Ideas in Motion: Early Modern Circulations of Thought through Theatre, Translation and Print

This event explores the circulation of knowledge in early modern Central and Eastern Europe through theatre, drama, and print with particular attention to the multilingual, multireligious, and multinational world of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and its culture. How did ideas move across languages, confessions, and regions? What was lost or ignored? How has cultural 'gravity' shaped what was remembered?

Across media from staged performances to printed texts, ideas were captured, reshaped, and transmitted. Alongside transmission, there were processes of omission, suppression, and non-transmission. Voices faded, texts disappeared, and entire strands of knowledge remained outside dominant circuits of exchange.

Theatre scholar Jolanta Rzegocka, author of Watching Virtues (2025) together with Professor of Renaissance Studies, Warren Boutcher, and historian Clarinda Calma bring together perspectives on performance and print culture exploring the forces that shaped both the movement of ideas – and the histories of their absence.

This panel is part of an ongoing project at the British Library that explores new approaches to recontextualising East European and Slavonic collections headed by Katya Rogatchevskaia and Olga Topol.

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