On the Border of the Worlds is a collection of essays that deals with diverse topics in the religious history of an area: the historical Metropolitanate of Kyiv, which today encompasses Eastern Poland and Western Ukraine. This in many ways was a border of two worlds, a meeting point between the Catholic and the Orthodox churches. The situation after the sixteenth century was made even more complex by the presence of the third element, the Greek Catholic (Uniate) church. As the editors point out, this volume tries to paint the picture of the history and culture of the Ruthenian Orthodox and Greek Catholic churches over a very long period of time (the late Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century).

The volume opens with two essays that explore a broader context of changes and western influences on the Orthodox Church in Eastern Europe. Ihor Skochylias uses the example of the Orthodox diocese of Lviv to show how the perception of space and organization changed over time. The medieval and early modern diocese was organized around a “personal” (direct) link between a bishop and each parish of the diocese. However, by the end of the early modern period the prevailing model became one of the administrative approach, where the parish was defined by “belonging to a certain registry in a certain office” (41). Mikhail Dmitriev's essay explores an even broader question by looking into why there was so little influence of Western humanism on the Orthodox world of Eastern Europe. He proposes that the answer lies in the difference between Western and Eastern medieval Christian anthropologies. The Eastern Byzantine view of the world (on which St. Augustine's writings had almost no influence) was much more optimistic, less focused on sin and the sinfulness of the human body. Thus, the anthropocentric and optimistic world view presented by the humanists was in fact “less of an innovation in the Orthodox culture of the East of Europe” (82).

The other four essays concern themselves more closely with the specific case studies of East-West interaction within the Ruthenian lands. Tomasz Kempa explores the work of the Orthodox stauropegic brotherhood of Vilno. An atypical institution in the Orthodox world, the brotherhood played a crucial role in supporting the Orthodox population of Lithuania and emerged as the most important Orthodox center in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Leonid Tymoshenko's article stresses numerous identity layers of the Ruthenian nobility. Writing about Ruthenian prince Konstantin Wasyl Ostrogski, Tymoshenko shows that the prince's religious choice (he was one of the few Ruthenian magnates who remained Orthodox) did not preclude his political alliances. Although looking to Russia for religious support, the prince was quite prepared to make independent political choices. In the last two essays, both Andrzej Gil and Witold Bobryk explore the emergence of an independent identity of the Ruthenian Greek Catholics after the Union of Brest. Gil does this by looking at the development of the cult of Josephat Kuncewicz, the Uniate Archbishop of Polock, who was killed by an Orthodox mob in the town of Vitebsk in 1623 and thus became the first Uniate Ruthenian saint (although canonized much later). Bobryk explores the changes in the liturgical rite of the Ruthenian Uniates as a move to define themselves as different from the Orthodox and as a part of the Catholic (Latin) West.

The book was obviously published with a Western audience in mind. It would have been useful to give readers some information about the authors. The volume would also have benefited from closer editorial work: Geographical names are given in any of several linguistic variants, and although the English is for the most part clear, there are places where something has definitely gone wrong with the translation: Bobryk's article, where Eastern Rite [Uniate] and Orthodox are used interchangeably, is the most unfortunate example, but there are several others.

With the exception of M. Dmitriev's article, the bibliography of all other papers includes almost exclusively the titles in Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. Although this inevitably implies certain weaknesses, for those who do not speak these languages, the volume provides an interesting window into the research on Poland-Lithuania that is currently done in the region itself.