Creating a "Uniate Narrative": Understanding the Brest Church Union in the Historiography of Catholic and Greek Catholic Authors

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the formation of the "Uniate narrative", a historiographical tradition that purposefully comprehended the events and significance of the Brest Church Union of 1596. The main purpose of the study is to analyze and systematize the approaches and arguments developed by Greek Catholic historians of the 18th and 19th centuries to justify the union and defend its historical legitimacy. The focus is on the works of such key figures as Archimandrite Ignatius Kulchinsky, Stanislav Rostovsky, Julian Bartoshevich and Bishop Julian Peles. In their research, they consider the course of events, the causes, the central actors and the consequences of the church union. The methodological basis of the research is a comprehensive analysis of historiographical texts involving the corpus of primary sources of the era (district letters, royal charters, acts). This makes it possible not only to reconstruct the system of views of the authors themselves, but also to check the degree of their reliance on the documentary base. The findings demonstrate that the study of the works of Greek Catholic historians is an integral and significant part of the study of the historiography of the Brest Union. Their works represent not just apologetics, but an integral system of historical thinking that influenced national and confessional identity, as well as the subsequent scientific discussion about the event.