Robert Frost
Kith, Kin, and Neighbors is a richly detailed portrait of the city of Wilno/Vilnius, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the seventeenth century. It is based on an impressive array of sources, in particular the local castle court books and a unique document drawn up in 1636 by the royal quartermaster, which provides a detailed topographical map of the city. David Frick looks at the major themes of human life: marriage and courtship, birth and baptism, divorce, education, work, and death. The stories of individual Wilnans give the book its power: we meet the same individuals across thematic chapters, in different stages of their lives and in different contexts.
From the Publisher
David Frick has produced a book that is destined to become a classic. Kith, Kin, and Neighbors constitutes a model of masterful research technique, analysis, and writing. An essential study for scholars of Eastern Europe and early modern society, it deserves an audience far beyond those confines.
Valerie A. Kivelson
This extraordinary book reconstructs the crisscrossing loyalties, affiliations, sodalities, and conflicts between and among segments of the population of early modern Wilno, home to five forms of Christianity (Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Calvinist, and Uniate), as well as to Jews and Muslims. David Frick poses fundamental questions about the possibilities and limits of tolerance and toleration in a multiethnic, multiconfessional city. The neighborhood interactions, the dynamics of movement through the city, the interplay of calendars, commerce, and culinary practices coalesce, in Frick's nuanced treatment, to create a vision of a city culture that tolerated multiplicity without articulating a sense of tolerance, and that was bound by personal, professional, and spatial ties across confessions while, at the same time, manifesting a range of frictions both across and within confessional groupings. Without in any way romanticizing the situation, Frick explores the communities of interest and the 'communities of litigation,’ as well as the ‘communities of violence’ that functioned in early modern Wilno. One of the most exciting aspects of this book is Frick’s willingness to carry the reader along on his journey of exploration and discovery. This is a book where the intellectual process is on view at its most appealing and engaging. Kith, Kin, and Neighbors is nothing less than a masterpiece.
