Patrick Meehan

I am a historian of colonization and colonial society in a time and place not usually associated with colonialism: the medieval Baltic. My first book project explores the colonization of the Baltic from the thirteenth through the mid-fifteenth centuries, primarily by a German crusading institution called the Teutonic Order. I approach this subject through the Order's version of a myth commonly held in settler societies, which framed the conquest and settlement of the Baltic as the divinely preordained transformation of a pagan "Wilderness" into a Christian "Promised Land." This myth of the "Promised Wilderness" suffuses both narrative sources and archival records, which I put in conversation with one another in order to interrogate the relationship between the ideologies and practices of medieval colonialism. Although this source base is thus itself a colonial product, the silenced voices of Indigenous people nonetheless speak from the interstices of texts that sought to occlude them, revealing themselves not only as members of a heterogeneous settler society, but also as fundamental agents in the Order's colonial enterprise. As a whole, the project brings together my interest in a number of fields, including environmental history, postcolonial studies, and Indigenous history.