In an ambitious project, Professor Laura Lisy-Wagner offers insights on the formation of modern Czech identity by looking at the Czech discourse on the Turks. This is not the first (and probably will not be the last) research that aims to show how a given identity was formed against an “other”, imagined or real. Even more so, this project is not even unique in its choice of the Ottoman “other”, a choice that can be considered the heart of the mainstream in this research direction. However, the combination of this widely-used method and approach, relatively little-researched geographical (and somewhat chronological) boundaries, and some innovative implementations of postcolonial theory, works and provides an important contribution to the study of East-Central European identities, and to the linking of East-Central Europe to the bigger world.
Following the late Greg Dening, who studied colonial encounters in Oceania, Lisy-Wagner envisages a rhetorical space created in the texts she’s studying, where identities are formed, reformed, and deformed. In this space, she’s trying to follow the negotiations and challenges that separate (and unite?) “Muslims”, “Turks”, “Czechs”, “Christians” and others, this time (and maybe for the first time in the history of these texts) with the Czechs as the protagonists, as the centre and not the periphery.
In the first chapter, four travellers are discussed: A Protestant sent on the behalf of the Unity of the Brethren to Asia Minor, Jerusalem, and Egypt; A Catholic Knight of the House of Lobkowicz, who made a pilgrimage to Palestine after two diplomatic missions to Luxembourg and Rome; A renaissance man, particularly a mathematician, who might have been a Protestant; and an emissary of Emperor Rudolph II’s embassy to Sultan Murad III. In analysing their travelogues, Lisy-Wagner finds alternative divisions of the world (northern Europe and the Mediterranean world, in one case) instead of the “Christianity versus Islam” kind of model, and concludes that together “the authors create a sense of distance and space, while at the same time making connections between the Czech and Ottoman lands” (47).
The second chapter also features travellers. Despite leaving the Catholic knight and the Renaissance man outside this time, the Protestant and the emissary are joined by another member of the Unity of the Brethren and by a humanist-printer. Unlike the first chapter, the analysis of the texts brought in this chapter is conducted as an analysis of ethnographic writings rather than travelogues. By doing so, Lisy-Wagner seeks to uncover the real purposes and the points of view, behind what might be “masquerading as ethnography” (66). While providing a firm, convincing analysis, the discourse sometimes becomes over-judgemental, perhaps, when she dubs Antialkorán, a clearly-polemic piece, one that “veers ... towards religious fanaticism” (75).
As a historian of religious ideas and their practical implications, I found the third chapter interesting and innovative in its approach. It is no secret that researchers of the Reformation and of reformations in general usually look at Bohemia as a classic, and departing from that point, Lisy-Wagner brilliantly looks for (and finds) the influence of inter-Christian polemics and confessional differences on the different Czech views of Islam. She demonstrates successfully, using a series of seemingly unrelated case studies integrated into the larger story of Bohemian religious history, how the formation of the individual identities of the different religious groups in early modern Bohemia was supported and reflected by their view and writings on Islam.
The fourth chapter is rather odd, even if telling. It focuses on a widely-studied a character, namely on Jan Amos Komenský, known in English as John Amos Comenius and in Latin as Ioannes Amos Comenius. His many writings, both in Latin and Czech, were thoroughly studied, and therefore it is little surprise that Lisy-Wagner finds out after a quite lengthy chapter that he was generally tolerant of Islam and Muslims, considering his overall tolerant approach. Perhaps intended to demonstrate one well-known example of non-hostility, this chapter seems to provide no major contribution to either the thesis or the general knowledge of the educated reader, who is at least familiar with early modern Bohemia and its intellectual history. The interesting conclusion is that his status as an exile enabled him to “transcend cultural boundaries” (117), while still allowing him to “identify as a Czech and a Moravian”, something that he “never ceased” to do (116).
The story continues to be fascinating in the fifth chapter, which focuses on Anabaptist material culture, especially those of the Habaner workshops of Moravia and Slovakia. In addition to the beautiful palettes, an attractive analysis is vouching for their relevance, as they were adorned with Ottoman motifs and were very popular in the Czech markets. Lisy-Wagner uses this case study to show that they “were able to see enough similarity in the face of seeming diversity to draw on both east and west to create something distinctly their own” (137).
The final chapter returns to travelogues. Drawing on two 17th-century travelogues, one by a member of the Protestant Bohemian Revolt that led to the Thirty Years’ War and the other by a diplomat and a soldier of the house of Černín, Lisy-Wagner shows how the first reflects “support for controlled, intellectual religious engagement, for religious expression with restraint” while the other reflects a much less tolerant picture, when the tolerance in Bohemia, in general, was no longer the norm.
The shortcoming of the books, in my view, can be attributed to editing. Besides the obvious pro-Islam attitude of the author, which only in a few and minor cases got in the way of the persuasion of her argument, the other problems of this book are purely technical, such as the lack of exact references inside the citations of primary sources (folios, etc.) and some missing details in references to secondary sources. Some other parts read like a Ph.D. dissertation, like the fourth chapter, not living up to the expectations of a monograph, while the general writing is good and flowing. Some might find the recurring use of Czech (often without translation after the first mention) excessive and exhausting.
Overall, it seems like Lisy-Wagner was very successful in her mission to offer a nuanced picture of the variety and complexity of Czech identities in the process of forming a “national” identity in the modern sense. Her methodological choices are very interesting, for they provide a prism to detect these nuances. I am sure that selecting different “Others” would yield similar, even if not very interesting or full, conclusions. This book, then, is a good reading not only for those interested in East-Central Europe, Bohemia, and even the formation of national identities but for people looking to see the benefits and costs of methodological sophistication.
