Epic at the Edge of Latin Europe: Latin Poetry in Lithuania

While Lithuania today is a small Baltic republic, between the 13th and 18th centuries the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was the largest country in Europe, and at various times it included the entire territory of modern Belarus, the western half of Ukraine, and large tracts of European Russia. One of the challenges faced by such an enormous country was the absence of a shared, common language. But from the 15th century onwards a myth gained in popularity that the Lithuanians were the descendants of Romans. This myth appealed to the nation’s nobility, and informed a unique cultural self-understanding that I call Lituanitas in Poetry and Nation-Building in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: a distinctive form of Lithuanian nationalism that saw the Lithuanians as a Latin people. The popularity of Lituanitas encouraged the use of the Latin language in Lithuanian literature; and, crucially, Latin in Lithuania was not a classicising affectation but a pragmatic necessity. Latin was the one language that all of early modern Lithuania’s literate elite were likely to understand; and while the Polish vernacular became ever more dominant in Poland, Latin maintained its position as the dominant language of publication in Lithuania into the 18th century.