Visual Vocabularies of Early Modern Ruthenia

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel seeks to engage with the ways in which the idea of Ruthenia was revised and updated in response to the new cultural and political contexts of the seventeenth century. Of particular importance is how both Ruthenian identity and external identifications of Ruthenia were mediated and animated through the encounters, dialogues, and mutual collaboration between verbal and visual languages. How did Ruthenians claim a belonging to the wider Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth while simultaneously professing a form of cultural exceptionalism? And, more critically, what was “Ruthenia” in the seventeenth century; who were the Ruthenian artists and intellectuals; how do their visual and textual vocabularies fit into a larger European context?

Sub Unit

• Early Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, to 1800

Chair

• Julia Verkholantsev, U of Pennsylvania

Papers

• Maps: Seeing Ruthenia for the First Time - Tomasz Grusiecki, Boise State U

• Engravings: Cryptography in the Printed Editions of the Kyivan Lavra - Maria Ivanova, McGill U (Canada)

• Icons, Visions, and Voices: Miracle Reporting in Seventeenth-Century Ruthenia - Michelle Ruth Viise, Harvard U

Discussant

• Georg B. Michels, UC Riverside