CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Kliuchnik, Alena Ivanauna |
|---|---|
| Title | Western Representations of Poland,Lithuania and Moscovia in the Fifteenth - First Half of the Sixteenth Centuries. A Comparative Approach Using Visual Text Analysis. |
| Summary | The European Age of Discovery, the Renaissance, the Humanism and the invention of printing were the most powerful processes of the research period that impacted the European civilization. It was the period when a new image of the world and a new image of self were being formed and conceptualized. These new conceptions turned into rather strong ideas which crossed the inner state borders within western Europe and were universally adopted thanks to printing, university culture, intellectual ties, and the sense of unity based on Christian religion. In this context, the images of Poland, Lithuania and Moscovia created by western European authors from the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth century are being analyzed in the present work with reference to the above mentioned global tendencies of the period. The study investigates the common textual and also visual strategies used by different authors while creating their images of the depicted lands. The main terminological content of the texts, the main themes and references to the topics of "culture" and "nature" in the descriptions became criteria for the comparative analysis. They were extracted and defined mainly with the help of quantification and computational tools for the basic textual analysis. Thus, it was defined that the most important elements while writing about Poland, Lithuania and Moscovia were references to their political power and political history, religion, urban settlements, local goods, markets, climate, nature, natural resources, people and other. The preexisting notions for the edges of the continent as well as a number of narrative practices to communicate the motion towards the eastern edges of Europe were observed and described. It was also discussed how the textual narratives influenced the narrative content of the maps. Thus, involving different kinds of textual and visual sources on Poland, Lithuania and Moscovia and applying different methods of textual analysis made it possible to trace some of the image-making strategies typical for western European authors while writing about the depicted area and also to better understand the images themselves. |
| Supervisor | Jaritz Gerhard |
| Department | Medieval Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/kliuchnik_alena.pdf |
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