Authors

Pavlo Yeremieiev¹;  ¹ Karazin University of Kharkiv, Ukraine

Discussion

In Eastern Europe, church historiography was established as a separate area of historical knowledge in the early 19^th century. Among other things, researchers of church history paid great attention to the history of Orthodox brotherhoods in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. In their studies, they often raised research questions that later, in the second half of the 20^th  century, were generalised within the concept of confessionalisation. Constructing the images of Orthodox brotherhoods in the church historiography of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries was influenced by a combination of factors: introduction into the scientific discourse of new sources, personal theological and socio-political views of the church historians, changes in general cultural and methodological trends (Enlightenment, Romanticism, Positivism, Neo-Kantianism), and processes of nation-building. Studying the history of Orthodox brotherhoods in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth necessitated a revision of the traditional historiographical paradigms by the church historians of the 19^th  and early 20^th centuries. Their general historiographical narratives were etatist and bishop-centric. However, when studying the religious situation in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, church historians gradually formed an image of the nation as a subject of church history. This image of the nation was included in the different national projects formed during the ‘long’ 19^th century.