[Pagans in the early modern Baltic: sixteenth-century ethnographic accounts of Baltic paganism] : recenzija

ENHistoric paganism is a subject for scholars from various disciplines who use diverse methodologies and approach it from different perspectives. This collection of ten firsttime translations of early modern Latin texts providing data on Baltic paganism is thus bound to have a wide readership. The title of the book refers to pagans, but the translator and editor of the book, Francis Young, primarily focuses on Christians imagining pagans in early modern Europe and the ‘uses to which discourses about Baltic paganism were put by humanist scholars’ (2). According to Young, the growth of interest in Baltic religion followed political considerations, and the discourses on it were used in the formation of a newly Christianized Lithuanian identity, a common PolishLithuanian identity, and in the politics of religion of the Reformation era. As such, the collection of sixteenth-century accounts of Baltic paganism and their translations accompanied by an introduction and commentaries is a significant contribution. It is also an invitation to expand the body of works on the imagination of European paganisms and the functions these served in Christian Europe pursuing its regional and global ambitions in various historical periods. [...]. [Extract, p. 145]