Erfindung oder Entdeckung? Neue Zugänge zur Erforschung des Heidentums am Beispiel des Preußenlands im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert

Abstract

The study is devoted to the “paganism” of the Baltic inhabitants of the Teutonic Order State of Prussia (Old Prussians, Prußen). They had converted to Christian faith in the 13th century, but still in the 15th and 16th century were reported to follow pagan rites. In contrast to common conceptions of a (secret) pagan continuity after the conversion, the new approach highlights the dialectic of Christianisation and discovery of “paganism”. Only when in the 15th century reforms intended to deepen the Christian behaviour of society as a whole, the reformers focused on the sparsely assimilated Prussian peasants. Their idiosyncratic, but neither religious nor anti-Christian festive culture is successively described with pagan connotations, regulated and prohibited.

The study makes use of discourse analysis in order to connect pieces of evidence to specific types of sources and to the social groups behind them. Thus it is demonstrated that Prussian “paganism” is in fact not so much about the Old Prussians, but can be used rather as an interpretative key to understanding the thought and behaviour of the elites in late medieval and reformation time Prussia. Talking about “pagans” was a mean of negotiating what was the proper Christian life, how authority and estates contributed to it and what was their place in politics and history.