Authors

Sándor Földvári¹;  ¹ University of Debrecen, Hungary

Discussion

In the Early Modern Age, “Confessionalization” was a process of building the social institutions of culture and religion by private capital and private burghers. Protestant priests and schoolmasters were employed by the local community of burghers. These processes were based on the unfolding of book printing, according to Benedict Anderson (1991), and the innovations institutionalized the culture. What can be said about nation-building via the “market of ideas and books” (according to Anderson), was reflected in Orthodoxy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, too (according to the author), by the activities of the brotherhoods, i.e. the confraternities of Orthodox laymen. Therefore, the processes of Confessionalization happened in the Orthodoxy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, too. On the other hand, no such happened in Muscovy. First, the social structure of Muscovian Tsardom was different, thus the Orthodox bourgeoise was not as strong there as in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and its room for innovation was very limited. Another difference was the subordination of Orthodoxy to the imperial expansive political rule in Muscovy, while the Orthodoxy in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth did not serve the political rule but the national identification and self-consciousness of Orthodox believers whose bourgeois middle class unfolded the brotherhoods for managing their confessional identity through the schooling and printing.
 The author overlooks the development of the term since Zeeden through Reinhardt up to Schilling, then its applicability in East Europe, considers the definition given by M. Dmitrieff, then concludes that Yaroslav Isaievich’s very significant contribution to the field of brotherhoods and book printing gave enough ground to state that the brotherhoods (confraternities) were the phenomena of Confessionalization. Lately published works, such as the great monograph by L. Timoshenko on Vilna, prove this view as well. Therefore, the bourgeois development in the Ukrainian and Belarusian terrains resulted in the European civil society having its organic roots in the history of Ukrainian lands.