Wolff , Larry Disunion within the Union: The Uniate Church and the Partitions of Poland (review)

Abstract

SEER, 99, 3, JULY 2021 570 Chapter four, the last in the book, ‘A Case of Infanticide and Witchcraft in Szczurowczyky’, is a detailed and fascinating account of a case in 1753 conducted under Magdeburg Law in the town of Kremenets, in which a young woman was accused of infanticide by taking a magic potion from a witch. She confessed, and under torture also incriminated the witch who gave her the potion, described the coven to which she allegedly belonged, and even claimed she had flown on a broomstick! An ‘Afterword’ briefly describes the presence of witches and witchcraft in later literature and popular culture. Warburg Institute W. F. Ryan School of Advanced Study, University of London Wolff, Larry. Disunion within the Union: The Uniate Church and the Partitions of Poland. Harvard Papers in Ukrainian Studies. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2019. 152 pp. Notes. Index. $18.95: £15.95: €17.00 (paperback). The eighteenth century, especially for the territories not annexed during the partition of Poland by the Habsburgs in 1772, has generally been neglected in the history of the Uniate Church and in Ukrainian national history. Unlike the renamed Greek Catholic Church of Habsburg Galicia that played a leading role among the Ruthenians of that crownland in their development as a national community, the eighteenth-century Uniates represented the highpoint of Polonization and Latinization of the church, hardly positions to be admired by the Ukrainian national movement and the present-day Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Yet the disappearance of the Uniate Church under Russian persecution in the nineteenth century and the rejection by its former adherents of Polish identity except for the Chełm (Kholm) region and certain areas of Belarus in time left the eighteenth-century Uniates outside the narrative of Polish history and to a degree outside the history of Catholicism in Eastern Europe. Still, an institution that encompassed the majority of the Ukrainian and Belarusian population and that left an imposing documentary and artisticliterary legacy could hardly be ignored, however few its modern claimants. Nevertheless, after World War Two and the outlawing of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in the Soviet Union, scholarship faced major problems. While Polish historians of the Catholic Church such as Ludwik Bieńkowski examined the structures of the Uniate Church and scholars centred in Rome such as Izydor Patrylo mined the Vatican archives for documents, especially on the Basilian order, it was only the fall of the Soviet bloc and the opening of archives in the former Soviet Union that permitted a more comprehensive REVIEWS 571 examination of the church, devoid of the confessional and national optics that had long dominated in the field. The works by Barbara Skinner, David Frick, Richard Butterwick, Ihor Skochylas and a whole new generation of church historians in Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania joined by Polish colleagues that Wolff cites have broadened our understanding of the multifaceted nature of the Uniate Church of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It was a church that with the Polish partitions found itself divided among the Russian and Habsburg empires and the rump Commonwealth that embarked on substantial reforms, including in its treatment of the until then discriminated against Uniate Church, just before the state was to be dismembered. Larry Wolff’s short monograph brings a new vision to the study of the eighteenth-century Uniate Church. It constitutes a rethinking of a long piece that he wrote over thirty years ago for a compendium on Ukrainian church history published in 2002–03 in Harvard Ukrainian Studies. That article had represented largely the view from Rome and by the papal nuncios on Ukrainian and Belarusian church affairs. The monograph broadens the discussion of these events based on the research that has been conducted by others since then, but also by Wolff’s engagement in other topics such as his monograph on inventing Galicia and his explorations of the eighteenth-century conceptualization of Eastern Europe. He divides his new monograph into two very distinct parts. The first part demonstrates how concepts of Enlightenment and the goals of states and rulers affected both the Habsburgs and the Russian monarchs in dealing with the Uniate Church. In so doing Wolff revises the usual...