Resumen de Heroes and Villains: Politics and Historical Memory in Late Medieval East Europe
The paper examines the process of forging a new historical memory in a particular area of the late medieval and early modern Eastern Europe. Because of contemporary intellectual controversy in present-day Lithuania and Belarus over its role in the early Grand Duchy of Lithuania, I have chosen for the study the historical land of Navahrudak. In order to elucidate the role of Navahrudak in the past, I have tried to investigate what a ruling class in Navahrudak did really remember of its past, as well as what was forgotten and why, in the specific conditions of the early sixteenth-century of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. First of all, by utilizing primarily such historical evidence as chronicles and by focusing mainly on the memories of dukes who had ruled in the region, I tried to understand the process of how the region's historical memory was being forged. My research clearly reveals that most of what we actually know about Navahrudak's past appears as nothing else as the sixteenth-century construction, initiated primarily by the contemporary Lithuanian chancellor Albertus Gastoldus and forged by a remarkable team of Renaissance intellectuals employed in the grand ducal chancellery. Their vision of the region's past was greatly influenced by the actual political, social and even personal (familial) considerations and was clearly aimed at glorifying Navahrudak's past, by highlighting especially Navahrudak as Lithuania's first political center, where Albertus Gastoldus had began his political career and where also the political and economical interests of his kin were located.
