changed over time, and if so, then to what extent and under what influences. The author’s research focuses not only on the understanding of the concepts that functioned in the period under study but also on their use as instruments in the political struggle. The book is addressed to readers from the academic milieu – students and researchers – but is likewise accessible to less prepared readers interested in the history of political language and concepts as well as the history of political thought.

Providing a comprehensive and engaging account of personal unions, composite monarchies and multiple rule in premodern Europe: Unions and Divisions. New Forms of Rule in Medieval and Renaissance Europe uses a comparative approach to examine the phenomena of the medieval and renaissance unions in a pan-European overview. In the later Middle Ages, genealogical coincidences led to caesuras in various dynastic successions. Solutions to these were found, above all, in new constellations which saw one political entity becoming co-managed by the ruler of another in the form of a personal union. In the premodern period, such solutions were characterised by two factors in particular: on the one hand, the entry of two countries into a union did not constitute a military annexation — even though claims to the throne were all too often imposed by force; on the other hand, the new unitarian constellation retained, at least de jure, the independence of its respective components. The twenty-four essays, ranging in scope from Scandinavia to Iberia, from England and France to Central and Eastern Europe, examine whether the respective unions were the result of careful planning and deliberations in the face of a long-foreseen succession crisis or whether they emerged from dynamic developments that were largely reactive and dependent upon various random factors and circumstances. Each union is assessed to provide an understanding, for students and researchers, of the political and social forces involved in the respective countries and investigates how the unions were reflected in contemporary literature (pamphlets, memoranda, chronicles, diaries etc.), propaganda and in legal and historical discourses. This volume is essential reading for students and researchers interested in the history of monarchy, political history and social and cultural histories in premodern Europe.

An in-depth look at British–Polish literary pre-Enlightenment contacts, The Call of Albion explores how the reverberations of British religious upheavals in distant Poland–Lithuania surprisingly served to strengthen the impact of English, Scottish, and Welsh works on Polish literature. The book argues that Jesuits played a key role in that process. The book provides an insightful account of how the transmission, translation, and recontextualization of key publications by British Protestants and Catholics served Calvinist and Jesuit agendas, while occasionally bypassing barriers between confessionally defined textual communities and inspiring Polish–Lithuanian political thought, as well as literary tastes.

Transcultural things examines four sets of artefacts from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: maps pointing to Poland–Lithuania’s roots in the supposedly ‘Oriental’ land of Sarmatia, portrayals of fashions that purport to trace Polish culture back to a distant and revered past, Ottomanesque costumes worn by Polish ambassadors and carpets labelled as Polish despite their foreign provenance. These examples of invented tradition borrowed from abroad played a significant role in narrating and visualising the cultural landscape of Polish-Lithuanian elites. But while modern scholarship defines these objects as exemplars of national heritage, early modern beholders treated them with more flexibility, seeing no contradiction in framing material things as local cultural forms while simultaneously acknowledging their foreign derivation. The book reveals how artefacts began to signify as vernacular idioms in the first place, often through obscuring their non-local origin and tainting subsequent discussions of the imagined purity of national culture as a result.