The Imperfect body of the community: formulas of noblesse, forms of nationhood in the seventeenth-century Grand Duchy of Lithuania

ENThis thesis analyzes the production of discourses of the nation in the seventeenth-century Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth which was one of the largest states in early modern Europe. Engaging in a close reading of seventeenth-century documents, including memoirs, personal correspondence, funeral sermons, testaments and historical studies, we examine the multiple ways in which the discourses, meanings and images embodying the nation, state and individual identity were negotiated. The experiences of literate, ambitious and well-traveled aristocrats of the Grand Duchy reveal common cultural assumptions and fashions of the European aristocracy. Like any seventeenth-century noble, the nobles of the Grand Duchy responded to recurrent problems of the individual's relationship towards the polity, of communal belonging, royal power and political rights. Attempting to accommodate the local interests of the Grand Duchy with, those of the Commonwealth and to articulate the different solidarities predicated upon manifold commitments, Lithuanian nobles were caught between conflicting desires and discourses and flexible but fractured communities.Being self-conscious of their shared history and political fortunes, they faced the challenge of choosing between often contradictory loyalties to the Commonwealth and the Grand Duchy. Negotiating a “nation” within the field of amorphous and equivocal phenomena of early modern nationhood, they had to account for a constant dialectic between the community of the Grand Duchy and their self-perceptions and individual identifications. To address how the territory, monarchy and individual self figured the contours of group identity of the Grand Duchy, we engaged a whole spectrum of early modern European political and cultural theorists whose ideas on state, nation, royal authority and aristocratic self were appropriated by the Lithuanian nobility. This dissertation demonstrates that despite the nobility's cosmopolitanism, they possessed strong patriotic sentiments deeply rooted in a separate historical past, separate institutions and self-representations. The perceptions of territory, history and aristocratic selfhood urged connections between the multiethnic nobility of the Grand Duchy and united them into a political nation.