SEER, 95, 3, JULY 2017 558 The fall of the Soviet system saw the Baptist church in Georgia break off membership of the Soviet Baptist Union. With ethnic Georgians the largest part of the church, their aspirations to a closer link with Georgian culture and traditions could now proceed. The church had male and female clergy of all ranks, bishops, vestments, liturgy, icons, singing and chanting — and a positive attitude to Orthodox traditions. Yet now it faced hostility — along with almost all other non-Orthodox communities — from an at times overbearing Orthodox church. Songulashvili’s account is full of interesting details and original materials on a little-studied community. However, the book recounts the emergence of the Baptist community in Western Europe, or a wider account of the revival of organized religion under Stalin, where a concentration on the specifics of the Georgian Baptist community might have made it more focused. Songulashvili has dutifully mined European and North American archives for reports of those visiting or in contact with Georgia, as well as Soviet publications in Georgian and Russian. Yet the biggest single gap is the failure to examine the Soviet-era archives in Tbilisi and Moscow. All religious communities were so closely scrutinized and recorded that much of interest lies there. ‘Little attention has been paid to the age of state-directed persecution in 1929–1940, because of the lack of written materials’ (p. 150), he merely notes. Despite this gap, Songulashvili’s book — with copious notes and appendices of documents — will be of interest to those studying Baptist history, the history of Georgia, religious communities in the region and the troubled independence period. London Felix Corley Ijäs, Miia. ‘Res publica’ Redefined? The Polish-Lithuanian Transition Period of the 1560s and 1570s in the Context of European State Formation Processes. Eastern and Central European Studies, 5. Peter Lang Edition, Frankfurt am Main, 2016. 304 pp. Notes. Bibliography. €56.00: £45.00: $72.95. In this ambitious book, Miia Ijäs analyses one of the crucial turning-points in the history of the Polish-Lituanian union, the first two free elections of the king in 1573 and 1575. Her book, based on a doctoral thesis written at Tampere University in Finland, is conceived as a study of state-formation, and draws on recent literature on composite states, in particular by John Elliott and Harald Gustafsson. She is influenced by fashionable notions concerning transnational history, but the book’s central concept is taken from the model of social function proposed by the American sociologist Talcott Parsons, which postulates a framework for political decision-making based on four functional REVIEWS 559 imperatives: pattern-maintenance (latency), integration, goal attainment and adaptation. These stages of the decision-making process shape the four main chapters of the book, which look at the way in which the Polish-Lithuanian nobility confronted the prospect of the imminent extinction of the Jagiellonian dynasty in the male line in the 1560s (taken to represent the Parsonian concept of identification of the forthcoming change); the difficulties it faced before and after the 1569 Union of Lublin in the face of the religious divisions following the Reformation (integration); the royal elections of 1573 and 1575 (goal attainment); and the confirmation of Polish-Lithuanian statehood during the reign of the second elected king, Stefan Batory (adaptation). It is a bold plan, and the approach is a fresh one. The author has a lively, questioning mind, and approaches the elections from interesting angles, deploying useful material from the Vatican archives and from Swedish collections. She criticizes scholars for concentrating too much on the domestic political context for the elections, stressing that foreign affairs played as great a part in influencing the decisions taken in 1573 and 1575, and supporting Dariusz Kołodziejczyk’s suggestion that it was the attitude of the Ottoman sultans, Selim II and Murad III, that helped decide the ultimate choices made in 1573 and 1575: like Sigismund August, the nobility wished to preserve the long peace with the Ottomans, and it was this factor that ensured the failure of the Habsburg candidacy in both elections. There are, however, a few problems with the book. For this reviewer at...
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Jun 13, 2024
Alex D.J Fry + 1
Open Access
