‘An Earnest Gospeller’ and ‘A Dignified Martyr’

Abstract

The 1560s, 1570s and 1580s were a distinctive period in cultural exchange between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and England. Although there seems to have been almost no correspondence exchange and the flow of information from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to England was insignificant, the spate of English texts was quite intense. This textual traffic from England generated a vast network spanning the two countries. Both Protestants and Catholics turned their energies to translating into Polish and utilizing the texts as tools in their cross-confessional debates over ‘right religion’. Although there is evidence in Lithuanian and English sources that English Protestants took shelter in the Grand Duchy, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was an amenable home chiefly for Catholic recusants, many of whom found their way to the Jesuit Academy of Wilno (Vilnius). As a result, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania became the principal place where the majority of English texts were translated and printed. Moreover, due to the lack of local Catholic martyrs English martyrs, and Edmund Campion in particular, were chosen to be framed and memorialized in polemical literature. By looking into which texts circulated between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and England and the various kinds of networks this circulation created, the chapter aims to re-evaluate the importance of Anglo-Lithuanian networks of textual exchange in the second half of the sixteenth century.