CAS Lecture. Diluted Wine, Disguised Belief: Catholic Ethnography of the Armenian Rite in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

Bogdan Pavlish, 2024-2025 Manoogian Postdoctoral Fellow in Armenian History, University of Michigan

Lecture Abstract: When in the mid-1660s two Catholic missionaries arrived in Poland-Lithuania to bring local Armenians into union with Rome, they faced an unexpected challenge. Armenian clergy and laypeople were ready to accept all but one of the Catholic conditions of unification, namely the use of diluted wine in the Eucharistic ritual. Perplexed but resolved to prove them wrong, the missionaries began to debate this arcane issue of Christian practice and theology using all available means, including political intrigues, historical arguments, and ethnographic observations. This talk focuses on a missionary expedition to Armenians of Kamianets-Podilskyi at the Polish-Ottoman border in 1666 which started with a heated dispute over the Eucharist and resulted in a detailed ethnographic account of local religious life. It revealed deep-seated differences between Catholics and Armenians which went back to late antiquity but assumed a particularly distinct shape in post-Reformation Eastern Europe. Rooted in the local context and history of long-lasting contacts between different Christian confessions, the encounter in Kamianets-Podilskyi reflected wider patterns of cross-cultural interactions in the early modern world.

Speaker Bio: Bogdan Pavlish is a historian of early modern Eastern Europe whose research focuses on the Armenians of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He is currently the 2024-25 Manoogian Postdoctoral Fellow in Armenian History at the University of Michigan after having earned his PhD in history from Northwestern University in 2024. His dissertation, entitled ‘Nothing Exotic but Ourselves: Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Armenian Diaspora of Poland-Lithuania in the Seventeenth Century,’ examines the role of the Armenian communities of Lviv and other towns of present-day Ukraine in cultural, commercial, and diplomatic exchanges between Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Bogdan is currently working on his first book project, which explores themes of distance, difference, and translation at the intersection of the early Armenian diaspora, Catholic missionization, and multicultural societies of Eastern Europe in the seventeenth century. His research draws on primary sources in several languages from archives and libraries in Ukraine, Poland, the Vatican, and Armenia. His writings have appeared in the Journal of Early Modern History and Ab Imperio.

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