Eastern Christians Under the Habsburg Monarchy

Somewhat confusingly, Amazon apparently has copies of this to sell now, even though it was advertised on their site and elsewhere as not being available until October of this new year, 2022. Still, if you are as eager as I am to read this, then you may want to snap up extant copies now of Eastern Christians in the Habsburg Monarchy. Edited by John-Paul Himka and Frank Szabo and published by the University of Alberta Press, this 248-page collection contains fascinating insights across an impressively wide range of topics. The publisher elaborates: 

The collection Eastern Christians in the Habsburg Monarchy

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.

We are also given a helpfully detailed Table of Contents: 

Introduction by John-Paul Himka and Franz A.J. Szabo

Historical Overview:

Eastern Christians in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1526-1918 by Paul Robert Magocsi

Historical Studies:

Politics, Religion, and Confessional Identity among the Romanians of Bistriţa: A Case Study by Sever Cristian Oancea

Aspects of Confessional Alterity in Transylvania: The Uniate – Non-Uniate Polemic in the Eighteenth Century by Ciprian Ghişa

Josephinist Reforms in the Metropolis of Karlovci and the Orthodox Hierarchy by Marija Petrović

Transnational Conversions: Migrants in America and Greek Catholic Conversion Movements to Eastern Orthodoxy in the Habsburg Empire, 1890-1914 by Joel Brady

Sacral Culture:

The Art of the Greek Catholic Eparchy of Mukachevo: Sacral Painting of the Eighteenth Century by Bernadett Puskás

Sacred and Heraldic Images on Ukrainian Banners of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries by Roksolana Kosiv

Facing East: References to Eastern Christianity in Lviv’s Representational Public Space ca. 1900 by Andriy Zayarnyuk

The Sacred Art of Modest Sosenko: Lost and Preserved by Olesya Semchyshyn-Huzner

Sacral Needlework in Eastern Galicia: Social and Cultural Aspects (Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries) by Natalia Dmytryshyn