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The conversion of Lithuania. From pagan barbarians to late medieval Christians . By Darius Baronas and S. C. Rowell . Pp. xi + 627 incl. 9 colour maps and 26 black-and-white and colour ills. Vilnius : Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore , 2015. 978 609 425 152 8
Reviews
There is little not to like about Darius Baronas and S. C. Rowell's impressive new study of the conversion of Lithuania in the 1380s, famously Europe's last pagan state and at that date also its largest. Despite assaults by the Teutonic Knights, Tartars and Polish kings, in the fourteenth century the Lithuanians forged a political hegemony over Orthodox cities and princedoms in present-day Ukraine, Belarus and western Russia. They created a polity covering areas so vast, and geographies so diverse, that it can be hard for historians of western Europe to take them in. In 1386 Grand Duke Jogaila of Lithuania married Poland's Queen Hedwig of Anjou, was baptised into the Latin rite and crowned king of Poland. From 1387 he set about establishing the Latin Church in his Lithuanian domains. The conversion of Lithuania was extolled by Polish chroniclers, invoked in later royal panegyrics, and heavily romanticised in the nineteenth century. Baronas and Rowell set out to deepen, update and significantly complicate our sense of this famous story of the end of paganism in Europe.
In terms of academic genre, this book is hard to classify, and maybe therein lies some of its intellectual liveliness. It is a grand-scale survey of medieval Lithuania in its wider Eurasian context, but also a close critique of the conversion's...