What’s in a name? Conflict and the common weal, unity and diversity in the early modern city

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Lietuvos Didžioji Kunigaikštystė (LDK; Grand Duchy of Lithuania; GDL); Lietuvos istorija; Socialinė istorija; Vilnius; Miesto bendruomenės; Konfesijos; Lithuanian history; Social history; Vilnius; Town communities; Confessions.

EN‘All happy cities are alike; each unhappy city is unhappy in its own way’. With due apologies to Tolstoy, does this famous dictum apply to a comparative study of such larger ‘families’, in this case, the early modern European city (and perhaps more generally)? My interest here is limited to those cities that were, at some point, ‘mixed’. Perhaps all of them were mixed with regard to estate, wealth and profession, but I am particularly concerned with those that were also confessionally, religiously, ethnically and culturally diverse. If the definition of a ‘happy city’ is not necessarily the monoconfessional, mono-cultural one (which often had come into being after much unhappiness), it was rather the one that was successful, in some measure, by some means, in meeting the various challenges, threats and opportunities presented by its diversity. If the second is the case we might, in fact, imagine of a broad continuum of ‘solutions’ to the questions posed by co-existence within municipal walls of more than one confession. This continuum might begin with cities that, in the name of the common weal, made the stark choice to eradicate or expel certain undesirable groups, or to force them into hiding. One thinks of decrees de non tolerandis ludaeis, or the eradication, persecution and/or banishment of Christian ‘others’, such as Anabaptists, Antitrinitarians, Mennonites, etc. Or the ‘toleration’ of ‘crypto-churches’: these might be simply some number of individual believers known ‘only’ to each other, who gathered in some neighbouring extramural places that offered them open worship (a practice known as Auslauf); or they might be the ‘hidden’ intramural spaces in which they gathered for services, what the Dutch called schiulkerken, ‘clandestine churches’ [...]. [Extract, p. 13]