Recent decades saw historical scholarship to pay more attention to the phenomena which were earlier considered unimportant or, in some cases, non-existent. Intimate relations between men and women who were not yet married, extramarital affairs, cohabitation, etc. were rediscovered and reassessed as indispensable to the more accurate understanding of the formation of marriages, families and
communities. Theoretically, physical and emotional intimacy could only take place in marriage, and as such all relationships that were extraneous to marital status were prosecuted by legal authorities – civil and ecclesiastical alike. This paper seeks to present how one group of these institutions – Lithuanian ecclesiastical courts – treated informal relations between unmarried laymen and women and what kind of penalties they imposed for such delinquencies. At the first glance it seems that neither canon law, nor the law of the Lithuanian Statutes or the Magdeburg law paid much attention to this kind of illicit sexual practices. The legal norms describe them rather vaguely and, as a result, the prescribed punishments seem to be unclear (except for the Third Lithuanian Statute, which, depending on the interpretation of the text, prescribed capital punishment for unmarried women). Analysis of the court material from three consistories (Vilnius, Samogitia and Trakai) has shown that Lithuanian Catholic consistories might not have been very concerned with such cases as there is only a handful of them mentioned and even less addressed. They seem to have been more common among the Catholic population of Samogitia, and men were likely to be condemned more often than women. The penalties for such crimes were mild – the delinquents mainly had to do public penance, pay fines, and observe fasting. The reasons behind such a low number of cases and even lower number of decisions are not clear, yet. It is possible, that while being mainly concerned with the marital litigation ecclesiastical courts left more initiative to the secular authorities, which could also act in the name of good Christian order and provide harsher punishments if necessary. Since most of the plaintiffs were parish clergymen, who generally initiated judicial processes against fornicators, it is plausible that they could take care of such delinquents themselves, without the help of the court. One must not forget that the Church had even more measures at its discretion – for example, missionary activities of the religious orders, during which the missionaries also attended to the illegal sexual practices of the population, and intervened with them.
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