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In the mid-seventeenth century, Wilno (Vilnius), the second capital of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, was home to Poles, Lithuanians, Germans, Ruthenians, Jews, and Tatars, who worshiped in Catholic, Uniate, Orthodox, Calvinist, and Lutheran churches, one synagogue, and one mosque. Visitors regularly commented on the relatively peaceful coexistence of this bewildering array of peoples, languages, and faiths. In Kith, Kin, and Neighbors, David Frick shows how Wilno's inhabitants navigated and negotiated these differences in their public and private lives.This remarkable book opens with a walk through the streets of Wilno, offering a look over the royal quartermaster's shoulder as he made his survey of the city's intramural houses in preparation for King Wladyslaw IV's visit in 1636. These surveys (Lustrations) provide concise descriptions of each house within the city walls that, in concert with court and church records, enable Frick to accurately discern Wilno's neighborhoods and human networks, ascertain the extent to which such networks were bounded confessionally and culturally, determine when citizens crossed these boundaries, and conclude which kinds of cross-confessional constellations were more likely than others. These maps provide the backdrops against which the dramas of Wilno lives played out: birth, baptism, education, marriage, separation or divorce, guild membership, poor relief, and death and funeral practices. Perhaps the most complete reconstruction ever written of life in an early modern European city, Kith, Kin, and Neighbors sets a new standard for urban history and for work on the religious and communal life of Eastern Europe.
David Frick is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Polish Sacred Philology in the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation: Chapters in the History of the Controversies (1551-1632) and Meletij Smotryc'kyj.
"Kith, Kin, and Neighbors is a richly detailed portrait of the city of Wilno/Vilnius, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the seventeenth century. It is based on an impressive array of sources, in particular the local castle court books and a unique document drawn up in 1636 by the royal quartermaster, which provides a detailed topographical map of the city. David Frick looks at the major themes of human life: marriage and courtship, birth and baptism, divorce, education, work, and death. The stories of individual Wilnans give the book its power: we meet the same individuals across thematic chapters, in different stages of their lives and in different contexts."-Robert Frost, University of Aberdeen, author of After the Deluge: Poland-Lithuania and the Second Northern War
"Kith, Kin, and Neighbors is extraordinary; there is nothing quite like it in the historiography of Eastern Europe. This is perhaps the most complete, most detailed, most vivid, most altogether successful reconstruction of the life of an early modern city that I have ever encountered. David Frick has meticulously and brilliantly re-created seventeenth-century Vilnius almost house by house, neighbor by neighbor, so we can see with astonishing clarity the dynamics of society, sociability, and family in the urban context."-Larry Wolff, New York University, author of Inventing Eastern Europe
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