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Paper short abstract:

The paper is dedicated to the influence of the personal religiosity of Ukrainian historians, their national consciousness, methodological approaches, and cultural trends of their time (such as Enlightenment, and Romanticism) on their descriptions of the religious specificity of Ukrainian lands.

Paper long abstract:

The first half of the 19th was the time when Ukrainian intellectuals tried to understand, what kind of events and processes could be marked as parts of Ukrainian history. Special Ukrainian historical works were created then. Religion was an important dimension of the images of different Ukrainian lands in the texts by Ukrainian historians.

This paper deals with the influence of the personal religiosity of historians, their methodological approaches, and cultural trends of their time (such as Enlightenment, and Romanticism) on their descriptions of the religious specificity of Ukrainian lands. How did the global processes of formation of modern nations (imagined communities in terms of Benedict Anderson) affect the description of the religious history of Ukrainian lands by historians of the first half of the 19th century?

This project is based on the methodological approaches of the Cambridge school of intellectual history. Quantitative content analysis with MAXQDA-program was used.

It is shown that Ukrainian historians of the first half of the 19th century saved the idea of Russian-Ukrainian unity, based, among others, on Orthodox coherence. This idea was formulated in the 1670s in Kyivan Synopsis. Ukrainian historians of the first half of the 19th century (Dmitriy Bantish-Kamensky, Petro Gulak-Artemovs’ky, Osyp Bodiznskyi, Mykola Markevich, Mykhailo Maximovich) combined this early-modern paradigm with intellectual trends, that were characteristic of Enlightenment and Romanticism. For example, Mykola Markevich in his description of Union of Brest condemned it with the help of a combination of enlightenment criticism of religious violence and a very traditional apology of Orthodox Christianity as true Faith. Catholicism in the such narrative was described as hostile and alien.

The religious images in the works of Ukrainian historians were crucially important for the construction of “nation’s spirit” (in terms of Romanticism) as well as to formulate the difficult hierarchies of loyalties.