Globalising the Periphery: Poland-Lithuania and Cultural Entanglement, 1587–1668
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Globalising the Periphery: Poland-Lithuania and Cultural Entanglement, 1587–1668 Tomasz Grusiecki Department of Art History and Communication Studies McGill University, Montreal Submission Date: May 2017 A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy © Tomasz Grusiecki, 2017 Table of Contents Abstract 4 Résumé en français 7 Acknowledgments 10 List of Figures 13 Introduction Globalising the Periphery: Poland-Lithuania and Cultural Entanglement, 1587–1668 18 Aims and Approach 25 Literature Review: Cultural Entanglement and Poland-Lithuania 31 Chapter Summaries 40 PART 1: ENTANGLED REPRESENTATIONS Chapter 1 Periphery as Representation: Poland-Lithuania and the Europeanisation of Europe 45 Mapping Europe’s Eastern Periphery as a Means of Self-Definition 51 Costume and Polish-Lithuanian Political Nation 66 Orientalisation or Europeanisation? 79 Poland-Lithuania and the Limits of Europe 89 Conclusion: Europe as a Spectrum 96 Chapter 2 Periphery as Performance: Entries of Polish-Lithuanian Ambassadors to Rome and Paris 98 At the Threshold of the Familiar World 102 Simultaneous Inclusion and Exclusion 108 Mocking the Periphery 122 Conclusion: Masquerade as Rehearsal of Cultural Boundaries 131 Chapter 3 Outsider-Insiders: Perceptions of Polishness in the Dutch Republic 135 Almost Different but Not Quite 139 Poles and the ‘Mother Trade’ 149 Masquerade 158 The Self, the Other and the Periphery 168 Conclusion: Seeing the Self through the Lens of the Periphery 182 PART 2: ENTANGLED MATERIALS AND IMAGES Chapter 4 Foreign as Native: Baltic Amber in Florence 184 Double Belonging 191 2 What is Amber 198 Cultural Conditioning 205 Amber as a Metonym of Place 212 Self-Reflexivity 218 Conclusion: Amber’s Horizontal Histories 221 Chapter 5 Of Mixed Origins: Tracing Michał Boym’s Sum Xu 224 Dispersed Authorship 229 Replicating the Sum Xu 244 Afterlives of the Sum Xu 251 Alternative Afterlives 257 Conclusion: Mixed Origins 262 Conclusion 268 Archival Sources 275 Bibliography 277 Images 300 3 Abstract French nobleman Gaspard de Tende (1618–1697) asserted that most early modern Europeans knew the Polish-Lithuanian state only through representations, for ‘though Poland is not very remote from us, yet one may say, it is almost unknown, few persons going thither to travel’. This dissertation examines representations of Polishness: both those formed in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth itself, and those articulated in the rest of Europe. Created in 1569 from the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the new state needed to construct a convincing story of its origins and place in the world. My study examines how these stories were narrated and disseminated by images and objects of material culture. But while these artefacts acted as native Polish-Lithuanian cultural forms and signifiers of nationhood, they were often appropriated from abroad. Thus, Ottomanesque costume, eastern carpets and Persianate weapons emerged paradoxically as the vehicles through which Poland-Lithuania’s political classes claimed their European and classical roots. Highlighting practices of mobility, adaptation and cultural confusion, the five chapters of this study aim to demonstrate the contingent and unstable nature of national and ethnic appellations, both as they pertain to self-identifications and the artefacts that mediated them. Poland-Lithuania is a useful methodological laboratory in this context precisely because of the way it challenges the theories of nations with distinctive cultures, and suggests instead that the discourse of distinctiveness is itself an outcome of cultural confusion. The first part of this project focuses on shifting representations and perceptions of Polish- Lithuanian costume (and, therefore, custom), both domestically and outside the Commonwealth’s borders. In so doing, it explores processes of transculturation, that is, when sustained contact with other traditions changes the way one defines their own cultural milieu. 4 Chapter 1 addresses the integration of Ottoman-style costume into Polish-Lithuanian self-image; it traces the dissemination of this costume across the country and asks how it contributed to the growing self-identification of the Commonwealth’s heterogeneous nobility as a united nation located on Europe’s eastern periphery. Chapters 2 and 3 discuss the cultural ambivalence of Polish-Lithuanian costume—Ottomanesque yet European—as it was perceived in Rome, Paris and Amsterdam. These three chapters combined thus reconsider the relationship between nativeness and foreignness, centrality and peripherality, and Europe and its others, by demonstrating that those categories were by no means antithetical poles, but depended on one another for their meaning and relevance. The second part shifts away from cultural misunderstandings triggered by costume to a cultural confusion that was generated by raw materials and naturalist imagery. To this effect, chapters 4 and 5 discuss Baltic amber and Michał Boym’s illustrated treatise Flora sinensis (1656): two cultural resources that modern Polish commentators have classed as quintessentially ‘Polish’. This study, however, demonstrates that these phenomena escaped easy categorisations in the early modern period, primarily due to their portability. A more horizontal narrative is advocated, one which treats with an equal concern all the various places where Baltic amber and Boym’s Flora sinensis were interpreted and re-employed. Stressing the ceaseless transformation and adaptation of ideas about these materials, part 2 accordingly foregrounds the on-going creation (and re-creation) of cultural forms that cannot be simply assigned to a single cultural region and its historical traditions. The aims of this thesis are thus both empirical and methodological; it presents several case studies that demonstrate how Polish-Lithuanian material culture was the product of intersecting traditions and customs, while at the same time using this heterogeneous region as a 5 critical site for arguing that the material signifiers of nationhood and ethnic distinctiveness often appeared amidst cultural confusion. This thesis allows this cultural messiness to come to the fore. 6 Résumé en français Le noble français Gaspard de Tende (1618–1697) affirme qu’à l’époque de la première modernité européenne, on ne connaissait l’état polono-lituanien qu’à travers ses représentations : « La Pologne n’est pas vraiment éloignée de nous, mais d’une certaine façon, elle est presqu’inconnue puisque seulement quelques personnes y ont voyagé. » Cette thèse étudie les représentations de la polonité telle qu'elles sont véhiculées à la république de Pologne-Lituanie ainsi qu'à l'étranger. Créé en 1569 à partir du royaume de Pologne et du grand-duché de Lituanie, le nouvel état a besoin de se construire une histoire convaincante à propos de ses origines et de sa place dans le monde. Ma recherche porte sur la façon dont ces histoires ont été racontées et transmises, par l'entremise d'images et d'objets issus de la culture matérielle. Cependant, ces artefacts, considérés comme des signifiants matériels de la nation polono-lituanienne, proviennent de l’étranger. Les costumes ottomans, les tapis d'Orient et les armes persanes ont été paradoxalement utilisés par la classe politique polono-lituanienne comme des outils leur permettant de réclamer leurs racines européennes et classiques. Mettant l'accent sur les pratiques de mobilité, sur l'adaptation ainsi que la confusion culturelle, l'objectif des cinq chapitres de cette étude est de démontrer la contingence et la nature instable des appellations nationales et ethniques en ce qui a trait à l'auto-identification et aux artefacts qui les a reliés. La Pologne- Lituanie est un laboratoire méthodologique utile dans ce contexte, car elle amène à un questionnement des théories qui promeuvent l’idée de nations avec des cultures distinctes. Au contraire, le cas de la Pologne-Lituanie suggère que le discours sur le caractère distinctif de la culture est le résultat d’une confusion culturelle. La première partie de ce projet porte sur les représentations et les perceptions flottantes des costumes polono-lituaniens (et donc des coutumes), dans la République des Deux Nations et 7 à l’étranger. Elle explore les processus de transculturation : le contact avec les autres traditions que change la perception qu’un peuple a de son propre milieu culturel. Le chapitre 1 traite de l’intégration des costumes de style ottoman dans l’autoreprésentation polonaise-lituanienne. De plus, il discute de la cooptation de ces costumes dans l’ensemble du pays, en cherchant à savoir de quelle façon ceux-ci ont contribué à l’auto-identification de la noblesse hétérogène de la République, et comment celle-ci se perçoit comme une nation unie située à la périphérie de l’Europe de l’est. Les chapitres 2 et 3 traitent de l’ambivalence culturelle du costume polono- lituanien à Rome, à Paris et à Amsterdam, à savoir s’il est perçu davantage comme étant ottomanesque ou européen. Ces trois chapitres contribuent à revoir les relations entre ce qui est natif et ce qui est étranger, entre ce qui est central et périphérique, entre l’Europe et ses autres, en démontrant que ces catégories ne sont pas des pôles opposés, mais qu’elles se nourrissent plutôt les unes des autres pour se définir et se justifier. La seconde partie s’éloigne des malentendus culturels en lien avec le costume pour aborder la confusion culturelle créée par les matières premières