Seven years after the publication of Paul W. Knoll's magnum opus on the early history of the Jagiellonian University,1 students of late medieval and early modern Poland can finally quench their intellectual thirst with another magnificent book by a North American scholar. At the close of 2023, Tomasz Grusiecki brings to the reader his first monograph, a study of cultural fluidity in seventeenth-century Poland. The book courageously addresses the long-held myth of Polish Orientalization and provides a fresh perspective on Poland's relations with other nations through the lens of material culture. An art historian by training, Grusiecki in my view has two concurrent yet seemingly opposing goals during his early career, which become fully manifest in this book. The first goal is to promote awareness of the arts in early modern Poland and construct an active, non-peripheral role for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the seas of European cultural exchange and global art historiography. The second, as a necessary adjustment, is to deconstruct the very notion of Polish art inasmuch as premodern artifacts made or found in the cultural territory of what was then Poland were not always so inherently Polish but rather complicated in origin and transnational in nature. Following Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Grusiecki counters contemporary perceptions of cultural homogeneity and repudiates the ethnonational identity of premodern things. He problematizes the firm boundary between ideas of local and foreign, replacing provenience with the more historically appropriate provenance.Grusiecki finishes his account with a cultural historian's craft: visual materials are well integrated with historical interpretation and theoretical consideration. Unlike a linear chronicle, each of the four chapters takes the example of one sort of foreign thing that was first considered exotic, then local, and eventually native throughout time, offering a distinctive story of Polish encounters with global material culture. Reading the book feels like walking into a beautifully curated exhibition, one room of wonders connected to another, and the four together weave a compelling narrative along the thread of transculturality.The first room (chapter 1) is filled with old maps of European Sarmatia. After demystifying its philological genealogy, Grusiecki argues that the idea of Sarmatism that has long symbolized the Polish character was actually rooted in cartography. Early modern cartographers such as Andrzej Pograbka, Nicolaus Germanus, Bernard Wapowski, and Wacław Grodecki adopted the ancient geography of Sarmatia in representing the Polish realm on the map, thus connecting the Poles with the oriental East. This spatial rhetoric was heterogeneous and gave rise to a collective Polish-Lithuanian-Prussian-Ruthenian identity, “reflecting a transcultural commonwealth in the making” (p. 34).The second room (chapter 2) features the Ottomanesque clothing that seventeenth-century Polish aristocrats loved to wear. Combining both portraits and textual accounts, Grusiecki historicizes the process of sartorial assimilation as the invention of local traditions, as opposed to an act of self-Orientalization. Rather than a change of taste from the West to the East using misleading geographical binaries, early modern Polish fashion was the outcome of a dynamic transculturation, and as “a transhistorical sign” (p. 77) it shaped a genealogical continuity and the collective identity of being Polish. Grusiecki nonetheless asserts that stylistic distinctions existed between Polish and Ottoman attires, and the seventeenth-century Polish outfit, despite being Ottomanesque in shape, was actually native in the minds of local elites.Shifting from eastward to westward, the third room (chapter 3) displays Polish garments and national culture in the ambassadorial events of Jerzy Ossoliński in Rome (1633) and Łukasz Opaliński in Paris (1645). As Grusiecki shows, Polish diplomats participated in creating a splendid image of Poland abroad as masculine, glorious, and triumphal. This image was conveyed and propogated precisely by their flamboyant costumes. Through self-aggrandizing efforts from public performance to making captivating pamphlets, Poles in the eyes of the Italians and French grew to be more familiar than foreign, “gradually losing their exoticism in the process” (p. 114). In this respect, Grusiecki criticizes Larry Wolff's construction of “demi-Orientalism” by presenting early modern Poles as active “creators of culture” instead of “an empty vessel” to be defined by Western European thinkers in the Enlightenment (p. 137).The last room (chapter 4) exhibits the doublethink on “so-called Polish carpets” (p. 151), or tapis polonais that has been wrongly attributed to a Polish origin. These Persian-styled carpets, which were in fact commissioned by Poles or their neighbors, were conceived by European buyers as at once Polish and Asian, at once local and foreign. Here, Grusiecki not only illustrates the possible imbrication between provenance and provenience but also demonstrates the fluid nature of early modern Polish local tradition that is “subject to ongoing recontextualizations” (p.151).Overall, Grusiecki situates himself squarely in the contemporary discourse of art historiography and knows exactly where the cultural memory of East Central Europe falls short. He successfully redresses the monolithic understanding of national heritage by expounding on the non-nativeness of Polish things and the fundamental pluralism of early modern states. Another positive attribute of the book is that he writes with his Anglophone audience in mind and explains every single detail. While remaining academically erudite and provocative, he manages to enthrall the general reader who might not be so familiar with this region of the world, let alone the seventeenth century.All that said, the book in my opinion is more concerned with the transculturation of things themselves than with the dynamic national/linguistic/social cultures among which the things were entangled, placing material culture over human culture. More questions about Polish history thus linger instead of being fully resolved: about Sarmatism, about nobility, about fashion, about the Ottoman influence, and about the Polish Baroque. Moreover, I am skeptical about the enormous stress laid upon the concept of transculturality, partly because it is already a given to our historicist mindset. Since all cultures are constructed and in constant flux, wouldn't it be more appealing to create a nuanced narrative of things, say, a history of the carpet, dropping the corrective framework of transculturalism and not using ethnocultural categories in a serious, qualitative way? Nonetheless, as a book cannot do everything, Transcultural Things with its deconstructionist critique serves as a commendable starting point, or tasting menu, for future research that will explore early modern Polish topics in greater depth and bring to light the long-forgotten Staropolska culture in addition to kingship, warfare, and diplomacy.To college professors who teach early modern Europe, it will be fruitful to assign any chapter of Transcultural Things for a “Polish week” (there should always be one on the syllabus). Grusiecki's writing in the form of case studies can satisfactorily replace the existing surveys of Poland and Eastern Europe that neither do justice to the earlier centuries nor explicate cultural history in any meaningful way. It is also important to note that premodern Polish history represents a very small field in the Anglophone world, rare to the point of nonexistence in North America, so I completely share Grusiecki's East-Central-European concerns. Hopefully, we will not tarry another seven years to see the next high-quality monograph about premodern Poland.
Václav Algirdas Zheng (Thu,) studied this question.