Buchner At The Font: Godparenting And Network Building In Seventeenth-Century Wilno

Abstract

By 1596, the year in which the Uniate Church was created, Wilno (Vilnius) the capital city of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and thus the second capital of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was home to five Christian confessions, all of which practiced infant baptism. With the fragmentation of the confessional landscape in Wilno over the course of the sixteenth century, Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists came to compete for seats on the Roman side of the Wilno Magistracy, Greek Orthodox and Uniates on the Greek side. This chapter discusses the godparenting and network building in seventeenth-century Wilno. It focuses on members of one Lutheran family that practiced particularly promiscuous extra-confessional godparenting. The chapter offers three clusters of Buchner family interventions as godparents for Catholic babies. This is not the whole story, but it will help give a sense of what was going on in Wilno and provide a basis for some further hypotheses. Keywords: Buchner family; Catholic babies; godparenting; infant baptism; Lutheran family; seventeenth-century; Uniate Church; Wilno