Sacred, Desecrated and the Struggle for Religious Boundaries in the Сities of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 16th-17th Centuries

Abstract

The article provides a historiographical overview of the problem of religious tolerance and interfaith relations in the Middle Ages and early Modern times. While studying both Jewish-Christian relations and Catholic-Protestant interactions, the popularity of new approaches of social and cultural anthropology is shown.Religious bounders deserve special attention here, especially David Nirenberg’s discussion of practices that kept religious groups separate, yet integrated them into communities.Author tries to involve new approaches to analyze the conflicts between Jews and Christians in the second half of the XVII century,when Jewish settlement in the towns of Poland-Lithuania was being greatly increased.