Monday, January 17, 2022





2006, The Origins of the Slavic Nations: Premodern Identities in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus
1059 ViewsPaperRank: 3.7400 Pages
I have been reading the History of Eurasia and Central/Eastern Europe for the last 60 years. I have to say that when reading the history of Eastern Europe, it is very difficult to follow the history of any one nation in a linear fashion. This is the best book written on this topic by any historian and believe me I think I have read most of them. The first problem are the histories written by the victors and then histories written by the defeated. Second there is the problem of countries popping up and then disappearing and then popping up and so forth ad nauseum. Third is the problem of multi-national empires. Fourth there are Nations without political borders or a National ruling elite. Fifth the National Elites change their national allegiances. Ultimately we have the book written by Prof. Plokhy and finally all is clear!


Cossack Ukraine In and Out of Ottoman Orbit, 1648 1681

Victor Ostapchuk

The European Tributary States of the Ottoman Empire in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Boston and New York: Brill, 2013)
34 Pages
Publication Name: The European Tributary States of the Ottoman Empire in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Boston and New York: Brill, 2013)


In the Shadows of Poland and Russia: the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Sweden in the European Crisis of the mid-17th Century. PhD dissertation. Södertörn University, 2006, 347 pp.



361 Pages

https://tinyurl.com/ycke6477             

This book examines and analyses the Union between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Sweden signed in 1655 at Kėdainiai and the political crisis that followed. The union was a result of strong separatist dreams among the Lithuanian-Ruthenian Protestant elite led by the Radziwiłł family, and if implemented it would radically change the balance of power in the Baltic Sea region. The main legal point of the Union was the breach of Lithuanian federation with Poland and the establishment of a federation with Sweden. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania aspired to return to international relations as a self-governing subject. The Union meant a new Scandinavian alternative to Polish and Russian domination. The author places the events in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the general crisis that occurred in Europe in the middle of the 17th century characterized by a great number of wars, rebellions and civil wars from Portugal to Ukraine, and which builds the background to the crisis for Lithuania and Sweden. The research proved the importance of lesser powers in changing the geopolitical balance between the Great Powers. The conflict over Lithuania and Belarus was the main reason for the Swedish-Russian, Polish-Russian and Ukrainian-Russian wars. The failure of the Union with Sweden was caused by both internal and external factors. Internally, various ethnic, confessional and political groups within the nobility of Lithuania were split in favour of different foreign powers – from Muscovy to Transylvania. The external cause for the failure of the Union project was the failure of Swedish strategy. Sweden concentrated its activity to Poland, not to Lithuania. After the Union, Swedish authorities treated the Grand Duchy as an invaded country, not an equal. The Swedish administration introduced heavy taxation and was unable to control the brutality of the army. As a result Sweden was defeated in both Lithuania and Poland. Among the different economic, political and religious explanations of the general crisis, the case of Lithuania shows the importance of the political conflicts. For the separatists of Lithuania the main motive to turn against Poland and to promote alliance with Sweden, Russia or the Cossacks was the inability of Poland to shield the Grand Duchy from a Russian invasion.The Lithuanian case was a provincial rebellion led by the native nobility against their monarch, based on tradition of the previous independence and statehood period. It was not nationalism in its modern meaning, but instead a … View full abstract


“Russia’s First ‘Orient’: Catherine in the Crimea, 1787.”

2002, Kritika 3.1, pp. 3-25
514 ViewsPaperRank: 2.324 Pages
Russian culture discovered its first “Orient” in the late 18th century when Catherine II extended the boundaries of her empire to Southern Ukraine and the Crimea. While Russians had interacted for centuries with their Asiatic neighbors, they had not systematically characterized them as Oriental “others” until Catherine’s reign. The 1783 conquest of new territory on the shores of the Black Sea, which coincided with the rising popularity of Oriental fashions in West European literature and culture, provided an opportunity to do so. Accordingly, these southern borderlands were the first landscapes in the empire to be elaborately imagined according to the Western parameters of Oriental stylization. An especially powerful stimulus to representations of the Crimea as an “Eastern” or “Oriental” territory was Catherine II’s trip to the Crimea in 1787. Commentary on the journey, written by the empress herself, members of her entourage, and her various correspondents, illustrates the initiatory formulation of an exotic Crimean imaginary -- a year before Byron’s birth and 12 years before Pushkin’s. This was not yet the full-fledged Orientalism of Said’s classic model and thus, though there is a direct link between Catherinian descriptions of the Crimea and later Orientalist characterizations of the Caucasus, Russia’s encounter with the Crimea is better described as a preliminary process of “otherization”: the production and circulation of images and stereotypes that expressed the region’s “otherness” or ontological difference from the norms of the dominant culture, in this case those of Western Europe. Not surprisingly, initial forays into Orientalist literary discourse were complicated by the fact that Catherine’s empire was hardly a typical Western power at all: geographically, politically, and culturally defined by its position on Europe’s periphery, Russia itself had often been cast in the role of the West’s Oriental other. The annexation of the Crimea provided a welcome opportunity for Russia to more assertively claim the status of a Western-style empire, the rhetorical construction of Russia’s first Orient ultimately providing compelling evidence of Russia’s Western pedigree.



The Imperial Roots of Soviet Orientology
David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye 
(Brock University)

Geography has made Russia intimately familiar with the East from its very beginnings.

The caches of Near Eastern coins dating from as early as the eighth century found on its lands testify to a lively Slav intercourse with the Orient even before the rise of Kievan Rus. Commerce, conflict and intermarriage continued to characterise Russia’s relations with its Asian neighbours on the Steppe and beyond after its conversion to Christianity in988. However, the sparse literature about the East that survived the medieval era was strongly influenced by the mother church in Constantinople. Monastic chronicles and other texts tended to caricature Asians as a sinister other, more in keeping with Byzantine anti-Islamic polemics than physical contact.

There were exceptions. “The Journey beyond Three Seas”, the fifteenth-century merchant Afanasii Nikitin’s account of his travels to India, portrayed the subcontinent and its Muslim overlords in a relatively objective light. Nikitin’s “Journey” suggests that the Russian laity did not necessarily share their church’s hostility to the non-Christian East. Moreover, since Russians developed a sense of national identity relatively late, their sense of race tended to be much weaker than among western Europeans. Many families in the official Tsarist genealogy proudly claimed a Tatar provenance, including distinguished names like Iusupov, Kurakin, Dashkov, Kochubei, Ushakov, and Karamzin, among a host of others. As for the peasantry, until the modern age, its primary allegiance was to its Eastern Christian faith rather than the nation. But this loyalty was to the triple-armed Orthodox cross, not the simpler Latin version. The Catholic nemets (western foreigner) was just as alien as the Turkic basurman (Muslim infidel).


Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration



RUSSIA
How Old Magic Does the Trick for Modern Politics

Claudio Sergio Nun-Ingerom
CNRS, Paris
and Universidad Nacional de San Martin, Buenos Aires


This article attempts to interpret the insurrection led by Razin in the seventeenth century as the beginning of modern politics, because it was founded on the immanence of the social in contrast to the transcendent conceptions of power maintained by the court and church. This advance was made possible by the working of magic. Through performative speech, magic permitted the creation of a verbal presence for the non-existent tsarevich Alexis, who, however, was never given material form. In keeping the self-appointed heir invisible and by declaring his father’s rule illegitimate, the rebels reduced the role of the tsar to a pure signifier. The proof that this uprising represented a turn toward modern politics is that it did not rely upon the invocation of an intangible philosophical or spiritual ideal (as in the West); it was built instead upon an armed people, expressing itself in a language that was still archaic but already oriented toward a new representation of power as socially legitimatized. This analysis opens an important line of argument that has power beyond this specific case.

Keywords
Razin Rebellion; self-appointment; Invisible tsarevich; magic; political expression; modernpolitical formation; immanence

Пусто место свято не бывает
No empty place is ever sacred.
(Variations on a Russian theme.)



Author(s): Valerie A. Kivelson

Source:
The American Historical Review,
Vol. 98, No. 3 (Jun., 1993), pp. 733-756

Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association
Accessed: 12-09-2017 19:27 UTC


"Revolts" in the Kuranty of March–July 1671

2014, Malte Griesse (ed.): From Mutual Observation to Propaganda War. Premodern Revolts in their Transnational Representations
116 ViewsPaperRank: 1.923 Pages



On the Cusp: Astrology, Politics, and Life-Writing in Early Imperial Russia

Published 2015
469 Views35 Pages

Witchcraft, Religion, and the State Apparatus: The Witch Craze Revisited


36 Pages
This paper revisits the phenomenon of witchcraft in relation to religion and the state apparatuses. It addresses the following questions: 1. How did the ISAs function during the witch hunt trials in Europe’s and USA’s witch craze? 2. What were the reasons behind the rise and fall of the witchcraft “epidemic”? Various scholars have attributed the rise of witchcraft to economic crises leading to a catastrophic rise in poverty and food shortages, to meteorological conditions brought about by the “little ice age,” which destroyed crops leading Europe into a period of famine, to the European religious wars, to some diseases that caused collective hysteria. As the majority of witches were poor women, some feminist argued for structural misogyny rooted in Christian religious doctrine. The persecution spread even to the New World. Social and natural catastrophes were attributed to witches who were perceived as wielding satanic powers that they gained through a covenant with Satan and the powers of the Anti-Christ. Both the Church and the State institutions worked hand in hand to rid their Christian societies of witchcraft, using the worst means available: torture, hanging, and burning victims at the stake. Both Catholics and Protestants had a share in this odious practice. It is still a mystery why the State and the Church suddenly stopped their trials over witchcraft accusations, despite the fact that it is still thriving as a belief system and secular entertainment. Some scholars attribute that shift to the early emergence of rational enlightenment ethos and the rise of the scientific worldview. And last but not least, 3. What are the implications for a critical study of witchcraft as a (counter)religious practice governed by the complex working of the ISAs?


Rats, Witches, Miasma and Early Modern Theories of Contagion

26 Pages
This chapter from Imperfect Creatures is an expanded version "Of Mice and Moisture," published in Journal Of Early Modern Cultural Studies. It explores the role of rodents and putrefaction in early modern theories of disease--mimetic contagion--by focusing on a wide variety of works, including drawings by Jacques de Gheyn and Shakespeare's Macbeth.



In his 1695 letter to John Dennis on comedy, the playwright William Congreve confesses his dislike for satire that smacks of the “Degeneration of [that] God-like Species” – “man.” Having conceded that he is disturbed by “seeing things, that force me to entertain low thoughts of my Nature,” Congreve then admits he “could never look long upon a Monkey, without very Mortifying Reflections; tho [he] never heard any thing to the Contrary, why that Creature is not Originally of a Distinct Species
”(Hodges 1964: 183). 

Congreve’s “mortifying Reflections” stem from his culture 'snagging fear that anatomy may be destiny – that the physiological similarities between humans and monkeys may undermine the philosophical and religious principles that grant our “God-like Species” dominion over the rest of creation. Because it unsettles distinctions between instinctual behavior and intelligent self-awareness, Congreve's monkey calls attention to a crucial set of problems in seventeenth-century thought: the difficulty of trying to distinguish humans from animals, animals from inanimate objects, and humans from machines.

 As Francis Bacon declared in Of the Wisdom ofthe Ancients (1609), “there is no nature which can be regarded as simple”: “Man has something of the brute; the brute has something of the vegetable; the vegetable something of the inanimate body” (Bacon 1860: 13, 96; see Fudge 1999: 94–98). To try to make sense of the complexity of nature and its hybrid forms was the centralproject of seventeenth-century science – or what was then termed natural philosophy........


Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life 1600-1740 (University of Michigan Press, 2016)

392 Views249 Pages
This is the full, published version of Imperfect Creatures, made available through the open access program Knowledge Unlatched. It contains chapters on George Wither, Abraham Cowley, Thomas Shadwell, John Wilmot, and Daniel Defoe, among others, read within the context of early modern science and ecology. Introduction Reading beneath the Grain Chapter 1. Rats, Witches, Miasma, and Early Modern Theories of Contagion Chapter 2. Swarming Things: Dearth and the Plagues of Egypt in Wither and Cowley Chapter 3. “Observe the Frog”: Imperfect Creatures, Neuroanatomy, and the Problem of the Human Chapter 4. Libertine Biopolitics: Dogs, Bitches, and Parasites in Shadwell, Rochester, and Gay Chapter 5. What Happened to the Rats? Hoarding, Hunger, and Storage on Crusoe’s Island Afterword We Have Never Been Perfect

"Male Witches and Gendered Categories in Seventeenth-Century Russia"

2003, Comparative Studies in Society and History
563 Views27 Pages
... If female magic differed at all from male magic, it was more in being geared more toward ameliorating domestic situations, but the differences are too minor to allow one to describe distinct male and female languages of magic along the lines of Labouvies Saar witches. 



Prosaic Witchcraft and Semiotic Totalitarianism: Muscovite Magic Reconsidered

Author(s): Valerie Kivelson and Jonathan Shaheen
Source:
Slavic Review,
Vol. 70, No. 1 (SPRING 2011), pp. 23-44Published by: Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; CambridgeUniversity Press


Elena Smilianskaia. Fortunetellers and Sorcerers in the Service of a Russian Aristocrat of the Eighteenth Century: The Case of Chamberlain Petr Saltykov 

Russian History. 2013. Vol. 40. No. 3-4. P. 364-380.




"Decriminalizing Witchcraft in Pre-Emancipation Russia," in Späte Hexenprozesse: Der Umgang der Aufklärung mit dem Irrationalen, ed. by Wolfgang Behringer, Sönke Lorenz, and Dieter R. Bauer (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 2016), 281-308.

207 Views36 Pages




Belief and Practice: Ideas of Sorcery and Witchcraft in Late Medieval England

Published 2007

137 Pages

This thesis analyzes fourteenth- and fifteenth-century sorcery and witchcraft cases from England and argues that witch-beliefs were developed and spread at the community level. Unlike the 1324 trial of Dame Alice Kyteler in Ireland, there were no inquisitional authorities in England that could have influenced ideas about sorcery, which can be found in legal records from London and Durham. The ideas found within these records reflect medieval laypeople's beliefs about magic, as well as their concerns about urgent social problems.


The Road to Heresy and Witchcraft: Women in Medieval Europe, 1000-1500

1483 Views42 Pages
Please excuse the formatting errors. I am currently working to figure out why these issued occurred upon uploading the paper. Edits are in progress.