Lietuvos istorijos institutas

This article presents an aspect of 18th-century Vilnius history that has received little attention in historiography – the situation of beggars in urban society: the legal regulation of begging is analysed, looking at how it changed during the period, the opportunities of beggars to participate in religious life in Vilnius, the necessity of beggars for the rest of urban society and how the situation of this social class had changed in Vilnius towards the end of the century. Referencing mostly normative and other sources compiled by members of the Catholic Church, the author shows that the situation of beggars in the city was significantly transformed at the very end of the century – before then, the role of beggars in Vilnius society could be considered as typical of traditional medieval and early modern period Christian communities.

In Catholic canon law, the terms used to refer to the sexual disorders causing difficulties in marriage were “impotence” (Lat. impotentia) or “frigidity” (Lat. frigiditas). These terms, although not gendered, were nevertheless most often used to describe men’s physiological problems. In the Catholic consistories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, impotence-related cases were perhaps the rarest category of all marital litigation. In the surviving sources of the seventeenth-eighteenth-century ecclesiastical courts, it was possible to find data on ten such cases, of which seven were examined. Due to the scarcity and chronological inconsistency of the data drawing generalising conclusions is problematic, nonetheless, it is possible to observe certain trends and to reveal aspects that are relevant from the point of view of micro-history.All bar one of the cases involved male impotence, and five out of seven resulted in the decisions declaring the marriages null and void. The analysis of case materials clearly reveals an aspect of publicity characteristic of this type of cases that had evolved in canon law since the Middle Ages, namely, third-party inspections. It was the expert insights of women or doctors that had a decisive influence on the decisions on whether to annul the marriage or to order the spouses to stay in it. This rather unwanted limelight may have precluded many of the cases from ever reaching the courts.