Transcultural things and the spectre of Orientalism in early modern Poland-Lithuania

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. It examines how the process of becoming an interconnected political community was activated and legitimised by material culture such as 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, this study points to the exogenous underpinnings of cultural self-identification and the allegedly local artefacts that mediated it. Transcultural things foreground the often-overlooked extrinsic aspect of nativism, positioning Poland-Lithuania as a useful methodological laboratory for challenging theories of national and societal cultural distinctiveness.

The analysis 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.

Tomasz Grusiecki is Associate Professor of Early Modern European Art and Material Cultures at Boise State University