Kith, Kin, and Neighbors: Communities and Confessions in Seventeenth-Century Wilno

CEES book discussion with author David Frick, UC Berkeley, Slavic Languages and Literatures.

Thursday, January 15, 2015
12:00 PM
10383 Bunche Hall

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 his book, David Frick shows how Wilno's inhabitants navigated and negotiated these differences in their public and private lives. 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.

Cost : Free and open to the public. No RSVP necessary for admission.

Sponsor(s): Center for European and Russian Studies, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies