XVIII amžiaus studijos / The Eighteenth Century Studies

The aim of this article is to establish which events of greater historical impact and in what manner affected the community of the Lithuanian Friars Minor Conventual. The article attempts to uncover what historical events were noticed, how they were reflected and thus inscribed in the collective memory of the Conventual Franciscans based primarily, but not exclusively, in Vilnius. The principal object of this investigation is the Memoriale of the Friars Minor Conventual that began to be compiled in 1702 by fr. Antoni Gumowski and received its final shape at the hands fr. Antoni Niewiarowski in 1842. This manuscript is kept at the Lithuanian State Historical Archive (f. 1135, ap. 20, b. 669). It includes miscellaneous materials relating to the culture of memoria as was practiced at the convent of Vilnius. For the sake of comparison, the information contained in the necrologies of the Valkininkai convent has also been used. The idea is, that memorial books containing detailed biographies of famous friars broke out of the limits of being a strictly necrological commemoration and approached to chronicling contemporary events. The local collective identity of the Vilnius Friars Minor Conventual rested on the memory of the Franciscan martyrs of Vilnius (fourteenth century) and the first two bishops of Vilnius, who were Franciscan friars themselves: Andrzej Jastrzębiec (1388–1398) and Jakub Plichta (1398–1407). The description of events and the enumeration of the names of friars of the fifteenth sixteenth centuries indicate that all this data was transmitted through the mediation of written records and notes. The 1610 fire of Vilnius may be viewed as the oldest event inscribed in the living memory of the early eighteenth-century Franciscan community. Other events that became seared into their collective memory are the mid-seventeenth century Muscovite invasion, the Swedish occupation of Vilnius in 1702, the great pestilence of 1710, and the First Partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. All these events of greater historical significance provided stimulus to produce a number of detailed descriptions of local events as lived through by the local Franciscan communities and individual friars. Their experiences range from a collective dislocation of communal life to the individual martyrdoms. The Vilnius Memoriale also describes events related to the Russian imperial policy in a matter-of-fact fashion, allowing a reader to draw conclusions as to the policy of interference, control and the eventual suppression of monastic communities and their convents.