Presentations by Streams

This panel examines cultural exchange in late medieval and early modern Eastern Europe from the perspective of liminal transmissions. It considers how the post-structuralist tendency to “isolate” cultural phenomena according to “political” boundaries might mask cultural exchange in Eastern Europe in the context of trans-regional connections with Western European monarchies, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Byzantine Empire, and the Qipchaq Khanate. It locates transfers of social, political, and intellectual practices within the multi-layered and fluid networks of communications, merchants and pilgrims that enabled knowledge and ideas to circulate. On the one hand, the panel participants argue that cultural exchange was rarely based on emulation, but instead on active adaptation to local social, political, religious or other needs. On the other hand, the participants will underline the necessity of comparatively analysing cultural exchange, to show how certain practices became sophisticated aberrations while coexisting between various sociocultural traditions.