ABSTRACT

This chapter explores how far Jagiellonian memories travel through space and time, whether or not they constitute a 'regional' memory. It also explores the wider lessons this royal family and its memorialisation can offer – to historians of the Middle Ages and early modern period, to scholars of modern nationalism, and to those debating methods and theories in memory studies today. Jagiellonians are pertinent to the issue of European memory, raising the question of how such a large-scale dynasty can have passed out of wider European cultural, pedagogical, political and scholarly memory – of why we have 'remembered' the Tudors, Bourbons, Habsburgs and Medici, yet 'forgotten' the Jagiellonians. A narrative of lost kingdoms and lost countries came to dominate 'remembering' of the Jagiellonians. In Ukrainian master narratives, it was the Cossacks and rural populace who formed the true nation in the late medieval and early modern period, not their rulers. The chapter also presents an overview of this book.