Eastern Christians in the Habsburg Monarchy

This collection brings together ten studies by scholars from various countries on a wide array of topics related to the history, culture, and ritual practice of Eastern Christians in the Habsburg Empire from the eighteenth to early twentieth century. This book represents a contribution to the development of newer perspectives on the Habsburg Monarchy emerging in recent years. These newer tendencies seek to understand the dynamics of the Monarchy’s pluralism by marrying local and transnational analyses and examining shared experiences across crown lands within the context of the empire. This approach proves to be valid for the religious pluralism of the Habsburg Empire, where self-professed confessional identity could not be delimited either within a crown land or within a specific ethnic milieu. The studies in this volume explore just such shared practices and experiences encompassing a larger collection of territories within the Monarchy by focusing on those areas that contained large numbers of Christians whose faith and rituals derived from Byzantium rather than Rome, that is, Eastern Orthodox and Greek Catholics (Uniates). The volume also aims to provide a corrective in Eastern Christian studies by looking outside Russia and Greece at the often hybrid practices and cultural and religious experiences of Europe’s westernmost Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic faithful. Several chapters deal with the sacral art of the Habsburg Monarchy’s Ukrainians and Rusyns.