scholarly journals The Phenomenon of the 18th Century Institutional Printing House of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: The Case of the Franciscans

Knygotyra ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 77 ◽  
pp. 203-235
Author(s):  
Ina Kažuro

Many of the printing houses in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania that operated during the 17th-18th centuries belonged to institutions the biggest part of which consisted of Catholic monk monasteries. Despite belonging to one group, the development path of each printing house and its contribution to book culture has unique features. Of the four institutional prin­ting houses operating in the 18th century in Vilnius, the printing house of the Franciscan Conventuals Monastery was the first to be closed and its operations terminated. The purpose of the article is to identify the following causes behind the issues and eventual closure of this printing house. Based on the expenses and income book of this printing house for the period 1752–1769 (it is preserved at the Department of Manuscripts of Vilnius University Library,) this paper examines various aspects of the Vilnius Franciscan Conventuals monastery printing house: funds, sources of equipment and paper, building location, relations with employees and hired craftsmen, orders, sources of income, profitability. In order to better understand the specificity of the institutional press, an effort was made to establish a link between the research outcome and the wider context by addressing the question of the impact of both the society of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Franciscan Order itself on the destiny of the printing house. In addition, the book of expenses and income reveals new biographical data about Vilnius engraver Franciszek Balcewicz.

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-124
Author(s):  
Czesław Łapicz

The paper contains a synthetic discussion of original and little known philological manuscripts which had been created since the 16th century by Tatars – Muslims of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania – as characteristic Slavic aljamiado. The preserved manuscripts in which Slavic languages – Polish and Belarusian – were recorded in the Arabic alphabet are enormously important for the history of both languages and the Slavic-Oriental language relations. Various types of these historical texts (kitabs, chamails, tajweeds, etc.) contain the first, that is the oldest (16th century), translation of the Quran into a Slavic language (Polish) recorded in the Arabic alphabet (so-called tafsir). These sources are studied within the framework of an original philological sub-discipline of Kitab Studies whose origin and development should be credited to Professor Anton Antonovich from Vilnius University. The author of the paper discusses the research methodology pertaining to these sources, particularly the transliteration of Slavic texts recorded in the Arabic alphabet into the Latin alphabet, and introduces prospective major research tasks for Kitab Studies.


2009 ◽  
Vol 10 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 209-223
Author(s):  
Galina Miškinienė

Institute of the Lithuanian Language At the beginning of the 19th century, the financial possibility to establish a department of Eastern languages at one of the oldest universities in Eastern Europe, Vilnius University, appeared. Turkish was among the Eastern languages that were expected to be taught. The intensive preparation of lecturers was started. Unfortunately, the ambitious plans were destined to never become reality; in 1832 the university was closed. Nevertheless, over the following two centuries the Turkic direction did not disappear; in one form or another it surfaced and retained its vitality. There was a sympathetic environment: Tartars and Karaims—both Turkic ethnic groups—began settling in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 14th century. Vilnius University was the cradle of many famous Orientalists who maintained Turkic research by their activities. In such a way, two main research subjects appeared: Kitabistik and the Karaim language. In this article, the origin problems, development and prospects of Turkic research will be examined.


2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monika Ramonaitė

The doctor of medicine and philosophy Stefano Lorenzo Bisio (1724–1800?) worked in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania between 1762/3 and 1787. During this quarter of a century, he earned renown as a private physician to magnates, an innovator in the science of medicine, and as one of the founders of academic medicine in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Regardless of this, only one of the last stages of Bisio’s career has received much attention in historiography so far, his becoming the first head of the College of Medicine, established at Vilnius University in 1781. In this article, I seek to give as comprehensive as possible a presentation of Bisio’s entire career in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, discussing thoroughly his academic activities and achievements. Through these achievements, I hope to show that he was one of the first to apply West European anatomical, pathological and clinical medical knowledge from the Age of Enlightenment, which itself was undergoing qualitative breakthroughs, in the GDL. In the article, I also correct and present new biographical facts about S.L. Bisio, his birth and death dates, work and education placesfamily, and work relations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 38-53
Author(s):  
Jelena Celunova

This article is devoted to the research of the Book of Psalms manuscript from A. S. Norovʼs book collection stored in the Department of manuscripts of the Russian State Library. The manuscript is written in the beginning of the 18th century in Church Slavonic language Polish letters. This manuscript has never been studied before, it is nonetheless of interest primarily as a Latin-graphic text, which is a transliteration of the originals in Church Slavonic. Very few such texts have survived, and almost all of them were created in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The article provides a complete description of the manuscript and analyses of its language peculiarities. The analysis has made it possible to identify Church Slavonic protographs of the manuscript, and also to establish that the manuscript was written by women (most likely nuns) for private use. Since the authors of the transliteration themselves had very good command of Church Slavonic, it can be assumed that the text was written to order. Against the background of the cultural and historical context of the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries it can be assumed that the manuscript was written by the nuns of one of the southwestern Russian Uniate monasteries who had moved to one of the monasteries in Russia at that time.


Scrinium ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Maria Korogodina ◽  
Aleksey Sergeev ◽  
Aleksey Sirenov

Abstract The “Master of Rhodes Letter”, which tells of the birth of the Antichrist, was one of the most popular eschatological writings in Europe in the 15th century. This pseudo-epistle was translated from Latin into Russian in the middle of the 15th century in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania by Feofil Dederkin, an informant for the Grand Duke of Moscow Vasily Vasilyevich. Previously only one letter from Dederkin to the Grand Duke Vasily Vasilyevich was known: a translation from Latin describing the earthquakes in Italy in 1456. The “Master of Rhodes Letter” was translated a second time into Ukrainian from Latin in the 1630s, during a time when the Orthodox hierarchy in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth resisted the adoption of the Union of Brest. The third translation was made from English into Russian at beginning of the 18th century, and was believed by Metropolitan Job of Novgorod to be the work of Old Believers.


2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Ramunė Šmigelskytė-Stukienė

In the mid-18th century, with the spread of the ideas of the Enlightenment, fundamental reforms of the state’s governance were introduced in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Part of the state’s modernisation concerned the reform of the court system, considered by 18th-century political theorists to be one of the composite branches of the state administration (alongside the treasury, the police and the army). During the reign of Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski, the work of the courts of first instance underwent reform on several occasions in Poland and Lithuania: with the passing of laws in 1764, 1792 and 1793 on the structure and organisation of the activities of the castle and land courts, the existing court system was changed, as was the procedure for electing judges, also defining the scope of competency of the courts, regulating court activities and the duties of judges, introducing new requirements for the handling of court procedural documents, and the calculation of judges’ working hours. During the course of the introduction of these reforms, principles reflecting the administrative ideas of the Enlightenment were gradually entrenched in the court system of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which concerned the election of judges and other court officials, the acceptance of collegial decisions, the elimination of the influence of any blood and marital ties, and the principles for remuneration, seeking to introduce stricter requirements for the qualification of judges. In this article, based on legislation on the organisation of court activities passed at the diets (Sejm) of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and documents from the dietines (sejmiki) of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the author seeks to analyse changes to the activities of the courts and the regulation of judges’ duties, and reforms made in the court chanceries between 1764 and 1793.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-60
Author(s):  
Adam Stankevič

This article gives an analysis of the punishment the noble courts of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania applied to murderers in the second half of the 18th century, where the noble courts acted as courts of first instance in hearing murder cases. The author aims to determine the catalogue of punishments applied in such cases and the trends in the application of punishments in terms of how they conformed with the valid legal norms of the day, and search for manifestations of the humanisation of the law. After an examination of 184 verdicts, the author found that in cases of wilful murder, the noble courts usually applied the death penalty as per the set laws. Exceptions applied only to individuals from the estate of nobles, who instead of receiving a death sentence were sometimes sentenced to lower or upper tower punishment, which was by law ordinarily applied to other crimes. At the same time, the executors avoided qualified ways of applying the death sentence (capital punishment). Of the qualified forms of punishment, only quartering was applied, usually to those convicted of the aforementioned crime, ritual murder, and, in some instances, in cases of robbery. Alternative forms of punishment were episodic, and were only applied to a small number of convicted persons: imprisonment as a form of punishment recommended by philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment was applied in only 5.3 per cent of murder cases. In most instances, imprisonment was related to the introduction of the 1782 Cardinal Laws of the Permanent Council. In this way, the research reveals the conservative nature of the estate of nobles in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and their efforts to continue to adhere to the strict law outlined in the Third Statute of Lithuania. It is likely that this practice could have been a result of the poor state of the penitentiary system, as there was not a single public prison in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania at the time where long-term imprisonment could have been possible.


Teisė ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 117 ◽  
pp. 99-112
Author(s):  
Adam Stankevič

This article analyzes the project for the improvement of the activities of the nobility (land, castle, border, arbitral tribunal and the Supreme Tribunal of Lithuania) courts of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania prepared by Teodor Rodziewicz, a nobleman of the Pinsk district, having the title of cup-bearer. The aim is to reveal the main reasons for the flawed activities of the nobility courts, as singled out by the author of the manuscript, and to discuss his suggestions, which were aimed at remedying this situation. The most important postulates of the judicial reform proposed by T. Rodziewicz were the following: general election of judges, introduction of the fixed terms of office for judges, extension of the areas of responsibility of judges, and collegial examination of cases. Some of these principles were implemented in the Four-Year Sejm.


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