Turning points must be considered within a network of transregional dynamics, as narratives that foster (or break) expectations and circulate both regionally and globally. The current geopolitical situation dominates debates on security and transnational cooperation, but also those on environmental change and pollution of the Baltic Sea. In order to capture historical, political, and literary discourses that are intertwined across and within regions, we propose to use the notion of “resonance”. “Resonance” is here understood at a certain distance from Rosa’s (2016) conceptual elaboration, which encapsulates a broad spectrum of human-world relations capable of countering processes of modern alienation. Instead, we use this term to reflect on the concrete medial, narrative, and discursive impact of peripeties across regional boundaries including the bodily resonance involved. The term is intended to denote the discursive and narrative conditionality of historical, political, and cultural entanglements.
The Baltic Sea Region has always been globally entangled. Via multimodal communication routes – from individual and collective mobilities to trade, discovery, and war voyages – peripeties generate transregional resonances beyond the local event. Historical Lithuania, for example, included parts of present-day Latvia, Ukraine, and the whole of Belarus. The Daugava (Düna), Nemunas/Nëman (Memel) and Dnipro (Dnieper) waterways were, and still are, important waterways for the exchange of goods, people and ideas between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea.
Transregional connections between the Baltic Sea and other maritime spaces are increasingly attracting attention: for example, with regard to early modern trade relations, labour migration, or linguistic transfer. Following up on maritime history’s re-invention as global and transboundary history, especially from the early modern period onwards, the concept of “connected oceans” (Michael North) offers a promising route towards a broader view of the Baltic Sea Region’s global maritime entanglements. Fields in which such entanglements are investigated in this IRTG include the histories of religious conversion and of historiographical practice. Both fields were profoundly shaped by colonisation and missionary activity in the early modern Atlantic World. How did cross-border movements shape circulating discourses on the Reformation that affect its regional manifestations?