[Latinitas in the Polish Crown and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: its impact on the development of identities. Giovanna Siedina]

ENAs we read in the foreword to this essay collection, it was “both an honour and a duty” for Italy, “the country that has always preserved and promoted the legacy of classical antiquity in Europe and throughout the world,” to hold the first-ever gathering (Florence, August 2013) of scholars from Poland and Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, to discuss the “impact of [Latinitas] on the development of identities in the lands of the Polish Crown and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania”. The basic proposition seems at first glance somewhat defensive. Assuming there never has been such a gathering, is there a need to be reminded what all European cultures, at a variety of levels - language, grammar, rhetoric, literature, historiography, law, “patterns of culture and mentality” - owe to Roman (and Florentine, and so on) models; or to be reminded that the early modern Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, with the modern nation states that have grown out of it - Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine - was just as much a part of the Europe of Humanism, Renaissance, Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Enlightenment as were the centers and the other peripheries? This continued insistence on the obvious seems, at first glance, unnecessary by now. It seems a reaction to a habit of especially North American, but also some Western European academic centers, to draw their mental maps of early modern European culture according to Cold War boundaries: early modern Europe ended at the same limit where, until 1989, Warsaw-Pact border guards in green drab uniforms with lethal looking weapons welcomed you to their country.One would think that the claim - especially strong (if at times simply implicit) in Polish scholarship, even during the Communist period - that this huge historical polity and its peoples had been an integral part of humanistic Europe had finally been vindicated, and that the call for the “return to Europe,” already a bit repetitive, need no longer be raised. [p. 116].