Didžiųjų istorijos įvykių atspindžiai Mažesniųjų brolių konventualų memoriale: XVIII–XIX a. pradžia

GREAT EVENTS AS REFLECTED IN THE MEMORIAL BOOK OF FRIARS MINOR CONVENTUAL: EIGHTEENTH TO EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURYThe aim of this article is to establish which events of greater historical impact and inwhat manner affected the community of the Lithuanian Friars Minor Conventual.The article attempts to uncover what historical events were noticed, how they werereflected and thus inscribed in the collective memory of the Conventual Franciscansbased primarily, but not exclusively, in Vilnius. The principal object of this investigationis the Memoriale of the Friars Minor Conventual that began to be compiled in 1702 byfr. Antoni Gumowski and received its final shape at the hands fr. Antoni Niewiarowskiin 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 memoriaas was practiced at the convent of Vilnius. For the sake of comparison, the informationcontained in the necrologies of the Valkininkai convent has also been used. The ideais, that memorial books containing detailed biographies of famous friars broke out ofthe limits of being a strictly necrological commemoration and approached to chroniclingcontemporary events. The local collective identity of the Vilnius Friars MinorConventual rested on the memory of the Franciscan martyrs of Vilnius (fourteenthcentury) and the first two bishops of Vilnius, who were Franciscan friars themselves:Andrzej Jastrzębiec (1388–1398) and Jakub Plichta (1398–1407). The description ofevents and the enumeration of the names of friars of the fifteenth–sixteenth centuriesindicate that all this data was transmitted through the mediation of written recordsand notes. The 1610 fire of Vilnius may be viewed as the oldest event inscribed in theliving memory of the early eighteenth-century Franciscan community. Other eventsthat became seared into their collective memory are the mid-seventeenth centuryMuscovite invasion, the Swedish occupation of Vilnius in 1702, the great pestilence of1710, and the First Partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. All these eventsof greater historical significance provided stimulus to produce a number of detaileddescriptions of local events as lived through by the local Franciscan communities andindividual friars. Their experiences range from a collective dislocation of communallife to the individual martyrdoms. The Vilnius Memoriale also describes events relatedto the Russian imperial policy in a matter-of-fact fashion, allowing a reader to drawconclusions as to the policy of interference, control and the eventual suppression ofmonastic communities and their convents.Keywords: Lithuanian Friars Minor Conventual, necrology, cultural memory, localhistory, political history, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.