Representing Muscovites in Early Modern Textual Cultures Organized by the Department of Comenius Studies and Early Modern Intellectual History
Detailed information
Representing MuscovitesRepresenting Muscovitesin Early Modern TextualCultures
Contacts:
Lucie Storchová (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., FLÚ AV ČR)
Kristi Viiding (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., UTKK)
Tomáš Havelka (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., FLÚ AV ČR)
Details
In the context of the aggression against Ukraine, the last two years have witnessed an unprecedented boom in representations of Russia and Russiansin the global public space. Although the early modern period represented a completely different media world, even a cursory examination of the literature of the period shows that the Grand Duchy of Moscow (later Tsardom of Russia) and its inhabitants were widely reflected and discussed in various types of Neo-Latin and vernacular texts from across the European continent, as well as from the early colonial environment. More or less stereotypicalimages of Muscovites can be found just as well in sermons, biographies,chronicles, diplomatic reports, travel writing, and occasional poetry as inreligious, educational and legal treatises. It seems obvious that Russia was represented in a much more complicated and complex way than simply as a non-Western region with a different religion and civilisation, and as a simple antithesis to the author’s own society. What representations then circulated in the literature between 1500 and 1750 and how exactly were they constructed? How did they intermingle with other images of the Other at the time? How did they co-create period´s political and social life as well as the agency and thecultural identities of both text producers and readers?
Although the potential of imagined geographies and processes of Othering has been attested in early modern studies for more than thirty years, surprisingly little research has been devoted to individual reflections of Russia and Muscovites as part of early modern literary and cultural exchanges. The main goal of our conference is to provide a detailed and locally specific analysis ofthese imaginaries and their possible social contexts, as well as a comprehensive comparison across various regions, with an emphasis on their cultural interconnectedness. The conference will also explore the variety of media, genres, discourses and rhetorical tools related to imageries of Russia and Muscovites and how they changed over time. Particular attention will be paid to the intersections of textuality, visuality, and materiality of early modern texts.
The conference will be held in English. It will be hosted at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Jilská 1, Prague, Czech Republic, from 31 October to 1 November 2024.
Keynote speakers will be announced with the first draft of the conference program. The organisers are happy to provide lunches and a conference dinner for speakers and recommend accommodationin Prague (i.e. the accommodation costs will not be covered). There is no registration fee. Proceedings will be published in an international peer-reviewed volume in English.
Thursday, 31st October
9:00 – 9:20 Introduction, welcomes
9:20 – 10:20
Keynote lecture | Peter Sjökvist (Uppsala University), The Image of Russia in Early Modern Swedish Sources: Dissertations, Pamphlets, Poetry
10:20 – 10:40 coffee break
10:40 – 11:40
Aiko Okamoto-MacPhail (Indiana University), Duchy of Moscow in the atlas Theatrvm orbis terrarvm by Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598)
Jakub Niedźwiedź (Jagiellonian University in Kraków), The 16th-century maps of Muscovy as polyphonic texts
11:40 – 12:40
Ovanes Akopyan (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice), A new Germania? Tacitean Elements in Renaissance descriptions of Muscovy, c. 1525
László Jankovits (University of Pécs), Jacobus Piso on the Battle of Orsha: An early representation of the Muscovites
12:40 –14:30 lunch
14:30 – 16:00
Maria Chantry (University of Wrocław), Portraits of Moscow tyrants in Latin and Polish Renaissance poetry
Madis Maasing (University of Tartu), Russians, Turks, and Tatars in the rhetoric of 16th-century Livonia
Jüri Kivimäe (University of Toronto), Naming the Enemy: Balthasar Russow on Muscovites at war
16:00 – 16:30 coffee break
16: 30–17:30
Marcela Slavíková (Czech Academy of Sciences), Ne Moscis simus praeda cruenta: Aegidius Salius the Bohemian on the Muscovite threat to Europe (1570)
Grzegorz Franczak (University of Milan), “What Barbarous Savagery!” Albert Schlichting’s Misdeeds of the Grand Duke of Muscovy (1571) and the Polish-Lithuanian Anti-Muscovite propaganda in the time of Ivan the Terrible’s Opričnina
Friday 1st November
9:30 – 10:30
Viktors Dāboliņš (University of Latvia), Zacharias Stopius letter to Riga City Council on Stephen Bathory’s military campaign in Muscovy and takeover of Velikiye Luki (1580)
Gábor Petneházi (University of Innsbruck), The Perfect Enemy? Stephen Bathory’s Livonian Campaign and its reception in contemporary Neo-Latin literature in Transylvania
10:30 – 11:00 coffee break
11:00 – 12:00
Lucie Storchová (Czech Academy of Sciences), The Nearest Other? Representations of Muscovites in the Bohemian literature around 1600 Kristi Viiding (Estonian Academy of Sciences), Multifunctional Neighbours: Reflections on Russians in the Livonian Neo-Latin epic from the second half of the 16th century
12:00 – 14:00 lunch
14:00 – 15:00
Andrzej Borkowski (University of Siedlce), Moscow and Muscovites in the works of Polish Baroque poetry: The case of Wacław Potocki
Piret Lotman (Estonian National Library), Are Muscovites Christians? Russian Orthodox believers in Ingria through the eyes of the Lutheran clergy in the 17th century
15:00 – 15:30 coffee break
15:30 – 16:30
Aivar Põldvee (Tallinn University), Depiction of the Great Northern War in the lament of sacristan Käsu Hans in Estonian
Kaarel Vanamölder (Estonian Academy of Sciences), Otto Fabian von Wrangell: Estonian nobleman and chronicler who met both Peter I and Charles XII
16:30 – 17:00 Conclusions
