Transcultural Things and the Spectre of Orientalism in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania

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Transcultural things explores visual and material modes of vernacular self-expression in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth--a confederate polity created in 1569 as the Polish, Ruthenian, Lithuanian, and Prussian nobilities found themselves drawing closer together culturally. This book examines how the process of their becoming an interconnected political community was activated and legitimized by material culture and, specifically, by objects like maps, illustrated histories, costumes, and carpets. These artefacts came to act as signifiers of localness and the Commonwealth's cultural distinctiveness, yet they were often from abroad, particularly the Ottoman Empire. Highlighting objects' mobility, adaptation, and cultural reappropriation--by which the 'exotic' becomes local and the foreign turns 'native'--this study points to the exogenous underpinnings of cultural self-identification and the only allegedly local artefacts that mediated it. Transcultural things foregrounds the often-overlooked extrinsic aspect of nativism, positioning Poland-Lithuania--a realm often regarded as 'Orientalized'--as a useful methodological laboratory for challenging theories of national and societal cultural distinctiveness. This analysis thereby reveals how a discourse of distinctiveness emerged in response to transcultural flows of people and artefacts as well as how, for Polish-Lithuanian elites, making sense of one's own world was fundamentally informed by other cultures--and was therefore, inevitably, embedded in a global context.