“Diverse Histories and Contested Memories” is the title of this edited volume’s introduction, excellently describing the book’s objective. The first part changes the perspective on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita) from a polonocentric one toward the often marginalized but none the less constituent populations and regions of this early modern state. In the second part, the book analyzes the echoes of the past, manifested in debates on history and memory since the nineteenth century. It thus inscribes itself in a historiographical turn that aims at demystifying the Commonwealth’s history, therefore opening it to history “beyond martyrdom,” as Brian Porter-Szűcs has adequately put it in his history of post-partition Poland-Lithuania.1

The introduction familiarizes the reader with the general history of the Commonwealth and historians’ interpretations. The book uses the concept of “multiculturalism” to describe the “presence of diversity” in the polity (p. 11). The six chapters of the first part focus on the multicultural realities of the Commonwealth. Magda Teter analyzes its Jewishness, juxtaposing it to a historical memory that “has been flattened and simplified in […] nationalist circles.” (p. 27). Far from being an idyllic world, Jewish life was still thriving and existed not in isolation but in significant entanglement with the Christian world. Karin Friedrich makes a similar argument when focusing on multiconfessionalism and interconfessionality and their limits in Royal Prussia, Lithuania, and the Ruthenian Lands. In his section on Islam, Dariusz Kołodziejczyk questions earlier assumptions that did not see strong entanglements of Lithuanian Tatars with other believers. However, the recently discovered 1686 translation of the Koran into Polish, authored by the Tatar imam of Minsk, shows “contacts and mutual inspirations between Christians and Muslims,” deserving further research (p. 79). This would also help to deconstruct the current negative image of Islam, which is omnipresent in Polish media. In a similar vein, Olenka Z. Pevny argues that the architecture and interior design of the Church of the Savior at Berestovo/Kyiv is evidence of a “transcultural discourse that sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed to unite the peoples of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth” in particular Catholicism and Eastern Christianity (p. 88). The following chapter by Tomasz Grusiecki focuses on early modern mapmakers and how they relate to the Commonwealth and its designation. Thus, Andrzej Pograbka’s 1570 map, which Grusiecki analyzes, avoids the alienation of Lithuanian elites, depicting the state as “European Sarmatia.” In the nineteenth century, Polish historians linked this “transnational spatial unit” in an anachronistic fashion to the emerging Polish nation-state (p. 116). The first part closes with Richard Butterwick’s analysis of confessions’ role in the demise of the Rzeczpospolita. He argues that the gradual erosion of the 1573 Warsaw Confederation aggravated the relationship between Catholicism and other confessions and would ultimately develop into a pretext for Catherine II’s push for the 1772 partition.

The book’s second part focuses mainly on the historical memory of the Commonwealth. The authors only in passing mention the internal Polish “Mnemonic Wars” that have been an integral part of the political debate over the last decade.2 Instead, they focus on Polish debates of the nineteenth and early twentieth century and public post-World War Two debates between actors in different successor states of the Commonwealth. Stanley Bill introduces the concept of the “Ukrainian sublime,” which as he argues dominated the Polish Romantic literature, such as in Henryk Sienkiewicz’s With Fire and Sword. This perception of the state’s eastern borderlands combined images of conflict and violence with positive images of a Polish civilizing mission in the mystified kresy (pp. 157–158). In this notion of a civilizational divide, the “Ukrainian sublime” imagined the inhabitants of the eastern borderlands as an “unassimilable ‘other.’” (p.158). Robert Frost’s section on how two prominent historians, Oscar Halecki and Lewis Namier, remembered the Polish past is followed by Rūstis Kamuntavičius’s investigation into Belarusian and Lithuanian politics of memory linked to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. He holds that in both cases, the contested memories are “tools of national indoctrination, manipulating the past to forge present-day identities.” (p. 217). The dividing legacy is also at the core of Simon Lewis’s chapter on Polish and Belarusian cultural encounters in post-World War Two Poland. Magdalena Waligórska, Ina Sorkin, and Alexander Friedman co-authored the chapter on Jewish heritage revival. On the example of present-day memorial initiatives in three former shtetls in Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine, they identify a myth of peaceful multiculturalism nourished by local activists and state agencies. Along those lines, the hegemonic, non-Jewish majority “makes decisions about how to represent the ‘others’ and narrate their history in the public space” (p. 265). The last chapter by Ewa Nowicka focuses on the recent multiculturalism in Poland, triggered by significant Ukrainian immigration to Poland. Even before the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, almost 1.4 million Ukrainians lived in Poland. Today, while historians and politicians frequently contest their entangled past, Poles and Ukrainians rarely refer to their troubled history. As Nowicka argues they are moving toward “acceptance, identification of positive traits in the spirit of cultural proximity” (p. 286).

The main virtue of this volume is the successful collaboration of scholars from Germany, the United Kingdom, Lithuania, Poland, and the United States from the disciplines of art history, history, literature, and sociology; they add new and often unconventional perspectives to our understanding of the region’s early modern past and make it accessible to scholars who are not outright experts of this period (as this review’s author). Unlike other edited books, this volume has a robust red thread embodied in the concept of multiculturalism. Several book chapters on the region’s history, multiculturalism, and historical memory can be assigned in upper-level undergraduate classes. A comprehensive index and several illustrations add to the volume's reader-friendliness. Part of the volume’s contribution to the demystification of history is a short note on proper nouns and place names; here, the authors follow an actor and time-centered approach to avoid falling into the trap of political implications. More references between the chapters could have helped prevent the occasional redundancies (for example, between chapters three, four, and five). However, the volume’s only noteworthy shortcoming is the lack of historical maps of the region.

Notes:
1 Brian Porter-Szűcs, Poland in the Modern World. Beyond Martyrdom, Chichester 2014. Similarly, focusing on post-World War One, see Maciej Górny, Polska bez cudów. Historia dla dorosłych, Warszawa 2021.
2 Most recently see Zofia Wóycicka / Joanna Wawrzyniak / Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska, Mnemonic Wars in Poland: An Introduction to New Research Directions, in: Acta Poloniae Historica 128 (2023), pp. 5–25.