GREAT EVENTS AS REFLECTED IN THE MEMORIAL BOOK OF FRIARS MINOR CONVENTUAL: EIGHTEENTH TO EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
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.
Keywords: Lithuanian Friars Minor Conventual, necrology, cultural memory, local
history, political history, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.