The Grand Duchy rejoins Europe: Post-Soviet developments in the historiography of pagan Lithuania
ENFamous in the Middle Ages as the last pagan enclave in Europe, the Baltic land of Lithuania is much less well known to medievalists than it was to medieval Crusaders. For many decades it was isolated from the West by the Iron Curtain and even more by anachronistic assumptions that the small and weak today could never have been otherwise (in fact the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the fourteenth century encompassed rich lands from the Baltic nearly to the Black Sea). Until recently, studies in English have been few and flawed, apart from the excellent The Northern Crusades: The Baltic and Catholic Frontier by E. Christiansen. Within the past decade - not coincidentally the era when the Iron Curtain cracked and crumbled - this has been partly remedied by the inclusion of Lithuania in the widely used general Crusade histories written by J. Riley-Smith, C. Tyerman and N. Housley. Because they deal with general European history, these works are well known, much respected and need no review here. Yet there are new ground-breaking publications by specialists on pagan Lithuania who deserve to be as well known, for they expand the horizons of European medieval history while transforming their own field.
