Preliminary Programme

While Western historians have produced many studies focused on illegitimacy in the past, this phenomenon received little attention in Lithuanian literature. This paper is one of the first attempts to explore illegitimacy and its demographic patterns in early modern Lithuania by paying attention to two principal dioceses during this time – Vilnius and Samogitia. The paper seeks to explore the life prospects of illegitimate children in the earliest stage. The paper deals with two research questions: bridal pregnancy and infant mortality; and their regional variations. The data, collected from 10 parishes, provides an opportunity for historical demographic analysis of the broad scale of illegitimacy and bridal pregnancy. The methodology of this research includes illegitimacy ratio calculation and nominal record linkage. Research findings let us question to what extent Lithuania differs in the European context. Likewise, this research can fill a small gap in a framework of illegitimacy patterns, firstly in Eastern Europe and then in the Western world during the early modern period. (Show less)

The Vilnius was the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, one of the capitals of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. With a population of about 25,000 people, Vilnius was the only large city in the country surrounded by rural areas and operating under a social and economic system of serfdom. The city experienced a period of growth in the second half of the 18th century, remaining an important administrative, educational, and commercial center and attracted migrants from different social groups and from all over the country.The source material for this presentation is a census of the city's population prepared in 1795 by the Russian authorities after the third partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In addition to basic demographic information such as age, family situation, and occupation, the census included data on the origins of the town's residents. (Show less)

This paper analyzes to what extent the social divisions based on wealth, social status, and distinct ethno-religious identities are reflected in the family, household and houseful structure in Lviv in late seventeenth century, which I jointly call the patterns of domestic cohabitation.
When analyzing cities of northwestern Europe, Katherine A. Lynch (1991) claimed that there is a peculiar demographical regime, which she called after John Hajnal (1965) as the “European Marriage Pattern”. Its main features are the domination of nuclear families, late age of the first marriage, neolocality, and high levels of permanent celibacy. This social phenomenon, in her opinion, related not only to the large mercantile European centers, but also to smaller towns of Germany and Switzerland called after Mack Walker as “home towns” (1971). It has been indicated by recent studies that the main features of the “European Marriage Pattern” are easily traceable also beyond the so-called “Hajnal line” and, among others, in the larger cities of Polish-Lithuania Commonwealth. One of the factors uniting urban centers scattered over the vast territory of Central and Eastern Europe, from Magdeburg to Lviv, Kyiv, Minsk and Tallinn, was the municipal legal system of the so-called Magdeburg law. Despite the considerable diversity in the applied local laws, the common legal foundations united these dispersed urban centers. At the same time, the cities located in the eastern borderlands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had exceptionally large ethnic and religious diversity of their inhabitants, which challenged the old medieval idea of the united urban communitas.
Since the Middle Ages, Lviv has been an important center in trade with the Orient. The role of trading hub and its location on the cultural and state borderland has shaped a very unique ethnic and religious mosaic of its inhabitants. Since Middle Ages, the dominant Catholic group lived side by side with the prosperous communities of Orthodox Ruthenians (Ukrainians), Ashkenazi Jews and Armenians, each with their own authorities, privileges, temples and institutions like schools, hospitals and print houses. This particular social composition of the city was founded on the system of Western urban law but it was inhabited by residents originating from very different and distant territories and tradition. This peculiarity allows us to ask about the scale of the impact of cultural factors (beside the socio-economic ones) on family and domestic cohabitation in this early modern city.
This issue is possible to investigate due to the preservation of the Lviv’s poll tax register of 1662. This unique source documenting the large part of the city’s population including Catholics, Ruthenians (Ukrainians) and Armenians in their place of residence, allows us to take a closer look on patterns of cohabitation in this city and their spatial, class and ethnic distribution. In this paper, I combine data from the 1662 Lviv poll tax register with the municipal tax registers, and a cadastral city plan from the end of the 18th century in order to analyze the pattern of domestic cohabitation in the multi-cultural urban space in the late seventeenth century. (Show less)