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" Between Two Worlds: "
Markman, Kristina
Geary, Patrick
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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897499
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TL0g57z7kw
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| Main Entry
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McGlazer, Ramsey
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| Title & Author
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Between Two Worlds:\ Markman, KristinaGeary, Patrick
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| Date
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2015
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2015
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| Abstract
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By the mid-fourteenth century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania comprised a territory stretching across the present-day republics of Lithuania and Belarus as well as parts of Latvia, Poland, Ukraine, Moldova, and Russia. While the transformation of Lithuania into a powerful and dynamic polity under the leadership of a pagan dynasty has received much attention, concurrent changes in literary representations of Lithuania have been rarely addressed. This dissertation seeks to present the first comprehensive comparative survey of the images of Lithuania in the chronicles of the Teutonic Order and Rus'—i.e., Lithuania’s closest neighbors and most frequent economic and military competitors as well as collaborators. By examining each chronicle within the historical and intellectual context of its composition, I argue that the portrayal of Lithuania in these texts was neither directly political nor polemical, but influenced by a wide variety of social factors. Representations of Lithuania were functional and constitutive; or, in other words, far from being passive reflections, these images were intended to shape perception and worked to reinforce as well as alter general ideas and attitudes. The first part (chapters 1–5) provides a detailed overview of the political and ideological structures that gave rise to the two chronicles traditions under investigation. Then, moving to questions of representation, this part argues that although images of Lithuania usually took on the form of “us” versus “them,” “good” versus “evil,” Christian versus pagan, they were deployed in different ways. The Teutonic Order’s chroniclers, for example, deferred to conventional Western paradigms of “otherness” in order to construct an image of the hostile Lithuanian and justify the Order’s mission of conversion and colonization in Prussia and Livonia. In Rus'ian chronicles, on other hand, the use of negative images of Lithuania appears to have been symptomatic of attitudes during years of crisis rather than a definitive ideological or pragmatic program. The second part (chapters 6–8) is comparative; it analyzes the similarities and differences between the presentation of specific Lithuanian characters and events in both chronicle traditions. One of the principal conclusions of this section is that multiple discourses were involved in the production of image rather than primarily a religious one. Using Lithuania as a case study, the final chapters also explore the interplay of cultural systems in the Baltic region, especially questions of cultural identity and how it is reflected in the literary production of frontier societies.
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Markman, Kristina
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UCLA
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