Rethinking Art's Histories Transcultural Things and the Spectre of Orientalism in Early Modern Poland Lithuania

Is it possible for foreign things to be perceived as local? Transcultural things sets out to examine this seeming paradox, focusing on artefacts from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Transcultural things explores visual and material modes of vernacular self-expression in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a confederate polity created in 1569 as the Polish, Ruthenian, Lithuanian and Prussian nobilities found themselves drawing closer together culturally. It examines how the process of becoming an interconnected political community was activated and legitimised by material culture such as maps, illustrated histories, costumes and carpets.These artefacts came to act as signifiers of localness and the Commonwealth's cultural distinctiveness, yet they were often from abroad, particularly the Ottoman Empire. Highlighting objects' mobility, adaptation and cultural reappropriation, this study points to the exogenous underpinnings of cultural self-identification and the allegedly local artefacts that mediated it. Transcultural things foreground the often-overlooked extrinsic aspect of nativism, positioning Poland-Lithuania as a useful methodological laboratory for challenging theories of national and societal cultural distinctiveness.The analysis reveals how a discourse of distinctiveness emerged in response to transcultural flows of people and artefacts as well as how, for Polish-Lithuanian elites, making sense of one's own world was fundamentally informed by other cultures – and was therefore, inevitably, embedded in a global context. Transcultural things examines four sets of artefacts from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: maps pointing to Poland–Lithuania’s roots in the supposedly ‘Oriental’ land of Sarmatia, portrayals of fashions that purport to trace Polish culture back to a distant and revered past, Ottomanesque costumes worn by Polish ambassadors and carpets labelled as Polish despite their foreign provenance.These examples of invented tradition borrowed from abroad played a significant role in narrating and visualising the cultural landscape of Polish-Lithuanian elites. But while modern scholarship defines these objects as exemplars of national heritage, early modern beholders treated them with more flexibility, seeing no contradiction in framing material things as local cultural forms while simultaneously acknowledging their foreign derivation.The book reveals how artefacts began to signify as vernacular idioms in the first place, often through obscuring their non-local origin and tainting subsequent discussions of the imagined purity of national culture as a result.