RECENZIJOS

Tautosakos darbai 66, 2023, p. 177–186

ISSN 1392-2831 | eISSN 2783-6827
DOI: https://doi.org/10.51554/TD.23.66.11

English Translations of 15th and 16th-Century

Latin Sources on Baltic Religion
and Mythology
RADVILĖ RACĖNAITĖ
Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore
radvile.racenaite@llti.lt
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7352-9579

Pagans in the Early Modern Baltic. Sixteenth-Century Ethnographic Accounts of Baltic Paganism,
edited and translated from Latin by Francis Young, Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2022, 192 p.,
ISBN 978-1-64189-437-1

Francis Young is a UK-based historian and folklorist focusing on Church history,

popular religion, and folklore. He is the author and editor or co-author of over 20
books on the history of Early Modern English Catholicism, monasticism, the cult
of St Edmund, the history of exorcism, witchcraft, magic, and British folklore. He
has a PhD in history from Cambridge University. He is a professional indexer of
academic books, and a translator specialising in Medieval and Early Modern Latin.
He is also a reader and lay canon in the Church of England [1].
Pagans in the Early Modern Baltic. Sixteenth-Century Ethnographic Accounts of
Baltic Paganism is a collection of translations into English of ten historic sources on
Baltic paganism in Latin. Although the book’s subtitle states that it covers the 16th
century, in fact the timeframe is broader by almost half a century, and covers the
period from 1458 to 1582,1 and is called by the author ‘the “long” sixteenth century’

1 The summary in Lithuanian states inaccurately that the book consists of translations of 11 sources,
and the time frame is rounded off, i. e. 1450 to 1590 (p. 171). If this is not a proofreading error,
it would certainly be interesting to know what other sources the author planned to publish in this

Received: 02/10/2023. Accepted: 24/10/2023

Copyright © Radvilė Racėnaitė, 2023. Published by the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore Press.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author
and source are credited.

177
178 TAU TOSA KO S DA R BA I 6 6

(p. 2). The main body of the texts is preceded by an introduction, which gives a
general overview of the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the specifics
of the Christening of the country, the Reformation, and the Counter-Reformation.
It outlines the idea of Baltic paganism, and the relationship between the concepts
of gods (in Latin dii) and spirits (numina), as well as the implementation of the
two ‘pillars of late medieval and early modern religious hermeneutics’ (p. 24),
interpretatio Romana and interpretatio Christiana.
Young explains his choice of sources by several reasons. Firstly, he was driven by
a personal research agenda that focused on expressions of popular Christianity and
the question of ‘pagan survivals’ in the long and arduous period of the transition
from the Middle Ages to the Reformation and the Post-Reformation era, and his
longstanding fascination with the pagan past of Lithuania. He adds later that the
importance of such books about the borderlands became particularly apparent after
the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Russia’s threats against the Baltic States,
since they ‘sharpen many scholars’ awareness of the urgency of communicating
the history and culture of East-Central Europe to a Western European and North
American public to whom the region is still largely unknown’ [2]. The apparent
realisation that this region is still visible through the colonial gaze was, I think, an
unexpected and unpleasant discovery for many of us. This way, the book by Young
not only reveals the hierarchical relationship between the authors of the texts and
the ‘barbarians’ they describe, which can be scientifically explained in terms of the
period of Christian missionary expansion and European geographical discoveries,
but it also serves as a sort of reminder that atavistic plumes of imperial ideology
can erupt even in the 21st century. Such unexpected parallels between the 16th and
21st centuries add symbolic value to this book.
Secondly, Young chose texts which represented the growing interest in Late
Medieval and Early Modern Europe in the Baltic peoples of Prussia and Lithuania
as a result of political and ideological considerations. What is more, it represented
a rise in humanist thought when the curiosity of Early Modern European scholars
partially overcame the abhorrence of alien ancestral belief systems and led ‘from
anti-pagan polemic to humanist proto-ethnography’ (p. 1). Young formulates the
valuable assumption that Early Modern writings on the Baltic peoples could later
serve as a model for future works about the indigenous peoples of the New World:
‘The ethnographic discourse developed by writers on the non-Christian peoples
of Europe, whether Baltic pagans or Muslim Tatars and Turks, created the space
for positive evaluations of indigenous cultures in the aftermath of European
contact with the Americas, and provided a language, conceptual framework, and

edition, or if, for example, Jan Malecki and Hieronim Malecki were counted as two authors in
the original draft of the book.
 R . Racė n ai t ė . ENGLISH T R A NSL AT IONS OF 15 TH AND 16 TH -CE N T URY L ATIN SO URCE S ... 179

range of imagery for scholars seeking to describe beliefs very different from their
own’ (p. 1–2).
The authors whose works were chosen for translation, though, came from
diverse ethnic and professional backgrounds, and the different degrees of
connection and familiarity with the Baltic in fact reprised all these criteria. Five
of the featured authors were Polish (Jan Długosz, Maciej z Miechowa, Jan and
Hieronim Malecki, and Jan Łasicki), three were Italian (Enea Silvio Piccolomini,
Filippo Buonacorssi and Alessandro Guagnini), two were Lithuanian (Martynas
Mažvydas and Michalo Lituanus), and one was German (Johannes Stüler, better
known as Erasmus Stella).
The importance of this book was clear even before it was published. This is
evident from the financial support it received in the form of a Book Publication
Subvention from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies. The book
has also already attracted the attention of researchers of Baltic studies. First of all,
in the spring of 2022, an online presentation of it was organised by the Lithuanian
Embassy in London [3]. Francis Young was welcomed by Renatas Norkus, the
Lithuanian ambassador to the United Kingdom, and joined by several panel guests:
Toms Ķencis PhD, a researcher in mythology and folklore at the University of
Latvia’s Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art Archives of Latvian Folklore,
Vytautas Ališauskas, a professor of cultural history at Vilnius University, and Pavel
Horák PhD, a visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge. The book was also
reviewed by well-known scholars in the field of religion and mythology from the
Baltic States: Eglė Aleknaitė, an anthropologist of religion, from Lithuania (Aleknaitė
2023), and Aldis Pūtelis, a folklorist and mythologist, from Latvia (Pūtelis 2023).
This summer, Francis Young gained even more notoriety, and has become widely
known as an expert on Baltic religion in the United Kingdom. He was approached
by numerous media outlets to comment on the appearance of a mysterious carved
pole on a coastal path in Kent which had the inscription ‘Perkūnas’, referring to
the Baltic (or more specifically, Lithuanian) God of Thunder [4, 5, 6]. We can say
that Young’s knowledge of Baltic religion is profound, and his popularity is indeed
well deserved.
I first came across the name of Francis Young a few years ago when I read his
essay ‘The Myth of Medieval Paganism’, where he critically explores the idea ‘that
something called “paganism” existed in Medieval society as a mode of conscious
resistance to Christianity’, and argued about the myth of the pagan Middle Ages that it:

dates back centuries, with beginnings in the Middle Ages themselves, when the charge
of paganism proved useful in theological controversies. The idea that sects of sor-
cerers worshiped the devil and offered sacrifices to him emerged in the writings of
180 TAU TOSA KO S DA R BA I 6 6

fourteenth-century demonologists. This legend allowed individuals accused of sorce-

ry and witchcraft to be tried for apostasy, since they were said to have switched from
worship of God to worship of the devil. In the sixteenth century, Protestant critics of
the Catholic Church made heavy use of the accusation that Catholicism was a form of
paganism, since it permitted practices such as veneration of saints and relics. For post-
Reformation Protestants, the Middle Ages were pagan because they were Catholic.
In the nineteenth century, anti-Catholicism combined with a Romantic fantasy of pa-
gan sorcery as a rebellion against the institutional power of the Church [...]. Nineteenth-
century folklorists classified many folk customs as relics of a pre-Christian past, creating
the impression that Europe’s peasants had remained essentially pagan beneath a cultural
veneer of Christianity throughout the medieval period and beyond (Young 2020).

Young’s focus on the fact that researchers often tend to label old phenomena as
‘pagan’ when they do not seem obviously Christian has a basis. As he puts it further,
‘the fact that a person had been baptised and had ceased to sacrifice to ancestral
gods did not necessarily mean that he had abandoned other pre-Christian cultural
practices, perhaps including some forbidden by the Church’ and ‘it is likely that for
many baptized ex-pagans and their descendants, the continuation of some form of
ancestral worship simply happened, without reflection or argument’ and therefore
‘a person who was securely Christian by medieval lights might look awfully pagan
to us’ (Young 2020). These arguments resonate with me, as an important and
cautious methodological assumption.
However, on the other hand, this quite rigorous approach to paganism is generally
more characteristic of historians than scholars of religion, both worldwide and in
Lithuania (see, for example, the works by Rowell [1994], and by Rowell and Baronas
[2015]). It seems that Young also supports their view that ‘organized paganism was
essentially extinct in Lithuania by 1387. The idea of pagan Lithuania ‘was, rather,
a rhetorical topos’ (p. 8–9) necessary for ideological reasons. Thus, he seems to
think that Christianity took root in Lithuania quickly and easily enough, and that
all the ancient remains described in historical sources were in many cases the results
of interpretatio Romana or interpretatio Christiana, and represented ethnographic
relics, rather than the still living rudiments of Baltic religion and mythology not
long after the official christening of Lithuania and Samogitia and the still weak
catechesis of the peasantry in rural areas. As Eglė Aleknaitė summarises in her
review of the book, these two approaches represent ‘a long-term tension between
Lithuanian historians and ethnologists, mythologists, historians of religion, and
scholars of religious studies, with the former devaluing the methodologies and
conceptual frameworks used by the latter’ because of ‘the politics of disciplines and
differences of disciplinary perspectives’ (Aleknaitė 2023: 146).
 R . Racė n ai t ė . ENGLISH T R A NSL AT IONS OF 15 TH AND 16 TH -CE N T URY L ATIN SO URCE S ... 181

We can add that due to the lack of substantial emic sources on Baltic paganism,
as well as accounts written by the pagans themselves, the usual methodological
approach by Lithuanian scholars of mythology is to study paganism not so much
diachronically as synchronically, by juxtaposing historical etic sources with late
ethnographic and folklore material. As the researcher on Baltic religions Gintaras
Beresnevičius puts it in his seminal article ‘On the Possibility of Reconstructing
the Lithuanian Religion and Mythology’, everything we know about the ancient
Lithuanian religion and mythology is based only on fragmentary sources, combined
with late folklore and ethnographic material. He shares the idea that this is a
rather dangerous scientific stance, because in the very wide field of folklore and
ethnography we can find whatever details we want, confirming or denying any
hypothesis. Unfortunately, it is not possible to do otherwise (Beresnevičius 1998:
29–30). Therefore, we should bear in mind that the results we get at the end of
our research can never be considered as a final and definite reconstruction of the
pagan mythological system. Thus, only a never-ending process of reconstructing is
available (Beresnevičius 1998: 32).
It seems that Young’s approach is also marked by a certain cautiousness, and he
calls it ‘a slender body of evidence’ (p. 9), from which an attempt to reconstruct
Baltic paganism should be ‘undertaken with the utmost caution’ (p. 10). He pays
attention to the fact that ‘Pre-Christian religion cannot be reliably reconstructed
from practices in a Christianized society assumed to derive from pre-Christian
religion, since whether practices are deemed “pagan” or not will depend, in
most cases, on little more than subjective intuition and personal prejudice,’ and
hence both the ‘attempts at reconstruction and systematization based on folkloric
material and comparative mythology (such as the work of Norbertas Vėlius,
Algirdas Greimas, Jonas Trinkūnas and Gintaras Beresnevičius)’ are debated and
historiographically problematic (p. 9).
In compiling his publication, Young primarily draws on his expertise as a
specialist in Church history, which is why he uses the phrase ‘ethnographic
descriptions’ in the subtitle of the book, rather than the more usual reference to
‘Baltic religion and mythology’, which is commonly used by Lithuanian scholars
when referring to sources for this period (e. g. the titles of the sourcebooks compiled
by N. Vėlius [1996–2005] and V. Ališauskas [2016]).
Although Young continually emphasises changes in the views of the authors of
the texts with regard to the establishment of a humanist world-view, it is nevertheless
clear that this edition of sources presents primarily a Christian imagining of pagans
in Early Modern Europe, the interaction between paganism and Christianity as it
was seen by their respective authors of Christian affiliation, and ‘represent more of
the author’s than the actual local people’s views’ (Pūtelis 2023: 177).
182 TAU TOSA KO S DA R BA I 6 6

Although Young explains that he chose sources in Latin because it was then
the universal language of scholarly communication in Western Christendom, it is
obvious that the choice was also determined by his personal skills in Latin and his
insufficient command of the Lithuanian language.2 The book would therefore have
benefited greatly from a special editor and a native-speaker Lithuanian proofreader,
since it has some disappointing spelling errors and general inconsistencies. For
example, some entries in Lithuanian in the bibliography are written according to
English rules of punctuation, capitalising each word in the title, which looks weird
to a native speaker (p. 165–170). Next to the article by Beresnevičius, the chapter
title ‘Baltų mitologijos fragmentai’ is spelt erroneously, and is written in place of the
title of the journal Tautosakos darbai in which the essay was published (p. 167). The
name of Martynas Mažvydas is sometimes spelt ‘Martinas’, most likely by linking
the Lithuanian name to the Latin form of the name Martinius. The Lithuanian
word signified by Długosz’s Znicz’ is žynys, not Žinis (p. 45). A Lithuanian editor
would probably have given some advice that Michalo the Lithuanian is not really
such a mysterious and ‘obscure figure whose true identity remains unclear’ (p. 27),
and that there are a number of studies that provide clues as to who is behind this
pseudonym. The most overlooked point is the difference between the titles of
sources in the table of contents (where the author is not even mentioned, only
the title) and next to the sources. In fact, the titles of the chapters in Latin and
English also vary greatly, the Latin chapter lacking the name of the author, which
is indicated only next to the translation into English. Although the dates when the
sources were composed or published are crucial to this edition, they are indicated
only next to two translations (p. VI, Nos 5 and 6) in the table of contents, and in
the book itself only next to the chapter titles of the translations into English. These
weaknesses are not fundamental, but they are annoying, and at times call into
question the value of the book as a serious scholarly source.
Due to the chosen period and the principle of selection, with Latin sources being
chosen as the main ones, some important works have been left out, since they were
written in German, Polish or Lithuanian. This principle has also completely left out
documents about Latvian paganism, as in early sources Prussian and Lithuanian
beliefs received much more attention (Pūtelis 2023: 177).
Therefore, for a local researcher familiar with these sources, it is evident that by
presenting only the Latin preface by Mažvydas and omitting the Lithuanian one,
the mythological information provided in his Catechism is somehow incomplete.

2 On his Twitter account, Young has said that for some time he has been learning Lithuanian, with
slow success, and that he has also started learning Polish. Given his diligence and productivity,
one can expect him to become fluent in these languages in the near future, and to continue the
complex work of translating sources on Baltic religions from other languages.
 R . Racė n ai t ė . ENGLISH T R A NSL AT IONS OF 15 TH AND 16 TH -CE N T URY L ATIN SO URCE S ... 183

In Lithuanian studies, these two prefaces are usually used to complement each
other, and, what is more, the Lithuanian preface is referred to more often, as it
provides a wider variety of mythological curiosities.
It is fair to say that this book is like a direct reprimand to the Lithuanian
academic community, and its inability to translate and publish key research titles
and sourcebooks into English. Up till now, the most easily accessed sources on
the pagan Baltic religion were the two late 19th-century volumes of Źródła do
mytologii litewskiej (‘Sources of Lithuanian Mythology’) compiled by the Polish
philologist and mythologist Antoni Mierzyński (1892, 1896), and Letto-Preussische
Götterlehre (‘Latvian and Prussian Mythology’) by the German mythologist and
folklorist Mannhardt Wilhelm, published in 1936. These books present the
sources in their original languages, and are supplemented by detailed comments
in Polish and German. Obviously, these titles are known and used by scholars
of religion. On the other hand, in the world of contemporary research where
English is the new lingua franca, as Pūtelis correctly notes (2023: 177), modern
researchers cannot easily read either Latin or (alas!) German, Polish or Russian,
and these were the languages that were mainly used to write about Lithuania until
the end of the 19th century, not to mention such niche languages as Lithuanian and
Latvian themselves.
Another edition of sources of Baltic mythology and religion in four volumes
appeared only in the late 20th and early 21st century as a result of the huge efforts
and long preparatory work by the late Lithuanian mythologist and folklorist
Norbertas Vėlius and his assistants (Vėlius 1996–2005). The volumes present texts
both in the original languages and in translation into Lithuanian. Every text is
preceded by two concise introductions about the historical context and religious
or mythological images. It is noteworthy that the first volume is supplemented
by an informative introduction on the character of the sources of Baltic religion
and mythology in three languages, Lithuanian, English and German (Vėlius 1996:
22–112). It has always been known that new, hitherto unknown sources on Baltic
religion and mythology, or texts so far not in scientific circulation, may yet emerge.
Such new discoveries in archives in Vilnius, Rome and Krakow, as well as in various
corpuses of ecclesiastical or secular documents, were compiled by the Lithuanian
diplomat, philosopher and mythologist Vytautas Ališauskas in 2016 in Baltų religijos
ir mitologijos reliktai Lietuvos Didžiojoje Kunigaikštystėje (XIV-XVIII a.) (‘Relics of
the Baltic Religion and Mythology in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania [16th to 18th
centuries]’). The book starts with a short preface in English, but the introduction
is only in Lithuanian. The newly discovered sources are published in their original
language and in Lithuanian translation; however, the edition somehow lacks a more
elaborate scientific apparatus.
184 TAU TOSA KO S DA R BA I 6 6

Moreover, research on Baltic religion and mythology is still mainly represented

in the world by the works of Algirdas Julius (Julien) Greimas (1994) and Marija
Gimbutienė (Gimbutas, 1995), whose most mature parts of their careers were spent
abroad without access to archives and libraries in Lithuania, and who applied their
own specific methodological approaches. The only monograph by Vėlius translated
into English, The World Outlook of the Ancient Balts (1989), was published in
Lithuania and is hence difficult to obtain in other countries. In addition, the book
does not present the most important research by Vėlius, but is based on a very
distinct approach, which on one hand was praised as the first study in the field
of the geography of religions, but on the other hand was criticised as the author’s
pure fantasy. Last year, an Italian translation of a book about images of the afterlife
in Lithuanian mythology by Beresnevičius was published (Beresnevičius 2022).
Hopefully, this year yet another monograph on Perkūnas, the god of thunder, by
Nijolė Laurinkienė in English translation will be published in Finland in the series
Finnish Folklore Communications [7].
Since the time when in 1845 the German philologist Georg Nesselmann
introduced the unifying term ‘Baltic’ and ‘Balts’ to denote the ethno-linguistic
group of peoples who speak (or spoke) Baltic languages, there has been a certain
tendency to write about the religions of the Baltic people and their worldview in
general terms as an implicitly homogeneous phenomenon, not taking into account
their differences. A recent example of such an approach to the Baltic people as
‘a Baltic cultural and linguistic unit’ might be the chapter ‘Baltic Religion’ by
the Latvian literary scholar and orientalist Sigma Ankrava published in 2013
in Routledge’s Handbook of Religions in Ancient Europe. Although she supports
the idea that ‘in practice, each [Baltic] tribe may have had different rituals and
practices. Nevertheless, there seems to have been a shared outlook on the world,’
and therefore she chooses to describe Baltic religions with an emphasis on Latvian
religious traditions (Ankrava 2013: 360), and presents books by Latvian authors
only as suggested reading (Ankrava 2013: 371).
It is worth mentioning that Young also pays attention to this methodologically
incorrect issue of merging the Baltic peoples and their religions into an artificially
unified concept. He states clearly that ‘in the first place, “Baltic religion” should
not be understood as a single religion of Baltic peoples, each of whom had their
own distinct religious practices; it is, rather a conventional term used for the pre-
Christian ancestral religious beliefs and practices of the various Baltic peoples’ (p. 7).
It could be stated that, in the context of the above-mentioned studies and
research on Baltic religion and mythology, a book of sources on Baltic paganism is
a necessary and long overdue publication in English. The principles of the selection
of the texts, compilation, editing and commentaries meet the requirements for
 R . Racė n ai t ė . ENGLISH T R A NSL AT IONS OF 15 TH AND 16 TH -CE N T URY L ATIN SO URCE S ... 185

publications of this type. Now we can only hope and look forward to the publication
of new research on this region and its distinctive religious tradition. I also wish that
Francis Young’s passion and admiration for Lithuania will only grow stronger, and
that we, the last pagans of Europe, will continue to have in his person a friendly
chronicler.

ONLINE SOURCES

[1] Personal website of Francis Young (https://drfrancisyoung.com).

[2] “The Impact of an Award: Report from Francis Young”, the Association for the Advancement of
Baltic Studies website, 2022-04-25 (https://aabs-balticstudies.org/2022/04/25/francis-young-
bps-publication/#).
[3] Online book launch “Pagans in the Early Modern Baltic” by Dr Francis Young organised
by the Lithuanian Embassy in London on 2022-05-31 (https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=xQHVkie3bL0).
[4] Young Francis, “Perkūnas in Kent Eastern European ‘native faith’ movements in the UK”, The
Critic, 2023-08-15 (https://thecritic.co.uk/perkunas-in-kent/).
[5] Batty David, “Mystery Totem Pole Appears on Coastal Path in South-East England”, The
Guardian, 2023-08-09 (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/aug/09/mystery-totem-
pole-appears-on-coastal-path-in-south-east-england).
[6] Blackburn Jack, “Baltic Banksy’s Tribute to Thunder God Looms Over Kent Coast”, The Times,
2023-08-10 (https://drfrancisyoung.com/2023/08/10/talking-perkunas-on-bbc-today/).
[7] Nijolė Laurinkienė 2023 [forthcoming]. “The God Perkūnas of the Ancient Lithuanians In
Language, Folklore, and Historical Sources”, Folklore Fellows Network Bulletin 57, p. 17 (https://
www.folklorefellows.fi/wp-content/uploads/FFNB-57-FFC-in-2023.pdf).

LITER AT UR E

Aleknaitė Eglė 2023. “Pagans in the Early Modern Baltic: Sixteenth-Century Ethnographic Accounts
of Baltic Paganism”: Book Review, Journal of Baltic Studies 54, p. 145–147.
Ališauskas Vytautas 2016. Baltų religijos ir mitologijos reliktai Lietuvos Didžiojoje Kunigaikštystėje
(XIV–XVIII a.): šaltinių rinkinys, sudarė ir parengė Vytautas Ališauskas, Vilnius: Lietuvių kata-
likų mokslo akademija (https://tautosmenta.lt/wp-content/uploads/brms/%C5%A0alt_2016_
BRMR.pdf).
Ankrava Sigma 2013. “Baltic Religion”, in: The Handbook of Religions in Ancient Europe, London:
Routledge, p. 359–371.
Baronas Darius, Rowell Stephen Christopher 2015. The Conversion of Lithuania: From Pagan
Barbarians to Late Medieval Christians, Vilnius: Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore.
Beresnevičius Gintaras 1998. „Apie lietuvių religijos ir mitologijos rekonstravimo galimybę“, Tauto-
sakos darbai 9 (17), p. 29–32 (https://tautosmenta.lt/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Beresnevi-
cius_Gintaras/Beresnevicius_TD_16_1998.pdf).
Beresnevičus Gintaras 2022. DAUSOS. Concezione del mondo postmortale nell’antica mitologia Lituana,
translated by Goda Bulybenko and Dario Giasanti, Viterbo: Vocifuoriscena.
Gimbutienė Marija 1995. Marija Gimbutienė: bibliografinė rodyklė, 1938–1995, sudarė R. Andrašiū-
naitė-Strakšienė, Vilnius: Vilniaus universiteto leidykla.
186 TAU TOSA KO S DA R BA I 6 6

Greimas Algirdas Julius 1994. Algirdas Julius Greimas: mokslinės kūrybos bibliografinė rodyklė, cita-
vimo indeksas, citavimo analizė, sudarė J. Šinkūnaitė, O. Voverienė, Vilnius: Vilniaus universiteto
leidykla.
Young Francis 2020. “The Myth of Medieval Paganism”, First Thing, February 1 (https://www.
firstthings.com/article/2020/02/the-myth-of-medieval-paganism).
Mannhardt Wilhelm 1936. Letto-Preussische Götterlehre (Magazin der Lettisch-Literärischen Gesell-
schaft / Latviešu Literāriskās biedrības Magazīna, XXI), Riga: Lettisch-Literärischen Gesellschaft
(https://tautosmenta.lt/wp-content/uploads/brms/%C5%A0alt_1936_Mannhardt.pdf).
Mierzyński Antoni 1892. Źródła do mytologii litewskiej / Mythologiae Lituanicae Monumenta: od
Tacyta do końca XIII wieku, zebrał, ocenił i objaśnił Antoni Mierzyński, Warszawa: K. Kowalewski
(https://tautosmenta.lt/wp-content/uploads/brms/%C5%A0alt_1892_Mierzy%C5%84ski_1.
pdf).
Mierzyński Antoni 1896. Źródła do mytologii litewskiej / Mythologiae Lituanicae Monumenta, II: wiek
XIV I XV, zebrał, ocenił i objaśnił Antoni Mierzyński, Warszawa: P. Szymanowski (https://tau-
tosmenta.lt/wp-content/uploads/brms/%C5%A0alt_1896_Mierzy%C5%84ski_2.pdf).
Pūtelis Aldis 2023. “Francis Young (ed. and trans.). Pagans in the Early Modern Baltic: Sixteenth-
Century Ethnographic Accounts of Baltic Paganism. Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2022”:
Book Review, Latvijas vēstures institūta žurnāls 1 (118), p. 176–183 (https://doi.org/10.22364/
lviz.118.10).
Rowell Stephen Christopher 1994. Lithuania Ascending: A Pagan Empire Within East-Central Europe,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vėlius Norbertas 1989. The World Outlook of the Ancient Balts, Vilnius: Mintis.
Vėlius Norbertas 1996–2005. Baltų religijos ir mitologijos šaltiniai 1–4, sudarė Norbertas Vėlius, Vil-
nius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidykla.