Textual culture of Vilnius (1323-1655) : rhetorical organising of the city

The book is about the use of texts in medieval and early-modern Vilnius. The main concern of the book is the influence that the produc-tion and exchange of texts had on the functioning of the city. The author focuses on questions such as literacy, reading and writing, multiplicity of alphabets and languages of writing, institutions and people producing texts, storage of texts, education, women’s writings, the production and use of books, rhetorical genres and the functions of texts. The introduction puts forward the need to undertake this sort of survey and the methodology employed. As Vilnius was the capital of the Great Duchy of Lithuania from the 14th century and one of the two capi-tals of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from the 16th century, it held the privileged position of being Lithuania’s greatest city: the centre of poli-tics, economics, and culture. Although the first mentions of the city date back to 1323, Vilnius’ particularly dynamic development began at the end of the 15th century and lasted until 1655, when the city was destroyed by the Muscovian army. It is therefore worth taking a closer look at the culture of this metropolis, especially between ca. 1550 and 1655. The method-ology applied in this book is close to research on literacy, New Histori-cism and the French Annales School. This is why the author concentrates on the use of texts (making no distinction between the ‘literary’ and the ‘functional’ ones) in a concrete time and place. He is particularly inter-ested in three things about the texts: the first is how they are socially anchored, another is about tensions and frictions that emerge in them, and the last is the economic and politic aspects of producing and using the texts. The introduction also contains a concise summary of the present state of research. The first chapter is about making of texts in old Vilnius. The early subsections give an account of import and production of paper, its prices and other materials used for making of texts (metal, stone, pens, ink, etc.). Further on the author discusses the question of differences between the spoken and written language and the use of manifold alphabets. Vilnius was a multilingual and multi-religious city. Its inhabitants spoke Ruthenian (i.e. old-Byelorussian), Polish, Lithuanian, German, Yiddish, and Latin. Most of them were Christians: Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants (Calvin-ists, and Lutherans), Uniats (from 1596) but there was also a significant community of Jews and Tatars, who professed Islam. The author notices that even though this diverse society used four different alphabets (Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Arabic) and several different languages of writing, one can observe an increase in the use of Latin as an alphabet and Polish as a language. Latin and Polish functioned as the languages and writings of the Latinitas - Latin culture, official culture of the state. At the begin-ning of the 17th century the knowledge of the Latin-Polish code became a sine qua non for participating in the public life of the capital city. The last part of chapter one is dedicated to levels of literacy of the city’s inhab-itants. The author separately examines the ability to read and to write. He marks that it is now impossible to determine the number of people who had these competencies but still some general conclusions can be put forward. As it was common in the first half of the 16th century to use written documents, it is safe to assume that at that time most of Viln-ians were literate or pragmatically literate in at least one of the Vilnian scripts. Thanks to the increasing number of schools, in the first half of the 17th century the percentage of men who could have read in Polish and Ruthenian was significant. At the same time, the ability to write remained a domain of the authority (secular and clerical). The highest writing compe-tence was held by municipal, state and clerical officials, who wrote in three or four languages and in at least two alphabets. The conducted survey allowed to establish that literacy was a highly pragmatic competence used mainly for commerce, politics and religion. Literature and aesthetics were on the sidelines of these main functions of text. Chapter two elaborates on the storage of texts in archives and libraries. The city may be acknowledged to be a large, multipartite archive. It included The Lithuanian Metrica - the main state archive, archives of various courts (among those were the castle court, district court, etc.), the archive of the city council, archives of religious institutions, such as the Jesuit Lithuanian Province, Lithuanian Calvinistic congregation, Vilnius’ Qahal, Catholic, Orthodox, Uniat and Protestant churches, and monasteries. The city-archive served not only the inhabitants of Vilnius - it also attracted people from the whole Great Duchy of Lithuania. From the 15th century there were private micro-archives providing documenta-tion for entitlements to wealth or confirmations of various legal proceed-ings. The second part of the chapter is devoted to libraries. The oldest of them belonged to clerical institutions. From the end of the 15th century there are records of private libraries of sovereigns and magnates, and from the beginning of the 17th century properties of clergymen, officials and burghers are mentioned. Based on partially preserved sources, the author discusses the most significant libraries in the city: the cathedral library, the library of king Sigismund Augustus, school libraries, and the library of the Jesuit university - the greatest one in Vilnius. Inventories of the private book collections mostly date back to the first half of the 17th century. From them it appears that burghers, regardless of their financial situation, could have had a couple of books, largely prayer books, psalters and a code of the Magdeburg Law. Libraries of well-educated people, like officials and cler-gymen, who often dealt with writing, consisted of up to a hundred books among which there were specialist texts and belles-lettres, predominantly classical. Jewish scholars living in Vilnius kept rich collections of Hebrew religious literature. What was specific about Christian libraries was the coexistence of books printed in the Latin alphabet (in Latin and Polish) and in Cyrillic alphabet (in Church Slavonic and Ruthenian). In the next chapter the author is concerned with the literacy of Vilnian women, their access to texts and their exclusion from the group of literate people. The first subsection deals with the literacy of secular women. Their chances for literary education were severely constrained: from the 1620s there was but one monastic school for girls in the city. Therefore, if Vilnian women acquired the ability to read and write, they did it mostly at home. Women’s signatures preserved until today are written in a rather clumsy handwriting: only women belonging to the wealthy burgesses or gentry could have skilfully used a pen. The author notices that it is as hard to assess how many women could have read as it was in the case of men. One can, however, presume tha t even in the middle of the 17th century the vast majority of them were semi-illiterate or semi-literate. Their contact with text was limited chiefly to religious literature in Ruthenian and Church Slavonic, Polish and Yiddish, and to the use of document. It seems to have been quite the opposite in five Catholic nunneries, described in the second subsection. The nuns, the majority of whom were from gentry background, must have been able to read and write. Reading was necessary to perform the religious observances provided for by the monastic rule. At the same time nuns had to manage the nunnery’s property, which required corre-sponding and keeping account books. In every nunnery there was a library and nuns had their own books. Access to texts, especially secular ones, was restricted by censorship of male clerical authorities and self-censorship. In spite of these limits, a lively culture of text developing within the nunnery walls emerges from preserved letters and two chronicles, of Observants of St. Michael’s Nunnery and Carmelites. Chapter four discusses education in Vilnius. It was almost entirely meant for boys. Until the 16th century the Catholic cathedral school played the main part. The author notices that the significance of that school is based on the fact that it prepared students for future studies at the Univer-sity of Kraków. In addition to Catholic and Orthodox church schools, the 16th century brought Protestant schools, which introduced a modern, humanistic style of education. The first institution of this kind was the Lutheran college of a Lithuanian humanist, Abraomas Kulvietis (1539-1542). Subsequent schools, one Lutheran and one Calvinistic, emerged around twenty years later. In 1569, Catholics founded a Jesuit college, a response to the growth of Protestantism, which was transformed into a university (the Academy of Vilnius) ten years later. It rapidly became the largest and one of the best schools in the Commonwealth. Members of the Orthodox Church also set up their own humanistic school (1584) that reached a high standard. The Jewish school at the newly-built syna-gogue probably came into being at the same time. Such an accumula-tion of schools made Vilnius an important educational centre in that part of Europe at the beginning of the 17th century. The author presumes that in the city of up to 20 thousand inhabitants there might have studied even up to 1500 students, mostly from outside Vilnius. A separate part of the chapter is dedicated to students’ life in Vilnius in the first half of the 17th century. In this section the author discusses methods of teaching and effects of education, as well as the impact that the education had on the functioning of the city. Besides the student-like character of the city, which is hard to define, things such as an increased demand for books are considered here. The central idea of chapter five is books. The first subchapters are about production of manuscripts and printing houses. In the beginning manuscripts were imported due to the needs of the Orthodox and Cath-olic Churches’ liturgy. From the end of the 15th century there were two scriptoria in Vilnius, one at the Virgin Mary Orthodox Cathedral and in the Catholic Observant Monastery and soon the first printing house, publishing Orthodox liturgical books, emerged. It was set by a Byelorussian humanist Francysk Skaryna and worked between 1519 and 1525. Later printing houses came into existence in the second half of the century. Between 1574 and 1655 there were 13 printing houses in Vilnius altogether: Orthodox, Protestant, Catholic and Uniate. Nonetheless, all through the discussed period, manuscript books were used parallel with printed ones. As a result of the increasing number of books, a bookbinding industry appeared in the city and this is a subject of the next subsection. From at least the 1540s there were talented bookbinders who produced luxury bindings for books from the library of Sigismund Augustus. Book-binders were usually engaged in the book trade. The final parts of the chapter discuss the branch of commerce concerned with prices of books and their availability. Vilnian booksellers imported books from Kraków, although they had relations with other cities in the Commonwealth as well. The analysis of books prices and peoples’ earnings allows the author to put forward a supposition that books were not too expensive for those who really used them. Also students could have afforded cheaper ones, like handbooks and editions of classical texts. It is not sure if there was the second-hand book trade in Vilnius, but there are some indications that it existed. The last four chapters (from sixth to ninth) elaborate on functions of texts which, according to the author’s idea, correspond with genera dicendi distinguished in the classical rhetoric. In chapter six the author focuses his attention on the texts of law and administration, related to genus deliberativum. He discusses mainly the rhetoric of a document, letter and will, texts that contemporary Vilnians used most often. He also advances a hypothesis that attributes an increase in rhetorical awareness of people, even those with low writing compe-tence, to the use of such documents. Part of this section is about the work of writers and secretaries - professional makers of documents. Chapter seven presents the literature and culture of litigation. This very branch of writing was based on the rhetorical genus iudiciale. The author introduces two terms: an ‘enclosed’ and an ‘open’ city. They corre-spond with two types of contention: local ones, limited but to the city, and affairs of state taking place in Vilnius. Litigations of the ‘enclosed’ city were usually of private character and were adjudicated by local courts, e.g. the magistrate one, the episcopal, the castle court or the Qahal (beth din) - the court of the Jewish community. Vilnians, who entrusted these insti-tutions with settling their matters, developed the habit of using legal text and judicial rhetoric. Judicial narratives, therefore, belonged to texts that were present in the inhabitants’ daily lives. Examples of such texts from the 16th and 17th centuries are quoted in this part of the book. Religious conflicts were significant far more than just locally. They appeared between Catholics and Protestants (both Calvinists and Lutherans) or Uniats/Cath-olics and Orthodox. Most of them took place between 1570 and 1630 and they were accompanied by publication of various texts, among which there were satires and pasquils, records of public disputes, treatises and polemic sermons, court documents like sentences, protocols from the royal commissions sessions, etc. Besides the most significant contentions of that period, this chapter presents also methods of disputing, e.g. Jesuit polemic theology. It is noticeable in Vilnius that rhetoric arguments were preferred to power play, which was rather avoided. Chapter eight deals with the functions of demonstrative art (based on the rhetorical genus demonstrativum), traditionally identified with belles-lettres and the fine arts. The author defines the function of demonstra-tive art as developing the official and coherent discourse of hierarchy (power) and identity. It aims at ideologically holding a society together. An important element of this ideological discourse is the established religion, which in Vilnius was Catholicism. In this sort of art the point is to repre-sent authority and its hierarchical order. This is most effectively achieved in ceremonies and public spectacles, like a monarch’s ceremonial entry to the city. The author describes an entry of king Sigismundus III Vasa in July 1611 and literary texts, occasional architectural and music works, paintings and theatre performances accompanying the event. Public cere-monies revealed elements of the identity discourse which were based on history (ethnogenetic myths, the myth about legendary founding of the city, the myth of the Jagiellonian dynasty, etc.). The chapter presents the backstage of demonstrative art: the court and school theatre, opera and panegyrical poetry and ‘everyday’ manifestations of hierarchy in the space of the city: epitaphs, funeral ceremonies, inscriptions on buildings. A vast part of this section is dedicated to the subject of creating Lithuanian historiography (Albert Wijuk Kojałowicz) and its processing in poetry (e.g. by M. K. Sarbiewski). The last chapter is about functions of religious texts. From the 15th century there were three religions based on Holy Scriptures: Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Two types of books occupied the central place in these religions: sacred, considered a message from God, and liturgical, which served to perform rituals. The author conducts a survey of the proce-dures that accompanied the exegesis of religious texts. It was performed at two levels, specialist and popular. Among explanatory texts that served interpreting Christian Bible, Jewish Law and Koran there were theolog-ical and halakhic literature and Muslim hamailis. On the popular level there were chiefly sermons and various sorts of catechisms. The most commonly used texts in Vilnius were popular prayers, as all believers of religions of the Book were obliged to say them. In most cases we can talk about a secondary orality of these texts: songs, prayers and medita-tions. Through them rhetorical devices, codes and topics characteristic for written language gained currency in oral communication of Vilnians. At the end there are eight personal records quoted, all from the middle of the 17th century. Their authors describe the capture of Vilnius by Musco-vites on 8 August 1655, the damage of the city and the exodus of its inhab-itants. These texts were written by a Protestant official, a Jewish scholar, two Catholic nuns, a secretary of the Vilnian chapter and city secretaries recording inhabitants’ complaints.