Medieval Studies in Lithuania
Medieval studies have traditionally played an important part in Lithuania’s historiography and historical consciousness. The former powerful Grand Duchy of Lithuania has remained a major theme in Lithuanian cultural and political life and, hence, medieval studies have tended to focus upon the history of the Grand Duchy. However, over the last two decades increasingly more attention has been paid to the Middle and Eastern European context (as witnessed, for example, by a recent bilingual volume, published in German and Lithuanian, on the formation of the Lithuanian state in a European context; see a review of this work in Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung, vol. 58 (2009), no. 1-2).
No specific institute for research on the European Middle Ages exists in Lithuania and only the University of Vilnius has a chair of ‘Medieval History’. The traditional emphasis on the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which existed from the 13th until the end of the 18th century, has had its influence on chronology: medieval studies in Lithuania cover the later Middle Ages (from the 13th century onwards) and continue into the Early Modern Period.