Ratio, affectus, sensus: Literary Culture of the Baroque in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania
In 2025, we will commemorate the 400th anniversary of the first publication of Matheus Casimirus Sarbievius' most famous Latin poetry collection 'Lyricorum libri tres' (1625). This has led to 2025 being declared the Year of Baroque Literature in Lithuania. The eminent Jesuit neo-Latin poet of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Sarbievius, has been hailed as the Christian Horace and the Sarmatian Horace. His theoretical thoughts on poetry and rhetoric are still highly regarded and have inspired new research on other concurrent themes and authors. This anniversary provides an opportunity to explore the extent and diversity of Baroque literary culture, which has seen a surge of interest in recent decades, both in the academic world and in popular culture. Therefore, the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, together with the Faculty of Philology of Vilnius University, is organising an international academic conference "Ratio, affectus, sensus: Literary Culture of the Baroque in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania" on 25-27 September 2025 in the baroque city of Vilnius.
The aim of the multidisciplinary conference is to stimulate discussion on the literary culture of the "long seventeenth century" (from the end of the 16th century to the middle of the 18th century) in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. This historical period, associated with dramatic changes and a general cultural crisis, is often described in contradictory terms and in constant tension between reason and senses, rigid structure and passions, classifications and impressions, etc. By embracing this contradiction, we invite an exploration of the theme in question through the lens of this dynamic interplay between reason (ratio), emotion (affectus) and the senses (sensus), which can be perceived in various genres of the period, such as poetry, biography, hagiography, rhetoric, private and public correspondence, and so on. The importance of the modern approach lies not only in what it can reveal about the Baroque in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, but also about subsequent and contemporary literary culture, as scholars have demonstrated the continuing influence of a 'Baroque spirit'.
Keynote speakers
Ona Dilytė-Čiurinskienė
Senior Researcher, The Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore
Prof Stephen Harrison
Professor of Latin literature, University of Oxford
Michał Heintze
The Reception of Sarbiewski's Poems in the Engravings of Pieter Soutman (ca. 1580–1657)
Michał Heintze
Adam Adam Mickiewicz University
The Reception of Sarbiewski's Poems in the Engravings of Pieter Soutman (ca. 1580–1657)
Keywords: Sarbiewski, Pieter Soutman, engravings
The topic I have chosen is a chapter of my dissertation on the reception of Sarbiewski. I was able to find four engravings by the Dutch engraver Pieter Claesz Soutman, for which the inscriptions were taken from Sarbiewski's poems. In doing so, the artist omitted that the author of the words he quoted was Sarbiewski. This is interesting in view of the fact that the engravings were most likely created before 1640, while the poet was still alive, in the Protestant city of Haarlem. In my speech, I would like to present the engravings I found and discuss their content in relation to Sarbiewski's poems. Claesz Soutmann lived in Warsaw for some time and was a painter to Sigismund III Vasa. It was probably there that he became acquainted with Sarbiewski's work. I would like to conclude my speech with an in-depth reflection on the reception of Sarbiewski in Protestant circles (a similar choice of topics as, for example, in the reception of Sarbiewski's poems into English).
