Jūratė Kianupienė, a historian known for his scholarship on the Baltic region and east-central Europe, has written a comprehensive and detailed history of the political development of Lithuania from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries. His description and persuasive analysis are based on a wide range of primary sources and expert use of the existing literature. The book was originally published in Lithuanian in 2016 and now appears in a smooth translation by Jayde Will, a preeminent specialist in Baltic languages. The principal thesis signaled by the main title—that the sociopolitical character of what became Lithuania crystallized in the premodern period, notwithstanding being buffeted by tensions between Polish Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy—is convincing. The subtitle regarding political culture is perhaps less so. I shall note some reservations regarding this last point following a brief synopsis of the book.An extensive introduction provides an overview of the author’s argument and methods, as well as justifications for the ways he uses the concept of political culture. He attributes the development of that concept to the book The Civic Culture, a 1963 work by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, two American political scientists. That mid-twentieth-century research project was based on extensive surveys of representative samples in five large countries and was focused on the attitudes, values, and orientations toward politics and the state by cross-sections of modern mass societies. Almond and Verba sought to identify what they termed distinct types of contemporary political cultures.Kianupienė recognizes that the notion of political cultures as orientations toward political life and the state by people in mass societies is not directly applicable to societies five hundred years in the past. Instead, he borrows formulations of political culture in the historical literature of the east-central European region in the two-hundred-year period with which he is concerned. Recognizing that a concept based on extensive attitudinal surveys of the populations of twentieth-century societies cannot be uncritically applied to societies in earlier centuries in which politics and governance were the purview of restricted elites, he uses less rigorous formulations to gain insights into orientations to political objects, using inferences from other types of information. This more flexible, looser idea serves to frame the language—although not so much the substance—of parts I and II of the book, each of which is divided into three chapters. The third part consists of a very brief theoretical essay that serves as a conclusion.The first two chapters in part I, “The Landscape of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania’s Political Culture,” recount the unfolding of the geographic and demographic features and the political and social events that shaped the Grand Duchy from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries. The third and final chapter considers what the author terms the mythological space of the political culture. The descriptions of the geopolitical and sociopolitical characteristics of the area and its shifting external boundaries and protean internal dynamics are presented in great detail, making meticulous use of primary and secondary sources. Kianupienė then identifies the myths, derived largely from historically tenuous allusions to Roman times, focused on the idea of common origin. Such myths helped to integrate what had long been a large number of loosely connected fiefdoms. The myths, fostered by Lithuanian elites, served to ground the idea of a distinct nation.Such efforts to construct a Lithuanian nation were contemporaneous with the structural political integration of the state. And that, in turn, predated by decades, if not centuries, the coalescence of a coherent national society. Kianupienė demonstrates these developments clearly and convincingly in the first and second of the three chapters that make up part II of the book. Lithuania’s makeup and status were fluid and complex in the late medieval and early modern periods; even its identity, as distinct from Poland, was in flux. At that time, the area of Poland–Lithuania was what Daniel Nexon has termed a “composite state”1: a realm comprising multiple and often overlapping jurisdictions, neither feudal nor yet a coherent modern state. Its varied entities were organized along dynastic or sectarian principles. Because relations among them were the domain of elites, they resembled international relations more than domestic politics of societies. Rapid economic changes complicated the relationships between nominal rulers and rising nobles from the mid-fifteenth century onward. Religious contention in western and west-central Europe between Catholicism and various reformation movements, and between the western (Roman) and eastern Orthodox (Byzantine) churches in east-central Europe, added another dimension of complexity to relations among the components of the composite state and between them and the emerging, progressively more important, central authorities (i.e., monarchs). The denominational choices of local rulers usually governed the religious identity of their populations and affected the ebb and flow of central authority. The details of the complex history of the Polish–Lithuanian space during this period cannot be presented in a brief review. Three observations will have to suffice here.First, “the feudal upper crust of . . . dukes and magnates, former high-ranking state officials, and the priesthood as an intellectual elite that ruled the Lithuanian state” progressively expanded to include Orthodox boyars from Ruthenian lands and others; such expansion shaped what Kianupienė calls the political nation.2 Thus, the idea of Lithuania as a focus for identity and loyalty took hold as the convergence of a multitude of fiefdoms integrated first elites and then populations with differing cultures, economic relationships, and religious denominations.Second, the heterogeneous Lithuanian elites resisted, with increasing vigor and effectiveness, the hegemonic drive of the Polish monarchy. Efforts to push away from Poland, as well as the need to confront varied military threats, especially against Muscovy, further served to integrate the state. Such adversaries and conflicts helped the diverse Lithuanian elites to identify and prioritize common interests over particular local loyalties. This, of course, demonstrates the thrust of the dictum of the eminent historian and social scientist Charles Tilly that “war making is state making and state making is war making.”3Third, Kianupienė’s richly detailed institutional—and to a lesser extent, political sociological—narrative illustrates the formation of the Lithuanian state much more than it does the political culture of its population. The top-down, elite-led processes of state-building brought together diverse elites with converging interests, particularly in resisting Polish hegemony and military challenges from the east. In the course of state formation, those elites slowly and incrementally created practices—such as limiting executive authority and institutions, including the development of the Lithuanian Sejm—that established a government that provided for the representation of the classes or “estates” of the population as well as of territory.In sum, the principal contribution of this learned, richly detailed treatise lies largely in its ability to show how, over the course of two centuries, disparate political elites with diverse interests, religions, and cultures built a state. In the course of creating viable, coherent institutions, they also evolved a distinctive political culture of sorts, but one that differs in important ways from what most social scientists understand by the concept. The political culture of a nation is not the same as the political habits of a thin veneer of elites astride a nation or political society. The book should stand for some time as the most thorough account of the emergence of early modern Lithuania.