"An Earnest Gospeller" and "a Dignified Martyr": networks of textual exchange between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and England, 1560s-1580s

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Lietuvos Didžioji Kunigaikštystė (LDK; Grand Duchy of Lithuania; GDL); Lietuvos istorija; Užsienio ryšiai; The Lithuanian history; Foreign Affairs.

ENA complex approach to the study of textual exchange, embracing both Catholic and Protestant dimensions, reveals another important aspect of Anglo-Lithuanian relations at this time. The second half of the sixteenth century was the period when the Protestant identity of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was emerging in opposition to the Catholic identity of the Kingdom of Poland, at least in the eyes of Englishmen. In a letter sent to the rector of the English college in Rome in 1580, William Shepreve, a Catholic priest and scholar, wrote about Radziwiłł ‘the Orphan's’ stay in Bologna: ‘This man what with the good diligence of the Jesuites [...] and other good instructions, hath so profited herein, that he resolved with him self to renounce all the errors, the Schismatical and Diabolical and Paganical acts and opinions of that of his corrupted country’. In the other camp, amicable encounters between the Calvinist members of the Radziwiłł family with the English diplomats demonstrate that English Protestants considered the Lithuanian magnates as reliable allies in confrontation with the papists. This reputation was anchored in the early seventeenth century when Janusz I Radziwiłł established a correspondence network with the English authorities, thereby inducing other members of the family to enliven and strengthen their contacts with England. [Extract, p. 178]