Vietos visuomenė ir valdžia. Tarpusavio sąveikos (Šiaulių ekonomijos atvejis. XVII–XVIII a. pradžia)

LTMonografijoje nagrinėjami valdžios ir bendruomenės tarpusavio santykiai XVII-XVIII a. pr. Autorė pagrindinį dėmesį skiria teisiškai fiksuotai ir apibrėžtai geografinėmis ribomis karališkos Šiaulių ekonomijos mikrobendruomenei. Jos pavaldiniai turėjo daug daugiau galimybių artikuliuotai išreikšti ir ginti savo interesus negu privačių dvarų valstiečiai ir miestelėnai. Gausūs išlikę šaltiniai (inventoriai, dvaro teismo knygos, dvaro valdytojų įvairūs dokumentai, bažnytiniai metrikai, to meto literatūros kūriniai ir kt.), esantys Lietuvos ir užsienio archyvuose, pasirinktos socialinės antropologijos, naujos politinės istorijos ir mikroistorijos prieigos leido įsigilinti ir išanalizuoti daugiasluoksnę bendruomenę, jos tarpusavio ryšius, saviidentifikaciją, ŠE pavaldinių ir įvairaus lygmens valdžios (nuo vietos dvaro administracijos ir parapijos dvasininkijos iki ŠE laikytojų bei karaliaus) tarpusavio sąveikas, palyginti plačiame Abiejų Tautų Respublikos kontekste. Dr. Rita Regina Trimonienė - VU Istorijos fakulteto profesorė, daugelį metų domisi ir tiria mikroistorijos ir lokalios istorijos tematiką.

ENContemporary Western historiography places great emphasis on community studies, which provide micro-level insights into the way major processes were reflected in specific local societies, into their impact on the lives of individuals, and trace the interactions between the local community and the authorities. These studies require starting research at the community level and then seeing the community in its overall (national, global) context. Resorting to the micro-historical approach, one of the trends of which focuses on community studies (Hans Medick, Giovanni Levi, David W. Sabean, Michel de Certeau, and others), also to the approaches of social anthropology and contemporary political history (Hilton L. Root, Robert E Goheen, Harald Gustafson, Andrė Holenstein, and others), this work focuses on one local community. Drawing on abundant sources and using different research approaches, the book aims to clarify the formation and manifestation of the concept of the local community in the early modern period in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and its structure and to analyse the relations and forms of communication of the community with the various levels of the authorities. Research is based on the example of the Šiauliai crown estate, or the so- called economy (Lith. ekonomija). The choice was made for the legally recorded and territorially- administratively defined society of the Šiauliai Economy of the first half of the seventeenth-the early eighteenth century, which was directly subordinate to the king of the Republic of the Two Nations. It consisted of the ruler’s subjects (mostly peasants, residents of five towns and township, and petty nobility), who had much more opportunities to express and defend their interests than the subjects of private estates.This choice of the research object allows for a fairly detailed discussion of the following issues: how the territorial-administrative space of the Šiauliai Economy and its society/community were formed and how it identified itself with the economy? What was the structure of governance in the Šiauliai Economy? What were the relations between the individual members of the community, with a particular emphasis on the representatives of the peasantry and the townspeople in self-government’ (the vaitas, Pol., wójt; pl. vaitai), the highest administrative officer of local self-government, and šuolininkai, benchers)? What were the forms of interaction and communication between the authorities (from the local government to the central government and the Church) and the local community? The aim is to capture’, in the rich albeit fragmentary source material, whether different groups in the local community were heard by different levels of the authorities and what kind of response they received. What were the reactions of the ‘bottoms’ to the decisions of the authorities and is it possible to trace them? Obviously, events in the Šiauliai Economy will be seen not only in a micro context, but also in a broader macro context (the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Republic of the Two Nations, and Western Europe). The study will lead to better understanding not only of the aspects of the interaction between a local community and the state institutions of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania but also of certain facets of the social and political functioning of the state in the seventeenth century. The archival base of the sources on the theme explored is abundant. Thousands of pages of manuscript documents, expanded by sources already published, were reviewed and analysed. Still, it seems that a scholar will never be fully satisfied with the quality of the archival material found. First of all, the work was hampered by the fragmentary nature of sources or their absence.This is no coincidence: the archives of the Šiauliai Economy, which had been collected, preserved, and catalogued for centuries, were burnt down during the First World War. Duplicates, documents, privileges, various letters, receipts, etc., which were accidentally removed from the archives, were scattered in the archives of Lithuania and other countries. A fire during the Second World War destroyed the documents of the Šiauliai church. One of the main sources in this study was the inventories of the Šiauliai Economy (1636-1638, 1657, 1673, 1676, 1682, and 1691), which provide important information about the rural districts, towns, townships, villages, užusieniai, the land that was left over after its division into voloks (Pol. zaścianki), and apyrubės, measured plots of land (Pol. obrąb) of a seventeenth-century economy and their changes. They also contain valuable data on the administration of the economy, its inhabitants, their land tenure, and the quality of the land. The inventory material is supplemented with the revenue and expenditure books of the Šiauliai Economy. The regulations of the manor (1639, 1649, 1657) and the ordinances (1640, 1689), from which we learn about the duties of the administration, vaitai and the benchers, their remuneration, the obligations of the subordinates, etc., are important for the study. Most of them have been published. Another important block of sources is the court books of Šiauliai and Žagarė manors. They are mainly dominated by contracts of sale and lease of land and forest holdings, rent, bequests, and wills of local inhabitants (townspeople and peasants, sometimes nobility), as well as records on the cases of theft, beatings, witchcraft, etc., and various complaints. [...].