“Of Divels in Sarmatia Honored”
Writing Baltic Paganism In Early Modern England
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/pome.19468Keywords:
Baltic Paganism, Lithuanian Paganism, Lithuania, Early modern England, Sámi religionAbstract
The persistence of Paganism in the Baltic region (especially Lithuania) long after its official conversion to Christianity in 1387–1413 was a matter of widespread concern in early modern Europe, including England, challenging the narrative of Christianity’s triumph in northern Europe. England had a long history of engagement in the Baltic, and early modern English authors displayed an interest in surviving Baltic Pagans, while English Jesuits labored in Lithuania to bring Pagans to Catholicism. This article examines the language used to portray Baltic Paganism by English authors and translators, arguing that Poland-Lithuania’s status as a European power meant Lithuanian Pagans received a somewhat more sympathetic treatment than other indigenous Pagans, such as the Sámi of Scandinavia and Native Americans. Early modern English responses to Lithuanian Paganism thus illuminate the complexity of European Christian attitudes to living Pagan religion in northern and eastern Europe.
References
Ališauskas, Vytautas, “Dievai po Lietuvos Dangumi, 1619 Metai . . . Vienos Deliones Gabaleliai,” Naujasis Židinys-Aidai 2012, no. 2 (2012), 95–102.
Ališauskas, Vytautas, ed. Baltu Religijos ir Mitologijos Reliktai Lietuvos Didžioje Kunigaikštysteje (XIV–XVIII a.): Šaltiniu Rinkinys. Vilnius: Lietuviu Kataliku Mokslo Akademija, 2016.
Álvarez-Pedrosa, Juan Antonio, ed. Sources of Pre-Christian Slavic Religion. Leiden: Brill, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004441385.
Ayre, Michael Broun. The Scottish Community in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania 1630–1750. Vilnius: Humanitas, 2019.
B., R. Miracles of Art and Nature. London: William Bowtel, 1678.
Bale, John. Scriptorum illustrium Maioris Brytanie. Basel: Joannes Oporinus, 1557.
Bale, John. Select Works of John Bale. Edited by H. Christmas. Cambridge: Parker Society, 1849.
Baronas, Darius, “Christians in Late Pagan, and Pagans in Early Christian Lithuania: The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Lithuanian Historical Studies 19 (2014): 51–81. https://doi.org/10.30965/25386565-01901003.
Baronas, Darius, and S. C. Rowell. The Conversion of Lithuania: From Pagan Barbarians to Late Medieval Christians. Vilnius: Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, 2015.
Batman, Stephen. Batman uppon Bartholome his booke De proprietatibus rerum. London: Thomas East, 1582.
Bekker, Balthasar. World Bewitch’d. London: R. Baldwin, 1695.
Bergesen, Rognald Heiseldal. “Dutch Images of Indigenous Sámi Religion: Jan Luyken’s Illustrations of Lapland.” Acta Borealia 32 (2015): 103–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/08003831.2015.1090164.
Bristo, Richard. A Reply to Fulke. Louvain: John Lion, 1580.
Bull, Malcolm. “Pagan Names in The Faerie Queene, I.” Notes and Queries 44 (1997): 471–2. https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/44.4.471.
Burnett, Linda Andersson. “Translating Swedish Colonialism: Johannes Schefferus’s Lapponia in Britain c. 1674–1800.” Scandinavian Studies 91 (2019): 134–62. https://doi.org/10.5406/scanstud.91.1-2.0134.
Cameron, Euan. Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199257829.001.0001.
Carion, Johann. Io. Carionis mathematici Buetickheinensis chronicorum libri tres. Paris: Jacques Bogarde, 1548.
Carion, Johann. The Thre Bokes of Cronicles. London: S. Mierdman, 1550.
Caudrey, Philip. “War, Chivalry and Regional Society: East Anglia’s Warrior Gentry before the Court of Chivalry.” In Fourteenth Century England VIII, edited by J. S. Hamilton, 119–46. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2014.
Chauvin, Pierre. A Chronicle of the Last Pagans. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Childs, Wendy. “England’s Contacts with Poland-Lithuania in the Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries.” In Britain and Poland-Lithuania: Contact and Comparison from the Middle Ages to 1795, edited by Richard Unger and Jakub Basista, 19–38. Leiden: Brill, 2008. https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004166233.i-486.12.
Chylinski, Samuel Boguslaw. An Account of the Translation of the Bible into the Lithuanian Tongue. Oxford: Henry Hall, 1659.
Clark, Stuart. “Inversion, Misrule and the Meaning of Witchcraft,” Past and Present 87 (1980): 98–127.
Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. https://doi.org/10.1093/past/87.1.98.
Connor, Bernard. The History of Poland in Several Letters to Persons of Quality. London: Daniel Brown and A. Roper, 1698.
Crull, Jodocus. The Antient and Present State of Muscovy Containing a Geographical, Historical, and Political Account of all those Nations and Territories under the Jurisdiction of the Present Czar. 2 vols. London: A. Roper and A. Bosvile, 1698.
Daborn, Robert. A Christian Turn’d Turke. London: Nicholas Okes, 1612.
Dalitz, R. H., and G. C. Stone. “Doctor Bernard Connor: Physician to King Jan III Sobieski and Author of The History of Poland (1698).” Oxford Slavonic Papers, New Series 14 (1981): 14–35.
Davies, Owen. Paganism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780199235162.001.0001.
Davies, Surekha. Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139568128.
Ditchfield, Simon: “Thinking with Saints: Sanctity and Society in the Early Modern World.” In Saints: Faith without Borders, edited by F. Meltzer and J. Elsner, 157–89. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Dlugosz, Jan. Historiae Polonicae Libri XII, 2 vols. Frankfurt, 1711–1712.
Joseph Foster, ed. Alumni Oxonienses 1500–1714. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1891.
Frost, Robert. The Oxford History of Poland-Lithuania: The Making of the Polish-Lithuanian Union, 1385–1569. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198208693.001.0001.
Fulke, William. Two Treatises Written against the Papistes. London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1582.
Fulke, William. A Rejoynder to Bristows Replie. London: H. Middleton, 1581.
Gaskill, Malcolm. Between Two Worlds: How the English became Americans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Gibson, Marion. Imagining the Pagan Past: Gods and Goddesses in Literature and History since the Dark Ages. London: Routledge, 2013. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203068304.
Gilbert, Eleanzar. Newes from Poland. London: Nathanael Butter, 1641.
Grady, Frank. Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Medieval England. Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan, 2005. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-12367-1.
Gratulationes serenissimo et potentissimo principi Sigismundo. Vilnius: Typis Radivili, 1589.
Griffiths, Nicholas. Sacred Dialogues: Christianity and Native Religions in the Colonial Americas, 1492–1700. Morrisville, NC: Lulu.com, 2017.
Guagnini, Alessandro. Sarmatiae Europeae descriptio. Speyer: Bernardus Albinus, 1581.
Guard, Timothy. Chivalry, Kingship and Crusade: The English Experience in the Fourteenth Century. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2013.
Hakluyt, Richard. The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation. London: George Bishop, 1599.
Heylyn, Peter. Cosmographie in Four Bookes. London: Henry Seile, 1652.
Heywood, Thomas. The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells. London: Adam Islip, 1635.
Hutton, Ronald. “How Pagan Were Medieval English Peasants?” Folklore 122 (2011): 235–49. https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.2011.608262.
Ivaškevicius, Adolfas, Juozas Marcinkevicius and Konstancija Cepiene, eds. Vilniaus Akademijos Spaustuves Leidiniai, 1576–1805. Vilnius: Lietuvos TSR Mokslu Akademijos Centrine Biblioteka, 1979.
Kahk, Juhan. “Estonia II: The Crusade against Idolatry.” In Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries, edited by Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, 273–84. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.
Kamuntaviciene, Vaida, “The Religious Faiths of Ruthenians and Old Lithuanians in the 17th Century According to the Records of the Catholic Church’s Visitations of the Vilnius Diocese.” Journal of Baltic Studies 46, no. 2 (2015): 157–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/01629778.2015.1029956.
Kavaliunaite, Gina. “Historical Sources Bearing on Samuel Boguslaw Chylinski’s Pursuits in England and the Netherlands and their Echoes in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.” Lithuanian Historical Studies 16 (2011): 7–28. https://doi.org/10.30965/25386565-01601002.
Kelly, Henry Ansgar. “Jews and Saracens in Chaucer’s England: A Review of the Evidence.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 27 (2005): 129–69. https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2005.0036.
Kelly, Henry Ansgar. “Chaucer’s Knight and the Northern Crusades: The Example of Henry Bolingbroke.” In Medieval Cultural Studies: Essays in Honour of Stephen Knight, edited by Ruth Evans, Helen Fulton and David Matthews, 152–65. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006.
Khanmohamadi, Shirin A. In Light of Another’s Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812208979.
Kirby, T. F., ed. Wykeham’s Register. 2 vols. London: Simpkin and Co., 1899.
Kolb, Justin. “‘In th’armor of a Pagan knight’: Romance and Anachronism East of England in Book V of The Faerie Queene and Tamburlaine.” Early Theatre 12 (2009): 194–207. https://doi.org/10.12745/et.12.2.811.
Kuhn, John. “Making Pagans: Theatrical Practice and Comparative Religion in Early Modern England.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2016.
Lee, Sidney. “Netter or Walden, Thomas.” In Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Sidney Lee, vol. 40. London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1894.
Lenaghan, James. “‘The Sweetness of Polish Liberty’: Sixteenth-Century British Jesuit Exiles to Poland-Lithuania,’ Reformation 15 (2010): 133–50. https://doi.org/10.1558/refm.v15.133.
Lituanus, Michalo. De moribus Tartarorum, Lituanorum et Moschorum, edited by Johann Grasser. Basel: Konrad Waldkirche, 1615.
Lübke, Christian. “The Polabian Alternative: Paganism between Christian Kingdoms.” In Europe Around the Year 1000, edited by Przemyslaw Urbanczyk, 379–89. Warsaw: Wydawn, 2001.
Magnus, Olaus. Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus. Antwerp: Christopher Plantin, 1558.
Magnus, Olaus. A Compendious History of the Goths, Swedes, and Vandals and Other Northern Nations. London: J. Streater, 1658.
Malecki, Jan. De sacrificiis et idolatria veterorum Borussorum, Livonum, et aliarum vicinarum gentium. In Livoniae historia in compendium, edited by Thomas Horner. Königsberg: Johann Lufft, 1551.
Mathisen S. R. “Hegemonic Representations of Sámi Culture: From Narratives of Noble Savages to Discourse on Ecological Sámi.” In Creating Diversities: Folklore, Religion and the Politics of Heritage, edited by A.-L. Siikala, B. Klein and S. R. Mathisen, 17–30. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2004.
Meserve, Margaret. Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674040953.
Murphy, Martin. “James VI and I, the Scottish Jesuit, and the Polish Pasquils.” In Publishing Subversive Texts in Elizabethan England the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, edited by Teresa Bela, Clarinda Calma and Jolanta Rzegocka, 28–40. Leiden: Brill, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004320802_004.
Murray, Alan V. “The Saracens of the Baltic: Pagan and Christian Lithuanians in the Perception of English and French Crusaders to Medieval Prussia.” Journal of Baltic Studies 41 (2010): 413–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/01629778.2010.527124.
Palmer, James T., “Defining Paganism in the Carolingian World.” Early Medieval Europe 15 (2007): 402–25. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0254.2007.00214.x.
Rabikauskas, Paulius. Vilniaus Akademija ir Lietuvos Jezuitai. Vilnius: Aidai, 2002.
Religion and Language, as they are now in use through the chief regions of the world. London: Samuel Speed, 1664.
Rostowski, Stanislaw. Lituanicarum Societatis Iesu historiarum libri decem. Vilnius: Typis S. R. M, 1768.
Rowell, S. C. Lithuania Ascending: A Pagan Empire within East-Central Europe, 1295–1345. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Rowell, S. C. “Unexpected Contacts: Lithuanians at Western Courts, c. 1316-c. 1400.” English Historical Review 111 (1996): 557–77. https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/CXI.442.557.
Rowell, S. C. “Was Fifteenth-Century Lithuanian Catholicism as Lukewarm as Sixteenth-Century Reformers and Later Commentators would have us Believe?” Central Europe 8 (2010): 86–106. https://doi.org/10.1179/174582110X12871342860045.
Salih, Sarah. Imagining the Pagan in Late Medieval England. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781787445819.
Stoyle, Mark. The Black Legend of Prince Rupert’s Dog: Witchcraft and Propaganda during the English Civil War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.5949/liverpool/9780859898591.001.0001.
Toulmin Smith, Lucy, ed. Expeditions to Prussia and the Holy Land made by Henry Earl of Derby in the Years 1390–1 and 1392–3. London: Camden Society, 1894.
Urban, William L. The Teutonic Knights: A Military History. London: Greenhill, 2003.
Vaitkevicius, Vykintas, “The Main Features of the State Religion in Thirteenth-Century Lithuania.”, edited by Vyacheslav Ivanov, 331–56. Moscow: Indrik, 2004.
Velius, Norbertas, ed. Baltu Religijos ir Mitologijos Šaltiniai I. Vilnius: Mokslo ir Enciklopediju Leidybos Centras, 1996.
York, University of. “England’s Immigrants 1350–1550.” https://www.englandsimmigrants.com.
Young, Francis. Edmund: In Search of England’s Lost King. London: I. B. Tauris, 2018. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350986183.
Zimmerman, Benedict, ed. Monumenta Historica Carmelitana. 3 vols. Lérins: Ex typis abbatiae, 1905–1907.
Zins, Henryk. England and the Baltic in the Elizabethan Era. Translated by H. C. Stevens. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972.
