As their citizens will often tell visitors with pride, the Baltic nations were among the last in Europe to accept the Christian faith and lay aside their ancestral religions. In spite of considerable academic and popular interest in the persistence of pagan beliefs and practices in medieval Europe, the writings of late medieval and early modern ethnographical commentators on Prussia and Lithuania (which constitute an important body of evidence for the beliefs and practices of European pagans) have remained inaccessible to most scholars. While the pagan Balts attracted attention during the Northern Crusades of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in the fifteenth century curiosity partially overcame abhorrence. Humanist scholars began to write about pagans in new ways, informed by new methods of historiography and ethnography. The resulting commentary is the subject of this book.

This project emerged from the convergence of two things: a research agenda that was increasingly focussed on expressions of popular Christianity and the question of “pagan survivals,” and a longstanding personal fascination with the history of Lithuania. The book started from the thought that a good way to gain a better understanding of what was and was not “pagan” in medieval Europe might be to look at the documentary evidence for Baltic paganism, where paganism was truly a force to be reckoned with. From the start, therefore, this project has never been narrowly focussed on the Baltic, and the research questions underpinning the book pertain to European (and indeed global) history: how did early modern European scholars make sense of alien ancestral belief systems? And to what extent can we rely on their reports as a reliable account of pagan beliefs? It is these questions of interpretation that the present volume seeks to address.

I have incurred many debts of gratitude in the course of preparing this book. I thank my wife Rachel and daughters Abigail and Talitha for their forebearance with—and support for—all my historical research. The staff of the British Library and Cambridge University Library were, as usual, unfailingly helpful, and it is also appropriate for me to record my appreciation of the University of Valladolid for its digitization of the Cosmographia of Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the “Polona” project (Projekt Patrimonium) for its digitization of Filippo Buonacorssi's Vita et mores Sbignei cardinalis, and the University of Vilnius for its digitization of the Catechismusa of Martynas Mažvydas.