Genealogical Links in Samogitian Nobility Heraldry Sources in the Second Half of the 16th–18th Centuries

Traditions are very important element of mass conciousness, which should characterize both society and army. Until recently on the European continent military traditions were one of important and carefully cultivated. One of the elements in the multithreaded traditions functioning in Polish armed forces before 1939, was the ethos of former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and thus the memory of the relationship between the Crown and Grand Duchy of Lithuania. As well, building the consciousness of those traditions in the military was convergent with the official policy of Polish political elites. One of the ways in which in the years 1921–1939 the Polish armed forces operated in the ethos of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In addition to native Polish, and military traditions of the lands forming part of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania were cultivated. In the course of training some conscripts from this lands an educational content recommended by the chief military authorities was used. Important components of this tradition were the bosses and the names and branches of the Polish Army and elements of symbolism and even departmental banners or commemorative badges. Therefore, the author tried to present the history of all infantry formations of the Polish Army in the years 1918–1939, which were cultivating ethos of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania. As well described how these facts were externalized in symbolic representation of those formations: banners, own names and commemorative badges. In addition, author gives information how these facts were used in the process of training and education of soldiers serving in these regiments.

The history of publishing in Lithuania begins with the early formation of the Lithuanian state in the 13th century. As the state was taking shape over many centuries, its name, government, and territory kept changing along with its culture and the prevailing language of writing and printing. Geographically spread across Central and Eastern Europe, the state was multinational, its multilayered culture shaped by the synthesis of the Latin and Greek civilizations. Furthermore, the state was multiconfessional: both Latin and Orthodox Christianity were evolving in its territory. These historical circumstances led to the emergence of a unique book culture at the end of the manuscript book period (the late 15th and the early 16th century). In the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL), writing centers were formed that later frequently became printing houses; books were written in Latin, Church Slavonic, and Ruthenian, with two writing systems (Latin and Cyrillic) coexisting, and their texts and artistic design reflected the interaction of Western and Eastern Christianity in the GDL. During the period of the printed book, the GDL, though remote from the most important Western European publishing centers, was affected by the general tendencies of the Renaissance, Reformation, Baroque, and Enlightenment culture through the Roman Catholic Church and integration processes. During the 16th–18th centuries, publications in Latin, Ruthenian, and Polish prevailed in the GDL. In the 16th–17th centuries, about half of the press production were Latin books that spread along with Renaissance ideas and the Europeanization of the state, while the Ruthenian written language (one of the official state languages) was developed. After the Union of Lublin was signed in 1569, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth promoted the integration processes in public life, manifested by the emergence of the Polish language and the spread of Polish books as well as the growth of publishing in the 18th century. In the 16th century, several Lithuanian writers emerged in Prussian Lithuania (or Lithuania Minor), the region of the Prussian state populated by Lithuanians. A unique tradition of writing and publishing had flourished there until the start of World War II. In 1795, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth disappeared from the map of Europe and a larger part of the GDL lands was annexed to the Russian Empire. However, Vilnius, a seat of old printing and book culture traditions, managed to survive as an important publishing center of the eastern periphery of Central Europe, and as a city fostering publishing in the Polish, Hebrew, and Yiddish languages. In the early 19th century, the main forces of authors, publishers, book producers, and distributors of Lithuanian books began to concentrate in Lithuania. In 1918, after the restoration of an independent state of Lithuania, new conditions arose to benefit the development of book publishing. The Lithuanian tradition of publishing, owing to a renewed printing industry and the expansion of a publishing house and bookstore network, significantly strengthened. Between 1940 and 1990, the country suffered a half-century occupation (the occupation of the Nazi Germans in 1941–1945; the rest was the Soviet occupation) during which the Jewish national minority was destroyed, the Poles were evicted from the Vilnius region, the Germans were expelled from the Klaipėda region, and Sovietization and Russification were enforced in the sphere of civic thought. In Soviet Lithuania, although all the publishing houses belonged to the state and were ideologically controlled, a core of publishing professionals emerged who, after Lithuania regained its independence in 1990, readily joined the publishing industry developing under free market conditions.

Political relations between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (further – GDL) and the Golden Horde, later with Crimean Khanate, are being investigated well enough. Priorities of the GDL’s foreign policy were addressed, on the one side, to the Central Europe, on the other side – to the East Europe. The relationship between Ottoman Empire and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth are being presented much more detail and broadly in the historiography, but too isolated from the political history of the GDL. Three important manuscript collections were preserved in Vilnius in the interwar period. One of these collections, which contained documents of the uttermost importance, which witnessed political and diplomatic relations between the Crimea, the Ottoman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, was preserved in the Manuscript Department of the Library of Vilnius University. Another collection of Oriental manuscripts, which belonged to the muftiate, was for the most part lost in 1944. The third collection, which consisted of the Karaim museum fund and library, was presented to the state in 1941 by Seraya Shapshal. Oriental sources – yarlyks of the khans and letters of Turkish border pashas, which are stored at the Manuscripts Department of the Library of Vilnius University, were presented in the article of Kılınç, Miškinienė (2014 = Oriental Materials in the Manuscripts Department of the Library of Vilnius University: Yarlyks of the Khans and Letters of Turkish Border Pashas). Article analyses and discusses the condition of the documents, as well as their palaeographic qualities, content and possibility of preservation. The jarlyk of Kaplan Giray written on the 4th of March 1734 to Jan Klemens Branicki, the Voivode of Krakow, is presented in the above mentioned article. This paper presents five documents from the Manuscripts Department of the Library of Vilnius University, funds F 3 and F 5. All five documents according to their structure and content could be assigned to the letters. Letters were written from Khotyn or to Khotyn and addressed to Branicki. There were not only sultans, viziers of the Ottoman Empire, commandants and treasurers of Khotyn and Bender between correspondents of Branicki. Crimean khans were correspondents of Branicki as well. The main purpose of this article is to continue the list of published documents, presenting the transliteration of the texts, the translation to English language and the comments. In this way, coauthors G. Miškinienė and A. Kılınç, continuing the publication of documents, wants to draw attention to the rather interesting sources, which sheds light on the relations of Ottoman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

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.

In the middle of the second millennium AD, Crimea became an outpost of Islamic civilization in south-eastern Europe. Muslim values, Islamic law, morality and aesthetics were at the heart of medieval Crimea: in the system of government, military organization, business, art and culture. However, the relationship between Muslim Crimea and Christian Europe did not deteriorate into opposition, military conflict and religious confrontation. Crimea found allies in eastern and central Europe. These allies were primarily Lithuania and Poland (after the Union of Lublin, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland - Rzeczpospolita of both nations, otherwise known as, ‘the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’). The alliance of the Crimean Khanate with the Polish-Lithuanian state was motivated by the strategic objective of countering Moscovite expansion, which had been aggressively focused towards the east and west ever since the 16th century. This may be seen in the conquest of the Kazan and the Astrakhan Khanates by Ivan the Terrible, his foray into the Nogai prairie and Moscow’s participation in the Livonian War. These strategic objectives resulted in an alliance between Crimea and Turkey. Crimea’s status as a protectorate of the Ottoman Empire was the most important factor in safeguarding the Crimean Tatar state from the Moscovite threat. At the same time, the fact that the Crimean Khanate became a vassal of Porte (the Ottoman Empire) did not result in its losing its political independence and neither did it interfere with the authentic nature and development of Crimean Tatar culture.

This article surveys the sources of the eighteenth century Jewish censuses in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. A large manuscript collection is stored in the Lithuanian State Historical Archive. Prevailing historiography on Jewish census sources unveils that these were never studied in their complex. This article describes the preserved census sources, their nature and the way the data are presented. It also raises several important questions for interpreting the data: how many Jewish censuses were carried out in the eighteenth century Grand Duchy of Lithuania and which of these is reliable for historical demography and family research. We conclude that the dates of reported for Jewish censuses in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania which appeared in historiography do not reflect the real situation: there were only two censuses, in 1764-65 and 1784. What is known in historiography as the second census of 1775 was not implemented. The poll-tax lists from 1775 are only an edited copy of the 1764-5 census documents, prepared in accordance with the territorial and population losses after the First Partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and because the poll-tax was made higher. Comparing the data of 1764-65 and 1784 shows that the latter are unreliable, not corresponding to the real situation, and demographically impossible and misleading. The 1784 census data are problematic for research on Jewish historical demography. Historiography based on research of the fragments of the 1784 census should be critically revaluated.

Purpose. The purpose of this article is to explore the features of the evolution of legal custom in Ukrainian lands up to the 18th century. It also aims to define the scope and directions of its influence on the development of Ukrainian law during the specified period. Methodology. The article employs a modern methodology of historical-legal research, based on which sources and literature are analyzed. In particular, the following methods are used: historical-legal, formal-dogmatic, synergetic, system-structural, hermeneutic, among others. Results. The research confirms the leading role of custom in the formation of Ukrainian law up to the end of the 18th century. In the pre-state era, law on Ukrainian lands was formed as the customs of tribal and clan communities. Legislative acts of the princes of Kyivan Rus and the Halician-Volynian state supplemented and systematized the norms of the existing customary law. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania allowed the preservation of most of the local customary law and adopted a significant portion of it. In the Kingdom of Poland and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Ukrainian legal customs interacted and blended with Polish law as well as German, Vlach, Jewish, and other laws. The Cossack customs of the Zaporizhian Sich gave new impetus to the development of Ukrainian customary law, which continued its evolution under the Hetmanate. Originality. The article reveals the significance of legal custom in the pre-state society of the Eastern Slavs, Kyivan Rus, the Нalician-Volynian state, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Kingdom of Poland, the Zaporizhian Sich, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Cossack-Hetman state. Archival sources were used for the analysis of this scholarly issue. Practical significance. The results of the research may be applied for academic and educational purposes and taken into account in the course of contemporary law-making and law enforcement.

In 1784 King Stanisław August Poniatowski undertook a splendid progress across the south-western parts of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The official account of the journey prompts the reflection that even in this linguistically and confessionally mixed part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the precedence over other confessions of the Catholic Church of both rites, Latin and Ruthenian, was axiomatic. By the mid-eighteenth century, about five-sixths of the Commonwealth’s population, the vast majority of the noble citizenry, and the entire legislature were Catholic. However, Catholics of the Latin rite constituted only about half of the population. Most Catholics of the Ruthenian rite (Uniates) were in only nominal obedience to Rome; they were the object of a struggle for the allegiance and salvation of souls, conducted between an advancing Catholic Church and a retreating Orthodox Church. The fault line between Eastern and Western Christendom ran through both the Polish Crown and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; Orthodoxy retained strongholds in both parts of the Commonwealth. However, the position of the ‘Latin’ Church was, in most ways, significantly weaker in the Grand Duchy, where the majority of the inhabitants were Uniates. Adapting recent mutations in ‘confessionalization theory’, this paper first reviews the confessional balance, and the privileges, structures, educational institutions, and missionary work of the Catholic Church (of both rites) in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the second half of the eighteenth century. It then asks how the dramatic events of Stanisław August’s reign (1764–95) affected Catholic supremacy. These changes included the enforced removal of the Catholic monopoly of the legislature in 1768, the impact of the first partition of the Commonwealth in 1772, the Orthodox revivals under Bishops Georgii Konisskii and Viktor Sadkovskii, as well as the formulation of new policies intended to promote loyalty to the Commonwealth and social cohesion during the Four Years’ Sejm (1788–92). It concludes that the partial ‘deconfessionalization’ of the polity had (or might have had) a proportionately greater impact on the Grand Duchy of Lithuania than on the Polish Crown.

This article attempts to show the emergence and development of epic poetry in the Latin language literature of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 16th century-the first third of the 17th century with regard to the art history and sociological concept by Pierre Bourdieu (theory of fields). From such point of view the work of the authors at that time can be seen as the specific ways of positioning in the literature of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Latin culture (Latinitas) was significant in forming cultural capital in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and works in Latin were the main means for transmitting social capital, which was also symbolic capital under the influence of certain habitus. Among such works are first of all the public and political ideas that were essential at that time (translatio imperii, “Jagellonian” patriotism), as well as the Polemon Legend. The herois perfecti idea became a significant part of symbolic capital at that time. This idea provided legitimate access to the Consecration process and was embodied in the idealized images of the agents in the field of temporal authority (that of a grand prince, a king or a magnate). The axiological potential of this symbolic capital at the point where the fields of literature and authority intersect was so great and acceptable within the European context that not only local but also foreign authors where actively integrated into the field of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (which was also closely linked to the respective literature of the Polish Crown).

Multi-Literacy in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: A New Research Approach The paper deals with the problem of using different languages of writing in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 15th–17th centuries. Among them there were: Latin, ­Polish, Ruthenian, Church-Slavonic, Lithuanian, German, Yiddish, Hebrew, Arabic and Greek, written in five alphabets: Latin, Cyryllic, Hebrew, Arabic and Greek. The author noticed that this multi-lingualism and multi-alphabeticism was omitted in Polish studies about history of literature of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He argues that including these two issues in the studies on the Commonwealth’s history is crucial to better understand the muli-cultural and multi-ethnic character of this country. One of the main questions of the paper is about the relationship between a script and an identity. The author notices that comparative approach can be especially productive in such research. He enlists similar borderline processes in use of writing in medieval and early modern England, Sicily, Malta, Cyprus, Venice, Dubrovnik, Moldova and Andalusia. It is illustrated by a few cases of use of the Cyryllic, Latin and Arabic alphabets. The author draws a comparison between the 16th-century literary languages of Spanish Moriscos and Lithuanian Tatars. Both these languages were based on the written version of a vernacular language (Romance and Byelorussian) in the Arabic alphabet.

This introductory chapter briefly explores Jewish life and Polish nationhood within the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth up until the Second World War. The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was a dual state, created in 1569 by the union of the kingdom of Poland with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It was extremely heterogeneous in character. The history of Poland–Lithuania throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries raised the questions of who was a Pole and what should be the boundaries of the future Polish state. For the Polish political élite, there was no question that the goal was the reconstitution of the country within its 1772 frontiers. This created a new interest in documenting the ‘Polishness’ of the borderlands (kresy) of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.

In the early modern period, the relentless growth in the copies of printed books and the increasing competition between craftsmen meant that, since the invention of Gutenberg until the 19th century, European bookbinders were forced to look for cheaper and quicker binding techniques. Based on this assumption, the article focuses on some of the bindings of books printed from the middle of the 16th until the middle of the 17th century which belonged to the library of Vilnius Jesuit Academy. This study is part of a broader research on the bindings of the Vilnius Jesuit Academy Library, and the article is limited to two groups of sources: books printed in Italy and books printed in the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth). The historical bindings are discussed by following the approach targeting the field of decorative arts and material culture studies, which is also well known as the ‘archaeology’ of the book or the bookbinding. It focuses not only on the decorative features of the cover of the book, but also on the structural features of the bindings which reveal comprehensively the work of the craftsmen of the past. This method of analysis is particularly useful for discussing not only decorated but also undecorated bindings which have so far received very limited attention in the research of the old Lithuanian book. As a result, the research revealed that the modest parchment bindings form nearly a half of all the examined bindings of the collection, and confirm the practical rather than the representational aspect of the Jesuit Library. According to the complexity of the technical execution and the number of operations involved in the process of binding, five binding techniques have been distinguished, ranging from the most complex to the simplest bindings, closely related with a retail bindings. What is more, a consistent number of parchment bindings are denoted by structural features, which is close to the Italian bookbinding tradition. The predominance of the latter in the group of Italian prints makes it possible to consider the possibility of already bound books entering the library of Vilnius Jesuit Academy. Moreover, the research has revealed certain binding features linked to the bookbinding traditions in Italy and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Although the subject of this chapter is contemporary Belarusian literature, the guiding motifs are borrowed from a Polish poet born in Russian-ruled Lithuania. This is not as incongruous as it may appear: most of the lands of present-day Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus were for several centuries united under one crown as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Memories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL), the eastern component of the dual state that wholly incorporated the territory we now know as Belarus, lived on in the political and cultural imaginings of many intellectuals after the partitions of the Commonwealth at the end of the eighteenth century.1 These memories are also vital to Belarusian culture today. Nonetheless, the project of establishing a link between modern Belarus and the GDL is fraught with difficulties, not least because of the enormous discrepancy caused by dramatic demographic change: the epicenter of what Timothy Snyder has called the “Bloodlands,” Belarus emerged as a virtually monoethnic polity in 1945, its formerly significant Polish and Jewish populations wiped out by Stalin and Hitler respectively.2

SEER, 96, 4, OCTOBER 2018 778 leaves the proponents of the official consensus blinded to the prospects of growth and unity — the foremost aim of any functional society. UCL SSEES Ruta Skriptaite Kuczyńska, Marzanna (ed.). Między wschodem a zachodem. Prawosławie i unia. Kultura Pierwszej Rzeczypospolitej w diaogu z Europą, 11. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, Warsaw, 2017. 389 pp. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index. Zł45.00. The book under review is volume eleven of an ambitious twelve-volume project launched in 2015 by the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies Artes Liberales at the University of Warsaw. Focusing on esthetics, literary culture, languages, political history and religions in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (PLC), the project is aimed at exploring different civilizational patterns of this polity in both its internal and external relationships with other religions, cultures and peoples. Exploring Ruthenian culture in early modern Poland-Lithuania, this collectionconsistsoftwelvechaptersbyspecialistsinreligious,cultural,literary and ethnic studies. In her introductory chapter, editor Marzanna Kuczyńska substantiates the significance of Ruthenian culture in the history of the PLC (pp. 7–15) and outlines the four main areas it will cover: 1) different identity aspects, including religion and church, language, social status, origins; 2) the continuity and changes in Ruthenian culture (e.g. liturgy, patristics, theology, printing, translations, icons); 3) changes in the preparation of priests; and 4) the Uniate Congregation of St Basil and the integration of culture, schooling and printing (p. 8). In the first essay, Tomasz Kempa investigates the interrelations between the Orthodox and Uniate churches in the PLC, including the politics of both secular and religious hierarchies (pp. 17–55). He follows the process of gradual Polish acculturation of the Ruthenian gentry and commoners and the introduction of the Uniate rite by the leaders of the pro-Union coterie of Orthodox bishops in 1595–96. The controversy surrounding the Union of Brest provoked an unprecedented outburst of polemical writing and the ensuing support of the Cossacks of the consecration of a new Orthodoxy hierarchy in the early 1620s. Kempa concludes that, because of the internal politics of Polish kings, the Orthodoxy in the PLC ‘lost its native character’, while all other cultures in this polity also ‘suffered’ (p. 55). Teresa Chynczewska-Hennel’s essay is concerned with issues of the religious and ethnic identity of Ruthenians (pp. 56–80). While stressing the mosaic REVIEWS 779 of religions, identities and peoples living in early modern Poland-Lithuania, Chynczewska-Hennel offers a detailed picture of linguistic, religious and cultural transformations in the development of Ruthenian identity, first and foremost the Union of Brest of 1595–96. In particular, she discusses the vicissitudes of the Ruthenian language in the Polish Crown and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the polemics around the dignities of the Ruthenian vernacular and Church Slavonic. Despite her exhaustive bibliography, she neglects Harvey Goldblatt’s study of the literary output of the Ruthenian monk Ivan Vyšens’kyj. More importantly, however, she outlines the transgression of Ruthenian self-identification from an ethnic-religious-cultural basis to the understanding of its social rights and privileges (pp. 78–79). Sergejus Temčinas concentrates on the languages of Ruthenian culture (pp. 81–120), elaborating on a typology of the respective languages on both a chronological and spatial foundation. He posits a period from 1385 (Union of Krevo) to 1569 (Union of Lublin) followed by a period from 1569 to 1795 when the PLC ceased to exist (pp. 81–82); during the aforementioned periods, different lands played the role of cultural centres, from Galicia-Volhynja to Wilno/Vil’no (Vilnius) to Kyiv. This is why, he argues, the linguistic aspect of Ruthenian identity is very complex, being comprised of Church Slavonic, Ruthenian, Polish and Latin (p. 89). Despite his detailed and exhaustive classification of languages, Temčinas proposes some dubious concepts. For instance, he claims that ‘the Ruthenian language [ruska mowa] is a largely Polonized western variety of Old Rusian [język staroruski]’ (p. 96). Not supported by a discussion of linguistic mechanisms proper, this thesis is poorly grounded; additionally, the geographical orientation in this definition does not reflect the dialectal grouping of Old Rusian (Old East Slavic) and presupposes the obsolete treatment of Old Rusian as...

Exile or free movement of Early-Modern Russian women abroad (first of all to Polish Crown and Grand Duchy of Lithuania) comes under scrutiny in the article, which is based on the manifold evidence from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Push-factors were decisions to leave the country with their husbands, children or other relatives, captivity, abduction and desertion in the frontier regions of the Russian state. The pull-factors were quite weak, and can be rarely proven by the evidence of sources evidence. Usually, the wives of the gentry (syny boiarskie) successfully integrated into the new society either with their husbands and sons or alone in the case of their death. These women of Muscovite origin often had a good grasp of the legal traditions of their home lands. They found familiar traits in the judicial practices of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Emigrees from the low classes emerged in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the normative “grey zone”, from which they could either rise to freedom, or remain in slavery owned by local gentry, magnates or town-dwellers. Special attention is paid to the sexual and family violence which could force the Muscovite women flee abroad, made them and their representatives bring lawsuits in the Commonwealth. Objectivation of women in Russia fed ethnical visions, but it did not stimulate stereotypes and phantasms typical for the Time of Enlightenment.