Beyond Eastern Europe, 1400–1700, session at the Renaissance Society of America 2019 Annual Meeting, Toronto, March 17–19, 2019

In the early modern period, eastern Europe was a mosaic of cultures. Multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-denominational, it was situated at the crossroads of trade routes, political affairs, and cultural flows. Yet in the eighteenth century, the region’s perceived distance from the main centers of the Enlightenment led to its subsequent framing as the space of socio-economic backwardness, political disorder and cultural periphery. This binary positioning has had profound consequences on the perceptions of this region to this day.

This panel seeks to explore and redress two interconnected problems: (1) the terminology and methodologies that have been applied to conceptually situate the lands between the Baltic and Black Seas—for example, the ‘East’, ‘periphery’, and more recently, ‘borderland’; (2) and, in turn, the different ways in which art, architecture and literature can challenge the conventional definitions of the region.

We thus invite scholars of central and eastern Europe to explore new approaches, terms, and questions that address the place of this region in its various complexities and thematic contexts. We seek papers that cover any aspect of culture (art, architecture, material culture, literature) that might shed new light on the region from within, across, and from without.