Traditional syntheses of the history of European culture have used the concept of the classical tradition conceived as ‘‘ancient heritage’’ to justify an identity founded on the belief that there existed a cultural canon and that passing it on ensured the proper upbringing of future generations. The idea of heritage harmonized with the ‘‘grand narrative’’ of European history and led to a negative judgment regarding any noncanonic reaction to the western European model of discovering antiquity - to the Italian model during the Renaissance, the French model during the Enlightenment, and the German model of Altertumswissenschaft (classical scholarship) in the nineteenth century.
In the humanities today, the growing interest in reception is opening up new possibilities for understanding the cultural tradition of regions, nations, and states. The canon is becoming a nonoperational concept and is unattractive to the contemporary consumer of culture; resistance, transformation, and noncanonical consumption are now perceived in a positive light. This creates a new opportunity to write the cultural history of regions like central-eastern Europe. In central-eastern Europe the lasting character of the classical tradition can be traced to its position at the margins of Europe and to the late development of nation-states. Instead of being seen as peripheral to the reception of antiquity, this area now occupies the space of cultural borderlands through encounters, exchanges, and free choices.
Central-eastern Europe is a fuzzy, ideologically marked concept. I shall use this name to denote the part of Europe that joined western Christianity in the tenth century, extending its reach east of the borders of the revived Roman empire. From then on, a systemic acculturation of the Mediterranean tradition began. The region comprised, from the beginning, three monarchies: the Czech monarchy of the Premyslids (in the western Christian community from the first half of the tenth century), the Polish monarchy of the Piasts (baptism 966), and the Hungarian monarchy of the Arpads
(baptism 997). The Hungarian Kingdom’s expansion gradually took over the area of today’s Slovakia, and in the early twelfth century a personal union between ruling families led to the incorporation of Croatia. In the late Middle Ages, Lithuania federated with Poland and together with dominions in Ruthenia (today’s Belarus and Ukraine) became part of this region. Such a delineation of borders means that the sphere of influence of the eastern empire - Byzantium and the Orthodox church - is excluded from this study, except for cultural forms created at the meeting point of the two churches (in Transylvania and Ruthenia). This geography continues to make sense in reference to subsequent centuries, because the Latin world separated itself from Turkish Islam with equal decisiveness and, in parts, on the same border that had divided it earlier from Byzantium. Meanwhile on the east, Kievan Rus was destroyed by the Mongolian invasions, and another eastern Europe was born and started gaining importance: Muscovy, whose ambition was to replace Byzantium in its imperial role and build its identity in opposition to the Latin west.
The approach proposed here differs significantly from the tradition of writing about the reception of ancient culture where ‘‘reception’’ is seen as identical with ‘‘heritage.’’ I also question the practice of describing the classical tradition in the individual nation-states in reference to their present borders. During the periods most important for the reception of the classical tradition, the map of this part of Europe was completely different (see maps 10.1-10.4). In the time of Renaissance
Figure 10.2 Central-Eastern Europe ca. 1500
Humanism, the territorial reach of the countries today called Poland, Hungary, and Lithuania was much bigger, while other countries (Belarus, Ukraine, Slovakia) did not exist as states at all. In the other period that is important for our inquiry - the nineteenth century, a time of scientific reflection on antiquity and the formation of modern nations - none of the countries in the region enjoyed sovereignty or had a national educational system. Thus western European learning, pro-state on principle, was imposed on peoples nurturing a constant hope of overthrowing the state in which they were living and of mythologizing their own past so as to raise new generations in loyalty toward the nation they identified with, not the contemporary state.
The systems of culture that developed in central-eastern Europe were dominated by gentry whose role as the sole representatives of society before the monarchy created a base for the cultivation of freedom that sought antecedence in Roman libertas (freedom), but made the cultures in question difficult to adapt to the conditions and structures of a modern, ethnic nation-state.
A region demarcated in this way lies ‘‘between’’ east and west, at any time and within every understanding of these concepts. This situation created a paradox: in this region of Europe enslavement was common, but so was the opportunity to choose and select - a typical borderland experience.
World History
