1588 metų Lietuvos Statutas Abiejų Tautų Respublikos politinės kultūros erdvėje (iki XVII a. pradžios)

ENThis article examines the well-known historiographical problem of functioning of the Lithuanian Statute of 1588 in the dimension of the Commonwealth of Two Nations. It notes that historiography developed a tradition to examine the Lithuanian legal system which had been established in the 16th century, and its functioning before and after the Union of Lublin as a separate problem and barely relating it to the contemporary legal system of the Kingdom of Poland. This state of historiography prompted to formulate a new problem of the research and to present the means how, using the methods of comparative law studies, the Lithuanian Statute of 1588 and the legal codices that were used in the Polish Kingdom in the second half of the 16th century could be analysed from the perspective of political culture and to present a way to examine the evolution of political culture of the Commonwealth of Two Nations via the interaction of political and legal cultures. In terms of chronology, the early period of creating foundations for the common Polish-Lithuanian state and society (1569-1600) is examined in the article. In order to achieve the goal, the jurisprudence of Jan Herburt (1570), Stanisław Sarnicki (1594), Jan Januszowski (1600) and the sections concerning political rights in the Lithuanian Statute of 1588, widely known to the 16th century political nations, are being used as they reveal the spirit of the law brought by the political nations of Poland and Lithuania to the common state.We chose to compare this uneven material (three Polish codices and one Lithuanian), because the codification of the law in the 16th century in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland evolved differently and had different results. In summary, we state that the goal to implement the decision of the Diet of Lublin of 1569 and to unify the law was not fulfilled, because the 16th century political nations of Poland and Lithuania had been imprinted with different traditions of the spirit of political law. Inside the Commonwealth of Two Nations, the Lithuanian Statute of 1588 drew a line which separated the state into two political dimensions. In one of them, the Kingdom of Poland, a belief implanted by the Łaski's Statute in 1506 that Lithuania had been incorporated into Poland during the reign of Jogaila and Vytautas was functioning. On the other hand, the nobility of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania came into maturity as a political nation by believing in the sovereignty of their state, and strengthened and defended it with legal means not only before the Union of Lublin, but also during the first decades of existence of the common state. [From the publication]