This is a past event
An International Symposium
The Burn, Edzell, Aberdeenshire
5–7 September 2014
Sponsors
Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen
Centre for Early Modern Studies, University of Aberdeen
Aberdeen Centre for Russian & East European History
Consulate of the Republic of Poland, Edinburgh
Image 1: Allegory of the Union of the Crowns, Peter Paul Rubens, 1636
Image 2: Allegory of the Union of Krewo, Anon,CXVII
The upsurge of interest among historians in recent years in cultural transfer and transnational history has challenged the paradigm of the nation as the sole generator and transmitter of culture. Stress on the process of nation-building and of nations as ‘imagined communities’, in which national identity and national culture was constructed rather than being handed down intact from time immemorial has undermined simple models of cultural transfer, while transnational history has sought to escape the metanarrative of the nation by stressing the transfer of culture and ideas across national boundaries. Yet comparatively little attention has been paid to the processes of cultural transfer within political unions, which established varying degrees of political unity while endorsing the separate political identities of the nations or provinces they contained. Political unions are overwhelmingly studied within the tradition of national historical narratives, and there has been little comparative study of the cultural impact of political unions which, through institutionalising diversity—whether political, religious, national, or cultural—establish spaces which both facilitate cultural transfer and reveal its limits, in the clash between forces promoting political and cultural unity and forces asserting the local identities that political unions embrace and explicitly endorse. Unions thereby provide an excellent opportunity to study the processes, spaces, actors, materials, and technologies of cultural transfer. The symposium will focus on two political unions formed in the late medieval and early-modern period: the British Union (1603 onwards) and the Polish-Lithuanian Union (1386-1795), comparing and contrasting an archipelagic state system with a largely continental one. The unions are closely comparable. The Polish-Lithuanian union lasted 409 years, while the Anglo-Scottish union, the core of the British Union, has lasted 410 years to date. Each union moved from a personal union to a real union, and provide the only examples in early modern Europe of full parliamentary union between Poland and Lithuania (1569), Scotland and England (1707), and Britain and Ireland (1801). The symposium will focus on the core unions between the kingdoms of Scotland and England on the one hand, and between the kingdom of Poland and the grand duchy of Lithuania on the other, but it will also take account of the separate unions of England/Britain with Ireland (1541/1603/1801), of Poland with Prussia (1454/1569), and of the secession of Podlasie and the Ukrainian territories from the grand duchy of Lithuania and their incorporation into the kingdom of Poland in 1569. Thus in both unions the internal political structures of union shifted substantially over the course of the relationship, and the symposium will examine the extent to which such shifts affected processes of cultural transfer. It will address from a historical perspective problems that are very much of concern in the present: the factors that produce a drive towards unification; the extent to which cultural transfer creates a common culture; the depth of loyalty such union-states can mobilise; and how such unification processes spark resistance and stimulate the retention, development, and contestation of separate national or provincial identities within the union. Crucial to these questions is the issue of language sharing—English in one case; Polish in the other, and the consequent retreat of other languages (Scottish Gaelic, Irish, Scots, Lithuanian, Ruthenian, German). The project will explore when and why language sharing occurs, enabling communication across multiple cultural divides and how it acts as a barrier to unification when language intersects with competing ethnic, religious and political loyalties. It will look at the ways in which the processes of cultural transfer and the conflicting loyalties and complex layers of identity produced by political unions formed and were reflected in literature and art. It will investigate the institutional structures of unions, and the ways in which institutions constituted spaces in which a common union culture was formed and transmitted, and the extent to which they became sites promoting cultural hybridity on the one hand and resistance to centripetal forces on the other. Finally, it will look at the cultural legacy of union, by considering the afterlife of these cultural processes following the end of political union: in the successor states of Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and the Republic of Ireland.
Programme (Provisional)
Friday 5th September
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2.00 |
Coffee |
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2.15 |
Introduction Professor Robert Frost |
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Session 1 |
Law, Commerce, and the Culture of Union |
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Chair: |
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2.30-2.50 |
Robert Frost (Aberdeen) |
Law and self-government in the Polish-Lithuanian union. |
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2.50-3.10 |
Adelyn Wilson (Aberdeen) |
Scots law, legal literature and the Cromwellian union. |
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3.10-3.30 |
Richard Whatmore (St Andrews) |
Swiss and Genevan ideas about union in the light of commercial society. |
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3.30-4.00 |
Discussion |
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4.00-4.20 |
Coffee |
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Session 2 |
Political Culture |
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Chair: |
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4.20-4.40 |
Ned C. Landsman (SUNY at Stony Brook) |
Under English Crown or British Crown? The Making of Imperial Identities in British America after Anglo-Scottish Union |
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4.40-5.00 |
Martyna Mirecka (St Andrews) |
Alien? Akin? Amiss? Poland-Lithuania and British Political Culture. |
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5:00-5.20 |
James Kelly (St Patrick’s Drumcondra) |
A logical and necessary measure: support for an Anglo-Irish Union in Ireland. |
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5.20-5.40 |
Ultan Gillen (Tyne Tees) |
Resisting the Union: The United Irishmen and their Enemies |
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5.40-6.15 |
Discussion |
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6.15 |
Drinks Reception |
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7:00 |
Dinner |
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Saturday 6th September
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Session 3 |
Religion and Union |
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Chair: |
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9:30-9.50 |
Piotr Wilczek (Warsaw) |
Polonia reformata: a few remarks on early modern religious history in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. |
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9.50-10.10 |
Michael Brown (Aberdeen) |
A Union of Hearts and Minds? Confession and Conversion in the British and Irish Union. |
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10.10-10.40 |
Coffee |
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10.40-11.00 |
Liudmyla Sharipova (Nottingham) |
Religious identity and cultural change in Ruthenia: the myth of Polonisation. |
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11.00-11.20 |
Wioletta Butterwick-Pawlikowska (SSEES/UCL) |
The Lithuanian Catholic Hierarchy and Union after 1569 |
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11.20-12.00 |
Discussion |
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12.30-1.30 |
Lunch |
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Session 4 |
Identity and the Culture |
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Chair |
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1:45-2.05 |
David Frick (Berkeley) |
Language and Culture in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the seventeenth century.. |
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2.05-2.25 |
Jane Stevenson (Aberdeen) |
The Scots Language after 1603 |
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2.25-2.45 |
Coffee |
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2.45-3.05 |
Dauvit Broun (Glasgow) |
Cultural unions and political independence: the case of medieval Scotland. |
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3.05-3.25 |
Andrew Mackillop (Aberdeen) |
The Other Union: the English East India Companies and England’s culture of unionism, 1698–1708. |
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3.25-4.00 |
Discussion |
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4.00-4.20 |
Coffee |
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Session 5 |
Art & Union |
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Chair: |
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4.20-4.40 |
Olenka Pevny (Cambridge) |
Orthodoxy and Catholicism: cultural hybridity and art in the Polish-Lithuanian union.. |
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4.40-5.00 |
Helen Pierce (Aberdeen) |
Union and identity in portraits of James VI & I. |
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5.00-5.20 |
Carolyn Guile (Colgate) |
Architectural practice, cultural property, and the perception of union in Poland-Lithuania |
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5.20-6.00 |
Discussion |
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6.00-7:00 |
Keynote Lecture: Professor Chris Whatley (Dundee): The United Kingdoms: Convergent and Divergent Cultures, c.1707–2014 |
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7.30 |
Dinner |
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Sunday 7th September
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Session 6 |
Legacies of Union |
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Chair |
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9.30-9.50 |
Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski (SSEES/UCL) |
The end of the union: Poland-Lithuania, political reform, and the Partitions |
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9.50-10.10 |
Cliona O’Gallchoir (University College Cork) |
Union, Progress and Language in the Work of Maria Edgeworth. |
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10.10-10.30 |
Michał Kopczyński (Warsaw) |
The past in the present: identity in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth yesterday and today. |
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10.30-11.00 |
Discussion |
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11.00-11.30 |
Coffee |
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11.30-1.00 |
Round Table Discussion. Chair: Professor Karin Friedrich (Aberdeen) |
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Frank Sysyn (Edmonton); Stanley Bill (Cambridge); Michael Brown (Aberdeen) |
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1.00 |
Lunch |
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