Abstract:
The arrival of the Jesuits to Lithuania and their Vilnius activities speedily and essentially transformed the forms and models of folk culture, influencing the pace and scope of cultural processes. A major role in this was played by Jesuit education, which assumed systematic form soon after their arrival and combined features common to all Jesuit provinces with local ones. An important, though underestimated, circumstance is that first Jesuits came to Vilnius from Prague and other Czech and Moravian cities. It may be guessed that the forms of their activities previously practiced and propagated in Prague’s Clementinum were transplanted to Lithuania. This is shown both by the attention accorded by Father Baltazar Hostouński to vernacular languages and by translations of Saint Petrus Canisius’ Catechism into Ruthenian, Latvian and Lithuanian that appeared in Vilnius in the 1580s and made a significant impact on the catechization process in the multilingual society of Lithuania.
